OPINION: We’re Witnessing Greatness with Jordan Lee

KISSIMMEE, Fla. – Before I write this, I’d like to offer an apology to Jordan Lee. As a humble, laid-back, “Aw shucks” kind of fella who grins and shrugs away words of praise about his fishing abilities, Lee will find what I’m about to say to be effusive.

He’ll say “Naw, man, I just get lucky sometimes”. And he’ll probably get a little embarrassed. So, my apologies Jordan, buddy, I’m about to praise you with the truth.

What we’re all witnessing with Kenneth Jordan Lee is greatness.

I know that the bass-fishing world is well aware of the recent major accomplishments of the youngster from Alabama. They are, after all, hard to miss: two consecutive Bassmaster Classic titles, a win in the first-ever MLF Bass Pro Tour event (against a squad of 79 hammers with 31 Angler of the Year titles among them). A win in the very first MLF event he fished, the 2019 Summit Select.

I say “recent” accomplishments, but we all started to become pretty aware of just how good Lee could be back in 2012 and 2013, when he lost a head-to-head Bassmaster College Series Bracket Championship to his older brother Matt, and then rebounded by winning that event the following year to qualify for his first Classic.

Lee finished sixth in that Classic in 2014, sandwiched between Randall Tharp and Todd Faircloth. That Classic was contested on Lake Guntersville, the fishery that Lee grew up on. But anyone who paid close attention to the then-22-year-old onstage in Birmingham in his orange-and-blue Auburn University jersey – showing off the 8-pound, 8-ouncer he caught on Day 2, smiling and nodding his head in a silent “Yeah boooyyy” – probably picked up on the fact that, instead of being just a tiger on his home lake, Lee had … something.

It was hard to define in the moment, but there was something about him.

The winner of that Classic, fellow Alabamian Randy Howell, saw it too.

“I’d seen Jordan since he was 12 years old, fishing some of the junior events around Guntersville, and people in the area always talked about him like he was just a natural,” Howell says. “And you could see it in the tournaments when he was a kid: he had a natural swag to him. He knew how to carry himself and even at that age had the same quiet confidence you see in him now as a pro. He just looked different than 99 percent of the other kids that age who love to fish.”

Starting a run that he’s still on

Following that 2014 Classic, Lee went “all in” in an effort to qualify for the Bassmaster Elite Series, competing in all three divisions of the 2014 Bass Pro Shops B.A.S.S. Opens. As I look back on it now, it’s clear that in the eight months in 2014 between the Central Open No. 1 on Lake Amistad in Texas and the Southern Open on Lake Norman in North Carolina, Lee’s greatness was beginning to show.

He collected three Top 10s and five Top 20s in nine Open tournaments (plus the Classic!), competing in 300-plus-angler battle royales loaded with local hammers, and FLW and Bassmaster AOYs – names like Evers, McClelland, Lucas, Iaconelli, Lane, Martens and DeFoe – in tournaments that can arguably be called the most brutal in professional bass fishing.

Lee qualified for the Elites in the Central Opens that year. Easily.

He cashed checks in eight of nine Elite events in 2015, finished the season with a sixth-place finish in the AOY Championship on Sturgeon Bay, and trailed only Brent Ehrler in Rookie of the Year standings at the end of the season (and as Ehrler, a 10-year FLW veteran with over $2.2 million in winnings at the time, pointed out, “Jordan Lee deserves this trophy, not me, I’m not a rookie … but I get the feeling he’ll have plenty of chances for other trophies in his career”).

Ehrler also saw Lee’s something, because there were indeed significant trophies bound for Lee’s mantle in the three years that followed. But Jordan Lee’s flirtation with greatness began in earnest before he hoisted his first Classic trophy in Houston.

The numbers don’t lie

Starting with that sixth-place finish in the 2016 AOY Championship, Lee went on a run where he stacked up eight Top 10s in 14 events (including five in a row in B.A.S.S. events). He topped that run at the end of 2017/start of 2018, when he collected six Top 10s in seven events (including winning the 2018 Classic on Lake Conroe).

That’s an astounding .867 Top 10 average.

Sports fans live and die by statistics, and almost every definition of “greatness” in competition is captured in numbers established over time: Clayton Kershaw’s 2.39 lifetime ERA; Lefty O’Doul’s lifetime .349 lifetime batting average; Bobby Jones’ 13 PGA Majors; Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson’s 27-3-1 MMA record.

And this is where the rubber hits the road in Jordan Lee’s transcendent success – his greatness – at this point in his professional career.

With the culmination of the MLF Bass Pro Tour event in Conroe, Texas, Lee has finished 10th or better in 23 of the 62 tour-level tournaments he’s fished since he competed in his first B.A.S.S. Open on the Kissimmee Chain in January of 2014.

That’s a Top 10 average of .371, which is a Hall of Fame batting average in Major League Baseball. But how, you ask, does it translate into the game of professional bass fishing?

As the second-best of all time.

Kevin VanDam’s career Top 10 percentage is .352. Roland Martin’s is .305. Rick Clunn’s is .278. Andy Morgan’s is .263. Only Bill Dance’s otherworldly .667 average (Dance finished in the Top 10 in 52 of the tournaments he fished in B.A.S.S.) is better, and let’s just be practical about that: nobody will ever match Dance’s numbers.

Statistics are sometimes like poetry, though: they speak differently to different people. They can be interpreted many different ways. While I’m over-the-top impressed with Lee’s young career, I’ll never go so far as to say that his phenomenal Top 10 success in a five-year span will extrapolate into a 25-year, eight-AOY domination of the sport like VanDam’s. Or that he’ll win four Classics like Clunn. Or even that he’ll reach 69 Top 10s like Morgan.

But I won’t go so far as to say that it won’t, or can’t.

If we’ve learned one thing about Jordan Lee, it’s that he seems to be capable of just about anything in the realm of professional bass fishing. I’d like everybody to keep it in mind when you watch the quiet kid from Alabama: you’re witnessing greatness.

Sorry Jordan!