In an event in which the Top 3 teams were separated by only 3 ounces, Guy Eaker and Ken Cook won the Bassmaster Legends Tournament by 2 ounces Sunday over Rick Clunn and Tommy Martin at the Bassmaster Toyota Trucks All-Star Week. Bill Dance and Jerry McKinnis finished 3rd – only 3 ounces behind the winners – in an event held at a 100-acre private fishery located 40 miles northeast of Montgomery, Ala.
“We were so much better anglers than them, I assumed we were going to win,” joked McKinnis, who is now a part-owner of B.A.S.S. “Bill and I are going to go study the tapes, analyze all that and make sure this is all on the up and up, then I’ll be glad to comment.
“If we do it again next year, which I really want to do, we will have more teams and really make it a blow-out deal. This was just a spur-of-the-moment thing. We said, ‘Let’s go have some fun.’ And we darned sure did that.”
Eaker (pictured) and Cook weighed 19-03. Clunn and Martin finished with 19-01 and McKinnis and Dance had 19-00. The team of Bobby Murray and Guido Hibdon was 4th with 9-11.
“We really had a great time,” Eaker said. “We caught most of our weight in the first hour-and-a-half, but we did cull some fish after that. And we were culling by ounces. If I hadn’t weighed the fish on a scale, we might have thrown the tournament away.”
As the four teams were leaving the dock at 9 a.m., Dance landed a 5-03 largemouth, which was fitting because he caught the first-ever bass in a B.A.S.S. tournament. In 1967, founder Ray Scott held his first tournament on Arkansas’ Beaver Lake. Dance had borrowed a boat that had a 60-hp motor on it. He raced out ahead of the field, stopped while the others were still leaving the takeoff area and caught a fish on his first cast.
