No-Info Rules Serve Valuable Purpose

(Editor's note: BassFan Bo Crawford lives in Alabaster, Ala. and is host of The Armchair Anglers podcast, which can found on iTunes or at ArmchairAnglers.Wordpress.com.)

Wouldn't it be awesome if the pros would just show up to fish with no practice and no information?

Indeed that would be awesome. I've read accounts of how cool the original Bassmaster Classics were when Ray Scott kept the location a secret to all the contestants. The story goes that he revealed the location in the final hours after all contestants were onboard a plane – and even then, only after they were safely in the air en route to the mystery lake. Mr. Scott and company illustrated what extreme measures must be taken if you want anglers to truly fish with no information.

Those tournaments captured the essence of what tournament bass fishing should be about. All the pros had the same limited timeframe to find their own fish.

Such a level playing field is a noble idea, but to be honest, I doubt even the great Ray Scott could reproduce a similar "no-information" tournament in these modern times. Were such a tournament to be held today, tech-savvy contestants could view Google Earth maps complete with GPS points on their iPhone and have 10 spots picked out before the plane hit the ground.

Such is life in the information age in virtually every field, including bass fishing.

Given the fact that it's close to impossible to police the "no-information" rule, it's been suggested by some to just eliminate the rule and allow information to be shared freely. But I suggest that eliminating the rule would open a Pandora's box of further issues that would make the field more unequal than it already is.

I'm no expert on bicycle racing, but let me try to make a sports analogy here. Lance Armstrong won seven Tour De France races, and received great accolades for his individual achievement. But how many titles would he have won were it not for the help of his eight domestiques (aka teammates)?

There's a great deal of team strategy that goes into making Lance the bicycle hero he is – from drafting to blocking, offense and defense. Similar team strategy could easily be applied to fishing. I don't want to encourage bad sportsmanship by giving specifics, but suffice it to say that in fishing, like bicycle racing, domestiques could be used to implement offensive and defensive strategies as well. Things could get ugly were it not for the no-information rules.

Although it's impossible to enforce the rules to the letter, the no-information rules serve a valuable purpose. Without the rules, tournaments could turn into an unprofessional free-for-all melee. Vince McMahon might like the sound of that, but I don't.

My problem with the no-information rules is that they appear to be worded in a way that provides loopholes based on how the information's shared. Consider the current BASS no-information rule, which states in part:

"During the off limits periods, other than using publicly-available information (e.g. newspaper and Internet reports) pro competitors cannot solicit, receive, or gather any information via phone, electronic devices, or any other means about locating or catching fish in tournament waters. THERE SHALL BE NO EXCEPTIONS."

As I read this rule, my interpretation is that I can take 5 minutes and publish my best GPS coordinates on a Google Maps page on the Internet to share with my favorite pro. This would be very hard to find unless you knew where to look, but it would be on the Internet in a public location. Therefore, it would be within the rules for any Elite Series competitor to view them. The pro could use this information and pass a lie-detector test all day long because he didn't violate the rule.

In this example, did the pro violate the spirit of the rule? Probably. But so what? This isn't your local bass club fishing a six-boat jackpot on a Sunday afternoon. This is the big leagues. We're talking about professional athletes playing for big money. As in all professional sports, the pros are playing to win and they're going to – and should – do everything they can to give them a competitive edge within the boundaries of the rules.

In professional sports, a true competitor is going to push the limits. That's his job.

The rule should be revised so that the spirit of the rule and the actual rule agree. It should say that a pro cannot "actively pursue" inside information during the off-limits period regardless of how the information is disseminated. How the information is shared is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the information was by phone, Internet, networked GPS, SD cards, Bluetooth connections, in person, telegram, Morse code, whatever – as long as the pro actively pursued the information from anyone other than a fellow pro, he's in violation of the rule.

Such a change in wording would allow the tournament directors to enforce penalties without getting bogged down in the semantics of how the information was distributed.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of all this is the complacence of local pros in refusing to turn in violators. John Crews, Bassmaster Elite Series angler and president of the PAA, says that many pros will continue to break the no-information rule until "the people who are being solicited are willing to step out on a limb" and bust the pros who are soliciting information.

The irony is that by remaining silent, these local big sticks are damaging the integrity of their favorite sport as much as anyone.

Any way you slice it, as a fan of the sport it's disappointing to learn that many pros feel they need help because they're not confident enough in their own abilities to find fish. I have to agree with Peter Thliveros when he said, "If they can't play the game the way it's supposed to be played, then they shouldn't be on the field."