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Meers,
OK. – The past several years on tour have not been kind to veteran Oklahoma pro Ken Cook, and 2008 was no different. He suffered through a two-check season that left him in 86th place in the Angler of the Year race at the end of the year.
With double-qualifiers and drop outs, 86th will be enough to keep his tour card for another year, but at the end of the year there were rumors that he’d had enough and would bow out gracefully.
No one could have blamed him – included among his six BASS wins was the 1991 Bassmaster Classic and he has a burgeoning trophy hunting operation on his ranch in Oklahoma. But here on the BASS ZONE, Cook made his intentions clear to the public for the first time: He will be back.
“I am ready to start over next year,” he said. “I’m going to put my hat back in the ring. I want to retire on a high note and this wasn’t it.”
He admitted that during a season that saw him fall as low as 96th in the AOY race – he was in 93rd going into the final event – he did consider leaving the Elite Series.
“I toyed with that idea,” he admitted. “But I never said that I would do it to myself or to my wife, but we did talk about it.”
His reasons for returning are clear: “I love the sport so much. I still have a desire to compete and a desire to solve the puzzle. There’s another challenge every week and you can never be satisfied. That’s still there. But (at this level) you can feel successful solving the puzzle and still not do well.
With that said, he’s still convinced there’s gas in the tank and that he still has “something to contribute to the sport.”
Finances First
With only two checks, both for $10,000, tournament winnings alone were not enough to sustain Cook’s time on the road this year. In fact, they probably weren’t enough to cover his gas.
“We didn’t make much and we spent a lot,” he said simply. “I have a lot of loyal sponsors who have paid me well for a long time. The problem is that expenses have gotten higher. You have to spend a lot more to compete, but the amount the sponsors pay me has stayed about the same.”
While he believes that “finances are an issue, but they’re not the issue,” had he been forced to dip into his retirement savings he would have had no choice but to give up the tour.
“We’ll see how the chips fall (next year),” he added.
All Mental
Despite his status as one of the elder statesmen of bass fishing, Cook prides himself on his ability to stay current with emerging techniques and strategies.
“I was one of the first to embrace the swimbait and dropshotting,” he said. “I know how to use them but for some reason I haven’t been able to play my cards right.”
He believes that part of the reason he’s struggled in recent years, finishing no better than 73rd overall since the dawn of the Elite Series, is that he’s lost his aura of invincibility.
“It all comes down to a head game,” he explained. “When I was Skeet Reese and Kevin VanDam’s age, I was bulletproof, too. But after being beat down, having all of those little chips knocked out, you get weaker and weaker and it’s harder to get your confidence back.”
Accordingly, he’ll spend the offseason working to build that confidence back up. He believes that a season’s-best 36th place finish at Oneida to end the year was a good launch point for that process, but he stressed that he “thought (he) had turned a corner a couple of times during the year” and each time fell back. Some of that was attributable to poor decisions, some of it was due to what he believes to be the highest level of competition in the history of the sport.
“A higher percentage of the field is able to win or at least finish in the top twelve than ever before,” he said. “We have better fisheries and smarter fishermen. We’ve taught them a lot – I’ve done a lot of it myself – and they feel bulletproof.”
“Twenty years ago, maybe 20 to 40 percent of the field could win, now it’s over 90 percent. They know they’re better and they think they’re better. With that said, I should have gotten better, too.”
Changes and Disappointments
In a season full of disappointments, one which included as many triple-digit finishes as it did money finishes, it’s tough to identify a particular low point, but Cook identified two tournaments that disappointed him greatly.
“At Falcon and Erie I should have done really well,” he said.
At Falcon, he failed to find the deep bite and was under the impression that 25 pounds a day would put him deep into the cut, but he “figured out at the middle part of the first day that it wouldn’t.” He ended up 53rd, just out outside the cut.
At Erie, his age did play a factor in his 65th place finish. “As I’ve gotten older, I’m not as brutal on myself (as I used to be),” he said. “I’m not as anxious to go out in the big water like we had. I knew that if I went out in the first day, I wouldn’t physically be able to fish the second day. So I laid up that first day and it bit me right square in the butt.”
His first step to getting ready for 2009 will be to step away from fishing for a short time, but he’s already planning for a lifestyle change that he believes will improve his time on the water. As the BASS ZONE spoke with him, Cook was in Boise, Idaho picking up a camper.
“We’re going to stay out of motels and reconfigure our living arrangement next year,” he explained. He believes that this change will provide him “with a better connection to the outdoors.”
While the camper won’t totally eliminate the hassles of life on the road, “it’s a different hassle, and at this point, different is good.”
And in this case, different also means shooting not just for checks, but for a return to the winner’s circle, a place he hasn’t visited since he won the 1991 Classic:
“I’ve still got some wins in me, at least one or two.”
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