A .500 batting average on decisions with regard to fairness is nothing to shout about. But give BASS some credit – the organization didn't make the same mistake twice.
Allowing only the Top 12 to fish the final day at Arkansas' Lake Dardanelle last week was wrong. Putting 50 anglers on the water for Sunday's finale at Lake Wheeler in Alabama was right. From a fairness standpoint, it's just that simple.
Both instances arose from canceled days due to weather conditions that were deemed unsafe by BASS officials. I'm not about to take issue with those calls – if my father, my brother or my son were in the field or riding along with one of the anglers as a marshal, I'd want officials to take every safety precaution possible. It's not like BASS wants to call off competition days – among many other things, they result in lost exposure opportunities for the organization's sponsors.
But here's my gripe with the way things went down at Dardanelle. The 38 anglers who were sent packing on that Saturday had combined to pay about $150,000 in entry fees for that event. Under the Bassmaster Elite Series tournament structure, they'd qualified to compete on the third day by being among the Top 50 after the day-2 weigh-in.
Whether or not that third day was re-designated as the final day should not have mattered. They were denied a chance to advance that they'd earned, only because it would have messed up the logistics for the taping of the TV show. That was a bad call, period.
James Niggemeyer, who was 13th after 2 days and thus was the highest finisher to lose out on the third-day opportunity, had culled three times late on day 2 and was more than a little bit excited about what he'd found in that spot. There's not much chance he would've made up a deficit of more than 10 1/2 pounds on leader Mark Menendez, especially considering that Menendez had a strong final day. But others in the 12-cut struggled under that Sunday's bluebird conditions – half of them failed to catch a limit and the best of those six bags weighed only 8-04.
It's not unfeasible to think that Niggemeyer, rookie Billy McCaghren (who lives 45 minutes from the ramp and ended up 14th) or others could've picked up as many as 20 additional Toyota Tundra Angler of the Year (AOY) points if they'd been allowed to fish that day. If they narrowly miss qualifying for the 2010 Bassmaster Classic, that will haunt them.
And before anybody tries to remind me that the FLW Tour cuts to the Top 10 after 2 days at every event, this isn't the same thing. Everybody in the FLW field knows that's the deal and fishes accordingly. Some who ended up in the teens or 20s at Dardanelle undoubtedly would have done some things differently had they known they'd be sent down the road when that day ended unless they were in 12th place or higher.
It matters not whether the decision on the specifics of the final cut came from on-site at Dardanelle, from BASS headquarters in Celebration, Fla. or from the ESPN offices in Bristol, Conn. ESPN should've bitten the bullet on this one instead of passing the burden to the 38 anglers.
The network has vast resources, including a lot of intelligent, talented people. They could've figured out a way to make the TV show work (I'm sure the program on the Wheeler tournament that airs this coming Saturday will look a lot like most others in which the competition days flow uninterrupted). Pardon the traditional-sports clichés, but the ball was in their court, and they dropped it.
If this were professional golf – a sport in which the competitors pay a chump-change entry fee and almost all of the prize money is ponied up by sponsors – then a decision such as the one at Dardanelle might not be quite so unjust. But Elite Series purses are comprised primarily of the anglers' own money, and they should be afforded the chances to compete for it that they've rightly earned.
The most important thing here is that the proper decision was made the second time around, and that blueprint is now in place. It should be followed from here on.
When situations such as weather-shortened tournaments arise, competitive fairness has to be the No. 1 consideration. If it's not, then we're all just pretending that this is really a professional sport.
