Each weekday morning, after I’ve showered and dressed and before I leave for work, I sit down in front of the television with a cup of coffee and whatever I’ve been able to scavenge for breakfast. I quickly check to see the sports highlights, and then flip until I find a certain infomercial offering investment opportunities and hosted by a gorgeous young woman sporting canyonesque cleavage. I watch, rapt, despite the fact that my net worth consists of whatever it is they’re paying per pound for aluminum cans these days. Sometimes I’ll hear a stirring in the background, and quickly change the channel as my wife emerges from the bedroom.
     “Whatcha watching?”
     “Bass fishing,” I say, and sometimes we sit together and watch as professional bass fishermen roar off to a part of a reservoir down South somewhere, fire a few perfunctory casts, and then roar off somewhere else.
     When I’ve had a tough week, I watch them and think to myself, “Hey, you know what? I could do that.”
     I think I can, too.
     First, I’ll need a gaudy outfit in colors not seen in my family since my brother Scott’s 1977 Homecoming date.
     Second, I’m a realist, and understand that things might be a little tough at first, since most of my bass fishing experience has involved rowing around quiet northern Wisconsin lakes at dusk with my dad. Until I get the fishing part down, I will—as we entrepeneurial types like to say—maximize revenue streams by acquiring sponsors. A shirt or jacket doesn’t offer much surface area for advertisement, so I will don a sandwich board. In light of my advancing age, potential sponsors include Metamucil, The California Prune Marketing Board, and Life Alert. Perhaps I can even hire Wilford Brimley for a television spot in which he eats a bowl of oatmeal in the bow of my boat.
     Speaking of boats, I know that standard procedure on The Tournament Trail is to operate a metalflake number with an engine consuming the annual output of a small OPEC country. I might not have the cash for that. Like I said, I’m a realist. So at first I’ll stick with my plain-Jane 14’6” aluminum boat powered by a 9.9 kicker because it possesses that most desirable of attributes: it’s paid for.
     My tackle will need some work. I need to change my mindset that six-pound-test monofilament is just about perfect and 10-pound is for heavy duty, and get line which is not only useful for hauling big ol’ hawgs out of heavy cover, but also for securing anchors and towing boaters-in-distress.
     Looking through the pages of a bass-fishing catalog, I realize that my reels are out of date, too. As Fletch said in the movie, well, “Fletch,”  “It’s all ball-bearings these days.” The reels in my catalog have 11, 16, even 20 ball bearings. Hah! I’ll have a reel constructed entirely of ball bearings. Drop it, and it rolls downhill. For backup, I’ll use a spincast reel because nobody on the circuit uses one. Think of the untapped revenue stream.
     I already have a bottle of garlic-flavored scent spray, so that’ll save me a few shekels there. The spray doesn’t work, as far as I can tell, but it does have the pleasant side effect of causing my boat to smell like a pizzeria. I was fishing with a friend a few years back, and I liberally doused my plastic worm with the stuff between casts.
     “You know,” he said, “vampires don’t come out in the daylight.”
     Salt-impregnated baits will probably be banned soon in the Madison lakes, due to the alarming number of cases of bass with hypertension, but that’s alright. I’ll introduce a line of baits which are impregnated impregnated. Cast, and they’ll give birth during the retrieve.
     I expect tournament success will come quickly, and I will parlay my fame into a television gig despite, as the saying goes, having a face made for radio. For my show, I will develop a signature line—something like “Ooo, son!” That’s Roland Martin, I think, and I probably haven’t hooked a fish in the last twenty years without uttering that phrase. Someday, after I tip, the final line of my obituary will read:
     “His last words were “Ooo, son!”
     One day maybe you’ll be like I was, sitting in front of the tube on a weekday morning, bemoaning your fate in the workaday world. You’ll idly flip the channels until you come across The Bassmaster Classic, and there I’ll be, my little aluminum boat idling amongst all the metalflaked monstrosities. They’ll blast off, and as I reappear from beneath the swells I’ll turn around.
     “Wait!” the commentator will say. “What’s he doing? He appears to be coming back to the landing!”
     And that’s exactly what I will do. I will don my sandwich board in full view of the phalanx of television cameras, take out my spincast outfit, and start jiggin’ and piggin,’ and rattlin’and buzzin’ and burnin.’ It shouldn’t be any problem to come up with a limit of lunkers.
     “Think of it!” the commentator will say. “It’s pure genius! He’s fishing virtually untapped water right beneath our feet!”
     Once ashore, I will hoist my mossybacks and get kissed by scantily-clad women. As an aside, this is a scenario which has not played out much for me in real life. James Madison Park here in Madison is on Lake Mendota, and is a popular sunbathing spot for University of Wisconsin students. Once I approached a particularly attractive pair of lotioned-up coeds, hoisted a stringer of really big bullheads, and awaited my smooch on the cheek.
     “Get those things away from us before we call the police,” they said.
     But after I get kissed at The Bassmaster Classic, I will chug a bottle of Metamucil in front of the cameras—thank you, sponsors! And then later, under the lights at the winners’ podium, I will say:
     “Thanks for the six-foot-long check. I have to go. No, I mean really. I have to go.”