I’m so sick of hearing about The ******* Rig. Enough already! Everyone seems to want a piece of The ******* Rig commentary pie. Everywhere I turn somebody is trying to opine their $0.02 worth of re-hashed faulty logic. It’s become cliché to the point of madness. Nothing is being said that hasn’t been said a thousand times for the last several months.
Guess what… you don’t have anything new to say. So, you might as well say nothing. Your ill-conceived rationale in favor of its tournament use is just a lame attempt to re-assure that tiny fraction of your soul that inherently knows something’s not right with it. I hear the same line of apologetics over and over again from the masses of anglers.
“It ain’t no different than a double fluke rig…”
“It ain’t no different than the Senko and Chatterbait, and we didn’t ban those…”
“A crankbait has more than one hook on it too, so what’s the difference?…”
God Almighty! Where do I even begin with how off base and irrelevant all of that is! It’s made me want to not throw it on purpose… just to distance myself from those who make these kinds of justifications.
Can we just talk about something different? From now on, if you have to write about it, just type this instead… ”The ******* Rig”. This gets the point across while also communicating a certain amount of subtle protest. If you embrace the castable umbrella rig, I would urge you to do this as well. This way you’ll be less likely to tick off those who are sick of reading the phrase every second.
If you absolutely MUST talk about it, can you just quit saying the word?… “Alabama, Alabama, Alabama, Ala-ala-ala-bama-bama-bama-la-la-la-bam-bam…” Call it something else. Call it the “5-wire rig”, “cheater’s rig”, umbrella rig, Sputnik, etc… I don’t care.
This is not necessarily rooted in any anti-******* Rig sentiment. I would say the same thing about the Carolina Rig if it was treated the same way.
I recently went down to Florida and thought I’d get away from all the ******* Rig talk for a while. Nope. As soon as I got to the tournament registration, that’s all I heard entering my ears like some kind of surround sound stereo effect. All the way down where the black water rolls and the sawgrass sways, I was still unable to escape it.
I’m to the point now where I don’t even want to drive to Alabama because of the “Welcome to Alabama” sign I would have to pass. I can’t help but look at it and see, “Welcome to Alabama Rig” now. My eyes have been so overexposed to those words together that my brain automatically superimposes the word “rig” next to Alabama. Alabama is a great state and a great word to say, but now it’s tarnished by the advent of this so-called “rig” — one that is actually more of a device than a rig.
As Paul Elias was weighing in his monster sack on the last day of that FLW Guntersville event, I wrote an article on FishStrong predicting the impending controversy. Yes, it was exciting to see what went down there, but I had to rain on the parade… the parade of crazed, wild-eyed anglers… eagerly clamoring into an orgy of twisted lines and backorders, cash in hand to seize the “bait” that would satisfy their “win at all cost” mentality.
Once again, I’m raining on the parade because it’s time to dial it back a notch. The needless dominance of The ******* Rig in fishing media is starting to hamper the discussion of other worthy topics. All these articles for/against The ******* Rig are wasting space and time that can be used to educate anglers on more worthy subjects. It’s getting to the point where anglers are being short changed more valuable information in favor of beating The ******* Rig horse — a horse that has been dead for weeks now.
