KVD in Winter

I suppose the news of KVD’s semi-retirement should not have surprised any of us. What does he have left to prove? Why does he need to continue hauling a boat around the country, staying in crappy places, and getting up at the ass crack of dawn? That all makes sense, but he reached that status 20 years ago. Even before he won his first Classic, there seems to have been a general consensus that he was on track to being the greatest of all-time, as evidenced by the popularity of the book he wrote with Louie Stout back in 1995, when he was still in his twenties. By the time ESPN held their unscientific “Greatest Angler Debate” 10 years later, he wasn’t a consensus champ – Rick Clunn took the title – but since that time he’s matched Clunn’s total of four Classics and increased his AOY count to seven.

There’s no question at all now.

I had no inside info on the announcement, and I’ve mostly resisted the urge to countenance the many rumors that started swirling as soon as the video was posted about what he’ll do going forward, but I’m fascinated by what his retirement means. Indulge me the following paragraphs where I speculate about the timing and meaning of it all.

There’s not really an analog for this. In other sports, you’re mostly forced out because you no longer can compete. Plenty of boxers unretire repeatedly, but in most cases, the over-the-hill returnees in all major sports leave at least a small stain on their legacies – think Willie Mays with the Mets, or Michael Jordan with the Wizards. In this sport, however, there’s no temporal end. Those who can afford to keep doing so keep on keeping on simply because they don’t know what else to do – after forty years of being your own boss, and doing nothing else but fishing/driving/promoting, it’s really hard to sit down at a desk for eight hours a day to sell insurance.

There has never been a tournament angler who retired with both as much gas left in the tank as KVD and as many accomplishments under his belt. Clunn and Nixon, for example, are still at it, despite being two decades older. Bill Dance made a monumental career for himself through promoting and the media but cut short his tournament career to do so. KVD is somewhere in between those poles. I’ve long contended that he could make more money not fishing the trails than by being out there day after day after day. Each time he’s trying to catch five green or brown fish and doesn’t claim one of the top five checks, he’s likely left money on the table in terms of appearance fees and other moneymaking opportunities. Nevertheless, he steps into a media landscape that is unlike the one that Dance “retired” to – television is no longer the primary mover, or to the extent that it is, it seems to be fading. I was surprised that he had approximately as many YouTube subscribers as Brandon Palaniuk, twice as many as Chris Zaldain, and two-thirds as many as Randy Blaukat. Based on status alone, I’d expect him to have many more, but of course, status doesn’t produce content. Two things may impact that paradigm: (1) he likely hasn’t put as much time into his YouTube offerings as some of those others, simply because he’s been spread too thin; and (2) he has the heft of the Bass Pro Shops empire behind him. That means he’ll be able to tap into resources deeper and wider than those available to anyone else.

Historically, he’s been one of the few anglers whose name consistently means something when appended to a product. Others may matter with respect to a certain category (e.g., frog, Jack Hammer, boat, etc.) or when they earn a win, but those are fleeting or limited. On the contrary, just about anything Kevin endorses flies off the shelf. I don’t see any diminution of that just because he’s not competing – once again, time in front of cameras and fans will equal more bucks, if that’s what he’s concerned with – and I have no doubt that he’ll continue to hustle. He’s simply not made to sit in a recliner.

The biggest question, as far as I can tell, is how long he’ll be able to sit out the game, or whether this truly is “the end.” While I don’t know him well, I’ve been around him, on the phone with him, and in his boat with him enough to know that the greater picture matters – and part of that picture is records. While for a variety of reasons he’s not quite as dominant as he was a decade or more ago, he can still win every time out and should be able to do so for quite a while. The first time the BPT goes to the Tennessee River for a cranking derby and he’s not there, it's gonna make him itchy. When the Classic goes back to the Louisiana Delta, or Lay Lake, or Pittsburgh (doubtful), he’s going to be figuring out how he could have unlocked the puzzle better. That doesn’t mean he’ll jump back in, but you shouldn’t be surprised if he dominates the media landscape as well as fishing going forward. There may be some procedural hurdles to overcome to get back, but no one’s going to tug on Superman’s cape to keep him down.