Rick Clunn quit his job with Exxon in Texas to take on the bass fishing tournament trails, and the final push was him saying that he didn’t want to lament never giving it a shot.
Coming off his historic victory in the Power-Pole Bassmaster Elite at St. Johns River, Clunn visited the JM studio recently. While he got a touch of make-up for his TV shoot, the Daily Limit snuck into the green room to pick his fertile mind. A big takeaway was what exactly made him go all-in to fish.
“What really gave me my courage to quit Exxon was my father-in-law was an armchair golf quarterback,” Clunn said. “Every weekend, he and I would be watching Tom Watson or Jack Nicklaus, and he would go ‘Ugh, I could have beat them.’
“It finally hit me one day. I was thinking about B.A.S.S. – that’s going to be me some day. I’m going to be sitting saying, ‘I could have beat them guys.’ Naw. I got to try.”
Tried and succeeded, the Jedi master has. He’s the active leader with 16 B.A.S.S. victories, which puts him fourth all-time. His first win, in the 1976 Bassmaster Classic on Lake Guntersville, came 43 years before his most recent. Clunn’s four Classic wins tie for that record, and he’s won a Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year title. He’s one of 12 anglers who hold Classic and AOY titles.
How he repeated on the St. Johns to eclipse his record as oldest B.A.S.S. tournament winner was one for the ages. Never think your best moments are behind you. Clunn again proved that by landing two fish weighing more than 9 pounds each in the final hours to rally from a huge deficit. His Day 4 big bag of 34-14 gave him 98-14 and a winning margin of almost 4 pounds.
Clunn wasn’t counting his chickens when he began Championship Sunday in eighth place, 11-13 behind leader Chris Johnston. Emcee Dave Mercer interviewed Clunn at the dock, where Clunn reconstituted an absurb line he heard some 35 years earlier en route to winning the 1984 Classic by the largest margin ever, 25-8.
“I jokingly made a statement to Mercer, ‘Yeah, I probably need a 10 and a 12 for a chance to make up 11 pounds,’” Clunn said. “That’s not the first time I ever heard that statement. When I won the Classic in Pine Bluff in Arkansas, I had a huge lead over Hank Parker going into the final day. Hank made the statement jokingly, ‘If I go out there this morning and catch a 12 right off the bat and a 10, I might be able to catch him.’
“So I was telling Mercer, ‘I’m going to use Hank Parker line.’ Here’s the big difference. It ain’t going to happen on the Arkansas River in July. It can happen here. And it did.”
Just making the Top 10 and getting to fish on Sunday was a thrill for Clunn, he said, because there was an incredible wave of fish coming in to spawn. He said there were obvious places to catch them off beds, the reeds and dollar pads, but he knew those fish were getting beaten up so he added something different by casting for staging bass.
“Five or six of the top 10 went there (near Drayton Island), and we were all feasting on them,” Clunn said. “I figured out one thing the others didn’t – the in between fish.
“They were setting up just on the inside line, and the spinnerbait was really what kept showing me those fish. That was a process of a lot of random casts in between the docks, which you had time to do in between the reeds.”
The first two days, Clunn included his 3/4-ounce Luck-E-Strike Trickster Spinnerbait in his rotation with a Hail Mary crankbait and Texas-rigged Gator Tail Worm. He said he might have gotten only one or two bites with the spinnerbait, but they were all quality 5-plus pounders.
“Not all fish are spawning on the obvious – the pilings and the reeds – some are spawning on a good hard spot you can’t see,” Clunn said. “The spinnerbait is what I needed to search for those and cover more of that water in between. They weren’t completely committed to the bed yet, which is good because they still have some aggressive nature to feed.”
Yes, he was fortunate that the big girls bit. Having a 9-14 then a 9-11 on the final afternoon for such a huge rally doesn’t happen very often in tournament fishing.
“Never. Never,” he said. “Even when I had almost 36 at Falcon, my biggest was an 8, so two 9-pounders … my wife asked if I’d ever done that. I said, ‘No, not in a competition.’”
Clunn recently wrote a column for Bassmaster titled “The realities of tournament fishing.” In it he details that young anglers should evaluate their reason to compete in tournaments, and it’s enlightening.
“I’m working with young anglers now,” he said. “I’m saying establish your main reason to fish. Make that very clear in your mind. Am I doing it to become a millionaire? Then you better rethink it. If I’m doing it just to make a living and do something I love to do, that’s the way you need to approach it.”
When he ended his day job, he said he was very upfront that it was something he loved to do, and that there would surely be lean times ahead, which there were. Yes, Clunn was nearly at the end of his rope before he studied how previous Classics had been won – on a spinnerbait in a cove – and did that to win his on Lake Guntersville.
“I realized when I quit Exxon, and I told my family, I will never have a retirement,” he said. “I will have to work the rest of my life.”
“Making ends meet, that’s all I was looking for. I surpassed making ends meet, but still we’re not baseball, not football. I didn’t get a $300 million contract. If you have the right frame of mind, then you can handle the tough.”
With the advent of college and now high school circuits, as well as knowledge obtainable on the internet, anglers have gotten better at younger ages. Many hit the Basspro.com Bassmaster Opens ready to hit it big, but Clunn said it’s not a given that any and all can succeed. He said he can’t tell whether a promising young stick will do well without more information.
“Not completely. If I’m around him enough where I can feel his passion for what he’s doing, really see it, believe it,” he said. “And I have to be there when he hits rock bottom. What he does there will tell me if he can make it. If all the sudden it’s gone away, and he gets bitter and all you hear him do is complain, he ain’t going to make it.”
Fishing tournaments going on 45 years, Clunn proves the sport is more of a head game. Now, he’s in great physical shape for most anyone, especially a 72-year-old, but it’s been his mental game that’s had folks calling him the Zen master for decades.
“I always promoted that ideal (agelessness). From early on, I saw real quick,” he said. “My dad made me play every sport in high school there was, and I wasn’t a gifted athlete. Not being a gifted athlete, looking back I thought I could have been a pretty good basketball player if that’s all I had done, if I hadn’t played football.
“When I got into fishing, I knew I had to focus on it. I knew I had to give up all my side hobbies, golf and bowling and whatever else I was doing. The other thing that hit me, this sport doesn’t require anything but a strong mind. It doesn’t require you to run a 10-second 100, lift 400 pounds over your head …
“It’s all in your head. It doesn’t matter if your 6 or 60. You can participate in this sport. It’s all up here, just matters how much you want to put into it. You’re not relegated to becoming an armchair quarterback like other sports.”
