Mark Menendez And The Sticky Anacondas

Years ago, on a sticky summer night before a Kentucky Lake tournament, Mark Menendez found himself going round for round with a bass fishing buddy. Soon, the duo found their nightcap bleeding into the early morning, leaving little time for Menendez to catch up on sleep before an early wake-up call for blastoff.

“We came in at 4 a.m.,” Menendez recalls. “This was years ago, like 1996. We had to be at the ramp at 5:30.” With a throbbing head and no sleep, Menendez wasn’t in the mood to overthink his tactics. At blastoff, he remembered an event that happened days earlier at a photo shoot. “I had just had Mark Hicks out