Entry 327-1
Strike King’s Mark Davis Is on His Road Back
Editor’s Note: Mark Davis of Mount Ida, Arkansas, one of the most-successful bass fishermen in the nation, won the BASS Angler-of-the-Year title in 1998 and 2001, as well as both Angler-of-the-Year and Bassmaster Classic titles in 1995. Davis is the only professional fisherman who’s won the Angler-of-the-Year and the Bassmaster Classic titles in the same year. Babe Ruth, one of the greatest baseball players in history, was known for his homerun record and his larger-than-life personality, making him the idol of many young baseball players. His 714-homerun-hitting record stood for many years until it was first surpassed by Hank Aaron in 1974. Most people don’t know that Ruth also held the record for strikeouts. But strikeouts didn’t overshadow his greatness. Each time Ruth had a run of bad luck on the baseball field, he’d bounce back with the power of his bat, proving that greatness comes not with a great event, but rather is defined when you come back from great defeats. Today, Davis will tell us about the homeruns and the strikeouts during the 2009 bass-fishing-tournament season.
Part 1: Strikeouts and Homeruns
Question: Mark, what type of year have you had this year on the tournament circuit?
Davis: I’ve had the worst year I’ve ever had in all my years of tournament bass fishing.
Question: Everyone expects someone who’s been as great as you in bass fishing to produce a winning performance at every event. Very-few anglers ever have been as consistent at winning as you have. Why haven’t you been able to produce a winning performance in 2009?
Davis: In every sport, great athletes have slumps where they aren’t performing well physically, mentally or both. This year was like that for me. As I look back over 2009, I realize that many of the events in which I didn’t perform well could have gone the other way. But sometimes, especially in bass fishing and most other sports, there’s a thin line between success and failure. For the most part, this year, I’ve been on the wrong side of that line.
Question: As fishermen, we all have days and sometimes weeks when we strike out, and if you’re a tournament fisherman, you may have seasons when you strike out. 
How do you come back from a bad fishing slump?
Davis: First, put failure out of your mind, and return to the basics of fishing. Work harder, fish harder, pay more attention to your surroundings, and spend more time in preparation on the water. Revisit all the lessons you’ve learned about catching bass and then relearn those lessons. Look at the types of changes you can make next year to improve your fishing performance. With fishing, many times you can’t really decipher the bad or the wrong technique that hasn’t produced a bass.
If you’re hooking a golf shot, you can spot the problem and fix it. If you’re a quarterback on a football team, you can see that you’re misjudging the distance between you and a wide receiver and develop strategies to resolve the problem. But in bass fishing, many times you don’t know why the bass won’t bite. 
But if you return to the basics of fishing and fish harder than you have during the previous year, you can come out of the slump and start to win.
Question: What do you mean by fish harder? That’s a term we all use for which very-few people have a true definition.
Davis: Fishing harder starts with preparation. You may fish hard to the best of your ability on the day of the tournament, but you may be lacking a vital piece of information about the environment during a tournament that can mean the difference between winning and losing. You may not have researched the lake well enough to know how the changes on that particular body of water will affect the bass and how to adjust to those changes to catch the bass. By pre-fishing and practicing more, you can learn to recognize those subtle changes in the fishing environment.
There are many variables in fishing, and if you miss just one key element, you won’t catch the bass. Often that one element you need to start catching bass would have become evident to you if you’d spent more time on the water fishing, studied the maps and researched the lake better, or had more information about how the bass would react on the lake you were fishing before the tournament started. So, to fish harder and pull yourself out of a slump, don’t just become more intense on tournament day, but become more intense when you’re preparing for a tournament. Spend more time preparing, practicing and learning all you can about the place where you’ll be fishing, and the bass’s behavior patterns there. That’s what fishing harder means to me.
Next: Pre-Practice to Win
Contents:
- Part 1: Strikeouts and Homeruns
- Part 2: Pre-Practice to Win
- Part 3: Tackle-Up to Take More Bass
- Part 4: Believe You Can Find and Catch Bass
- Part 5: Time on the Water Increases Your Ability to Catch Bass
