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Prattville,
Ala. – For a twelve month period in 2006, Alabama’s Russ Lane might have been the hottest angler on the planet. He didn’t challenge for the Angler of the Year title in that inaugural Elite Series season, ending up 15th overall, but he was a check-cashing machine.
Eleven tournaments, ten checks, and the one time he missed the money, at Sam Rayburn, he only missed it by one spot.
And then he got to the Classic on Lay Lake, his home waters, a place where he has won countless thousands of dollars, and suffered what he called the biggest letdown of his career.
“Those are my home waters,” he said. “I’ve always caught them well on the Coosa River lakes that time of year. Boyd (Duckett) won doing exactly what I was doing, fishing that Rat-L-Trap and flipping.” Lane ended up 24th in the event. He had previously finished 21st in the 2004 Classic in Pittsburgh at Lake Wylie.
Now, without a spot in the 2009 Classic, and with consecutive 69th and 70th place finishes in the AOY race in 2007 and 2008, respectively, Lane’s number one goal is to get back to the championship in 2010, when it will once again be held in Birmingham. In order to do that, he’s seeking to streamline his obligations and return to his check-cashing roots.
Road Warrior
Lane hitched his boat to his truck, got behind the driver’s wheel in February, and only recently did the combo sit at his house for a meaningful period of time. He fished 20 major events in 2008 – eleven Elite Series tournaments, three BASS Southern Opens, four FLW Series Tournaments and the two PAA tournaments. He also got married in July. That’s enough to fill up anyone’s calendar, but it may be too much for all but a few die-hards to tackle and still hope to maintain any consistency.
The results were poor. In the Elite Series, he managed only four top fifty finishes in eleven events. His best finish was 17th at Amistad. At no point did he string together two checks in a row, but from Wheeler to Erie he had a dismal stretch of four tournaments without a money finish.
Compare that to 2007, when he earned five checks in the Elites (none better than his 31st at Clarks Hill), but also fished the three Majors and logged an 11th place finish at High Rock. The more striking contrast is to his 2006 season, when (as stated above) he managed ten checks. A 12th place finish at Oneida was his only Sunday showing, but the consistency paid the bills and put him in his second Classic.
The biggest difference between 2006 and the subsequent years? That year he focused on the Elites to the exclusion of everything else. So for 2009, that’s where he’ll focus his attention once again, to the comparative exclusion of some of those other circuits.
Struggles Snowballed
With 2008 now in his rear-view mirror, Lane can look back on the season and separate the learning experiences from those that need to be forgotten. The season started at the Harris Chain with a 35th place finish, but his time in Florida was counterbalanced by a dismal 95th at Kissimmee the next week.
“I tried to simplify and fish to my strengths whenever I could this year,” he explained. “Going into Toho, I committed to fishing offshore and found two schools of fish in the middle of Toho. I got in the lock headed up there and VanDam was two boats behind me. Mark Davis was right next to me. As I went up the lake, VanDam went right to one school and when I looked back Mark Davis was on the other.”
KVD went on to win the tournament and Davis finished 18th.
At Falcon, he was plagued by an inability to get the fish that bit into the boat. He estimated that on the first day of practice he caught 40 pounds flipping bushes, so he decided to stick with that bite the entire tournament. He got the bites he needed, but he “couldn’t get the fish out of the bushes for nothing” and missed the money by nine spots. He recovered somewhat the next week in Del Rio, with the season’s-best 17th at Amistad, but after that the bottom fell out, with two checks in seven events, a 44th at Murray and a 32nd at the season-ending tournament on Oneida, when he was fishing for pride and a paycheck, but at which point a Classic berth was all but out of the question.
New Year, Old Strategy
So other than the wear and tear of fishing 20 tournaments instead of 11, what caused the disparity between his 2006 successes and the struggles of 2008?
Lane believes that a big part of it is the fact that two years ago he fished for checks and this year he bought into the myth of “swinging for the fences.”
“All I could think about was trying to win,” he said. “But I’ve realized that if you’re not fishing all four days, you can’t win.”
The tournaments where he did well in 2008 were those where he got back to his roots. “I’m proud of what I did at Amistad,” he remembered. “I went and found a hotel away from everybody and threw all of those other philosophies out.” |
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He still remains perturbed by the fact that even when he’s earning checks, they’re not always the top twelves needed to make a major move in the standings and get some time on TV. He believes that his failure to make those cuts to Sunday is explained by the fact that he has trouble finding enough fish to last three or four days.
“I’ve been in the top ten so many times on the first day, but I get too locked in on one thing in practice,” he said. “I need to look for more options in practice.” He believes that in some cases that will require him to look for something other than the dominant paradigm. With the caliber of anglers on the Elite Series trail today, the main patterns get battered over the course of three practice days and the tournament itself. “I’m hoping that if I fish against the grain they won’t run down,” he said. “The obvious patterns – like if you’re fishing on Kentucky Lake in June you know it’s going to be won cranking ledges – I know that I can’t just find one or two schools. Maybe I need to get a shallow deal going or find a secondary school.”
Most importantly, Lane believes that he needs to put the dock talk aside and get back to the point where he “can make the most out of (his) abilities.”
“The last two years I’ve gambled a lot,” he said. “I pushed and pushed and now I’m done with that. The name of the game is consistency. If it turns out that I make the most of my abilities and my best is to finish in the twenties or thirties, that’s OK with me.”
He also hopes to get back some of the hunger that characterized the earlier portion of his career. While that early success translated into a sizeable stable of paying sponsors, and doesn’t believe that he ever got “comfortable” in the pejorative sense of the word, he hopes that fishing for the goal of the 2010 home-field Classic will give him back some of that earlier edge.
“I had said back that that it sure would be nice to have a nice sponsor income, settle down and not stress about checks,” he said. “But the pressures may sometimes make you do better. If you have to catch them to feed your family, sometimes you will.”
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