Thanks guys, ya’ll have brought up stuff I wasn’t aware of. I guess Jason Crispy fishing it is evidence all you had to have was money to fish FLW at some point. Sounds like FLW started as THE circuit and BASS became THE circuit sometime in the earlier 2000’s. Thanks for the info all.
Well Bassmaster was "the" Circuit before Redman(Operation Bass) turned into FLW, back in the Bob Cobb days going way back to the start in 1971 And BASS was pay to play also back then. When Fish Fishburne was an angler on the bassmaster tour he literally did have team grandma. Some of those bassmaster tv show post Bob Cobb are really sad and embarrassing, I would guess they would prefer those to be locked away and never seen again.
It’s seems like to me, the only time FLW really challenged BASS, was back when they had the chance to win 1 million bucks. Darrell Robertson won a million and I think Dudley won 500k, they paid big for a few years. I always felt as if Ehler could have been one of the big guns on BASS if he would have moved over, not saying he did wrong being at FLW. But he never got the recognition that he could have, we was a hammer for awhile.
FLW actually paid 2 million twice, once it went Scott Suggs won the Forrest Wood Cup and once it was split between the FW cup winner and the FLW fantasy fishing winner. I think this was all in the 2000's and sure it was Walmart money.