(Editor's note: This submission is from Ed Hardin, a retired columnist for the Greensboro News & Record.)
I didn't so much meet Ray Scott as I was recruited by Ray Scott.
As an outdoors writer in Greensboro, where Scott had once sold insurance, lots of insurance, he sought me out and invited me to come down to Birmingham and cover the 1992 Bassmaster Classic at Logan Martin Lake.
I had no idea what I was getting into, but to make it short, I had the time of my life, fishing as a press angler with Guy Eaker, who taught me how to loop cast, which I still do to this day. I met Rick Clunn, Guido Hibdon, Hank Parker, Bill Dance and a barmaid from the Sheraton Hotel bar.
But I digress.
Scott introduced me to everybody, making a point to tell them I was from Greensboro, North Carolina, which he reminded them was one of the underappreciated hotbeds of bass fishing in America.
It didn't dawn on me until later that he had something else in mind. He always did.
To make a short story a little longer, I went back to Birmingham a year later, watched High Rock Lake wizard David Fritts win the Classic in front of not just an outdoors writer from Greensboro but the mayor, the head of the N.C. Sports Council and Gov. Jim Hunt.
The following year, the Classic was held in North Carolina.
It was the first of three Classics on High Rock, where the late Wrangler Angler Bryan Kerchal won in 1994 as an "amateur." Greensboro is the home of Wrangler, by coincidence.
Scott had it figured out all along. I was a part of his plan.
We stayed friends after that, him calling me from time to time with story ideas and me writing columns that made him a folk hero in Greensboro.
The morning after his death, before I even knew he was gone, I caught the biggest bass of my life, a 10-pound monster out of a North Carolina lake.
Call it coincidence or a gift from above, but I think it was somehow ordained. I think Ray planned it that way.
