Nixon's Points Finish Was Best Since '06

By John Johnson
BassFan Senior Editor

The rosters of both major tours contain a smattering of anglers who are on the backside of their 60th birthday. The unquestioned leader of that contingent, in terms of success on the water, is Arkansas legend Larry Nixon.

The 64-year-old Nixon recently completed his best FLW Tour regular season since 2006. He finished 23rd or better in each of the last four events, advanced to the final day in the last two and ended up 10th in the Angler of the Year race.

He could've legally bought a drink in any bar in the country when each of the other Top-10 AOY finishers were born – the next oldest among that group are 43-year-olds Andy Morgan and Wesley Strader.

"I kind of got some of that eagerness back this year – I had a lot more fire than I've had in some past years," he said. "The only lake that really got me was Smith (where he finished 97th in late March), and that was one where I thought I was going to whack them, but the weather change really threw me a curve.

"Other than that, I just fished my style – slow and patient. I only fished a few areas at each tournament and I didn't run all over the lakes. I won a lot of money on a Senko, and I used a ton of them."

Youth on Board

Nixon said some of his renewed vigor this year could be traced to spending his practice days with Joey Cifuentes, a 26-year-old co-angler from Clinton, Ark. (just a few miles from Nixon's home in Bee Branch). Cifuentes finished 4th on the back-seater points list and won a BFL at Lake Dardanelle in May.

"He was kind of my lucky charm," Nixon said. "When he told me he wanted to try the Tour this year on the co-angler side, I told him to jump right in there. He's got visions of the big show.

"He'd never let me slow down – if it looked like I was ready to, he get on my case and keep me fired up. Instead of getting complacent, I'd be thinking about winning.

"And we both finished with 1,007 points. What are the odds of that?"

Cifuentes, a former baseball player at Southern Arkansas University who competed for a season on the fishing team after exhausting his eligibility on the diamond, met Nixon through a friend. He has a degree in exercise science and was planning to become a physical therapist, but then Nixon asked him to fish as a co-angler in last year's Texas Rayovacs and he won one of those derbies.

"He's been doing this for so long and he's taught me so many things," Cifuentes said of Nixon. "It's not just the actual fishing, either, but also the ins and outs of sponsorships and those kind of things. I couldn't ask for a better person to fish with."

Different Plan This Time

The top echelon of the Tour is full of run-and-gun guys who have no issue with making 40 stops a day, but that's never been Nixon's mode of operation. He simply did what he does best this year and, with the exception of the Smith event, it worked out dandily.

"In 38 years of doing this, I've always tried to fish to my strengths," he said. "There've been very few tournaments over the years where running and gunning would've gotten me to where I wanted to go.

"I used to throw a spinnerbait, a crankbait or a buzzbait right along with everybody else, but to do that in hot weather, that's not me and it's not my style. I just stuck with the Senko the whole year, from the Toho to the Potomac."

Nixon, the 1983 Bassmaster Classic champion, will take his 15th crack at winning the Forrest Wood Cup next month at Lake Ouachita. The venue is in his home state and he knows it well, but he's never fared particularly well there in FLW competition.

He has four Top-10 Cup finishes on his ledger, but the best showing he's managed in the two previous times it's been staged at Ouachita was 27th. He also posted a dismal 125th-place showing at a regular-season Tour event in May 2015.

"I'm going to prepare differently this time and I'm going to practice differently," he said. "It's been won deep there both times (by Scott Suggs in 2007 and Scott Martin in 2011) while almost everybody else was fishing shallow. Deep is good for me – fishing in that mid-range is something that I've never been particularly good at.

"I'll have made three or four (pre-practice) trips over there before it goes off-limits and I'm going to practice pretty hard – especially those last 10 days."

Winning the event would be of enormous significance to him.

"I'd probably break down for a long time. It's not necessarily the money (the winner's share of the purse is $500,000), but it's a tournament that I've been so close to winning so many times and it's eluded me.

"Winning it would be unreal, and it'd probably take me half the night to get done talking to you."