Buzzbait buzzer-beater lifts Lawrence over Wheeler in instant classic on Nickajack
Jake Lawrence scored his first Bass Pro Tour event win with a clutch catch in the final seconds of Period 3. Photo by Phoenix Moore.
Mitchell Forde
Bass Pro Tour Press Release
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Thirty hours of competition across four days at O’Reilly Auto Parts Stage 4 Presented by OPTIMA Batteries boiled down to the final seconds. Separated on SCORETRACKER® by just 6 ounces, Jake Lawrence and Jacob Wheeler both set the hook.
Wheeler and Lawrence had long since distanced themselves from the rest of the field during Sunday’s Championship Round on Nickajack Lake. The latter half of the day morphed into a one-on-one prize fight: Wheeler, the longtime bully of the Bass Pro Tour, who caught all smallmouth in the current beneath Chickamauga Dam, versus Lawrence, a rookie who caught all largemouth roughly 40 miles down the lake. Lawrence had led most of the day, but with 6 minutes left, Wheeler finally passed him. Still, both anglers felt like if they could just muster one more scorable bass, they’d secure the trophy and $150,000 top prize that comes with it.
With 45 seconds left before lines out, Lawrence made a bomb cast with his his Buckeye Buzzerk buzzbait. About halfway back to the boat – 21 seconds left – a massive mouth engulfed it. Nine seconds later, Lawrence swung the bass over the gunnel and hung it on the BUBBA scale: a 5-pound, 9-ounce buzzer-beater, easily enough to put him back in the lead. At virtually that exact moment, Wheeler hooked up with another smallmouth, but he couldn’t get it in the boat before time expired. It might not have been enough to overcome Lawrence’s late lunker anyway.
With a total of 83-2 on 27 scorable bass, Lawrence had won his first Bass Pro Tour title in one of the most dramatic finishes in the seven-year history of the tour. More than an hour later, he still couldn’t come up with a way to describe the ending other than divine intervention.
“The only thing I can say is, man, He wanted me to do it,” Lawrence said. “Wheeler jumped me there by a couple ounces, and I said out loud, ‘Lord, if you want me to do this, you’re going to make it happen.’ I had 45 seconds left, and I had just gotten my buzzer back to the boat, and I said, alright, you can throw right, which is where I had been catching them, or you can throw somewhere totally new. And I chose to throw somewhere totally new, and it was the deal. Unbelievable.”
Here’s how the Top 10 pros finished the Championship Round:
Jake Lawrence – 83-2 (27)
Jacob Wheeler – 77-15 (27)
Cole Floyd – 48-14 (17)
Ron Nelson – 42-7 (15)
Wesley Strader – 37-14 (15)
Michael Neal – 37-4 (12)
Matt Becker – 29-9 (12)
Drew Gill – 25-9 (11)
Justin Cooper – 21-12 (7)
Justin Lucas – 15-8 (6)
The tournament may not have been decided until Lawrence’s literal last cast, but his win was a week in the making. Stage 4 offered the Bass Pro Tour field a unique challenge, with the two-day Qualifying Round taking place on Lake Chickamauga, then the Knockout and Championship Rounds relocating to neighboring Nickajack Lake, one reservoir down on the Tennessee River chain.
Like many in the field, Lawrence chose to spend most of the three-day practice period on Chickamauga. The Paris, Tennessee, native didn’t make it to Nickajack until Wednesday afternoon, when he got his first clue about how to attack the mysterious fishery, which had never hosted a tour-level MLF/FLW event: He caught a few bass that looked to be feeding on spawning bluegill.
“I was very fortunate in the 4 hours that I had the last day of practice that I saw several cruising shallow,” Lawrence said. “I actually caught a 2-pounder that was real close to a bluegill bed. I assumed that she was relating to it, kind of hanging around that area. And that’s really what I ran with.”
Just to make it back to Nickajack, Lawrence needed to finish among the Top 20 anglers on Chickamauga. After a lackluster Day 1, he sat in 21st. But on the second day, he showed off the offshore ledge fishing skills he’s honed during a lifetime fishing Kentucky Lake, blasting 91-11 to rocket all the way to second place.
That stellar Day 2 performance actually briefly put Lawrence in the top spot on SCORETRACKER®, but Justin Lucas edged him with a couple late catches to win the Qualifying Round. That might have turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. While Lucas skipped Saturday’s Knockout Round and advanced straight to the Championship Round, Lawrence got an extra day of competition on Nickajack. He stacked up 40 pounds by the midpoint of the second period and used the latter half of the day to practice. He later said he “100%” would not have won without that extra time on the water.
Lawrence wound up keying in on Mullins Creek in the mid-lake area. While the rest of the lake got dirty following the thunderstorms that hit the area earlier in the week, the water in the spring-fed creek stayed clean.
“It seemed like everybody on the lower end really struggled, and I have to imagine it’s because of the water quality,” Lawrence said. “The clarity just got really, really bad down there. This lake is generally really clear, so it’s kind of a shock the first couple days that happens. However, my little area back there stayed clean because of that spring-fed creek in the back of it.”
The final piece of the Nickajack puzzle was figuring out how to trigger the bass relating to bluegill beds and other bare spots amid the carpet of eelgrass in Nickajack. Lawrence primarily leaned on a Yamamoto D Shad and a Yamamoto Senko during the Knockout Round. However, even though it doesn’t necessarily have a reputation as a tournament winner, he always keeps a buzzbait handy when trying to cover water up shallow this time of year, and it quickly became apparent on Sunday that’s what the big ones wanted.
“I actually caught a couple non-scorables on it (during the Knockout Round), and I had like a 5- or 6-pounder in that area that came off,” Lawrence said of the buzzbait. “It was just enough to kind of keep me interested, keep me going with it. And in such vast areas like this – and when I say vast, it wasn’t like the area was humongous, but there was no change. And so, I’m not super confident in slowing way down and dragging when there’s just nothing to really key on. So, that was a really big deal for me to cover a bunch of water.”
Lawrence got on the board Sunday morning with a couple scorables on the D Shad. Around 9:30 a.m., he caught consecutive fish on the buzzbait, including a 4-4, which gave him the confidence to keep it in his hands. Thirty-five minutes later, he threw it over a hole in the grass at the base of a tapering point, and the water exploded.
Lawrence wrangled a giant into his Phoenix. At 8-3, it easily earned Berkley Big Bass honors for the day, clearing the next-biggest bass caught over two days at Nickajack by more than 2 pounds. Perhaps more important, it clued him into the spot that would provide almost all his shallow fish for the rest of the day – a series of sandy patches around that point.
“It was just light enough that I could see the hole up there in probably 10 to 14 inches of water,” Lawrence said. “My first cast up there was that 8-pounder. And it just kind of materialized from there.
“When I came back to it 30 minutes into that third period, oh my goodness, it was unbelievable. It was like every third cast. Had a father and son that was bluegill fishing right on the end of it, and their bobber was going down, and (bass) were blowing up on my buzzbait. It was just mayhem there for about 20 minutes.”
Lawrence followed up the 8-pounder with consecutive 2-pounders in the final 10 minutes of Period 1, which gave him the lead at the intermission. When competition resumed, he made the decision to swap his casting rod for spinning gear and move to deeper water. Using his one allotted period with forward-facing sonar during Period 2, he targeted bass that were suspending around submerged timber in a nearby creek channel. Lawrence racked up 33-3 on 11 scorable bass during the period, pushing his lead to more than 7 pounds.
That Lawrence, one of the best on tour with the technology, put together the best forward-facing sonar period of the day didn’t come as a shock. But part of what will make this win so memorable is the fact that he combined his forward-facing prowess with offshore ledge skills and shallow power fishing to get it done. Lawrence prides himself on his versatility and willingness to change course on a dime.
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