After incredible 1998 and 1999 seasons, a back injury has forced Denny Brauer to fish at only 50%.

Brauer Recovering From Third Back Surgery

Wednesday, August 1, 2001

For two years Denny Brauer has been fishing in pain. Sitting down.

After an incredible 1998 and 1999, during which Brauer reigned as king of the bass fishing world, he was practicing for the first BASSMASTER Top 150 of the 1999-2000 season when disaster struck.

He'd been out on Lake St. Clair (Michigan), fishing with his grandson. "We were coming into the marina and it was rough with all the boat traffic," he recalls. A big wake "threw the boat up in the air and we came down kind of sideways. A stinger shot down my leg.

"I don't know if that was final straw," Brauer says, "but the next morning I couldn't stand. I've stood my whole career, but that day I got a butt seat out and I've used it ever since."

A painful season followed, culminating in back surgery that took place while many of his friends were fishing the 2000 BASS Masters Classic. Unfortunately, the surgery wasn't successful.

It was supposed to be endoscopic, but ended up differently. "With a small incision, the down time would have been minimal," Brauer says. "The surgeon thought he could do that, but there was a lot more to it than he anticipated." What the doctor saw caused him to pull out the scope and make a larger incision. Outpatient surgery turned into 5 hours on the table with a 4-day hospital stay.

Afterward Brauer had a numb foot and leg, "and some of the same pain," he says. An MRI showed a blockage, but the doctors couldn't tell whether it was scar tissue or blood residue from the recent surgery. So he had to wait.

His condition kept deteriorating, so this season he went to see a different doctor, the same one who performed successful a cervical fusion on him in 1989. An MRI showed a blockage at the same level the 2000 surgery was supposed to address. The doctor said he didn't know how Brauer was functioning: a big calcium deposit had the sciatic nerve pinched flat.

The recent operation "cleaned out everything," Brauer says. "It might take a few months for the feeling (in his left leg) to come back, but I'm optimistic that the problem is cured. I'm kind of excited. Hopefully I'll get to the point where I get to fish at the level I enjoy."

Brauer's son and fellow competitor, Chad, says his father "has been fishing at less than 50 percent. But he still held his own doing that." No doubt: even sitting down, with all the pain, Brauer qualified for September's FLW Championship and just missed qualifying for the Classic.

"I fished all the tournaments this year," Brauer says. "I'm not saying I had much fun at them, but I fished them."

The acknowledged master of pitching and flipping didn't even use his favorite techniques, which don't work too well when you're sitting down. "I felt like some kind of rookie when I would flip," he says. "I'd hit the head of the trolling motor, the side of boat." Instead he did a lot of Carolina rigging and crankbaiting.

Brauer says the injury forced him to sacrifice the practice intensity needed to win. Chad says that intensity is what keeps his father going. "He doesn't have anything left to prove and I think he knows that. The only reason he's still doing this is because he likes the competition. He's such a competitive person he probably won't quit for a while, especially when he gets healed up."

Brauer hopes to be back on his feet fishing this month. "I'll take a common- sense approach and limp through the tournaments this fall to salvage what points I can, then go wide open in 2002. The last thing want to do is have a setback on this. I'm going to strictly follow the doctor's orders."