Bryan Kerchal first felt the tug on the other end of the line when he was only 7 years old, on the Fox River in Illinois. He was immediately smitten with the sport.
“He was intense from the very beginning,” said his mother, Ronnie Kerchal. “We couldn’t even get him in to eat.”
From then, the biggest complaint anyone ever had about him, said his father, Ray Kerchal, was that if you went fishing with him, you better be ready to be out all day — regardless of the weather, your tiredness level or your hunger. Because he just wouldn’t stop.
Bryan spent every day he could out on the water. He’d go fishing after school — even if it was raining or cold — and if he wasn’t fishing, he was reading Bassmaster Magazine or watching The Bassmasters on TV. He was completely self-taught outside of those sources. He didn’t have any experienced bass anglers in his life to show him the ropes.
A natural
That lack of knowledge showed when he joined his first bass club, the Housatonic Valley Bassmasters, in 1991.
When he joined, he met and instantly befriended Chris Mann, who was as shy as Kerchal was. Mann invited Kerchal to go pre-fishing with him before a club tournament.
“What’s pre-fishing?” asked Kerchal.
“What?” asked Mann, surprised and laughing a little. “What do you mean, what is it? It’s when you practice before a tournament.”
“He thought that was the greatest idea,” said Mann with another laugh when relating the story in 2014. “He knew so much, but there was still a lot he had to learn.”
Ed Cowan of the New York B.A.S.S. Nation fished with Kerchal a lot in those days, too, and had the same thing to say. “He didn’t know what triangulation was, and he had never fished with a buzzbait before,” said Cowan.
Did that mean Kerchal was just lucky to win the Bassmaster Classic? Not at all, said Cowan.
“He was just a natural,” Cowan said. “It’s all mental. I’ve fished with some of the best guys in the sport, in a lot of draw tournaments, and I can tell you that Bryan was one of the three best anglers I’ve ever fished with — the other two being Kevin VanDam and George Cochran. All three of them just have something the rest don’t have — better awareness, better instinct.”
I believe in dreams
Mann had never met an angler who openly acknowledged he wanted to be a pro.
“I wanted to be a pro, too, but I didn’t admit it because it sounded crazy,” said Mann. In the Northeast, people just didn’t “go pro.” There was a lack of opportunity, too much travel, not enough successful role models.
“That was for dreamers,” said Mann.
But Kerchal had already tried college. He gave it his best effort, but he came home on his first fall break, practically crying and physically sick from doing what he didn’t want to do. He told his parents he wanted to be a professional fisherman. They told him they would support him — “I believe in dreams,” said his mom, “and I wanted him to do what made him happy” — so he finished his semester and came home to Newtown, Connecticut.
“He didn’t listen to negative thoughts about it,” said Ray Kerchal. “He had a way of tuning it out. I wonder if he could even hear people when they said he couldn’t do it.”
Nobody took him very seriously
One thing standing in Kerchal’s way was a lack of funds and good equipment. He bought a used truck and a used boat, and he did the best he could with them, but they were not in good shape.
“Nobody took him very seriously because of his boat,” said Cowan. “And with his long hair, they thought he was a punk.”
Cowan was also with Kerchal when the bumper of Kerchal’s truck just came right off on the way back from the 1993 B.A.S.S. Nation Championship while he was towing his boat. He sometimes slept in his truck when needed to avoid hotel costs en route to tournaments. And when it came time to fish club tournaments around Connecticut, he fished as a nonboater.
“He thought it would be unsportsmanlike to subject someone to his boat,” said Cowan.
Rough around the edges
None of his equipment failures or shortage of money stopped Kerchal, though. He continued working at The Ground Round, the American-style restaurant near his home, because it afforded him the opportunity to fish during the day, work at night, and travel to tournaments whenever he needed to.
It wasn’t long after he joined the Housatonic Valley Bassmasters that Kerchal earned a spot on the Connecticut state team and a slot in the Eastern Divisional. It was there he exhibited a quality that’s not desirable for a bass pro — stage fright.
“He was afraid to come across the stage with his catch,” said Don Corkran, then the director of the B.A.S.S. Nation. “Even though it was just a small crowd of friends and family, he did not want to come up on that stage. I told him if he wanted to weigh his fish, he was going to have to get on stage. And he did. But he was very rough around the edges.”
Kerchal realized this inability to be comfortable on stage or speaking in front of crowds would be a hindrance. He won the Connecticut berth in the 1993 B.A.S.S. Nation Championship at that divisional, and he decided he needed to do something about his shyness quickly. So he enrolled in the Dale Carnegie classes that were offered at the time — you could compare them to Toastmasters nowadays — so that he could break out of his comfort zone. And he later worked with a confidence coach to improve even further.
“He wanted to just go fishing and then go home,” said Ronnie Kerchal. “I told him, it doesn’t work that way.”
Really out of place
At the championship, Kerchal won the top spot for the Eastern Division and qualified for the 1993 Bassmaster Classic.
“He was ecstatic but kind of subdued,” said Mann. “He had this big grin. But when the grin went away, he was real serious. He was not taking it lightly. And he was very intimidated.”
The 1993 Classic proved to be a huge learning experience for Kerchal. By all accounts, he had the bones of a plan, but he listened to the dock talk of all the pros before the tournament started. And he chose to do what the veterans of the sport — the ones who had proved themselves on the tournament trail for decades — said would work.
“But the pros changed the pattern because they’re pros and the pattern wasn’t working,” said Ray Kerchal. “Bryan didn’t.”
“He felt pretty defeated, like he messed up,” said Mann. “He was among the greatest, and yet he carried a 12-inch fish across the stage. He felt really out of place.”
Kerchal finished in last place. He finished exactly how people expect the amateurs to finish. And he was disappointed.
“He was trying to fish a way other people were fishing rather than the way he would have fished,” said Mann. “He wasn’t going to do that again.”
You better go win
Two months later, he was back on track to return to the Classic. He had won Connecticut in the divisional again, advancing to the B.A.S.S. Nation Championship. There, he beat his good friend Cowan for a spot in the Classic.
“I told him, ‘Now that you’ve done that, you better go win!’” said Cowan.
While fishing in another tournament prior to the Classic, Kerchal partnered with his friend Roy Rickus, who had a novelty fish whistle that he had picked up somewhere several years before. Kerchal loved it. Rickus gave it to him as a good luck charm for the Classic.
Kerchal told him he’d not only take it as a wish for good luck, but that he’d blow that whistle every time he caught a fish in the Classic and think of Rickus.
I’m not going to let this one get away from me
There was something different about Kerchal before the 1994 Classic. He wasn’t nervous. He had pre-fished High Rock Lake, he’d gotten more coaching on speaking in public, and he’d gotten a haircut. And he was confident.
“I’m going to do well,” Kerchal told Mann. “I’m not going to let this one get away from me.”
Cowan sensed it, too.
“I knew he was going to win,” said Cowan. “He was calm and he knew what he was going to do.”
Kerchal stuck to his guns in the 1994 Classic. He did what felt right to him, and it was as simple as fishing with a worm. He wanted to catch a limit every day — having five each day was more important to him than winning because it meant he could compete with the top guys.
As it turned out, he was the only angler in the entire field to catch a limit every day. And despite a huge last-day charge by bass fishing veteran Tommy Biffle, Kerchal had enough — by 4 ounces — to take the biggest trophy in all of fishing.
He not only blew that fish whistle when he caught each fish. He blew it on stage in front of thousands as a tribute to his friend Rickus.
I won the Classic. Give me a call.
“Hey, Chris, this is Bryan. I won the Classic. Give me a call.”
That was the message Kerchal left on Mann’s answering machine on July 30, 1994.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Mann. “I did a happy dance.”
Kerchal left that message after his triumphant lap around the arena with his family and his new trophy in tow, a moment that Don Corkran describes as “magical.”
For Kerchal, it hadn’t sunk in yet what had really just happened, said Corkran. “He was just in a daze.”
Dramatic turnaround
At the championship banquet that night, though, Corkran said he could barely even believe that the clean-cut guy in a tuxedo and a Classic trophy delivering an eloquent acceptance speech was the same guy he had to coerce onto the stage only 2 years prior in front of a crowd of fewer than 50 people.
“The transformation was just amazing,” said Corkran. “He looked like a young executive up there talking, whereas before, he looked the part of what everyone would think an ‘amateur fisherman’ would look like.”
“It was such a dramatic turnaround from his first Classic to his second,” said Dave Precht, then-editor of Bassmaster Magazine. “It was so exciting to see a young man turn his fishing around in such a short period of time, and then to go and win the title that meant more to him than anything else.”
Didn’t fit the mold
Kerchal won the hearts of the fans who were at the Classic in person, and then he won the hearts of the fans who watched the TV show when it aired just a few days later.
One of those fans was Mike Iaconelli.
“We were all set up with drinks and snacks to watch the Classic when it came on TV,” said Iaconelli, 22 at the time. “It was so cool to see him win. He was a super humble dude. He just had this air about him. All the guys who were fishing were my heroes, but that was the guy I wanted to win.”
For Iaconelli, it helped that Kerchal was from his neck of the woods.
“When I was in high school and college, there wasn’t a lot of guys fishing from the Northeast,” said Iaconelli. “He didn’t fit the mold. I could have been to his house in three hours. Bryan made a connection for me between reality and dream.”
And that connection carried over, too, to another pro — one who was only 7 years old at the time.
Brandon Palaniuk hadn’t even started fishing yet, but when he did get into the sport, Bryan Kerchal was the man he looked up to.
“A lot of people have the dream to do what we do,” said Palaniuk, “and he’s one of the ones who actually did it and succeeded.”
I am the king
Bryan Kerchal nearly forgot he was Classic champion.
“A group of us were sitting around one night, respooling our reels and just hanging out, and one of the guys told Bryan he should ask the pros something,” said Frank Giner, close friend and fishing buddy of Kerchal’s.
“I don’t remember what it was, but it was some technique he had a question about. He said since Bryan knew all those guys now, he should ask them.
“There was a pause,” said Giner, “and Bryan just kind of nodded his head.
“And I yelled, ‘Are you kidding me? You should be asking Bryan! He’s the Bassmaster Classic champion!’”
Kerchal broke into a bit of a smile. Then he chimed in.
“Yeah, I’m the Bassmaster Classic champion,” he said, bowing up. “You should be asking me!”
“We thought it was so funny,” said Giner. “He was laughing, and we were all cracking up. It was really like he had forgotten what he had done just a couple of months before, and sometimes we would forget how big it was, too.”
Kerchal rather enjoyed this type of humor. According to everyone who knew him, he was extremely humble. But when he was with his friends, he let loose with outrageous statements just for a laugh.
“He was fishing a tournament with a friend, and he was cruising down the bank,” said Mann. “Another angler started coming from the other direction. One of them was going to have to move. The friend asked Kerchal if he was going to move.
“’What do you mean? This is my stretch. I’m the king. I am the king!’
“The two fell over in laughter, and of course Bryan moved,” said Mann. “But he just thought that was so funny.”
Mann recalls that Kerchal’s pre-tournament ritual was to relax by finding something on TV that made him laugh.
“He was fun to be around, and he loved comedy,” said Mann. “He was hysterical.”