Jordan Lee’s Elite Series season couldn’t have started off much worse. He took a lonely 1-pound, 5-ounce bass to the weigh-in on the first day at the Sabine River. Mired in 103rd place, he was the lowest-ranking angler who brought a scorable bass to the scales that day.
“It wasn’t a great way to start off the year,” he said. “I kept my head down and tried not to get too down about it. I felt like I was on really good stuff.”
On Day 2 at the Sabine, Lee weighed in five bass for 12-10, one of the best weights of the day, and jumped up to 40th place, inside the money cut. The next day, he added 8-13 and moved up 18 more places to 22nd.
He may have started off like a clueless rookie, but he quickly righted his ship and ended up the season in ninth overall in the Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year race. Except for a disastrous 99th-place showing at Havasu, the Auburn graduate never finished below 33rd place in any Elite event, and he notched seven checks in eight regular-season tournaments.
“If you’d told me at the beginning of the year that I was going to finish ninth, I would’ve taken that and not gone out,” he joked. “I wasn’t really sure at the beginning of the year how it was going to go. I knew it would be a challenge. My goal was to make the Classic, and after Kentucky Lake [the fifth event of the series], I thought I had a pretty good shot.”
While Lee has long desired a career in professional bass fishing, he said that his years competing at the collegiate level gave him an advantage over what he might’ve accomplished had he pursued that path straight out of high school.
“It helped me as far as getting in the groove of practice and fishing new water,” he said. “We went to a lot of different water in college and sometimes it was only one or two days of practice. That helped me learn to find fish a little better.”
Unlike the Opens, where competitors don’t have to be off the water for a specified time before the start of the official practice period, the Elite Series affords its field only a strictly enforced 2 1/2-day official practice after a lengthy off-limits period.
Lee turned 24 during the course of his rookie season, but he might not have been treated like a typical young rookie because of his track record. He qualified for the 2014 Bassmaster Classic through his efforts in college and finished sixth in the stacked field at Lake Guntersville in the championship won by Randy Howell. He remains the highest-finishing College B.A.S.S. representative in the Classic to date.
“I feel like because of the Classic and everything, they may have respected me a little,” Lee said of his peers, many of whom were fishing B.A.S.S. events before Lee was even born. “I can see it even a little bit more now. That means a lot to me.”
He also had the support of his older brother and traveling partner Matt Lee, who didn’t have quite the season that Jordan enjoyed, but still earned checks in half of the regular-season Elite Series tournaments.
Like his younger brother, Matt made the Classic while competing as a member of Auburn’s fishing team and fished the 2013 iteration on Oklahoma’s Grand Lake.
Jordan has never been to Grand Lake, site of the upcoming Classic, and said he doesn’t “know how it sets up in March,” but surely he’ll pick his brother’s brain prior to his second Classic next March, as the two share information regularly.
“We talk to some other guys every now and then,” Jordan said. “But there are a lot of 30 percenters out there. They give you about 30 percent of the truth. Matt gave me a place at Kentucky Lake and I may not have made the cut without it. At the St. Lawrence, I fished by him.”
Both brothers made money at each of those two tournaments, and Jordan said that makes for a happy family.
“The cuts we both made, it’s just a lot of fun going out on the third day,” said Jordan. “When one of us doesn’t make it, you kind of feel bad, but we know it’s going to happen. Just look at Chris Lane and Bobby Lane. Chris won at the Sabine and Bobby was almost last. That’s a little worse.”
In addition to having the support of his brother, the respect of his peers and the skill set developed through college fishing, Lee said his years at the collegiate level gave him a leg up when it came to developing a set of sponsors.
“We got really fortunate,” he said. “Through the college deal, we got to meet a lot of people who really had a lot of faith in us. We ended up with money that we probably wouldn’t have gotten otherwise because companies knew who we were even before we came in. That meant that we didn’t have to smash them to be OK financially.”
With the pressure off, Jordan Lee still smashed them on tour this year. Things ended well, regardless of how poorly they started.
