During the spring of 2004, I fished a tournament on a beautiful lake just outside of Eufaula, Ala. It was only a 10-boat field, and one of the other nine boats was helmed by Dave Precht, the longtime editor of Bassmaster Magazine and then vice president of publications for B.A.S.S.
Seeing him there was like spotting a rock star at Starbucks.
Using the loosest definition of the term, I guess he and I were both “outdoors journalists.” But there were pictures of him sitting with presidents and superstars from the fishing industry, while no such pictures of me existed.
I refused to even talk to him for fear that he might actually, you know, hear me. That’s the respect I had for him then and the respect I still have for him today, even though we’ve now shared an office space, a truck and a boat many times.
As this magazine celebrates its 500th issue, he deserves as much credit for its success and longevity as anyone.
Not only did he edit and produce a near-perfect product every month of his tenure, he gathered the greatest cast of outdoors writing talent ever assembled to fill its pages.
There’s Don Wirth, who gave the greatest induction acceptance speech in the history of the Bass Fishing Hall of Fame (seriously, he thanked everyone and got the heck out of there like he was on deadline).
There’s Steve Price, who I once woke up accidentally just after midnight by dialing the wrong room when he was scheduled to get up for the Bassmaster Classic on Lay Lake at 2:30 a.m.
There’s Louie Stout, who used to counsel me when I was just a young pup about not letting him dominate the interviews at Bassmaster events when I was the newspaper guy with a deadline to meet.
I could stop with just those three guys and it would top any lineup for any fishing magazine that’s ever existed. But there are so many more.
How could we not mention the incomparable Bob Cobb?
Mr. Cobb — I’m sorry, some folks just deserve to be addressed properly — has written quite a bit for Bassmaster lately.
As you’d expect, everything he’s filed has been pure gold. But there was this one time when I was editing his copy and found a tiny little error that needed to be corrected.
I fixed it. Then I sat straight up in my chair and said, out loud, “I just edited Bob Cobb. How crazy is that?”
I didn’t know whether to feel proud or guilty. Should I call and apologize? Where did I get off thinking I could edit the very first editor of Bassmaster and the owner of that booming voice that narrated The Bassmasters for so many years?
Being a part of a publication that is filled with such incredible talent each month makes me proud, but it also makes me sad.
No one lives or works forever — not even the incredible writers I’ve mentioned in this space. There will come a time when each of them writes his last piece for the publication they’ve built brick by brick during the past four-plus decades.
Each of their retirements will be hard to stomach.
James Hall, the current editor, and I, the executive editor, will do our best to replace them, knowing all the while that some folks are simply irreplaceable.