COLUMBIA, South Carolina – Fred Roumbanis’ first thought when he woke up the morning of his Elimination Round competition at the 2018 Challenge Cup in Columbia, South Carolina wasn’t a positive one: “I can’t fish today.”

Roumbanis had fallen ill the week before his arrival in Columbia, checking in to event headquarters with a racking cough, fever and difficulty breathing. He had coughed his way through the night before the Elimination Round, and headed out onto Lake Murray on one hour of sleep, with a slight fever.

The fish didn’t seem to mind. Roumbanis lapped the rest of the field that day, catching more than double the weight of second-place finisher Marty Robinson – Roumbanis had 14 pounds, 14 ounces to Robinson’s 7-0 – and claiming his first MLF win.

“That was one of the most emotional, surreal wins I’ve had in my entire career,” Roumbanis admits. “Physically, I was an absolute mess, but it’s funny how the mind will overcome the elements. You forget about the pain and illness when you’re out there competing, but, man, after I was done that day, I was done.”

Roumbanis and wife Julie made two visits to urgent care during the week; one breathing treatment, two inhalers, a steroid shot, and three prescriptions later, “Boom Boom” had survived his week in South Carolina.

“Just barely,” Roumbanis jokes. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been that sick in my life.”

It took another three weeks of visits to six different clinics between South Carolina and Arkansas before Roumbanis was diagnosed with walking pneumonia.

“It was awful,” Julie Roumbanis says. “It kept getting diagnosed as asthma, so we kept going back in until it was finally diagnosed as pneumonia. He was miserable that whole week in South Carolina, I’m really proud that he got through it as well as he did.”