Where's Ike?
Posted by Pete Robbins on Feb 28th 2021
As the professional bass fishing world got back into full swing for the 2021 season, with one group’s best-of-the-best competing on the Tennessee River in Knoxville, and the other group’s best-of-the-best competing on Lake Eufaula for $300k, one of the sport’s five biggest stars by any measure was in neither place. In fact, if you checked his social media accounts, you could see that Mike Iaconelli was living the high life on some Caribbean island which presumably has no bass on it.
Does that make him the smartest pro angler in the world? The dumbest? The happiest? The most out-of-place?
None of us will likely ever be able to answer those semi-rhetorical questions with any level of accuracy. Ike may not, either. If he’s honest about it, there’s a good chance that his emotions about it may vary from day to day, or moment to moment.
For someone whose identify has been so closely tied to competitive angling for well over two decades, is it possibly to truly step away? I recognize that as a writer, I tend to see just about everything I do (including those things I have no intention of writing about) through the lens of a storyteller. Occasionally that’s to my detriment, as I worry about framing a narrative as opposed to just living in the moment. I have a friend who recently retired from a very successful career in business, but still sees most things, including fishing, first from the perspective of an entrepreneur. So while Ike is a media personality, an entrepreneur and an educator, among other things, the river that runs through all of those personalities is his ultra-competitive nature. The Caribbean looked nice, and I’m sure he loved the trip, but I don’t think he can permanently pull a Bill Dance and step away from the big leagues while he still has gas in the tank.
