ALTHOUGH IT HAPPENED over 35 years ago, John Crews remembers the day as if it were yesterday. He’d cast a plastic worm near a line of cattails, felt a bite and set the hook. A bass rocketed out of the water and just kept jumping until he finally pulled and dragged the fish up on the bank. He was 8 years old, and it was one of the first bass he ever caught.
“It felt so heavy, I could hardly lift it,” he remembers, laughing, “but actually, it barely weighed 3 pounds. We took some pictures with a Polaroid camera, then released it, but to this day I remember distinctly how that bass made me feel. All I wanted to do from then on was catch more of them.”
In the years since, Crews has caught a lot more bass, many of them weighing more than 3 pounds. Although he’s a veteran in the Elite Series today, has qualified for more than a dozen Bassmaster Classics and has developed an extremely successful lure company (Missile Baits), it surprises many to
