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"I've explained to ESPN," he goes on later. "'You know what you need? You need a bad boy of bass fishing.' When I say 'bad boy' I don't mean someone who breaks rules and things like that, but a guy who, if he goes out there and misses a fish, just gets pissed off and – ksssshhhh – snaps a rod over his knee. It's stuff like that that would bring more people into the sport.
"They asked me if I wanted the job. I said, 'No, not really. Everybody likes me.'" (Incidentally, Monroe's cussing at the Classic – he said either "shit" or "fuck" – wasn't bleeped, which may or may not have been a conscious grab by ESPN for "edge.")
I ask Monroe if he thinks ESPN is using him. "They can use me all they want," he says. "It ain't gonna do nothing but make me more popular and put more money in my pocket." As he points out, casting from the prow of his boat, he's using ESPN, too. Come an' git you some.
Clear Lake and its namesake city, Clearlake, lie about 100 miles north of San Francisco; at 43,000 acres, Clear Lake is the largest natural lake within California's borders and possibly the oldest in North America. (The Chamber of Commerce also would like you to know that Clear Lake is considered the "Bass Capital of the West.") The three-day CITGO Bassmaster Western Open presented by Busch Beer rolls into town on a Wednesday evening in October, beginning with registration and a briefing at the Clearlake Senior Center, and for the next few days, the city is overrun with trucks and boats, moving mostly in schools – massing at the senior center or the Best Western, or idling, in the pre-dawn hour before launch, along the roads leading into Redbud Park.
The event is not one of bass fishing's biggest, but on the first day, a Thursday, a handful of fans turn up for the weigh-in outside the Bassmaster trailer, dragging their lawn chairs into the shade. A group of boys run around with autographs covering their yellow ball caps, lures dangling from the sides of the hats, and as the anglers return in waves at the end of the round, the kids head down to the docks to plead for more autographs and more lures. Each day of the tournament, in fact, draws a larger crowd, and by Saturday there is actually bickering among certain spectators about who set down whose cooler where.
Out on the water, Monroe fishes a pair of unspectacular but solid rounds and on Friday sits in 37th place, high enough to qualify for Saturday's finale. (Each angler fishes for a limit of five bass in a round and is ranked based on the weight of his total catch.) "I've become Mr. Consistency," Monroe says that night. "That's the new nickname I've given myself." Mr. Consistency is eating takeout on an old living-room sofa; the house, a low-roofed affair next to a dirt road and a bunch of barking dogs, belongs to his friend Aaron Coleman, a young black pro from Oakland, who uses the place when he's in town for a tournament. This week, he's let several other fishermen sleep here, and on Wednesday night there were five guys staying at the house, four of them black, or nearly the entire contingent of black anglers at the tournament. "Got all the brothers staying in one place, huh?" one white fisherman said to Coleman after the briefing. That night, they prepared for their first rounds by eating barbecue and flipping between old fishing videos and the Weather Channel. (Monroe's girlfriend, Rachel, wanted to come; he told her no.)
In any case, Mr. Consistency is not to be confused with Mr. Big Fish. "I used to be Mr. Big Fish," Monroe continues, "used to shoot for the win, and I'd either do really, really well, or I'd do really, really bad. Now I stay consistent, and I just cash checks." It's a different style of fishing, incorporating an altogether different pattern, and it means that at the end of a tournament there will likely be a paycheck. It's how full-time fishermen remain full-time fishermen. Meanwhile, Coleman and Matt Miley, an amateur staying here, make their merry way through a bottle of cognac; neither of them qualified for the final day.
Fishing with any kind of consistency is itself a major achievement. Anglers know only a few things about bass. Bass like structure (docks, for instance); they like a nice, cool spot in the shadow of a tree; they like an easy meal. "They're like people," Monroe says. "A pizzaman shows up at your doorstep with a pizza, and you ain't gotta pay for it, you're gonna eat it." The idea is to get a bite, determine precisely how you got that bite, then develop a pattern around that bite (which, come to think of it, is also how a car salesman moves Chevys). "The only thing about that is that fish are unpredictable," he says. It's not light work, either. After two days – 16 hours – of fishing, Monroe's right leg aches from leaning on the trolling motor's pedal. The muscle between his right thumb and index finger has locked up. His hands are cut, his fingers hurt, and he just took an Excedrin for his head. "Put it this way," Coleman says. "Those people who say bass fishing isn't a sport? They have no fucking clue."
The sheer difficulty of the sport – of trying to make rent money off the whims of a few ugly fish – seems to give even Monroe doubts about his choice of career. His youngest half-brother is starting to fish, and Monroe says he'd like him to get involved in the sport, but not too involved. "My mom takes him fishing, and I tell her to do it as much as she possibly can, because he'll end up like me," he says. "I'd love for my brother to end up like me, as far as not having the whole drugs thing, not getting into trouble, never going to jail. But as far as fishing for a living? No. I want him to have a real job." He laughs a little. "A real life."
