Entry 294-1
Tournament Bass Fishing with Greg Hackney – Get Your Head Together and Keep it Together
Editor’s Note: From February 20-22, 2009 in Shreveport-Bossier City, Louisiana, 51 of the best bass fishermen in the nation competed for $500,000 in the 2009 Bassmaster Classic, where the winner was determined by skill, luck, talent and emotional stability. If you lose your cool in a big tournament, you’ll lose the tournament, and if you’re not mentally prepared, you won’t fish well. How professional tournament bass fishermen deal with the emotions and the pressures of bass fishing determines their success or failure. This week, Strike King has asked Greg Hackney of Gonzales, Louisiana, the pre-Classic favorite, how he deals with his emotions during a big tournament. If we can understand how the best bass fishermen in the world deal with the emotions of bass fishing, we’ll greatly improve our chances for success every time we fish for bass.
Part 5: I Love a Streak
Question: Greg, up to this point we’ve discussed dealing with the emotions caused from negative circumstances in bass fishing. However, bass fishermen also can get into trouble by believing bad press received during a bad-luck streak. How do you deal with finishing in the top five in three tournaments consecutively?
Hackney: Weekend and tournament bass fishermen pray for streaks. When you’re catching a number of fish every time you go out, you’ll increase your confidence level. A streak helps you understand that you consistently can catch bass, you’re a good fisherman, and you possess the ability and the knowledge to win a pro bass tournament. A successful streak causes me to fish and work harder to maintain the streak. For me, bass fishing is like a drug. Once you do well in the tournament and have that success, you love that feeling you get when you come across the stage with a big bass and get a check at the end of the tournament. 
When that happens, I feel confident in my ability to find and catch bass. You want that feeling all the time.
To consistently get that feeling, you have to win or finish in the top five in every tournament. So, when you’re on a streak, you’ll push yourself harder to concentrate more, make more and better casts, vary your retrieves and perform the extra work required to catch more bass and win. When you’re on a streak and consistently catching bass, there’s an adrenaline rush that’s hard to describe, and few understand that feeling except bass fishermen who’ve had that rush.
Strike King makes great lures that will catch bass in any water, weather or fishing conditions. Strike King’s lures have consistently won tournaments, caught trophy bass and produced successful bass fishermen. Strike King’s Pro Staff includes some of the most-successful professional bass fishermen in the world. But regardless of the quality of Strike King lures and the success the Strike King pros have had in the past, if we don’t keep our heads together and deal with the emotions of bass fishing in a positive way, we can’t be successful competitors or fishermen.
The same is true of the average bass fisherman. 
You can’t catch as many bass as you’d like, consistently catch bass every time you go fishing and have as much fun as a bass fisherman should when you go fishing, if you don’t learn to deal with the emotions of bass fishing. I’ve learned from this sport how to turn negatives into positives and pull encouragement and strength from defeat and poor performances. I’ve learned to use my experiences of not catching bass during a tournament as a springboard to catch more bass the next time I’m fishing or to perform better in the next tournament I fish. If you’ll try some of these techniques for staying positive, you’ll catch more bass, have more fun and be a more successful and happy bass fisherman.
Contents:
- Part 1: Riding the Emotional Roller-Coaster of Bass Fishing
- Part 2: How to Handle the Slump
- Part 3: When the Wheels Come Off
- Part 4: Disqualification or A Dead Fish - Now That's Bad
- Part 5: I Love a Streak
