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Maybe the best place to watch Ish – the persona, at least – is the weigh-in at the end of a round. There are the board shorts and visor; his tournament shirt – the one with logos crawling up the arms and collar – will be clean and pressed. ("Guys are like, 'Dang, how do you keep your shirt so neat and clean?'" he says. "What I do is, I fold it up in a plastic bag and put it away. I won't wear my tournament shirt until weigh-in time, or unless the cameras are on me. 'Cause you go out fishing all day, driving these boats 75 miles per hour, you get grass on you, blood, bugs.") Monroe will banter with the MC, careful to drop the names of his sponsors whenever possible and maintain his good humor in general. At the Classic, he entered to the thump of Rob Base's "It Takes Two" and even managed to smile as he walked onto his sport's biggest stage – without a single fish to weigh. But when he has something – a fat, ornery 6-pounder, say, that came and got herself some – he'll hoist it by the lower jaw and smile broadly for the cameras. Knowing the extent of Monroe's obsession, knowing that his girlfriend once popped in a tape expecting Christian Slater and instead got a screenful of bass, you have to wonder: Is he holding the fish, or is the fish holding him?
As eureka moments go in the world of sports, it's certainly a humble one, with the whiff of apocrypha: On a rainy day in 1967, an insurance salesman named Ray Scott Jr. was holed up in a Jackson, Miss., Ramada Inn, watching a basketball game (or was it a pocket-billiards tournament?). "That's it," he said, snapping his fingers, instantly envisioning a new spectator sport in which people would pay thousands to compete. And thus organized bass fishing was born. It had to be bass, too. "Can you imagine a Crappiemasters Classic?" Scott once told a Washington Post reporter. "I knew the bass was the heart of fishing. He's the king – potbellied, ugly as a backwoods sheriff, indifferent to anything you do, unpredictable. You think you know him today, but come back tomorrow, and he's done read the paper. He's gone." By 1968, Scott had founded BASS.
Less than a decade later, in Michigan, Gregory Simpson handed his baby son a small Zebco reel. Simpson's father had taken Gregory fishing, and now Gregory was doing the same for his son. The two of them would fish around Ann Arbor, sometimes for dinner, and when Ishama (his name, his mother says, is Swahili for "first born") was 2 1/2 years old, he caught his first fish, a bluegill. Simpson hooked it; Ishama reeled it in. "From that day on," says Simpson, now a San Francisco firefighter, "he was kind of sprung." Fishing, Monroe says, "was the only thing me and my dad ever had, emotionally" – a game of catch, of a different sort. And on fishing trips what would they talk about? "Fishing," he says.
Monroe moved to San Francisco with his mother, Wanda Monroe, and his father followed soon after (his parents never married). The two of them continued to fish, and Monroe would spend his summers in Michigan, rod in hand. Meanwhile, bass fishing's appeal was spreading, and a BASS television show, The BASSMASTERS, debuted in 1985. (ESPN would like you to know that The BASSMASTERS, now in its second season on ESPN2, delivers "the most in-depth, thrilling coverage of professional bass fishing.") Monroe had a Fisher-Price tape recorder, and he'd hold it up to the TV during fishing shows, catching the dialogue so he could replay it later. "I used to just sit there for hours and listen," he says.
"This kid," says Wanda Monroe, a respiratory therapist who lives in Vacaville, sighing with feigned exasperation. "When other kids were getting bicycles, footballs, basketballs for Christmas, Ishama was getting fishing poles." She remembers buying him a pair of $100 Nikes, which he wore one day to Lake Merced and promptly lost on the shore. "That kid," she says. He was fishing every week – striper, perch, largemouth bass – and he eventually began to enter local tournaments as a non-boater (meaning he'd fish in the back of a pro's boat). At 17, with some help from his father, Monroe bought his first bass boat, and when the two of them would fish together, it'd be Monroe at the front, running the trolling motor, and Simpson in back.
In 1993, soon after he turned pro, Monroe met Mel Tellez through a mutual acquaintance. There was a small gathering one night, and Monroe, then just out of high school, actually turned off the Super Nintendo to talk to her. At one point, as Tellez remembers it, he told her he was working as a UPS loader, but he said that job was only to pay for his tournaments; what he really wanted to do was fish. "I laughed," she recalls, "and I continued laughing for the next four years."
By the time of Napa High School's prom, they had been dating for four months or so. Tellez, a senior, picked out a dress and made dinner reservations. "I naturally assumed my boyfriend would be taking me," she says. "Then he informed me, probably about a week before prom, that he had a tournament to go to. I was like, 'OK, you're still taking me to prom.' He said, 'No, I have to go to this tournament.' I said, 'You're joking. You're taking me to my prom. You can't do this to me.' He picked the tournament."
