Today’s Throwback Thursday historical photo dates to 1994 and features Sugar Ferris, the founder of the Bass’n Gal tournament organization. The first women’s tournaments Sugar put on date to 1978, and the organization had been growing for over a decade by the time this wide-ranging article by Tim Renken appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1994. According to the story, membership had grown to 32,000 women in 46 states.
Renken had attended the recent Bass’n Gal Championship, held on the Mississippi River, and noted in the story, “the crowds were smaller by at least a factor of 10 than, say, the annual BASS Classic. There were only a handful of reporters, and – most significant – there was just a fraction of the banners, vans and entourage of sponsors. Only a few of the big names – Stren, Ranger, Delco, Humminbird, Shimano – were there.”
He continued, “That’s what irks Ferris most. She says many of the big sponsors of the sport, all of them run by men, ‘aren’t convinced that women can sell their products. Some of them think this thing of ours [Bass’n Gal] is just a passing fancy. Some of them aren’t even convinced that women should be there.'”
“The only thing separating them from the Denny Brauers, the Guido Hibdons and the Tommy Martins is the ability to devote their lives to fishing the way the top men do.”
This article came out after the big controversy with women fishing BASS events, a couple years prior, and Sugar expressed her thoughts on the subject of men and women integrating into a single professional sport. “I’ve taken a lot of heat from the feminists on that, but I don’t think that women should have to compete with men in fishing,” she said. “It’s not because they can’t but because of the problems it can cause in family relationships.”
