Roland Martin: Bass Fishing Legend and Million-Dollar Tournament Winner

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 427 — Roland Martin — Bass Fishing Legend and Million-Dollar Tournament Winner.

Introduction

Roland Martin: We were coming back from Europe, and we were really having a good time. We picked up a new car in Paris, and we were gonna go visit some relatives in Sweden. It was a rainy day, coming down a hill in Brussels, Belgium, and we had a head-on collision with a big Mercedes. It killed mom and dad. And I'm in the car. And so after all the funerals and all the things, I go back to Santee. I was kinda busted up — I had a busted shoulder and busted ribs and stuff like that. And so I became a guide, just kinda recuperating with Santee Cooper for a number of years. And the whole time I'm thinking, my parents never saw me as any kind of success. I don't know — I'll have to do something worthwhile, maybe it'll prove them wrong, because they can't see that I'm any success at all. So, anyway, Ray Scott called. Ray Scott was the president of BASS. Hi. Roland Martin here, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Hey, guys. This is Tom Rowland with the Tom Rowland Podcast, and we have just finished up a really long extended shoot. We were doing both shows down in the Florida Keys, and it's been kind of a long couple of weeks. So this week, instead of having a brand new episode, I thought I would take you back. If you're a new listener to the podcast, maybe you haven't listened to this one yet, but it's one of my favorite ones that we've ever done. And it's when Roland Martin, the legend Roland Martin, came into the studio, and we did a podcast, and I learned his whole story. And Roland is a guy that could have done so many other things, and he ended up making a very successful living in the fishing industry because that's what he wanted to do. Just a really cool story. I enjoyed my time with Roland. He's a true legend, a true professional, and I'm really happy to bring this one back to you. So if you haven't heard this one, stay tuned for an outstanding podcast that tells you exactly how and why Roland Martin made it to be a household name in the fishing industry. Alright, stay tuned. Here we go.

Tom Rowland: I'm sitting here with Roland Martin. Roland Martin is a man that probably needs no introduction to this audience, but I will try. He has won over a million dollars in BASS tournaments, and he continues to fish them. In fact, today he drove two hours out of his way to come here and talk to us on this show as he's moving from place to place doing other sponsor things. But he's a man that is one of the true pioneers of the sport, a true icon of the sport, and he's continued on that path with his TV show, with the tournament fishing, with so many other things. And when I first started this, I made a little list — I put Bill Dance on it, I put you on it, I put several other people on it, because I was really curious about how it all started for you. One of the things I'm really curious about, because I've been fortunate enough to follow along a path that you guys blazed, is the television-sponsorship road, where you have a fishing television show on TV and you're selling product through all different types of entertainment. You and Bill Dance and Jerry McKinnis and Jimmy Houston and on and on down the line really pioneered that, but I know that it didn't—

A Difficult Beginning

Roland Martin: It wasn't an overnight success. It was kind of a slow start. In fact, my parents were professionals — my mother was a school teacher, and my father had a doctorate in engineering and was a professional engineer. So the fact that I fished was completely against the grain. When I was in college, my dad wanted me to become an engineer, and I kind of failed out of engineering. I got into biological sciences and stuff, and I finally struggled through college after a lot of fishing trips. I managed to make it several extra years, but I finally got an education of some sort. My parents had already figured I was just gonna be a loser because I was a fisherman, and they thought I was wasting so much of my time, so they tried to talk me into other things. I grew up in Maryland, and they were always on me — not that I didn't fish every minute and forsake my studies, which caused a lot of problems. So I was the black sheep of the family.

Tom Rowland: How many in your family? What was the structure?

Roland Martin: I have a brother who was pretty successful, and my sister was valedictorian of her class. I struggled through school like I told you, and I didn't know what to do. An interesting thing happened — I kind of proved myself because I went into the military. I volunteered for the draft. I'd taken two years of ROTC because it was mandatory back in the sixties, so I had a little background there. As I got into the Army, I was just a private, and I had a boat tied up near the barracks. This one colonel, Colonel Gravel, who ran the communication school, kept wanting to know whose boat that was, because he liked to fish. He introduced himself one day, and he turned out to be the colonel of the whole training brigade. So I made a deal — I said, colonel, I'll take you fishing, I'll take you out at Santee Cooper and we'll catch some big bass. He said, okay, private. On about the second or third fishing trip, Colonel Gravel asked, have you ever thought about OCS — going to advanced military training and getting a commission? I said, no, not really, I'm not really interested. He said, well, I'm the review board chairman, and I'm looking for candidates for the OCS Academy. I said I kind of liked artillery, so he put me on hold, had me come in for a review, and I passed the test. He said, okay, you're a good candidate, we want to send you to Fort Sill to become artillery. That didn't open up, but Fort Benning did, so I went to Benning, got a commission after six months of hard work. It was the neatest thing in the world, because they want you to quit the whole time you're in school — they say you can quit any minute, you just have to keep going. I was great at it. My map training was so good, because from helping my dad with engineering survey work, I could take a topo map and read all the contours — know where the lakes were, the ridges, the house foundations — and do the same with an army map, avoiding all the perils of cross-country movement because I could read a map. So I traversed all around everywhere and really did well in all the training at Benning. When I got my commission, Colonel Gravel got me back to Fort Jackson, where I set a record in basic training and also set a brigade record at OCS for rifle marksmanship. He ran the rifle ranges too, and he said, I want you as a rifle range officer. So we fished all the time — every Friday he'd come get me, and we'd go to Santee and have the biggest time. I was kind of a guide for some of the military guys.

Roland Martin: My father kept saying, son, what are you gonna do after the military? I said, I don't know, dad — I think I want to go to Vietnam and become airborne special forces ranger, I want to do all these wonderful things to become an Army hero. He said, son, you're not gonna get killed — you need to come to Brazil. He'd gotten a job working for AID, the Alliance for International Development, under President Kennedy — Kennedy was dead by that time, but the programs were still set up, and dad, an engineer, was working on the dams and reservoir systems in Brazil. He didn't fish, and he didn't get me into fishing, but he said, come on down to Brazil, I got you a job teaching school — algebra, general science — and you don't have to go to Vietnam. I said, oh, I wanna go to Vietnam, I wanna become a big hero. He said, no, son, it's better if I get you this teacher job in Brazil. So at the last minute, I got the teacher job in Brazil. It was really cool, and we got along great that year. We always saw eye to eye for the first time in our whole lives — we'd never been close as father and son, and now he could see me as an adult, and I could see him as an adult. I'd been the black sheep all those years, and he finally said, well, okay, son, you're doing better than I thought.

Roland Martin: And so we were coming back from Europe, and we were really having a good time. We picked up a new car in Paris and were going to visit relatives in Sweden. It was a rainy day, coming down a hill in Brussels, Belgium — we had a head-on collision with a big Mercedes. It killed mom and dad. I'm in the car. After all the funerals and everything, I went back to Santee. I was kind of busted up, with a busted shoulder and busted ribs, and I became a guide, just kind of recuperating at Santee Cooper for a number of years. The whole time, I'm thinking my parents never saw me as any kind of success. I don't know — I'll have to do something worthwhile, maybe prove them wrong, because they can't see that I'm any success at all.

Meeting Ray Scott and Joining the Tournament Trail

Roland Martin: So, anyway, Ray Scott called — Ray Scott was the president of BASS. He said, have you heard of my tournament trails, have you heard of all the great things happening? I said, no, Ray, I don't wanna do tournaments — I'm down here at Santee Cooper catching big eight- and ten-pound bass, and that's what I wanna do, I don't wanna fool with your tournaments, you don't catch fish like that in a tournament. He said, no, we don't specialize in trophy fish, we specialize in a lot of good fish. I said, no, I don't wanna do that. So he kept calling forever, and finally, in 1970, I said, okay, I'll go to the first tournament, I'll just go there. I started doing really well — I came in second in the first one, won the second one, and came in second in the third one. I really took over the trail. About that time, Ray said we were gonna organize a membership drive for BASS — there were seventeen thousand members, and we were gonna go on a Bluebird bus and do a seminar circuit trail from Connecticut to California, hitting cities like Dallas and putting on big seminars. He said, Roland, you can handle the projector and the screen and do a deal on reading depth finders, Bill Dance can do something, John Powell, you can talk about shallow-water fishing, I'll talk about worm fishing, and we'll try to get members for the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society. So I worked for Ray for a whole year. I started fishing tournaments and making money — I made money in Brazil, I made money from my parents' insurance after their death, and I made money fishing the trails. By 1972 or '73, I had thirty or forty thousand dollars, I was finally married, and I figured, well, I'll start television.

The Long, Expensive Road to Television Success

Roland Martin: I had about thirty-five thousand dollars to spend, and I bought some cameras and started fooling around with television work. I lost my butt — I lost everything I had. Then I'd win another tournament and maybe get another camera. I kept saying I'll do it one more year, but I was struggling, I couldn't make it a success. The whole time I'm thinking about my parents, wishing they could see me — I'm struggling to get ahead, just about ahead but not quite, maybe getting into television, maybe doing good on the tournament trail — a half a success. I wished they could see me as a success, but they couldn't. It was a motivation to try to prove it to them even though they couldn't see it. Ray set the stage, saying this was a springboard — winning tournaments, becoming a big deal, and getting into television meant you could go to the AFTMA show, which is now ICAST, and get credibility, get good sponsors, and get ahead. And sure enough, about the third or fourth year of television, I started breaking even a little. We started with film work — film, that was really tough.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's plenty of editing.

Roland Martin: Were you in the business? All that crazy editing — it was awful. Then we had single-tube videotape with the old cassettes, all that stupid stuff, and finally we went to Betacam. We started getting ahead, and I began working with Bill Dance — we had a center sports group over in Little Rock, and that worked out pretty good. Then I went with Orlando Wilson right after that. Orlando and I had a big deal at AT Communications up in Atlanta, working together as partners with some big contracts. Then the guys from TNN came along — David Hall from TNN came down. They'd fished with me at Okeechobee, where I'd set up my marina by that time, and it was a great destination. TNN people came down to fish, fell in love with my television, and decided to hire Orlando and me. They gave us a giant contract, like a quarter of a million dollars just for performance — this was back when we were doing a million households a week. Television in the late eighties and early nineties was bigger than it is now, way bigger. We were making big money — another hundred thousand on endorsements, another hundred thousand winning tournaments. I was on top of the world in the nineties. The whole time, I'm thinking, I wish my parents could see I'm finally a success, and at that point I really was. Television was so big that when I had a faltering first marriage, to Mary Ann, my son Scott's mother, I figured television was worth so much that I'd give her the marina and take the television in the divorce. That was a bad choice — it was a seven-million-dollar marina, and the television was going downhill. But I'm happy with it, and we've made television work. What we're doing now is cutting corners — television is actually profitable, we're just not spending as much on production. Another thing we do, and I know you do it with your destinations, is get places that want us to come help pay for the cost, get some Chamber of Commerce money — that helps a lot. So we've cut expenses and gotten destination money, and it's profitable if you just cut corners.

Tom Rowland: How long have you been on television?

Roland Martin: I've been on television forty-three years. I started full time in '74.

Tom Rowland: So when you got started, who were you looking at as somebody doing something you thought maybe—

Bill Dance, Jimmy Houston, and the Original Legends

Roland Martin: Bill has always been my hero — Bill Dance. He started on the tournament trail a couple of years before I did and won the first few tournaments as leading money winner. By the time I started, after three or four years I caught up with Bill, but he'd started television three or four years ahead of me, and I worked with him on some shows. He preceded me, and he was my hero — and he still is. He's a great guy and so entertaining. So is Jimmy — in fact, we're partners now. Three legends: Bill Dance, Jimmy Houston, and myself, and we do little things together — Booyah boat cleaners, tackle box stuff, gloves — trying to make that work. It's not bad. But Bill's been a great one, and I work with Jimmy even more — we're hunting together today.

An Elk-Hunting Detour

Roland Martin: We were gonna go elk hunting last week, and we got all messed up and didn't go. We still might go in October.

Tom Rowland: Well, you were telling me that was kind of an invitation you got on the fly, and I was telling you my son is starting his elk guiding career this year. He's been on two hunts, apprentice guiding both times, and next week he's gonna be all by himself as the full guide. He's outside of Big Sky, Montana, at Sage Peak Outfitters — they hunt the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. They got one on the first hunt and one on the second, all bow hunting.

Roland Martin: Bow hunting — I love Montana, my biggest deer ever was in Montana.

Tom Rowland: You do all kinds of stuff outside of fishing.

Roland Martin: I'm a better fisherman, and that's my biggest thing — people ask me all the time what my favorite thing to do is. Back years ago, I used to be a fly-rod tarpon fisherman, used to be my number-one thing. I'm kind of over that a little now — I built my own fly reels, tied my own flies, did all that stuff, caught hundreds and hundreds of fish on top, fished tournaments. But I'm a little burned out on it. I don't know why, I just am.

The Story of How Tom and Roland Met

Tom Rowland: Well, you can spend a lot of time doing anything, and then you find something else interesting. I know the first time I ever had an extended period of time to talk to you, I was with Bass Pro, and they would do the spring classics — they'd send you a schedule of cities you're supposed to be in. I showed up at the hotel, scheduled to go to Mobile, then the next spot, ending up in Louisiana. I didn't know who else was going, but I walked down and there you were sitting at breakfast. I thought, that's strange — why would Roland Martin be here if he wasn't going on this same thing? I introduced myself, said my name is Tom Rowland, and I think we might be going to the same places. You said, no kidding, sit down. We started talking, and you were going here and here and here, so I said, why don't we just ride together?

Roland Martin: That'd be good.

Tom Rowland: And you said, okay, great, that's fine. So we rode together, and from the moment we left, you told stories. That's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on this podcast so badly — you're a really good storyteller, and you've got a lot of stories.

Roland Martin: I think of all the crazy ones — I entertained these guys I stayed with up at Douglas Lake, we really had a good time talking about stories.

Tom Rowland: That's where you just came from?

Roland Martin: Yeah, we just came from Douglas Lake, and I kind of fell on my butt a little. I had a great practice, some wonderful times catching fish before the tournament, and then I caught limit after limit in the tournament — they were just small. It didn't do very good.

Four Decades of Change in Bass Fishing

Tom Rowland: Well, that's the way tournament fishing is, right? I'm sure your television show's been on forty-seven years, but you've been fishing tournaments quite a few years longer than that.

Roland Martin: Actually, yeah — I've been fishing tournaments since 1970.

Tom Rowland: And in that time you've seen massive changes in the way people fish — the boats, the electronics, the engines. How do you sum up the changes you've seen in bass fishing since you started?

Roland Martin: I think a lot of it came through the guides in the Florida Keys, who set standards as well, but the tournament trail people set standards too. Anytime you put money on the line, whether it's a guide trying to excel or a tournament pro making his living, the success on the tournament trail set the standards in the tackle industry — all the new lures, all the new tackle, it's just phenomenal. The electronics are out of sight — that Panoptix, being able to see fish swimming around.

Tom Rowland: It's incredible — now you can see side, front, back.

Roland Martin: Oh, I know, it's just—

Tom Rowland: And in real time. I don't know how it can get a lot better, but luckily we're getting a lot of that technology from the military, and it's coming over to the consumer, just like GPS technology — that wasn't even around when you were having your big days in the early nineties, that was pre-GPS.

Inventing the Water Clarity Meter

Roland Martin: Well, just before I started television, Ray Scott had me officiating all the tournaments, and my first real job was with Lowrance Electronics. One of the things I'd done was patent a water clarity meter — I'd written articles about how important water clarity was and had a way to measure it.

Tom Rowland: And what was that called — was that the color selector?

Roland Martin: No — do you remember that thing? That was Dr. Loren Hill's deal.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, my grandfather had one of those, he swore by it.

Roland Martin: The people I'm going to film with tomorrow night are the Spike-It people — they bought the color selector, they have that system now. That's one of my advertisers now.

Tom Rowland: Cool. So what was your water clarity meter?

Roland Martin: Well, it was something that never worked out. It was a photocell, like in a camera, and it read a light — you'd turn the intensity up with no water in the tube, and the photocell would read a hundred percent.

Tom Rowland: So you're getting a sample of the lake water?

Roland Martin: Right — I'd take air, and when it's a hundred percent translucent, you adjust your meter to a hundred. Then you immerse it in the water, and it's not a hundred anymore because the water obscures the light. The muddier the water, the more the light's obscured — down to where it's really muddy, that's zero clarity. So you'd pull it out of the water, adjust it to zero, put it back in, and it'll read forty percent or thirty percent or eighty percent, whatever the clarity is.

Tom Rowland: And then what would you do with that information?

Roland Martin: If it was ninety percent clear, you could see pretty well, so I'd use more natural bait — matching the hatch with shad-colored stuff that looks similar to a smaller baitfish. On the other end of the scale, if it's only reading twenty or thirty percent, it's really dingy, and you want chartreuse, big flashy things, something with noise and attraction rather than a subtle presentation.

Tom Rowland: And that never worked on the open market, but was it working for you in the tournaments?

Roland Martin: Carl Lowrance, when he was alive, saw this thing and said, man, we can make a million dollars selling these color selectors — why don't you come work for Lowrance Electronics, and we'll do really good. But it never got off the ground. I don't know what happened, it just didn't pan out. Well, there's a good story out of it, at least.

Gimmicks, Gadgets, and What Actually Works

Tom Rowland: There's always things that seem like a really good deal but don't make it. Over the years I've seen all kinds of wacky things. Especially now with social media, I get messages all the time — hey, would you try this product if I sent it to you? Some of them are interesting — like, I've got this bait, it's revolutionary, it's got a battery in it. It's hard — you go to an ICAST show and see all these tiny little booths with all these ideas people have.

Roland Martin: I can see that they're gonna go broke, because they have one little product and they're thinking they're gonna make a million dollars on it. None of those people will be back another year — that's the only shot they ever made. Where the success does come is if they have that single product and sell it to some other big company. That's the deal.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, but some of them really work — like Z-Man came out with the ChatterBait, and it was different, and then people started winning with it, and it does work.

Roland Martin: I use it every day — I used it yesterday.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's become like a standard thing. It's funny to see the trends that go into fishing, and I'm sure over the years you've seen wacky things in both freshwater and saltwater — some of them silly, and some of them actually really work.

Where Innovation Really Comes From

Tom Rowland: Without the tournaments or the guide industry and the money on the line, that's where, in my opinion, innovation kind of stops. If everybody's just out there to have fun, who cares if you catch forty-nine fish and your buddy catches fifty — you both had a great day. But when you catch fifty fish every single day and everybody else is catching forty-nine, all of a sudden your percentage of success is way better than everyone else's. And if you're catching five fish that are all a pound heavier than everyone else's, consistently, you're winning the money and people wanna know what you're doing. That's where I see a lot of innovation coming — in the tournaments, or even the guide world, but more so in tournaments. If you can just be a tiny bit more successful, over time that's a lot more successful.

His Son Scott and the Pursuit of Efficiency

Roland Martin: My son Scott is that personified — he's seen the efficiency and the failure of everything. With the electronics, for example, his big deal now is his Panoptix, and he thinks that spotting a few extra fish and getting one or two more to commit makes all the difference in the world.

Tom Rowland: Well, of course — how many tournaments is he fishing a year?

Roland Martin: He's consistently winning — he was second last year for Angler of the Year for the FLW, and he's won six of their big tournaments, so he's probably their most successful fisherman. He believes in efficiency — it's all just getting that one extra fish.

Tom Rowland: Right, and that's really what it's about — or landing that one extra fish, the one that didn't get off. That's what we were always interested in with the redfish tournaments, finishing the deal. It's one thing to get the bite, another to get it up boatside, another to actually get it in the boat and measure it, and it's an eighth of an inch too big or too small. You refine your process — the right hook, because you lost four fish last year on the wrong one — and you stop losing fish. It's that refinement, getting just a tiny bit better, and over time that's a lot better. That's what you're talking about with Scott — trying to find one more fish a day, over fifty days, a hundred days, two hundred days. That's a lot better.

Roland Martin: It's really close, because when you talk about that one extra fish — all I would've needed to do really well in this last tournament was one halfway decent fish. The first day, I had about a five-pounder come rushing out at my topwater plug, and he didn't take it. I twitched it a funny way and he turned off of it. That would've put me in the money right there — it came an inch from getting caught. So I screwed up a little, wasn't a hundred percent efficient, and it cost me, say, a thousand dollars. Just that one fish cost me a thousand dollars.

Why He's Never Lost the Fire

Tom Rowland: So what is it — when you tell a story like that, I see your eyes light up about that efficiency and missing that one fish. What's kept you so interested in fishing for as long as you've been in it?

Roland Martin: We're all competitive in nature, and I think I am. I just enjoy it. I've retired, like, three times, and I'd sit around, cut the grass, tie flies, and say, I'm getting bored, I'm gonna have to go fish some more tournaments. The first time I retired was in '92, I think, and I came back on the tournament trail and won the Connecticut River tournament with the jet boat thing.

Tom Rowland: What was the jet boat thing?

The Jet Boat and the Rule Book That Follows the Winner

Roland Martin: At the time, they didn't have restrictions on what type of boats you could use. I'd gone to the Connecticut River early to check it out, and a guy showed me some smallmouth fishing way above these rapids you couldn't get a boat up to. I asked how to get a boat up there, and he said you can't, unless it's a jet boat. So that's the kind of thing — there ended up being about five or six new rules afterward. One was about jet boats, another about raised front decks, like you'd have on a bonefish skiff to stand up high and see fish. I've got one because I bonefish and tarpon fish, so I put a regular front-deck platform on my bass boat, went to Okeechobee in the late nineties, and won a big tournament. Everybody was rolling — that's a disadvantage, nobody else has a raised platform, we'll have to make that illegal.

Tom Rowland: That was a mistake — could have been.

Roland Martin: They could have — and that was the reason, because I won the tournament.

Tom Rowland: I asked Shaw Grigsby about that — I said, what about just getting a little elevation? He said, no, it's illegal, you can't do that. And I find it interesting that one tournament allows nets and another doesn't.

Landing Nets, Practice Days, and the Rules That Shape the Sport

Roland Martin: That one didn't arrive because Jerry McKinnis, bless his heart — I love Jerry to death — likes to film, and he likes the drama of filming: people struggling, possibly getting hooked, possibly losing the fish at the boat. He likes that drama.

Tom Rowland: Well, there's—

Roland Martin: Some people like that, I don't. You just wanna catch the fish.

Tom Rowland: Right, and the landing net makes a big difference. What are the other rolling rules?

Roland Martin: Oh, the raised platforms, and there was the practice rule. I remember winning one of the early tournaments in the early seventies — Ray Scott, at a little banquet night presenting awards, asked, Roland, what's the key to your success in winning this tournament? At the time, there was no cutoff, so I'd come in about a week or so early and spent, like, ten days getting ready — I had fish found everywhere. I told Ray having those ten extra days really helped, I knew where every fish was in the lake. So we said, okay, we're gonna have to have a cutoff — three days of practice. That's kind of been the rule for the last forty years.

Tom Rowland: Think about that?

Roland Martin: There's a new format now — a new tournament circuit I might compete in called Major League Fishing. They're not doing any pre-fishing — they take you in cold, like we used to do at the Classic years ago, when they'd just fly us in and say, here's the mystery lake, go figure it out. That's what Major League Fishing is doing on their format. If they expand the tournament trail, they might get me in, because Bass Pro Shops sponsors me, and Johnny Morris wants me to fish it if I can work it out. But their format is just going to the lake cold — no practice, go catch them right now.

Tom Rowland: That's good — then nobody has an advantage, unless it's a lake similar to one you spend a lot of time on.

Roland Martin: But for me, the practice is fun — I love trying to figure things out, trying to eliminate patterns. I wrote a book years ago, Roland Martin's 101 Bass-Catching Secrets — it's all about patterns, so I have a hundred and one patterns to try if I have enough time. Practice is a big time for me.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I love practice. When we fished the redfish tournaments, there were no rules on practice, so everybody would go spend as much time as they could. If you felt like you could win a certain tournament, you'd spend your time there — but you still gotta pay the mortgage and your bills, and you're not getting paid pre-fishing, so that's time you're not putting into the others, unless the schedule spaces tournaments a month apart. Some people would just camp out and try to become professionals. But it elevates the sport and the competition when people are that dialed in.

When Sharing a Fishing Tip Becomes a Rules Problem

Roland Martin: Another thing I enjoy about tarpon fishing, redfishing, bass fishing, is that I'd come down to the Keys and say, Tom, let's go redfish, what's the good news — we'd have a conversation. When I'm practicing for a tournament, if the rules allow it, I'm calling all my friends, what's going on, what's the current deal? But so many tournaments now have no-information rules, which kind of ruins it, because you and I are good buddies, I enjoy talking fishing with you, and now I can't, because you're not allowed to tell me a secret spot that would help me win. That's the fun of being friends and talking fishing — you go to the tackle shop, everybody has a big time telling stories, and you can't do that anymore. So much of the tournament trail is on a restricted basis now — you can't even look at the internet or talk to anybody about fishing. In a way, that kind of spoils the fun.

Tom Rowland: I agree it spoils the fun a little, but I get where they're trying to go — a completely level playing field, seeing who the best angler is with no information. But what that does, in my opinion, is create so many rules and so many opportunities for someone to inadvertently break them — not on purpose, but say you're closing your gas cap and somebody says, don't forget, chartreuse is the color.

Roland Martin: People come up to me all the time because they recognize me as a top guy, and they'll say, Roland, I gotta tell you about these big bass on Browns Point — go out to the end in seven feet of water and throw a chartreuse spinnerbait. I'll say, slowly, well, sir, the rules prevent me from getting any information — of course, they've already told me. I didn't solicit it, I wasn't looking for it, they just came up and told me, and the first thing I said was I can't get any information, but they'd already given it to me.

Tom Rowland: So there's an opportunity to—

Roland Martin: Turn it over — but it didn't break any rules.

Tom Rowland: Right, but if you won that tournament on Browns Point because you happened to end up there without even knowing its name, and the guy says, hey, I told him about that spot — that gives somebody an opportunity to get—

Roland Martin: In trouble. It is. So I don't spend much time listening — I tell them pretty quick, I can't solicit it, and I'll avoid Browns Point. It really will, of course.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, you'll try to, but if you've never been on the lake before, you could—

Roland Martin: Happen to be just pushing along and there's Browns Point — might as well.

Tom Rowland: Well, the Keys tournaments would do the same thing — if somebody wins, they'd make a rule against it. I remember somebody won a tournament catching a bunch of redfish in a shallow boat, then went bonefishing in a deeper boat, and the rule became you've gotta fish out of one boat.

Roland Martin: Out of one boat.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, they always make those rules. I don't know what I think about them — in my opinion, the more rules you have, the more opportunity for someone to inadvertently break them, which causes controversy, and controversy isn't good for the tournament. People get upset, and that creates an environment that's not pleasant. So on the couple of tournaments I was part of creating in the Florida Keys, my two cents was always, just make the rules straightforward and black and white, and keep it—

Doctor Mike Gautz and Learning to Fish Slow

Roland Martin: Did you have a few rules from the IGFA stuff? Did you meet Dr. Mike Gautz? He's my doctor — such a great fisherman, really great. And he makes hundreds of thousands of dollars — he's a concierge doctor.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, you told me that one time.

Roland Martin: I pay him several thousand dollars a year, and he takes care of me really well. I can call him — hey, doc, I got a boil on my hand, what should I do — and he'll write a prescription. That's what concierge doctors do, they make referrals, and if I have an eye problem he'll send me to the right doctor. It's a really cool deal, and he's also the best fisherman around. He's won two or three of the big IGFA tournaments, fished with my partner a lot. He says, Roland, if it weren't for the fact I'm making half a million a year as a doctor, I'd become a professional guide or fisherman — that's what I'd wanna do, because I love fishing, but he can't do that.

Tom Rowland: But that's why he moved his practice into that concierge model.

Roland Martin: Right, he has more time — Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, he can pretty well fish three days a week if he wants.

Tom Rowland: Well, he is really good — he taught me a tremendous amount. He and Robert Collins together are a very dangerous combination of anglers — they fished with my partner and won a whole bunch of tournaments. Mike and those guys taught me how to snook fish. We were doing a show recently, and I was catching more than everybody else — Rich was in the boat and wasn't catching anything, and he asked what I was doing. I said, I'm doing exactly what Mike Gautz and Robert Collins told me — I'm fishing super slow. He asked what I meant, and I said, remember, he told us — look at a snook, and I picked one up and was talking about it. Look at their belly, flat to the bottom, because they just lay there and don't move. If you move that bait very, very slowly — both of those guys told me ninety percent of the people who fish for snook fish too fast. That's the one piece of information I've locked away — snook fishing, go slow. That's what I do now — I fish it very slow, hop it along the bottom, give it plenty of time, let it sit, move it, let it sit again. That's what they taught me, and those guys catch a lot of fish.

Roland Martin: They do — a lot of fish, really good.

Turkey Calls, Woodworking, and the Legend of Neil Cost

Tom Rowland: So what about turkey hunting?

Roland Martin: I love turkey hunting. One of the reasons I'm going tomorrow to visit the people at Spike-It is that Don Rollins, who owns Spike-It, also likes woodworking — he has big lathes for wood, and so I make turkey calls, bowls, and I'm into the lathing and woodwork. It's kind of fun, and making turkey calls is so satisfying, just like making a lure. I make little lures too — devil horses, Zara Spooks, all that kind of stuff. And of course, how much fun is it to tie flies, same kind of deal.

Tom Rowland: Super deal — you're making box calls?

Roland Martin: Box calls, yeah. I've done some slate calls, but mostly box calls.

Tom Rowland: How did you get into doing that — did you just see what was happening and think you might be able to make it a little better?

Roland Martin: Well, Rob Keck used to be the executive director for the Wild Turkey Federation — he lives over in Edgefield, South Carolina. He said, Roland, come to Nashville and help with our Wild Turkey Convention, do some judging, sign autographs. He had me come, and he said, I'll get you a Neil Cost original box call. I asked what that was, and he said it's the best box call in the world, worth hundreds of dollars, because Neil Cost is the most famous guy. He gave me one, and it is the best call. I've had a couple since, and I met Neil Cost himself — he died about ten or fifteen years ago, but he's recognized as the number-one master of all turkey calls ever, and his calls are worth thousands of dollars. I still have a couple of them.

Roland Martin: I've duplicated them — I haven't built one as good as Neil's, but they look identical. They cut them apart, compared his call to mine, and his really sounds good and mine doesn't.

Tom Rowland: Why do you think that is?

Roland Martin: Because every piece of grain in every wood runs a certain way — turn the block just a little, and the grain runs a different way. Lining up the grain is one big issue when you make a call. The type of wood matters too — was it from the center of the log, where the rings are closer together, or the outer cambium layer, the lighter wood? There's all kinds of density and strength to consider, and all kinds of wood.

Tom Rowland: What type of wood do you make it out of?

Roland Martin: Butternut, walnut, some exotic woods. The wood is musical, just like a good violin — it has a certain vibration and tone, and I don't fully know the difference yet, because I just get all kinds of wood and make all kinds of calls.

Tom Rowland: How many?

Roland Martin: I'll make, like, ten perfect turkey calls, and out of those ten, one will really be good, and one will be kind of good.

Tom Rowland: And when you see that one that's really good, are you having a hard time figuring out what it is about that one that's different?

Roland Martin: It's how thick the walls are, the choice of wood, the way you finish it, maybe even the finish you put on. Everything's different when you mill it out and do it all by hand, and it's just fun playing with it. I've gotten a little better.

Tom Rowland: My buddy sent me this — I just opened my computer to show you. He sent me something about a turkey call, a box call, but I'm having trouble finding it — I don't do Facebook much, but he sent it there. Anyway, so where do you turkey hunt?

Thirty-Five Years of Turkey Hunting and a Friend Named Ronnie

Roland Martin: For thirty-five straight years, I've gone to Missouri in the spring — I missed one year. By the way, my really good turkey hunting buddy, who I've killed most of my turkeys with, is also Johnny Morris's college roommate from Bass Pro Shops. His name is Ronnie Curry, and we fish together a lot. He just recently, two weeks ago, had a brain tumor, and I've been calling him every day. He's been feeling down, saying he's paralyzed, his right leg half paralyzed. I asked if his arms work — he said yeah. I said, well, I'm gonna take you fishing, I'll send you a check and a plane ticket, take you down to Lake Okeechobee and some of the swamps in Florida, and we'll do some fishing. He said he didn't think he'd be able to fish, he'd been so sick, had this operation. I said, Ronnie, I'm gonna take you fishing, get your spirits up. I called him today, and he's ready to go — he said, when are we going? It's good to give people incentives like that.

Tom Rowland: Absolutely.

Roland Martin: He's my number-one turkey buddy — he's got a couple of farms, and we've hunted turkeys together for thirty-five years and killed, between us, probably more than we should have.

Tom Rowland: What about the Everglades turkeys?

Roland Martin: Oh, that's a tough one. I went down this year with my lawyer — we spent a week in the Everglades and got two, he got both of them, I didn't get one. It's tough — the only way I can really hunt the Everglades effectively is going in a whole month before with my swamp buggies, doing a lot of reconnoitering, particularly after a rain, finding the tracks on roads people aren't traveling. But just going in cold, the Everglades are too big, eight hundred thousand acres, it's easy to miss them. We've had a couple of bad years not having enough time.

Tom Rowland: That's the Osceola, right? How do you find them different from the Easterns and others?

Roland Martin: Just fewer of them in a more spread-out area — quieter birds. There's a lot of predators in the Everglades swamps, panthers and bobcats going after the ones that gobble a lot, so they don't gobble much — harder to call, more wary.

Tom Rowland: When you say Everglades, you mean not the park, but the area around it.

Roland Martin: All through South Florida, really — just about anywhere.

Tom Rowland: There are some areas where the Osceolas and Easterns are on the same property.

Roland Martin: They say everything north of I-4, between Orlando and Tampa, isn't the true Osceola — everything south is. That's kind of the dividing point.

Tom Rowland: Has there ever been any mixing of the breeds — are there hybrids?

Roland Martin: I don't know much about that — there are probably some hybrids. When I hunt Kansas, we get a turkey the biologists say is a hybrid between the Merriam and the Rio Grande. The Merriam has a lot of white in the tail, and the Rio Grande has more of a buff, gray-tan tail, but the cross has a bit of both, so you can see the difference.

Tom Rowland: Seems like a hybrid with the best senses of both species would be really hard to hunt — knowing you're there before you even get close. The hardest turkeys to—

Roland Martin: Hunt are the ones people are hunting a lot. When an area gets hunted extensively by good turkey hunters, the ones left are the wary ones. In areas that don't get hunted much, like parts of the Midwest, or Montana, they don't hunt turkeys much there.

Tom Rowland: I know — that's what my son was telling me.

Roland Martin: Easier to hunt, because they're not being hammered.

Tom Rowland: He saw turkeys that looked like pets on this person's farm. He asked if they were keeping them, and they said no, they're just wild.

Roland Martin: Yeah, see, they haven't been hunted much, so they're not so wary.

Tom Rowland: My turkeys are definitely wary, and they don't get hunted much either, but they're smart — Easterns.

Roland Martin: Yeah, Easterns are tough. Any of those species, when they get hunted, they get real worried, believe it.

Still Chasing Projects

Tom Rowland: So at this point in your career, what gets you excited? What are you looking forward to?

Roland Martin: I'm a project person, Tom. I have a hard time sleeping at night because I'm thinking about that perfect turkey call I'm gonna build tomorrow, or that big seven-pound bass I'm gonna catch on a new lure, or some other project. I have nothing but projects. I'm in my seventies, and you'd think I'd have time to relax and watch television — I can't do that, I'm piddling, making things, new lures, turning wood. I still have aspirations of even winning the Classic — probably not a real reality at this point, I'm probably a little over the hill for that, but I wanna do it.

Tom Rowland: Right, but you're on the path — you're actually in the game, you're competing.

Roland Martin: And so I have a lot of expectations — every single day I'm thinking about all the expectations for tomorrow, all these great things, and I've got a whole list of projects every day.

Forty-Three Years of Discipline on Television

Tom Rowland: What did it take in terms of discipline? I know from talking to other people with television shows, and from our own experience — we've only been on the air fifteen years — that getting it started is one thing, but maintaining it, keeping it going, is another. There are discouraging times, times when it looks like things aren't going the way they should, and some really good times. But in order to keep it going, there's discipline, a hard-nosed attitude that it's going to work and you're going to make it work. What do you think, as far as your career goes, in forty-three years of television?

Roland Martin: Forty-three years.

Tom Rowland: Forty-three years. So there's gotta be some times where it looked really good, and some where it looked really dark. What is it — discipline and focus — that keeps it going?

Roland Martin: For the last five or six years, when I talk to Walt, my marketing director, I'll ask, what did NBC Sports say, do we have a contract for next year? They say, sure, you've got a contract. I say, good, I got another year.