Angling for Tie-Ins, Irwin Jacobs
Took Up Big-Time Bass Fishing
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Angling for Tie-Ins, Irwin Jacobs
Took Up Big-Time Bass Fishing
By ANN ZIMMERMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
For a year, financier Irwin Jacobs stalked Wal-Mart president Lee Scott.
Almost daily, the Minneapolis deal maker phoned at 6:20 a.m., before Mr. Scott's secretary had arrived at his Bentonville, Ark., office.
"One day I said, 'Irwin, you don't think I come to work this early just to talk to you?' " Mr. Scott recalls.
Mr. Jacobs, who in the 1980s attempted hostile takeovers of Disney and ITT, merely wanted to talk about fishing. Which is to say, he wanted Wal-Mart to sponsor a bass-fishing tournament tied in to selling boats made by Genmar Holdings, a company Mr. Jacobs owns.
Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, had never lent its name to a sporting event. But Mr. Scott ultimately said yes. "It was either that or join the witness-protection program," Mr. Scott says.
Now four years into its bass-fishing experience, the seven-event Wal-Mart FLW Tour (named for bass-boat pioneer Forest L. Wood) has put the imprint of Mr. Jacobs's personality on what has over the years become a flashy, modern sport. With the fat purses, big sponsors and TV exposure have come merchandise mania, cranky fishermen and a bitter rift between Mr. Jacobs's new league and an existing organization that had been in the background for many years. Now, deciding just what hat to wear on the winner's stand is a $10,000 question.
Once Mr. Jacobs, now 59 years old, had Wal-Mart on board, a dozen other corporate sponsors signed up. Kellogg Co., Visa USA Inc., Energizer Holdings Inc., Timex Corp., among others, now tattoo their logos, Nascar-style, on the sides of $35,000 bass boats made by Ranger, a Jacobs brand.
Two years ago, a professional bass fisherman -- the FLW Tour's Angler of the Year -- got his picture on the front of a Wheaties box. Fast-paced hour-long televised competitions are the most popular broadcasts on ESPN2, a Disney Co. cable channel. Chinese TV has picked up the FLW tour-show as the first U.S. offering on CSBN, its new sports network.
Wal-Mart has used its perch to sell stuff -- poles, tackle boxes, life preservers, coolers. Every tournament includes a parade of boats, with police escorts, from a Wal-Mart store to a lake somewhere and back. Tournament fish weigh-ins are held in Wal-Mart parking lots and broadcast live to all 2,500 Wal-Mart stores.
At a June tournament in Florence, Ala., about 6,000 people flocked to a big tent pitched outside Wal-Mart. At the Poulan/Weed Eater booth, a power-saw virtuoso transformed a tree stump into an eagle grasping a bass in its talons. Nearby, "Butter Bob" Beedle, Land O' Lakes Inc. national accounts manager for Wal-Mart, handed out his company's new cheddar-cheese squares and had kids decorate fish-shaped cookies. Fuji Photo Film Co. converted a portable pool into a pond stocked with trout and snapped pictures of children catching their first fish.
Wal-Mart processes that film free and then hangs the snapshots near FLW Tour merchandise in a heavily trafficked area near cash registers that is known as "action alley."
The event increased the Florence store's sales by 40% that week. "It was the right kind of sport for us -- wholesome and something families do together," says Mr. Scott, Wal-Mart's president.
Yet with the big money and TV exposure comes the kind of complaining typical of big-time sports, with some fisherman longing for the days when fishing was a tranquil, solitary pursuit. Anglers chafe at how Operation Bass, the Jacobs company that organizes the tournaments, dictates what logos can be worn at televised weigh-ins. The winner, for example, gets a $10,000 bonus from the sponsor in whose boat he fishes -- but only if he wears its logo-festooned shirt and hat at the weigh-in.
Rick Clunn
At the Florence tournament, Rick Clunn won $200,000 by catching five fish (weighing 15 pounds, 11 ounces in total), but he forfeited the $10,000 he would have been paid by Timex because he felt it would slight Tracker Boats, which has supported his career for a decade but isn't a tournament sponsor.
Instead, Mr. Clunn, who won three of the first six FLW Tour events this year -- and more than $500,000 in prize money altogether -- appeared logo-free. "I don't enjoy dressing up like a Mexican Army general with all the patches," says Mr. Clunn, a 54-year-old martial-arts expert who left his computer-systems job in Houston 27 years ago to become a professional bass fisherman.
Mr. Jacobs says his dress code is lenient: When the TV cameras are rolling, he asks only that anglers not wear competitors' logos. "I'm not going to pay a million dollars in a Wal-Mart parking lot to a guy in a Kmart hat," Mr. Jacobs says.
Regulars on the tour have had to learn how to act for TV cameras. No tobacco, no white shirts, and no sunglasses while being interviewed. The last day of competition, when the field has been winnowed to five finalists, each angler wears a microphone and is followed in another boat by a camera crew. Earlier this year, a competitor named David Dudley fell into the water as he turned to look at the camera.
"I want to see their personalities," says Jerry McKinnis, host for 37 years of the syndicated TV show "The Fishin' Hole" and producer of the FLW Tour programs on ESPN. "Let us have it all. All this stuff about fishermen and their secrets is all B.S."
With Operation Bass events getting lots of attention and lucrative support, the 32-year-old Bass Anglers Sportsman Society Inc., a venerated fishing organization that promotes its own tournaments, decided to jazz up the sport in its own way.
Last August, B.A.S.S. launched World Championship Fishing, a bass-fishing and boat-racing competition that has grown into a five-event series. Anglers fish in the morning, then spend the afternoon racing their bass boats around an obstacle course. The events draw coverage on Fox Sports Net's cable operation.
This past spring, Ranger Boats accused WCF of "promoting unsafe boating practices" and announced it had ceased negotiations to renew its sponsorship of B.A.S.S. tournaments. B.A.S.S. then wrote its 600,000 members, accusing Mr. Jacobs of being interested only in furthering his own league -- and the sale of his boats.
Wal-Mart, meanwhile, added its sponsorship to a second-string Operation Bass tour called the EverStart Series, named for Wal-Mart's store-brand battery. And in May this year, the company announced it would take over a 119-event amateur bass-fishing series that had been sponsored for 17 years by Red Man chewing tobacco.
About 55 million people fish in the U.S., more than play tennis and golf combined, according to the National Sporting Goods Association. Wal-Mart now has asked Operation Bass to set up fishing clubs for kids. And Mr. Jacobs has agreed to stage Wal-Mart parking-lot weigh-ins at as many tournaments as possible next year, even though these fairs usually require 20 tractor-trailers of equipment. "We need to do more," Mr. Jacobs says. "This is Barnum & Bailey coming to town." |
