Of the visionaries that built sport fishing over the last 50-60 years, Jerry McKinnis of Little Rock doesn't get the credit he deserves, but he stakes an authoritative claim in his new book Bass Fishing, Brown Dogs & Curveballs.
We all know what Ray Scott did for bass fishing, and what Forrest Wood did for fishing and boat building. We know what Dave Whitlock, Lefty Kreh and Mark Sosin did for fly fishing, and we all know how Bill Dance popularized bass fishing for everyman.
Through his long-running fishing show, The Fishin' Hole and from his association with ESPN, McKinnis stands as tall as anyone.
His book is not self-aggrandizing. It is Jerry's life story, and what a story it is. As a pioneer in outdoors television, McKinnis experienced the best that the fishing world had to offer, but the bigger story is about making the most of opportunities.
The places McKinnis has been makes an angler envious. He was a guide on the White River in its prime, before its trophy trout became known to the world. He guided on Bull Shoals Lake when it was still young. He fished Sam Rayburn Reservoir in Texas when it was brand new, and he fished Toledo Bend when it was brand new. He fished Dale Hollow Reservoir in Tennessee with Billy Westmoreland when it still had world-record size smallmouth bass.
His journey took its second major detour with a guided fishing trip on the White with Forrest Wood, who was a jack-of-all-trades in the White River country. The first detour was quitting a baseball career rather than accept a demotion. McKinnis had saved up his change to splurge on a fishing trip he really couldn't afford with a wife and small children back home in Missouri. He and Wood hit it off immediately, and Wood helped him get established in the guiding business.
Oh, and McKinnis also fished Lake Maumelle when it was new and vibrant. He ran Maumelle Harbor -- now Jolly Rogers Marina -- for years, and that's where the story hits high gear.
Fishing is the dominant theme, but McKinnis concentrates on relationships and how people miraculously find each other at the crossroads of inspiration, preparation and opportunity. There were many pivotal figures at crucial points in McKinnis's life, and he weaves them into a tapestry of personalities bound by the threads of gratitude, honesty and integrity.
Maumelle Harbor is also where McKinnis met the late Bud Campbell, the former sports anchor at KATV Channel 7 and the beloved "Voice of the Razorbacks" until his death in 1974. Impressed with a stringer of big bass that McKinnis had caught, Campbell invited McKinnis to show them on a KATV newscast.
That led to one thing and another, culminating in the Arkansas Sportsman television show that I watched religiously as a child.
McKinnis described his relationships with the other people that came into his life over the years. They helped him advance from a local show to a regional show to a nationally syndicated show.
McKinnis was already a big name in outdoor programming in the early 1980s when he made a cold call to a fledgling cable sports outfit in Bristol, Conn. Hungry for innovative programming, the company bought the proposal, and McKinnis found himself on the ground floor of ESPN.
Those chance meetings that change life's trajectory are the "curveballs" in the title. In this way it is remarkably similar to Ray Scott's 1992 book, Prospecting and Selling.
Throughout, McKinnis seasons the narrative with spicy anecdotes about fishing with Coach Bobby Knight and Boston Red Sox great Ted Williams.
Some newsworthy passages involve McKinnis' account of his relationships with BASS and FLW in the 1990s and early 2000s. They answer some important questions about the modern evolution of professional bass fishing and involve the classic elements of loyalty, greed, vengeance and forgiveness. McKinnis was a key player as a producer, and now as a principle owner of BASS.
The story is fabulous, but the book itself suffers greatly from shoddy editing. It is full of typographical errors, usage errors, misspellings, subject-verb disagreements and grammatical errors that could provide enough grist for a parlor game. Even Steve Bowman's cover blurb contains a typo.
McKinnis offers a disclaimer on the dust jacket, saying that he didn't want to pay $2,000-$5,000 for a professional proofreader. He donated the savings to Central Arkansas Rescue Effort for Animals.
"If you see a misspelled word or a comma out of place, please give me a pass!" McKinnis wrote.
McKinnis obviously laid out some serious coin on the layout, thick, glossy paper and high-quality printing; the visuals, if you will. An autobiography is a legacy document, though, and a rough draft is unfitting for a figure as influential as Jerry McKinnis.
Sports on 07/23/2015