A Turkey of a News Dump
Posted by Pete Robbins on Dec 1st 2019
Normally, the best way to hide bad news in plain sight is to release it when you expect other things to be occupying interested parties’ attention. That means late Friday afternoon, or perhaps Super Bowl Sunday, or on a holiday. So bravo to the fishing world for following that general rule and dumping the biggest tour news in a year on the afternoon before Thanksgiving.
Unfortunately for them, fish people don’t sleep, and just moments after media reps around the country pressed the “send” button, our easily-outraged ranks were up in arms.
Then, just a few hours later, a few pros started to fan the flames on social media. The posts achieved their intended goals, with one of the most notable generating over a thousand comments, 60-plus shares, and more memes that you should shake a stick at.
The only thing that would’ve made us more rabid is if Tackle Warehouse had canceled their Black Friday savings. Fortunately, they did not.
The jockeying and brinksmanship amongst the bass tours was anticipated by many of us. If anything, we are poor rumor keepers, and just as BPT’s birth last year was widely-expected, the news that certain anglers were dissatisfied with their positions and looking to move had been whispered about for months. Eventually, though, it becomes nut-cutting time – deposits are due, fields need to be set – and rumors either do or don’t become reality. That’s what we saw last week.
What didn’t we see? Well, for one, the machinations that went into making those moves happen. Unless you’re the accountant of one of the parties involved, or have access to their email accounts, it’s tough to tell what being on one trail or the other actually means. Nor do we know whether these are one-off switches, or if they portend additional moves. And most of us have no idea what the unaffected anglers – those who neither moved nor poked the bear on social media – actually think about this. I feel like I’m more wired into this situation than all but a handful of people who aren’t on tour, and I have far more questions than answers.
There are going to be more news drops: if not sooner, then later; if not during dead time, then when we are more ready for them. We – and when I say “we,” I definitely include myself – need to learn a little bit of restraint in analyzing what these things mean before their meanings are readily apparent. I think one of the things that many of us like about tournament fishing is that the numbers don’t lie. What you put on the scale is what you get. Why, then, are we so anxious to turn everything into a soap opera?
