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Little
Rock, AR – Veteran Arkansas pro Scott Rook makes no bones about it. He covets the one thing that his traveling buddies Kevin VanDam and Davy Hite have that he doesn’t -- a Bassmaster Classic championship.
“I want to win a Classic more than anything else,” Rook said. “More than even Angler of the Year. During the year, my number one goal is to qualify for the Classic. Then, once I qualify, my goal is to win. And to do that, you have to go all out. There’s no fishing conservatively. You have to gamble and go for broke.”
All three of VanDam and Hite’s collective Classic wins have come on river systems. Hite won on the Mississippi Delta out of New Orleans in 1999. VanDam matched that feat at the same venue two years later and then upped the stakes with another victory in 2005 on Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers.
Rook, perhaps the member of the group most closely identified with river fishing, had his two best Classic finishes (out of six attempts) in the 2001 and 2005 events, where he finished 2nd and 9th, respectively. Despite recently joining the BASS million dollar club, the low-key Rook may fly under the radar more than his friends, and the Classic victory he craves would change that substantially.
“I know what it does for a career,” he said. “I’ve seen it with Davy and Kevin and Alton and George Cochran. Look at Boyd Duckett – no one had heard of him before he won and now he’s a household name. But I also know how hard it is to win and if you push too hard and get frustrated, you won’t fish well.”
Home Cooking
If there was ever a Classic that had Rook’s name written all over it, it would have to be the upcoming event on the Red River.
“I live just a couple of miles from the Arkansas River, so I feel real comfortable around current,” he said. “I understand how fish relate to it. The Red River is just a smaller version of the Arkansas River. It’s a lock and dam system with jetties and backwaters.”
In recent years, he has made the Red River his personal playground and piggy bank. Between 2002 and 2004, he fished one EverStart tournament per year and each time the one he cherry-picked was the Red River. He ended up 9th in 2002 and 25th in 2003 before claiming victory and the $50,000 top prize in 2004. He has also finished in the money all four times he has been there with BASS for AAA level events. An aberrational 37th place in 2001 put him just inside the cut. That low mark was sandwiched in between earlier 12th and 13th place finishes as well as a 13th the next year.
But none of his prior competitive efforts on the Red River have been in February. “They were all in the spring through the fall,” he said.
“The biggest question is what the conditions are going to be,” he said. “It could be muddy and flooded or there could be no current at all like a lake. I went a few weeks ago and refamiliarized myself with the place. Not a lot has changed. I also went to some areas that I had never been in. But I didn’t fish much because I don’t want to have too many preconceived ideas. Mike Iaconelli coined the phrase ‘fish in the moment,’ not yesterday, last week or a few years ago.”
Ups and Downs
Rook’s 2008 season started off strong, with seven checks in the first eight events. He rose as high as 3rd in the Angler of the Year race and was still in 7th after the eighth tournament at Kentucky Lake. But three straight finishes outside the money, including a 104th place bomb at Oneida, dropped him to 21st at the end of the season. He was never in danger of missing the Classic, but he seemed to have peaked early.
“I’ve sat in a deer stand a lot lately and thought about what went wrong,” he said. “It’s all about making the right decisions. They cancelled the Mississippi River tournament in Iowa, which I was looking forward to. We went to Old Hickory and I had the preconceived notion that it would be all ledge fishing, so I spent 99 percent of practice doing that. Then the first day I didn’t catch them. The second day, I started off on the ledges again and didn’t catch them so I went to the banks and caught a limit that weighed 10 or 11 pounds. It was just a bad decision on my part not to do that earlier.”
“I was kind of bummed out after that tournament,” he continued. “We went to New York and at Erie I had a decent first day, but on the second day I lost some fish and I lost my focus. When we went to Oneida I was just burned out.”
Has he recovered from that burnout?
“I haven’t fished a whole lot since the end of the season,” he answered. “I’ve recharged my batteries.”
Techniques and Tactics
Other than the cancelled Mississippi River tournament, the 2008 Elite Series season had no tournaments on river systems. That didn’t seem to both Rook, who notched consecutive appearances in the top twelve field with 3rd and 6th place finishes at Kissimmee and Falcon, respectively.
He noted that his success, particularly at offshore slugfests like Wheeler (23rd) and Kentucky Lake (22nd) reflects a maturation of his own fishing abilities. “I’ve always been a shallow water fisherman,” he said. “But in the past few years I’ve learned to fish out, off the bank, and I like it. The fish out deep seem like they replenish better and they don’t get as much pressure.”
Fishing deep may not be an option in the flooded jungles of the Red River, but Rook doesn’t necessarily believe the Classic waters will fish small. “There are three or four known places that will be crowded,” he said. “But with only 50 boats it can’t get really crowded for that river and there’s always the option of locking through.”
Given his earlier recognition that the Classic is a venue where it pays to go for broke, will he succumb to the temptation to bring an aluminum jet boat to Shreveport? “I won’t do that,” he replied. “I’ll use my Ranger. If you take a jet boat and you get into your place and they don’t bite, you’re stuck with it. You don’t have a lot of other options. (Brent) Chapman is the only one I remember who’s won one of our tournaments that way and that was one of the first times we fished there. A lot of places you could get into that way back then, a lot of them are silted in now.”
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Finances and Goals
Rook recently renewed his title sponsorship with Alltel for another year. It is a hometown deal that has proved to be one of the most substantial and enduring of the Elite Series anglers’ non-endemic sponsorships.
“I lost a couple of small deals (this offseason) but I feel real fortunate that I re-signed with Alltel,” he said. “That plays a big role. If you don’t have a primary sponsor that will at least pay your entry fees and expenses, you have to make eight checks in eleven events just to break even. If that’s not pressure, I don’t know what is.” |
He admitted that there was a time in his career when his main objective was just to make the money cut, but the Alltel deal, along with the substantial support of his other sponsors, enables him to fish more freely and effectively.
“I can fish more relaxed,” he said. “I don’t have that monkey on my back and it definitely helps me. If you’re focusing on something other than what the bass are doing, you can’t do well out there.”
But that relaxation doesn’t necessarily apply to the time leading up to the big event. He’ll be watching the weather reports religiously, hoping for stable conditions, He stated that the temperatures at his home can be anywhere from 30 degrees to 70 degrees in February – and Shreveport, only a three hour drive away, is susceptible to the same sort of fluctuations.
He believes that stable water levels and temperatures would provide him with the best opportunity to join Hite and VanDam on the list of Classic winners, and that’s his ultimate goal. “Angler of the Year is a close second,” he said. “You hear a lot of guys say they’d rather win Angler of the Year. It’s probably 50/50. But one of my first bass fishing memories is of the Bassmaster Classic at Pine Bluff, the one that Rick Clunn won. Ever since then it’s been my personal goal.”
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