Anderson: Hooked on bass, young Minnesotan survives brain surgery, lands 8-pounder to win Bassmaster Classic

In August 2023, Gordon and Jennifer Fothergill were at the Itasca County Fair in Grand Rapids, Minn., when Jennifer’s phone rang.

She could tell by the area code that the call was from Alabama, where their son, Easton, was a college student and a budding professional bass angler.

A standout bass fisherman at Grand Rapids High School, Easton had chosen to attend the University of Montevallo in part so he could learn about fishing bass in other parts of the country, especially the South.

But Easton hadn’t been feeling well, and his parents were worried.

He’d been having headaches, and that summer at the Bassmaster College National Championship, he had washed down a handful of ibuprofen trying to stop the pain.

Still, his head pounded, and he passed out in his boat.

Recovering sufficiently to finish fifth in the tournament with his Grand Rapids High School buddy, college roommate and fishing partner, Nick Dumke, Easton returned to Alabama, where he fell into bed for days.

Unable to reach him, Jennifer gave his roommates an ultimatum.

“Get him to a hospital or I’ll have an ambulance at your front door in 10 minutes.”

It was shortly afterward, at the county fair, that Jennifer’s phone rang.

“A doctor was on the phone and told us they’d found a mass near Easton’s brain and they were taking him into emergency surgery,” Gordon said. “We jumped into our car and headed to Alabama.”

…

Just a few days ago, on March 23, Gordon and Jennifer were at Lake Ray Roberts in Texas to watch Easton compete in the final day of the Bassmaster Classic.

The Super Bowl of competitive bass fishing, the Classic is a high-octane mixture of wildly chromatic boats, fuel-injected outboards and enough fishing-product logos to fill a Cabela’s catalog — all of it livestreamed to homes and phones everywhere.

Only the best anglers qualify for the annual contest, and this year, a $300,000 first prize and untold other endorsements and riches awaited the angler who at the end of three days boated the heftiest catch of bass.

Miraculously, on the cusp of the contest’s final day, Easton was at the top of a 56-name leaderboard. The five largemouth bass he weighed the first day tipped the scales at 24 pounds, 15 ounces, good for third place, and the second day he bested all anglers with nearly 30 pounds of Micropterus salmoides.

The miracle wasn’t that at 22 years of age, Easton was beating a field of anglers who had far more experience catching XXL-sized bass.

Nor was it that Easton was from Minnesota, and northern Minnesota at that, where bass fishing is an afterthought to many anglers who prefer at day’s end to fillet a catch of walleyes, crappies or even sunnies.

Instead, the miracle was that on this day, hard by the shores of Lake Ray Roberts, Easton was only 18 months past having an abscess the size of a tangerine excised from his skull.

“After we got the call from the doctor, and Jennifer and I were driving from Grand Rapids to Alabama, I was preparing for Easton’s death,” Gordon said. “I was putting together what I would say at his funeral.”

One story among many would be the time when Easton and his dad were trolling on Pokegama Lake not far from their Grand Rapids home.

Easton was just a young boy, and the walleyes were snapping. But Easton soon grew tired of catching Minnesota’s state fish.

Staring at the lake’s shoreline, he finally said, “Dad, can we just go over there and cast?”

Tournament walleye fishing had long been one of Gordon’s passions, and he harbored dreams of rising among the ranks of regional and even national competitors.

But when Easton was born, he put all that aside, preferring to spend time on the water with his son, no matter the quarry.

“I wanted him to be my fishing buddy,” Gordon said. “So when he said he wanted to stop trolling for walleyes, I said, ‘Sure,’ and we reeled in and went to the shoreline to cast for bass.”

Just five weeks after his surgery, Easton won the 2023 Bassmaster College Classic Bracket Championship, out-fishing rival Auburn University’s top angler, Tucker Smith, and earning $7,500 and the use for a year of a Nitro Boat and Toyota truck.

He’s been on a tear ever since — a streak he hoped would continue at the Classic.

On that tournament’s third day, Gordon and Jennifer watched as Easton pulled on his life jacket and settled into his 21-foot-long Skeeter.

Turning its ignition key, he fired up the big Yamaha that swung from the boat’s transom, knowing that even though he held an 8 ½-pound lead over his nearest rival, he needed to catch five big bass to win.

Targeting areas where the fish were holding before moving into shallower water to spawn, Easton caught one bass, then another and another.

Nevertheless, he felt the day slipping away, and with only an hour of fishing remaining, he had boated just four bass.

Gambling, he leveled his Skeeter across the 30,000-acre lake, redlining the scimitar-like craft beneath a gray sky to a stump-filled location where he had caught a keeper the day before.

Spotting on his electronics a bulbous fish hunkered beneath a flooded tree, Easton used a spinning rod to launch a 3/32-ounce Neko rig with a Strike King finesse worm toward the leafless target.

Multiple times he sent the bait airborne.

No takers.

Then the big fish finned slowly from its hideout, and Easton cast again.

Seconds later, when the bass ever so delicately inhaled the plastic bait, Easton set the hook as quickly as any big-leaguer swings a bat, putting an 8-pounder in his live well and $300,000 in his pocket.

…

“This summer, I’ll be back in Minnesota, at least for a while,” Easton said the other day.

Humble in ways that belie his newfound celebrity and grateful for his good health, Easton in his mind won’t come home as the only Minnesotan to win the Classic in its 55-year history, or the angler who set a tournament record with his 15-bass tally weighing in at 76 pounds, 15 ounces.

He’ll return instead as the kid who was an infant when he was first taken fishing by his parents to Lake of the Woods, who as a teenager was thrilled when he played basketball for Grand Rapids High School, but who was even more excited when his dad and other dads formed the school’s bass fishing team.

Best of all, while home, he’ll get a chance to be on the water with his favorite fishing partner.

“There’ll be some smaller tournaments in the Grand Rapids area that Dad and I will enter,” he said. “There’s no place better to be in summer than in Minnesota.”