Legacy?  Bill Wicker was fishing bass tournaments, before there were bass tournaments.  There have been bass tournaments long before Ray Scott created BASS.  Mainly club orientations where fellas got together, dropped a few bucks into a pot and then fished against each other for the thrill of kickin their bass.  Bill Wicker cut his bass fishing teeth during those years and he has lived to see a lot of innovation and growth in the sport.  "Those guys are fishing for $500,000 this week," he told me in Birmingham.

An impressed, proud, observant, caretaker of our sport, Bill Wicker remembers the old days, (not necessarily the "good old" days.)  The Wicker Report is now a regular column on ProBassAngles.com  It might be the most important thing we have ever done on this site.  It represents an unofficial history of bass fishing that includes 1st hand accounts of things that would later become the standard for what we do in our sport.  "If you look hard enough, you can find pictures of the big guys in the "olden days" weighing in stringers of bass, (as in dead fish on a stringer.)  Ray Scott got a lot of heat from locals who didn't want the tournament organizations killing their fish."  You wondered where catch and release came from?  

So when Luke Clausen claimed the first place prize of $500,000 last Summer in Birmingham, Bill Wicker saw what he had help create, he smiled and said, "this is good."  -Keith Nighswonger