RAY SCOTT’S BASS Anglers Sportsman Society has had a seismic impact on every aspect of the sport of bass fishing. Following the success of Scott’s first All-American Invitational tournament in 1967, he formed B.A.S.S. to be both a nationwide fraternity of bass anglers and a first-class tournament organization. Upon joining Scott’s bassin’ brotherhood, you received a colorful sew-on B.A.S.S. patch, eligibility to fish in B.A.S.S. tournaments and a subscription to Bassmaster Magazine, the first issue of which appeared in the spring of 1968.
Now, 499 issues later, Bassmaster’s readership has grown from a few hundred to over half a million. But the publication’s mission hasn’t changed since the day Scott, an insurance salesman with no editorial experience, cobbled together the very first issue:
“Give hard-core bass fishermen hard-core information on how to catch bass.”
No Azure Sunrises
According to Bob Cobb, Bassmaster’s first “real” editor, Scott felt the prestigious “hook and bullet” magazines of the day gave bass fishing short shrift and were annoyingly elitist in their verbiage. “Ray knew bass fishermen wanted hard facts and didn’t want to wade through seven paragraphs about azure sunrises to get them,” Cobb recalled. To that end, Scott cajoled anglers who fished his earliest tournaments into writing articles for Bassmaster. “These were blue-collar guys, not journalists,” Cobb said. “Many of their Bassmaster submissions were handwritten; most were grammatically challenged. But they contained no-nonsense information about catching bass, and readers devoured every word.”
One of Scott’s earliest contributors was John Powell, a retired military man who had won the, but Powell gave novices like me the lowdown they needed to catch lunkers on this slithery artificial in . I recall one article where Powell slyly revealed when to set the hook when worming. “The first tap you feel is a bass sucking in your worm,” he explained. “The second tap is the bass spitting out your worm. The third tap is me tapping you on the shoulder to tell you that you missed the fish.” Whoa! This was exactly the kind of straight shooting that made THE go-to source for bass-catching know-how!
