REDCREST 2022 Presented by Costa: This Tournament is ‘The GOAT’

Roster includes four decades worth of dominant anglers

REDCREST 2022 features perhaps the most prolific angler lineup of all time.

March 18, 2022 • Joel Shangle • Bass Pro Tour

When I was a child growing up in an extremely small town in northern Nevada, there was a time when every waking thought was occupied by (of all things) boxing.

Yep. The sweet science. Not baseball, not football, not basketball. Not even fishing or hunting. My third-grade PE teacher spent a couple of hours one week teaching us the basics of boxing (“Left hand up, left foot forward, jab, jab, cross”), and as sometimes happens with 8-year-olds, my imagination ran away with me. I became enamored with the fight game and began an obsessive hunt for any information I could dig up about the history of the sweet science.

Not long after, I came across something that transcended every boxing book I’d ever scrounged up: a board game called “Title Bout” by a company named Avalon Hill. Without digging too deep into the minutiae, Title Bout was a simple but well-researched game that assigned attributes to boxers from multiple eras and allowed you to simulate matchups between the best fighters in history.

You could put, for example, Muhammed Ali against Jack Johnson, Sugar Ray Leonard against Sugar Ray Robinson and Marvin Hagler versus Harry Greb. It was a game-simulation geek’s dream come true, and it allowed me to simulate that Henry Armstrong, Joe Louis, Willie Pep, Roberto Duran and George Foreman were in the same arena, duking it out.

In 2022, the bass fishing world will call that “REDCREST”. Grand Lake, Oklahoma will be the arena, and it won’t be a simulation.

A Truly Grand Lineup

The lineup of 41 anglers competing in REDCREST 2022 Presented by Costa – a list that includes the best of the best from four different decades – is perhaps the greatest tournament roster of all time. That probably sounds like hyperbole, but it’s not: the field boasts combined tournament winnings of nearly $80 million.

You don’t have to look very hard to spot the history-makers in the REDCREST 2022 lineup.

There’s Kevin VanDam, the only bass angler in the world to surpass the $6 million mark in career winnings and the only bass pro to earn eight tour-level AOY awards.
And there’s Scott Suggs, the first angler in the history of the sport to claim a $1 million payday for a single tournament (the 2007 Forrest Wood Cup).
Oh, and there’s David Dudley, the only angler in the world whose trophy room can display four FLW Tour AOY trophies. Dudley is also the only other angler beside VanDam who has cleared the $4 million mark in career winnings.
And that guy, Jacob Wheeler: he’s the only angler in the world who owns five Bass Pro Tour trophies (plus a General Tire World Championship trophy, a Bass Pro Tour AOY award, a Forrest Wood Cup, an FLW Tour Super Tournament trophy and the hardware from an All-American championship). He was also the fastest angler in history to the $1 and $2 million marks in tournament winnings.

Four-Decade Talent

Scan down the list of anglers getting ready to start competition on Grand Lake and you’ll see a REDCREST field that owns over 50 Angler of the Year titles or major tour-level championships. Their excellence covers a 30-year span that started in the 1990s and covers four decades (the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s).

It includes the dominators of the early 2000s, when VanDam and Mark Davis accounted for eight AOYs or tour championships between them (1992 to 2001).
It encompasses a run of brilliance by Dudley, Andy Morgan, Edwin Evers, Skeet Reese and Bryan Thrift, starting with Dudley’s Forrest Wood Cup win in 2003, continuing through Thrift’s Forrest Wood Cup victory (and Dudley’s fourth AOY) in 2019.
It includes the three anglers who have emerged as the superstars of the sport in the past 10 years: Ott DeFoe, Jordan Lee and Wheeler.

REDCREST 2022 will truly be history happening before our eyes, and the boxing-simulation-game child inside of me can’t wait. Whether you’re reading about it in the March/April edition of Bass Fishing magazine as you stroll through the REDCREST Outdoor Sports Expo Presented by Costa in Tulsa, or soaking in the immersive coverage of REDCREST 2022 here at www.majorleaguefishing.com, we’re glad you’re joining us. Let’s get ready to celebrate the GOAT (bass tournament, that is)!