Preface The Optimists I n the spring of 2003, I approached my editor at Forbes magazine with a story idea about the chase for the world-record largemouth bass. It wasn't immediately an easy sell. I wasn't going to uncover some seedy corporate scandal or analyze some brilliant new marketing scheme. And the somewhat obscure endeavor of a few obsessive fishermen surely wouldn't move any markets. But the chase had all of the elements of a good story, so I gave it a shot anyway. I pitched it like this: A collection of very dedicated people'entrepreneurs, really'are actively pursuing a lofty goal, using their wits and an incredible amount of hard work. At stake was the possibility of great triumph, as well as the risk of utter failure. The plot thickened with the colorful, mysterious, and daunting history that had to be overcome.

It helped, too, that at the time an $8 million bounty lay on the head of the world-record bass'money put up by a Tampa, Florida, outfit run by a used- car salesman and a real-estate developer. I'll admit that I had more than a little self-interest in this story. I have been a fisherman all my life. I grew up in the American South, in North Carolina and Alabama, where fishing for largemouth bass is both a predominant pastime and an industry like, say, skiing in Austria or window shopping in New York City, where I live now. In North Carolina my family lived on a farm. Behind the house, down a gentle slope of horse pasture, lay a blackwater pond full of plucky bass. After my father, Donald, patiently taught me how to fish, I spent an inordinate amount of time tossing lures into its dark water, sometimes even hooking into a wriggling, green- sided largemouth bass. One summer I used a miniature remote-control boat'outrigged with a 6- inch rod tip, 4 feet of monofilament line, and a spinning lure'to troll the pond.

I hooked and fought bass from a lawn chair on the shore. When my father died of cancer in 1989, we moved to Alabama to be closer to my mother's family. I was seventeen years old, an awkward and self-conscious teenager, devastated by my father's death. Fishing was one of the few things that I believed I did well'largely thanks to my father'so I did it often. Luckily for me, my grandfather, whom we called Toots, had a bass lake in Alabama that was just a twenty-minute drive from our new house in Birmingham. He named the lake Tadpole. I fished that lake nearly every day during my last summer before college, and it became a bridge that connected my past with my future. And I haven't stopped since.

Fishing'especially for largemouth bass'was just something you did in our family, a stubborn stain on our genetic code that, like freckles, hasn't been scrubbed out through subsequent generations, though it missed a few of us. Neither my mother nor my youngest brother cares much for the sport. But for me, as it had been for my father and grandfather, fishing was a necessity, though why I love it and continue to pursue it with such passion is as mysterious and beguiling as the black water in that North Carolina farm pond. So I thought that maybe by hanging out with these world-record-bass chasers'even though they obviously had taken what was for me merely a passion to the much higher level of obsession?I could shed some light on this mystery of mine. My inquiry, I believed, was perhaps similar to the way a pathologist studies the brain of a madman to determine the roots of lesser mental illnesses. I didn't tell my editor any of this. But I did say that all fishermen, every time they cast a lure, dreamt of catching the biggest fish. And the world-record bass was, for reasons both mythical and absolute, the most sought-after prize of them all.

I thought, however quirky, that this was a story the readers of the magazine would enjoy. My editor leaned back in his chair in an office that overlooked Fifth Avenue and thoughtfully rubbed his goateed.