Steve Kennedy is a a heckuva bass fisherman, many of you have probably heard of him. He also just TURNED down Toyota for a full sponsorship deal. They wanted him to tow his boat with a Toyota and he refused, he uses a motor home.
This is a great story about his tourney boats he used to get going – from BassZone.com
STEVE KENNEDY’S WILD RIDE
Story by Brent Conway
In today’s high-octane adrenalin-charge environment of professional bass fishing, the status quo for choice of boats is fiberglass rigged with a big time go-fast motor with a minimum of 225 horses at the propeller. Imagine backing your $50,000 rig into the water the morning of a tournament only to look over and see a fellow competitor slowly backing his aluminum boat in beside you.
To take this one step further, imagine that the guy who’s running the aluminum boat with a 50-horse motor on it actually went on to win the event? Sounds a little far-fetched, right? Everyone knows that serious bass fishermen wouldn’t be caught dead a tournament of any size in a rinky-dink aluminum boat. Only a few years back, this was a reality for the reigning CITGO Bassmaster Rookie of the Year Steve Kennedy.
The Alabama pro is now a familiar name in the sport after being a frequent visitor atop the Elite Series leader board all season. 2005 was indeed a storybook season for Kennedy, and like any good book there’s an equally good beginning.
Kennedy is, as many fans of the sport may know, the son of Van Kennedy who earned a page in the annals of professional bass fishing back in the ‘80s. Father Van passed his competitive passion and knowledge of everything bass onto son Steve, and together they began fishing (and winning) in BFL events throughout the southeast.
Kennedy made a promise to himself after graduation from college in 1992 that he’d someday make his living by bass fishing. So, he stuck with his program, and chalked up 15 top-10 finishes in the BFL and the EverStart Series as well as five out-and-out BFL wins over the next ten years. By 2002, he’d earned a third-place finish and $10,000 at the All-American.
What’s truly gripping about Kennedy’s record though, isn’t the volume of victories or upper-echelon showings, but rather how he went about his business. For the better part of eight years, Kennedy competed as a non-boater, relying on the glass and muscle a boater would provide to supplement his own talents with rod and reel.
Kennedy was content with fishing as a non-boater and quite satisfied with his winning ways too, but the status quo screeched to a halt with the introduction of the boater/co-angler format. Kennedy jumped into the Boater Division and never looked back. “In 2000, or somewhere in there, they came out with the pro/co format,” Kennedy explained.
“All of a sudden, there were non-boaters everywhere, and for the first time I was on the waiting list. The second event of that year at Eufaula they told me that I could fish on the boater side, so that was pretty much the start of being a boater.”
It’s at this point in the story where things get interesting. The boat Kennedy had to fish from in that event was his 17-foot aluminum BassTracker rigged with a 50-horse motor (which had recently been upgraded from a 40-horse power plant). “I won the Super Tournament at the end of that year in the Bama Division, and won the first tournament of the following year in the Bulldog Division,” he said.
“I fished nine tournaments that year in two different divisions and won two Super Tournaments back-to-back in 2001 out of the Tracker.”
The Tracker certainly never rumbled at takeoffs or impressed anyone with its blistering top-end speed, but its sneaky disposition kept Kennedy in uninterrupted contact with fish, and his winning ways only proved it. “I’d won $25,000 or $30,000 in two years fishing out of my little boat, so I had absolutely no qualms with fishing anywhere against anybody in it,” he said.
“I’d put off buying a big boat because I’d just got married and my wife was still in school. That same year, I decided to quit my job and go do this fishing thing full time. Buying a big new boat just wasn’t in the cards.”
It was in 2001 that Kennedy, then working full-time as a mechanical engineer, decided to part ways with the nine-to-five world and emerge as a full-time professional angler. That decision was made with the full knowledge, too, that his beloved johnboat would have to move over and make room for a Ranger if he wanted to move up to the FLW Tour.
“I bought a used 354 Ranger out of the paper for $1500 before signing up for the FLW and Everstart events so that I could get priority entry,” he said. “The boat didn’t have a motor on it, the livewells didn’t work, and it didn’t have any carpet at all. It wasn’t in any kind of working order, so I just kept using what I had – but I was a Ranger owner, which gave me priority status.”
In 2002, Kennedy fished the first four FLW Tour events, pocketing more than $6,000 and landing a third-place finish at Santee Cooper out of the Tracker. “I had won four BFL tournaments the year before fishing out of the aluminum boat, so moving up a couple levels in terms of competition wasn’t that big of a deal to me,” Kennedy explained. “I didn’t really have a hang up with fishing out of the Tracker because I knew I had been able to catch them so well in it for years.”
While the Tracker fit Kennedy like a glove and he had all the confidence in the world in his abilities to perform from within the comfy confines the boat provided, the same couldn’t always be said for his co-angler partners. “Of all the guys that I fished with in the Tracker, there was only one guy that had any issues with it,” he said.
“I told him at the pairing meeting that we’d be in the Tracker, and he was like, ‘What?’ He thought I was kidding with him! He was the only guy that ever said a word about it to me, everyone else didn’t seem to mind – or at least they didn’t say anything.”
Heading into the fifth event of 2002, Kennedy knew that he was going to have to get the Ranger up and running for the big water he knew he would be facing at Champlain. “I put a 90-horse motor on the back of the Ranger that first year to go to up there,” he said. “There was no way that I was going to go up there and fish out of the Tracker. I wound up finishing out the season in a very used Ranger 354 with a 90-horse motor on the back of it.”
Steve was content to fish another season in the 354 with the 90-horse brute hanging on the back, but things took an unexpected turn for the worst at the first stop in 2003. “The first tournament of the next season was at Okeechobee and I burned up the 90-horse in the grass,” he said. “Dad gave me a 150 that he had, so we hung it on the back before the next tournament and I kept right on trucking.”
Kennedy was now “in the game” in terms of his ride. He’d upgraded motors from the meek 90-horse to a state-of-the-art 150, plus he’d carpeted it from stem to stern (though he admits there were still a few old patches mingled in with the new), and all of the boat’s electronics and livewell systems were working tip top. One would think that moving from an aluminum boat into a Ranger would be a huge boost to his ego.
That assumption would be way off base. “Looking back, to go from a 17-foot aluminum boat to a Ranger with a 150, you’d think that I felt like I was in tall cotton at that point,” he explained. “But, you have to understand that I’d been around tournaments and tournament fishing my whole life. The boat was just another tool to me…as long as it worked, I could work.”
By the beginning of that 2003 season, Kennedy (still in the Ranger 354) was closing in on nearly $100,000 in career earnings. That year the 354, just like the aluminum skiff before it, was retired when he landed a sponsor team deal. “The third year on tour FLW put me in a team deal, which got me into a big boat; but the boat was never primary to my fishing,” he said.
“I’m out here to catch fish, not win a beauty contest. When I started doing this, I knew that once I put my boat in the water I could go in any direction and catch some fish as long as I was fishing the conditions that were in front of me.”
During the 2003 season, Steve won his first FLW event and the rest is, as they say, history. Based on the accolades that his inaugural season of fishing on the Elite Series provided, the promise of someday earning his living by bass fishing that he’d made to himself back in ’92 after graduation from college had come true.
Just goes to show you that where there’s a will, there’s a way!
There were 6 guys running real “bass boats” and they just about swamped us at take-off. It took us 30 minutes to get to a large reed bed across the lake. I finished first and my partner took second. The boat has nothing to do with catching fish, it just gets you there faster. 
