Before Steph Curry, there was Denny Brauer—a wide, smiling face in the cereal aisle. Brauer, before Curry, had his face on the Wheaties box. But he was no point guard. Denny Brauer was a bass fisherman—the first professional angler to earn the most edible honor in sports.
At the height of his career, in 1998, the former building contractor traveled the country raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars hoisting bass into his boat and trophies over his head. Brauer is widely regarded as one of the greatest anglers of all time. But a funny thing happened to the living legend in 2015. Now, at age 68, he mostly fishes for fun near his south Texas home on Lake Amistad. And it was there, under the towering Texas cliffs on the U.S.-Mexico border, that the former face of fishing found its future: a talent that could redefine the sport and bring it the kind of national prominence that has always eluded it.
The star landed under his nose.
“I was on top of a mess of bass,” Brauer said, “and I see this water kicking up about 300 yards away. So I stop. I crank the motor up to see what’s going on. At first, I thought it was some monster bass busting on top of the water, but when I got there, I saw it was a guy.”
The guy was a small, wiry man about 30 years old with a three day beard and sun-scorched skin. He was swimming across the 200-foot deep lake as part of a morning fitness routine. Though Brauer didn’t know it, this stranger was about to dazzle the veteran angler who thought he had “seen it all.” The swimming stranger was about to reveal himself as a fisherman so talented that his abilities could make him an overnight millionaire.
“I wanted to know what this guy was doing swimming across the lake,” recounts Brauer. “So I asked him to hop in my boat.”
The man crawled to the aft of Brauer’s 21-foot fiberglass bass boat. It was just the two of them. Then, without even asking, he picked up one of the living legend’s rods and let fly.
The cast went soaring farther than Brauer had ever seen a lure go.
“He did something to my bait,” Brauer said. “Then, he chunked it a mile! I mean, he had never cast that rod before in his life, and I’m telling you I’d have to run the trolling motor for over a minute to get in range of where this guy hit … from the back of my boat! I was dumbstruck.”
The strike happened immediately, and when the line was reeled in, a gleaming, 6 pound bass was on the other end. “It hit instantly. Right where he put it … at least 100 yards out. That’s when I asked the guy’s name,” recalls Brauer. “He told me—Kenichi Gomez.”
That’s the part of the “Ken” Gomez story that most savvy fishermen know by now. The unlikely pair fished for the rest of the day, with Gomez leading Brauer by a final count of 41 to 7. And from that first day at Lake Amistad, a rumor spread throughout the bass fishing world of an angler who couldn’t be matched.
Every cast he made was long and accurate. Every fish he caught was big—and there were a lot of them. Put him in a professional tournament and he would destroy any field.
A multibillion dollar industry waiting for a new superstar seemed his for the taking.
But professional bass fishing doesn’t work like that. You can’t just rise from a morning swim and walk straight into the big leagues. It takes years of competition and preparation to make it from local tournaments to the Bassmaster Elite Series. That’s where the big boys play. That’s where millions can be earned: $300,000 for winning the Bassmaster Classic alone, and hundreds of thousands more throughout the nine-event season. If you factor in tournaments in the rival FLW Series (some anglers compete in both), a first class competitor could make as much as a million dollars in a single year. If he were to win every event—a feat that’s never even been considered, much less accomplished—he could bring home over $2 million.
Few have risen from bass fishing anonymity to the upper echelon in under five years. You don’t debut at the top. You pay your dues, put in the early mornings on the water and late nights in the garage, and you slowly gather sponsors with deep pockets. Pro bass fishing is expensive, starting with a $75,000 boat, a $50,000 tow vehicle and tens of thousands of dollars in rods, reels, line, lures, gas, food and motel bills. You need corporate support to help with the financial burden, and it doesn’t come quickly or easily.
In the 40-plus year history of professional bass fishing, no angler has ever received a seven figure sponsorship offer without first winning several major championships.
Nobody until Ken Gomez.
“We brought him out to see,” said Strike King Lure Co. Media Relations Manager Mark Copley. “Strike King obviously has an interest in the future of our sport. We’ve won more Bassmaster Classics than any other lure company, and we take a lot of pride in picking the right guys for our pro staff. We want the best of the best to represent us.”
Strike King heard about Gomez the day after Brauer’s Amistad adventure. “Denny called us almost immediately,” Copley said. “To be honest, I thought it was a joke. But he’s been a member of our fishing family for decades. If it had been anybody else, we wouldn’t have believed them. But for Denny, we said, ‘Sure … bring him on up.’” So Brauer brought the young angler to Strike King’s Tennessee headquarters.
“Once we saw him, we knew he could change bass fishing forever. We knew we were going to owe Denny Brauer big time,” Copley laughed.
A roaming enigma
Ken Gomez wasn’t always on his way to stardom. Born the eldest son of a Japanese school teacher and a Mexican fishing guide, the young man had a history of lashing out against authority and running away from his father’s home.
“Él se desaparecía, [He would disappear],” recounts his childhood friend Sofía Olvera, who lived beside Gomez in the small village of El Chillilo, on the outskirts of Mazatlán. “Sometimes he would go to the streets in Culiacán. Sometimes they would lose him for weeks and hear that he was by the lake at San Marcos. When he came back, his father would scream at him. He would say, ‘You don’t want to grow up like me.’ I think not having his mother was hard on Kenichi. I always felt like he was looking for something.”
The young Gomez was an enigma. He was rumored to be one of the best soccer players in state of Sinaloa, but he never joined a club. He was known to be one of the most dedicated fishermen, too—often rising before dawn, guided only by a small flashlight, to trek the 15 miles from home to Lake Picachos—but he never offered to guide tourists. And if Gomez was looking for something, he apparently didn’t find it in Mexico.
“He would sit by the ocean sometimes and just stare for hours,” recalled Olvera. “Then one day, he disappeared for good. Nobody in Chillilo has seen him in about 10 years.”
She still keeps his old flashlight for good luck.
“Ken didn’t really want to talk about Mexico when we interviewed him,” recalls Copley. “But he did mention his mother.”
Atori Nakamura. The mother he missed growing up.
The relationship between Ken Gomez and his parents is an overseas, digital love affair. His father and mother were never legally married. They met across the Sea of Cortez in La Paz, where his father Eduardo was guiding local fishing charters, and Atori was visiting Baja on vacation. “He said they kept in touch with her via email,” acknowledged Copley. “I guess it was a sort of summer romance kind of deal.”
When Gomez vanished from Mexico, he headed west to his mother in Japan, but attempts to follow his trail there have failed. Though he told both Copley and Brauer that he had reunited with his mother, he never said where or for how long.
It is speculated that Gomez lingered near Kyoto for about five years, where Atori taught at the Nihongo Center Language School. There, rumors swirled about a Mexican man with an enormous spinning reel sitting beside Lake Biwa. But if it was Gomez, nobody can be sure. Though he is presumed to have been in the area and the man at Lake Biwa could reportedly cast great distances, he was never actually seen landing a single fish, and none of the tackle store owners in Kyoto knew his name.
Attempts to contact Atori Nakamura via phone and email have also failed, and the mystery man at Lake Biwa has not been seen in two years.
In reality, there is a chronological gap between the last time Gomez was spotted in Sinaloa in 2007 until Brauer caught him swimming across Lake Amistad in 2015. But somewhere in between, Gomez learned a skill thought to be unique in the fishing world: one that had one of the best anglers of all time, a major sponsor and a school of Elite Series pros in absolute awe.
A VanDam fine deal
“He’s unbelievable with a rod and reel,” exclaims Elite Series veteran Mark Menendez, who was one of the first pros to put a face to the name Gomez. “He’s such a good fisherman and such a good caster that he can catch them anywhere he goes.”
It was Menendez who caught a glimpse of Gomez fishing from the bank at a Strike King testing ground. There, the seasoned pro claims to have witnessed the prowess of Gomez first hand—90 yards from the shore.
“He slung a 1/8th ounce Marabou jig out there and snatched a four pounder. He’s got this giant spinning reel. He skied that bad boy to the bank, threw it up on the shore and got another one. I haven’t seen him since.”
What Mark Menendez witnessed seems impossible, but he isn’t the only Elite pro to have seen the Gomez effect in person. And it’s not just long distance, precision casting that has anglers muttering to themselves. Menendez saw two casts and two catches. That’s a Gomez trademark: he only casts when he’s sure he’s going to catch a fish. Brauer noticed it the day they met, when the wiry stranger caught 41 bass. “He might have cast 50 times,” noted Brauer. “That shocked me to the bone.”
Though Brauer is easily one of the all-time greats of the sport, Kevin VanDam is the undisputed king. With four Bassmaster Classic championships, seven Angler of the Year awards and over $6 million in career winnings, nobody has come close to dominating the sport the way VanDam has. At 49, he’s still going strong, but he knows he can’t fish forever. And the king sees the future of his sport in the same man Menendez saw on the bank.
“The other guys said he could cast 100 yards with pinpoint accuracy and catch a fish every time. I told them that was ridiculous. I said we’d deal with this on the water.” VanDam remarks.
VanDam was a skeptic, at least until he put Gomez in his boat. There, in a secluded Tennessee River creek, the greatest bass fisherman of all time put Gomez through the paces. “We took him out in a cove and set up a target,” recounts VanDam, steadily shaking his head. “I mean it was a legitimate hundred yards and he hit it with deadly accuracy.
“I thought I could cast, but I’m nothing like Gomez.”
VanDam’s ringing endorsement was exactly what Mark Copley and Strike King needed to hear. They offered Gomez a lucrative sponsorship deal on the spot. The terms were unprecedented. Typically, they’re associated with an angler like VanDam, who has millions of fans and multiple world championships under his belt.
“We wanted him bad,” said Copley. “We knew whoever signed Ken Gomez was going to hold the keys to the bass fishing market for 20 years.”
Half a million dollars as an advance. A full line of customized, Ken Gomez feathered jigs—the only lure he uses—a lifetime place on their pro-staff and a partnership with electronics manufacturer Humminbird. That was the offer.
“It was a strange situation,” remembers Humminbird Brand Manager Jeff Kolodzinski. “How do you sponsor a guy that doesn’t need help? He could find the fish without the equipment. It was like he could see the fish and gauge their mood. But we knew with Kevin behind this guy we needed to get onboard. We could tell he was the future, and we had a chance to get in early.”
“We thought it was an incredibly strong offer from Strike King,” Copley said. “But Gomez wanted to wait.”
Before taking the deal, Gomez wanted to experience American tournament life for himself, so he headed back to Texas with Brauer and entered a local, weekend tournament; the kind of event where a few dozen guys meet at sunrise and the winner takes home $250 at sunset. “He got some strange looks from those Texas boys,” admits Brauer. “The eight-foot long rods weren’t a big deal, but when they saw this little guy walk out with one of those giant, saltwater spinning reels they started to laugh. They all thought he was a pushover, but if I’d have let him weigh-in that day, Ken would have been the one laughing. His five best fish must have weighed 40 pounds.”
After that day, Gomez was in. “He called us after the tournament and said he was ready,” Copley tells. “He said he was on the way up from Amistad to grab the check. We made some calls and had a who’s-who of fishing media ready to make him a star.”
That was the summer of 2015. Since that time, the star has vanished.
Ken Gomez never showed up at Strike King. He hasn’t signed the deal, and he hasn’t completed a single one of the media interviews Copley and Kolodzinski lined up. “We don’t really even have a good photo of the guy,” Copley laments. “He didn’t want to be around cameras before signing anything.”
As the 2017 Bassmaster Elite Series season gets underway, Copley and the half-million dollar sponsorship deal are still waiting. Menendez and VanDam, starting the new season, are left wondering, looking over their shoulders at every boat ramp.
And Denny Brauer, back home at Lake Amistad, is heartbroken.
“I thought he was the future of our sport,” Brauer said. “He was going to be the guy to take it to heights unknown. It’s like he just dropped off the face of the Earth.”
Now and then, Brauer says he’ll hear a rumor of Gomez floating across the Rio Grande. He’s heard about a new guide down in Mexico. He’s heard of a marine biology accident in La Paz, where a man matching Gomez’s description was attacked by a shark, and he’s even heard whispers of a sun-scorched, familiar face on the shores of Japan’s Lake Biwa. But he has not heard from his protégé.
“I’m really kind of crushed,” lamented an emotional Brauer. “I was a Ken Gomez fan immediately. To me, he was the hero of bass fishing, and I don’t even know if he’s bass fishing anymore.”
Sidebar: In almost three months, Denny Brauer and Kenichi Gomez fished together 14 times, and logged over 2,000 miles on the road back and forth between Texas and Tennessee. And while Brauer doesn’t know the secret to Gomez’s extraordinary precision casting, he did get up close and personal with his gear: two beaten up Mitchell 402 Saltwater reels, an Altoids can full of marabou jigs, a straw hat and a pair of 8 foot custom graphite and carbon composite rods.
Brauer says Gomez is identifiable not only by this unusual combination of gear, but by his strange, patient fishing technique. “It’s almost like one of those great blue herons,” he explained. “He sits there for what seems like hours until just the right moment, then he’ll let that jig fly for a hundred yards and pull in a monster.”