Riding the Bass Boom

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•In professional bass fishing there are two pro circuits and more than 25 minor leagues, as well as leagues for walleye in the north. The FLW has added redfish and kingfish tournaments as it expands into saltwater pursuits. It underwrote 214 events this year, handing out more than $30 million in cash and prizes. That's up from 135 in 2000. Sponsors continue to line up, checkbook in hand.

•Pro bass fishing appears on two television networks. ESPN, which spent $40 million to buy the Bassmaster Tour, and Fox, which sponsors the FLW, are going fin to fin for supremacy (see box).

•The hottest store in retailing isf Bass Pro Shops; the second hottest is its rival, Cabela's. Cities from Buffalo, N.Y., to Broken Arrow, Okla., are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at those outfits for the privilege of getting one of their megastores. The stores are so popular, they drive economic development.

Fisherfolk are a passionate lot, and Jacobs is one of them. The son of a Minneapolis junkman, Jacobs learned to spot value early in life, and by the 1980s he was plying that trade on Wall Street as a corporate raider, even making a run at Walt Disney. In 1992 he made a different play, buying most of the junk bonds of yacht builder Carver, which had used the high-priced debt to gobble up a portfolio of boat brands and got into deep trouble when recession hit. When Carver's owners called Jacobs to negotiate with their new partner, he told them, I don't think you understand; you're out. He had spent $27 million to control $150 million in assets.

Carver came with immediate problems: Jacobs had to sell more boats in a soft economy. Among Carver's assets was Ranger Boats, which had been founded by Forrest L. Wood, a pine-tree- tall Arkansan in a Stetson who is pretty much the Paul Bunyan of bass fishing. Ranger, along with other fishing-industry firms, had for years sponsored fishing tournaments, but the payouts had been small because the companies couldn't afford big prizes.

To help promote fishing and thus boat sales, Jacobs bought Operation Bass, which ran many of those low-paying tournaments. But it too was struggling. He realized that since more than 50 million people fished, they didn't define a market subset. They were the market. "This group of people buys everything. And they're loyal. A bell went off in my head," says Jacobs. Folks who bought Strike King lures also bought tons of cereal and candy. And not only did they buy that stuff, but they could identify with pro fishermen.

In Jacobs' analysis, the tournaments were small time because they had the wrong sponsors. The fishing outfits were great, but they couldn't pay all the freight needed to raise purses or produce great television. So Jacobs supplanted them with corporations such as GM's Chevrolet division, M&M/Mars, 7-Up and Fujifilm, which wouldn't blink at, say, a $10 million sponsorship fee if it could move the sales needle. Then in 1997 he landed the whale: Wal-Mart. "We tend to think in increments, in small steps," Scott tells TIME. "Irwin thinks in big steps, in flights of steps." He also hounded the Wal-Mart man into submission. "It was the only way I could get Irwin to stop calling," says Scott of the deal.

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