By John Johnson
BassFan Senior Editor
Andy Morgan is in 2nd place in the FLW Tour Angler of the Year (AOY) race with just two events remaining, and the venue at which the winner will be crowned is one he's extremely familiar with. He must be a bundle of nerves as he awaits the arrival of June, right?
Nope.
The man with one of the highest check-cashing rates and lowest blood-pressure rates in all of professional fishing will head into the final third of the campaign with the same mindset he always carries: He'll go out and fish to the best of his ability and let everything else take care of itself. A quick glance at his statistics will show that his low-key approach works extremely well for him on the water, and it also results in a lot less stress during the extended periods when he's away from his boat.
The only reason he knew that he was No. 2 in the points chase was because somebody told him about it recently – he figured that his 68th-place bomb at Beaver Lake would place him considerably farther down the list. When asked to guess how many points he trails leader Brent Ehrler by, he said, "Oh, maybe 25." The actual number, which many anglers would've figuratively tattooed on their brains if they were in his position, is 17.
He's logged six straight Top-10 finishes in the points chase, but has never copped the award. Winning it simply isn't an all-consuming quest for him, as it is for many of the sport's top performers.
"I honestly haven't thought a whole lot about it," he said. "It'd be great to win it and if it falls that way, everything would be merry and all that. If it doesn't, it'll be another Top 10.
"I've kind of had a force field around that award – I've had a 2nd and a 4th and a 6th or whatever. Usually everything has to go completely perfect to win it and I'm kind of surprised I still have a shot after that horrible Beaver event, but I guess this is just one of those years where everybody's going to have a bad one."
The New Over the Well-Known
The two events remaining on the Tour schedule are at Grand Lake in Oklahoma (June 6-9) and Lake Chickamauga in Morgan's home state of Tennessee (June 27-30). He's never been to the former but has fished the latter, which has been surrendering gigantic sacks all year, hundreds of times since he was a boy.
Which is he more excited about competing on? Well, the one at which he has zero experience, of course.
"I've never laid eyes on (Grand), and that makes it exciting," he said. "I get bored going to the same old places over and over, and when that starts to happen you tend to not practice as hard. On places where you have so much past experience you know that certain places are good and you avoid them in practice, and then sometimes there ends up not being any fish there that time.
"Then if you do make the (Top-10) cut, you give up the whole deal on TV. That puts you in a bad way when you go back."
The closest he's been to Grand was on a deer-hunting trip to the general vicinity, but what he's heard about the lake appeals to him.
"It seems like it's both a good shallow fishery and a good deep fishery, and that'll scatter the field out and everybody will have a better time. I don't like to fish when I'm looking at other folks and I think a lot of guys are that way. Whether you're fishing shallow or deep, you shouldn't be in that big of a crowd."
Boats Thick at Chick?
Chickamauga could be a different story entirely in terms of crowding.
"The lake's still on fire and big stringers are still being caught, but come the end of June when the fish are out on those drops, it's going to fish extremely small," Morgan said. "It's not a very big lake (about 36,000 acres, compared to about 46,500 at Grand) and it'll be really tricky to try to go out and catch them every day.
"You're talking about a lake that's been A-Rigged to death and the majority of the fish are highly educated, and now that they're spawned out they won't weigh as much. We might see some bags in the upper 20s and a big bass in the 9-pound class, but I don't think there's going to be a lot of weights like that. It'll get pounded in practice and there'll be multiple boats on all the good locations during the tournament."
If he's still in AOY contention when the weekend arrives, might he have a "secret" hole or two that could put him over the top?
"Not anymore. All the deep places I found years ago with my dad were with a flasher and getting out on a river bar and fishing the whole bar. You could keep those places under your hat back then, but now with GPS and all that, there aren't any secrets left.
"Those places get pounded day in and day out because now they're easy to find."
