Glen Andrews doesn’t forget much. Even at 93 years old, his memories of fish catches are etched in his mind with the clarity of scenes forever chiseled in stone.
There was a time when Andrews was considered the best bass angler in the world. He had the credentials to prove it. But the memory of who he was has quietly dwindled from the annals of bass fishing. Andrews impact on the sport of bass fishing, though, along with his memories, have stood the test of time.
“I believe my dad is the missing link,” said Shane Andrews. “He trained Ray Scott. He trained Bill Dance. He trained Bobby Murray and so many more. Nobody knows that, and he’s the one who kind of slipped through the fingers like sand.”
To understand that statement you have to go back to the 1960s. Professional bass fishing as we know it today was still in the womb, incubating and growing for its birth in 1967 at Beaver Lake. Glen Andrews was one of its fathers.
There were tournaments back in those days, but few that were strictly centered on bass fishing.
“It was fresh water fishing, it wasn’t just bass fishing,” Andrews said “We could catch crappie. We could catch perch. We could catch catfish. We could catch walleye, trout, bass. But bass was the number one thing. If you weren’t a good bass fisherman, you didn’t have no business in the tournament. You couldn’t win nothing. Because that’s where the big points were. Points were a lot bigger on bass and trout.”
Each species was weighed separately and each ounce was worth varying amounts of points. For instance, crappie were worth 1-point per ounce, while bass were 3- to 5-points per ounce. “A 5- or 6-pound bass would be worth 200 points or more, where a limit of crappie might be 50 points,’’ Andrews said. “But those could be important points.”
That was the outline of many of the fishing contests of the day and none were bigger than the World Series of Sport Fishing. Started by Hy Peskin, world-renowned sports photographer for Sports Illustrated, who by some accounts began the venture with Ted Williams of Major League Baseball fame. One of those events combined saltwater with freshwater. But for the most part these events were held within the heartland of country.
You got to those events via an invitation from Peskin or qualifying through a state championship. In Andrews case, he lived on the border of Missouri and Arkansas and qualified through the Show Me State’s championship.
In 1962, a 22-year old, Andrews fished his first World Series of Sport Fishing in Oklahoma. It was a 5-day contest held on a different lake each day, most of which Andrews had never seen before. But he finished a very close second to Virgil Ward of early fishing television fame, which fit right into Peskin’s plans for the World Series. He believed, outdoor writer or television show winners would launch his championship to another level.
Like so many who preceded him, Andrews was bitten with the bug. He was a full-time guide who spent every day competing for clients with other guides, so slipping into the game was natural. His skills at finding fish and catching them built his reputation, especially among outdoor writers from the states surrounding Missouri and Arkansas.
With that reputation and his strong showing in 1962, Andrews was quickly becoming recognized as a force in the fishing world. He was preparing to make it even stronger in 1963. Already qualified for the Championship, this time on Bull Shoals, Andrews started to get a glimpse of how those early tournaments played fast and loose with the rules. Those lessons would be invaluable to Ray Scott when he started building Bassmaster events.
It started with a phone call that informed Andrews he wouldn’t be able to fish the 1963 event. He had guided on the lake and a last-minute decision had been made to keep him from the competition.
“I told them ‘you can’t do that. By your rules, I’ve qualified for this event,’” Andrews said. “But they didn’t care.”
Over the next few days, all the outdoor writers Andrews had taken fishing went to his rescue in papers from St. Louis to Little Rock. Feeling the pressure, Peskin relented but just to a point.
“He asked me, if he let me fish would I do it by his rules,” Andrews said.
Those new rules lined up like this: Andrews would accept a 104-minute penalty each day in the 8-hour event. The typical day in the Championship had the angler fish with an observer. In Andrews case, Peskin paired him with two observers, no small thing considering the boats were in the 16-feet long range. But Andrews accepted his penalties and four days later he had amassed an insurmountable lead in the contest going into the final day.
That’s when the rules switched again. Andrews was still saddled with a time penalty and two observers, while Peskin decided to zero the weights going into the final day for the top 10 and to make matters worse, put all 10 boats in one big cove, where thousands of spectators were expected to come and watch the final day. Legend says that less than a dozen perched on a cliff to watch the action. And there wasn’t much to see. Ken White, who edged Virgil Ward out of the top 10 on the strength of a 4-ounce bream, caught a 5-pounder that day and won the Championship, putting Andrews as runner up for the second year.
“Peskin got what he wanted,” Andrews said. “But I still feel like I won that event.
“The guy won it accidentally. He illegally caught a 5-pound bass. He was fishing, and he threw his rod down in the boat when a big bass broke on the other side of the boat in open water. He caught a 5-pound bass, but he did it illegally, because he had the other line in the water and everyone could see that. You couldn’t have two lines in the water at the same time. They wouldn’t do anything about it, though. They still gave him his trophy instead of giving it to me.”
It left a sour taste in his mouth. To add to it, the Missouri contingent asked him to not fish in 1964. He relented and sat out a year. But in 1965 he came back and in a big way. He qualified again, this time on Lake Tawakoni in Texas. In practice for that event, Andrews was constantly harassed by a boat that buzzed him all day.
He learned the harassing boat was being piloted by a gentleman who had bet $10,000 on another competitor and he was hoping to run Andrews off the water.
“When that didn’t work, he jumped me in the parking lot,’’ Andrews said. “His first punch took out two ribs. But 5 minutes later he was begging me to stop hitting him.”
The damage was done, though. Andrews suffered two broken and separated ribs and two broken bones in his right hand.
“The next morning I couldn’t hardly get out of bed,’’ Andrews said.
He fished the Championship in intense pain and was forced to cast left-handed. It didn’t matter, though, Andrews won his first World Championship. Intending to retire, he was spurred to go another year when he was told no one had ever won two. In 1966, he returned and won the event again on Lake Eufaula.
From 1962 to 1966, Andrews had won three Missouri State Championships, an Arkansas State Championship, was the runner up twice in the World Championship, followed by two World Championships. In all of those events he never made a single dollar in prize money. But his reputation, guide and lure business were flying high. He had helped develop and was the first man to market what is now known as the Texas-rig. In the 1960s, it was the Andrews Slip-Sinker Worm.
Then along came Ray Scott and his idea for the All-American on Beaver Lake. By then Andrews was guiding on Beaver as well. Scott was spurred by local businessmen, all who knew of the shenanigans of these past events, insisted Andrews give his approval and be involved in the event before they showed their support.
Always shrewd, Scott, who didn’t want local guides in his early events, enlisted Andrews as his “Chairman of Rules.” That was something Andrews was passionate about, for obvious reasons. Andrews preached the importance of having and following strict rules to Scott. It was a sermon Scott would soak in and fall back on for decades.
For Scott having Andrews around served several purposes. One, the most-feared angler in the region would not be in the event. Two, the locals would sign off on it. But as important as all those things were, it was unfettered access to Andrews’ little black book of anglers already accustomed to fishing tournaments.
Andrews and Scott, working in the back office of Rogers Chamber of Commerce with a donated Watts Line, would spend the evening calling anglers from Texas and Oklahoma to Illinois, enticing anglers to come fish this “new kind of derby.” They would make sojourns to states close by. On one of those they met a young kid named Bill Dance while fishing on Pickwick, inviting him to come fish the All-American.
“I can still remember Glen and Ray pulling up,’’ Dance recalls. “After we finished talking, Glen said, ‘if you will cast out there behind you in 17 feet, you will get a bite.’
“I was like ‘whatever.’ I had never fished much deeper than 3- to 5-feet deep. But when they went around the bend and got out of sight, I threw my worm out there and as soon as it hit the bottom a fish bit. I went nuts. 17-feet of water! I couldn’t believe it. I did it again and again.
“After that I called Glen every day during a tournament and he coached me. He taught me so much. I wouldn’t be here today without him.”
Bobby Murray has expressed similar feeling toward Andrews as a mentor, as has many anglers from that era, including Jerry McKinnis, Jimmy Houston, Johnny Morris and Roland Martin.
Andrews’ reputation and leadership placed him as president of the Professional Sports Fishing Association (PSFA), a group of anglers who started an advocacy group soon after the All-American. Their hope was to fold B.A.S.S. into their organization. History tells us that didn’t happen.
Scott had lit the fuse on a rocket ship and he soon left everyone behind in the pursuit of having a tournament organization with no shenanigans. Andrews’ position in a soon-to-be defunct PSFA, left him out of the limelight and arguably shunned. By the 1980s, few anglers were left who remembered the impact Glen Andrews had on the sport of bass fishing.
By absorbing the figurative and literal body blows of early competition, Andrews ensured that Scott’s early rules were written in stone and strictly followed. Many of his friends and cohorts helped fill the field that kicked off the sport and his willingness to help a long list of up-and-coming anglers paid dividends that all Bassmasters have reaped in some form.
While Andrews remembers the fish catches, the rest of us should never forget the impact.
Sidebar
Glen Andrews was obviously a phenomenal bass fisherman. But what made him so good?
Some might expect his super-natural skills were just that; supernatural, a prodigy of sorts. In truth Andrews was on the forefront of so many things in the bass fishing world, that what made him great has since become basic bass fishing for the rest of the world. It just wasn’t so basic in the 1960s.
It started with a mentor. In every great angler’s life there is someone who laid the groundwork. In Andrews’ case it was Joe Lindsey of Harrison, Ark., an early guide on the lakes of the White River Chain.
“He was the greatest bass fisherman I’ve ever known and I’ve known about all of them,” Andrews said. “He took me under the wing, and for five years, every day, he coached me. He taught me how to find bass. He taught me how to catch them.
“He said, ‘You know. The important thing is finding the bass. You can take an idiot and knock his brains out and he can catch a limit of bass if you got someone to put him on top of them.’”
Armed with the knowledge of how to find bass, it improved drastically by the timing of those lessons. One has to remember in the early 1960s, a tremendous amount of water was being created by the Corps of Engineers in an era when lakes all over the country were in their infancy. When Andrews’s first guided on Bull Shoals, it was 25 feet from being full. The visual of dry land soon to be inundated along with an uncanny memory of a what a lake looked like underneath the surface far outweighed the rudimentary maps of the day. Some could make the case it was the side-imaging of the day without the electronics.
Seeing a point prior to flooding and then after helped Andrews visualize in every fishery he traveled to. All of that helped his fishing skills, but it didn’t necessarily improve his derby skills. That would come in the most natural of ways.
“You’ve got to remember, I guided for a living,” he said. “We had 15 or 20 guys, but there were 10 guys you had to compete with every day. You had to produce or you’d lose your customers. It was a dog fight every day who was going to have the best string of fish out of 10 guys. I got pretty good at it, and of course I’d hold my own.
“That’s one of the reasons that bass fishing tournaments were so easy for me, because the pressure didn’t bother me one bit. I was used to it. I fished against it every single day. I didn’t have nearly the competition in the World Series of Sport Fishing as I did from those guides.”
With about 20 or more years of full-time guiding, trying to feed a family, that can produce a lot of pressure. But he caught on quickly, even foreshadowing the ways pros in coming decades would build their names by creating relationships and building his brand in the media. By the late 1960s he was considered the best in the business.
That need to succeed didn’t end there. Because guiding was his business, Lindsey encouraged him to keep records.
“I kept a daybook,” Andrews said “Every day I put down how deep my bass were, what I caught them on, what kind of water they were in. Was it steep bank, was it bluff, was it long drop off corner. After five years, I looked at that book and realized I was doing the same thing every year with the same lures and fishing the same kind of waters.
“I knew early on that there were patterns, that bass have a pattern they follow year after year after year.”
Those seasonal patterns worked on other fisheries as well. And it was simple as looking at a map, comparing with the daybook and testing it wherever he went. It was those patterns, that hadn’t even come to light for the rest of the world until Roland Martin introduced them in the 1970s, that Andrews would use to coach Bill Dance, Bobby Murray and many others.
To add to those, Andrews is credited with developing the Texas-rig worm. It wasn’t called that then, bearing the more concise “slip-sinker worm.” Back in those days, before the advent of terminal tackle packs full of lead, anglers would often cut the bottom from a bell-shaped sinker, discarding the swivel and slipping it on the line. Andrews was the first to market what has come to be one of the mainstays of fishing world in the form of the “Flitter Tail Slip-Sinker Worm Kit.” You got three worms, three sinkers and three hooks in that package with a lesson on how to use it.
The slip-sinker worm would become the meat in Andrews’ arsenal as it has in many arsenals since.
You put all those things together in the early 1960s and you have Glen Andrews, an angler who used the basics to rule the bass fishing world for a decade, teaching the rest of us how to follow.