Spawners, shad spawn and swim jig key to win!
by Justin Onslow
FLW PRESS RELEASE
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| Shallow water spawners key to Cox win! (Photo: FLW) |
John Cox considers Lake
Chickamauga his favorite lake in the country. On Sunday, it cemented itself as
the lake that gave Cox his favorite and most memorable win.
With
21 pounds on Championship Sunday and 83-9 for the tournament, Cox won the FLW
Tour event on Chickamauga, presented by Evinrude, thanks in big part to a couple
trees the nine-year Tour pro forgot about until the waning moments of day four.
“I’m
telling you, it was an amazing day,” Cox says. “I can’t believe this. All day I
kept going and going. Right at the end… the last ten minutes was just unreal.
“It
was last-minute. I don’t know why, it just popped into [my] head, ‘Go to the
trees,’ and I went to them and it was unreal. It was the first cast to them.”
The
first cast he’s talking about is the cast that almost broke his heart. Cox
pulled up to the pair of trees he’d fished so many times before – but not once
during this tournament – with the clock ticking on the end of his day. He
hooked a big fish and lost it. It might have been a $100,000 fish.
Cox
then went to the next tree and landed a 4-pounder. And then right back to the
previous tree, where he’d just lost a big one, to land another 4-pounder, which
ultimately sealed the deal on his tournament-winning bag.
“I’m not going to lie, when I
caught those two fish real quick in the last 10 minutes, I got all worked up,”
he admits. “I’m running back and tears are coming out. I felt something. It
felt better than any other tournament any time I’ve won before. It was
overwhelming. I’m getting chills thinking about it. I’ve never felt like that
before.”
And
Cox has had some amazing wins. He already has more hardware than he knows what to do
with, including trophies from FLW Tour wins on Hartwell and the
Red River, as well as an FLW Cup win on Wheeler. But this one just felt
different.
