I make a concerted effort to avoid hyperbole in my writing, so I had reservations about using the word "historic" in this piece, but there's simply no other way I can articulate what happened this past weekend during the Elite Series tournament on Lake Fork. Patrick Walters absolutely smoked the field and beat second place by 29 pounds.
Read that again. It's not a typo.
He beat some of the best anglers in the world by 29 pounds. He could have stayed at the dock on the final day and still won. He didn't even have to make a cast.
He beat 10th place by 50 pounds. Again, that is not a typo.
He doubled the previous record for margin of victory in Elite Series history. On a stingy Lake Fork when the fall bass were giving anglers all kinds of trouble, Walters found a golden ticket in the form of suspended bass in standing timber located on the main lake. As bass anglers, we've always been taught to stay in the creeks throughout the fall. Walters, however, proved a lot of us wrong by avoiding them and finding a pattern no one thought would be happening.
Over four days, he weighed 104 pounds, 12 ounces fishing something nobody else found.
In my opinion, this victory is the most monumental moment in bass fishing since Paul Elias won on Guntersville with the Alabama rig in 2011. Give me a minute to explain why I think that.