Before there was the Bassmaster Classic, there was the World Series of Sport Fishing (WSOSF) held from 1960-1968. That first event held in late 1960, won by Harold Ensley, was an eight-day event held at seven Michigan lakes, and it was multi-species, not just bass that were counted. In that first event, there were 58 competitors. We also covered details of the 1967 event which was won by Dwight Keefer.
What hasn’t been talked about before, and I’ll only briefly touch upon it in this post, was the initial WSOSF was held in early January 1960. The briefness of coverage is because it was mostly a saltwater competition in the same style as the freshwater series, that being multi-day, multi-species. What I found interesting about the January event in particular was that there was a largemouth bass component to the competition.
The inaugural 1960 World Series of Sport Fishing event was held in Florida had 38 contestants from 7 countries. The 5-day series included specific days of competition for sailfish, marlin, bonefish, snook, tarpon, and largemouth bass. The largemouth bass fishing portion was held on Lake Okeechobee.
Names of anglers in the contest were drawn randomly from a hat, paired together, and then assigned a guide from the lake for the day.
The obvious part that ties in with what we try and do here at Bass Fishing Archives was the largemouth bass portion of the competition. One single file photo I stumbled across started me on this sleuthing adventure, that being the picture of the father of structure fishing himself, Buck Perry, holding two redfish and a snook.
This image of Perry was taken just a couple years after his infamous Spoonplugging presentation in Chicago (1957) and three years before Bill Binkelman would run with Perry’s structure fishing concepts and start Fishing News/Fishing Facts (1963). The era would become what Ron Lindner termed the “modern angling revolution.”
On the day that they held the bass competition on Okeechobee, Buck Perry got drawn out with Sam Snead. THE Sam Snead of professional golfing fame. Sam was an avid bass angler who also spent a lot of time fishing with Ted Williams who also participated in the event. You had Ted, a professional baseball player and later tackle collector/Sears fishing personality, Sam Snead, a professional golfer, and Buck Perry.
I was able to track down some old newspaper photos from a reporter who followed these two out on Okeechobee that day. It seems rather comical, if not ironic, to see Buck sitting in the middle of a rowboat casting at a massive field of shallow vegetation. As it turned out, it was Sam Snead who caught the largest bass recorded by all contestants in that portion of the event, a 7-pound largemouth. For more images, check out the old photos in the gallery below from the Sarasota Harold Tribune, featured in their January 21, 1960 issue.
