I stood in line at the Bassmaster Classic to meet Rick Clunn. He’s the only angler I would do that for. I wasn’t the only one – his booth had people queued up all weekend long. One intrepid fan even snuck into the Expo early to make sure that he could purchase commemorative coin number one.
I don’t know what all of the ongoing attention means to the Hall of Famer. He’s hard to read and hard to hear. One possibility is he sees himself as a lion in winter, nearing the end of his tournament career, regretful that it cannot go on forever. If indeed that’s the case, I hope he reconsiders.
Clunn’s career in some ways inadvertently propelled my own journey as an outdoor writer. Indeed, thinking of it as a journey seems to me to be a very Clunn-like manner of framing the effort. Nick Taylor’s 1988 book Bass Wars about life on tour, in which Clunn was already cast as the archetype of the untouchable veteran, spurred my interest in professional bass fishing. The first B.A.S.S. event that I attended was Day 3 of the 1990 Classic on the James River, when he seemingly came out of nowhere with a monstrous bag to claim his fourth Classic trophy.
I didn’t start writing until over a decade later, so by some conventional metrics I missed Clunn’s glory days, the times when he was a dominating force on the water. He’s won two Elite Series events in the past decade – and in some respects those victories are more impressive than his earlier excellence – but I felt like I’d missed the all-time great at the peak of his powers.
And then, shortly after returning from Tulsa I heard Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” for the 8,000th time.
I’ve always assumed it was a sad song, about people past their prime. First there’s the guy the narrator went to high school with:
I had a friend was a big baseball player
Back in high school
He could throw that speedball by you
Make you look like a fool boy
Saw him the other night at this roadside bar
I was walking in, he was walking out
We went back inside sat down had a few drinks
But all he kept talking about was
Glory days…
There’s also a woman he knew from those same bygone days:
Well there’s a girl that lives up the block
Back in school she could turn all the boy’s heads
Sometimes on a Friday I’ll stop by
And have a few drinks after she put her kids to bed
Her and her husband Bobby well they split up
I guess it’s two years gone by now
We just sit around talking about the old times
She says when she feels like crying
She starts laughing thinking bout
Glory days…
The message I always heard was of people past their prime, sad that it couldn’t go on forever.
But despite the fact I thought it was a miserable ode to what was and what-could-have-been-but-never-happened, for the first time I heard “Glory Days” as a happy song. There’s the tune itself, which without the lyrics would be a stomp-happy danceable frolic. Then there are the words. With respect to the baseball player, yes “all he kept talking about” was those high school years, but there’s no express indication that he’s unhappy or unfulfilled in any way. The head-turning girl – just when she feels like crying, Springsteen tells us, she starts laughing instead. Maybe the laughter isn’t a means of masking her sadness, but rather true happiness that she turned out the way she did, rather than the way she had envisioned.
What made me think they were unhappy in the present? What made me think that they were truly happy back in high school, when their status came about as the result of what other people thought of them – whether it’s the ability to make someone look like a fool, or to turn someone’s head?
What has always impressed me with Clunn is that he’s been willing to go against the grain in a sport where toeing the party line is placed at a premium. No matter how many times he was derogatorily referred to as “Conehead” or “Zen,” he kept doing his own thing. On the one hand, he was certainly measured in reference to his competition – indeed that’s why they keep score – but it always felt like he held himself to a higher standard, an internal one.
Indeed, the more I thought about it the more I was thankful, bordering on happy, that I hadn’t been there for the period of his career when he was most successful on the water. As we learned from Springsteen, physical gifts are transient, but it’s how you treat their demise and remember them later on that mark the measure of character. If my memory had been clouded by a firsthand view of Clunn’s excellence at Toho and Guntersville and Pine Bluff, then I wouldn’t have known that his glory days came much later:
- They came when most of the field waited around on Day 4 in Palatka to see if he’d win at nearly 70 years old;
- They came when Skeet Reese insisted on carrying Clunn’s bag to the scales as a show of respect and as a way of touching greatness;
- They came as Clunn entered a seemingly unthinkable 50th year in the sport and 500th tournament with B.A.S.S.; and
- They came when he was the only still-active pro granted his own episode of Bassmaster’s The Cast television show.
The more I thought about it, the more I came to hope Clunn never sees old age as a penance, but rather as a time to see the seeds he planted coming out of the ground.
If you’re willing to admit that glory days will pass you by, that your greatest successes were those that came earliest and easiest, you may not be trying hard enough. Clunn has told us as much, reminding all of us we should never assume our best days are behind us. I hope he’s able to fully internalize that. Something tells me he hasn’t yet. He’s living a journey where it’s impossible to know everything. But the message I learned in line at the Classic, and from a three-minute record, is that while he accomplished a ton on the field of play, that’s just a small fraction of what he means to the sport.
