Classic champ in the Xpress lane

JONES MILL — Jason Christie, the hottest angler in professional bass fishing, personally thanked the employees at Xpress Boats for their role in his recent success.

Christie, a terse, gruff, Oklahoman, showered gratitude on every member of the Xpress team in a meet-andgreet session Tuesday at the Xpress factory. The retinue also included the Lakeside Junior High School fishing team. Christie is one of a handful of professional bass anglers that fishes in an aluminum boat, and he proved over the last several weeks that it is possible to win consistently at the highest level in a non-fiberglass platform.

“I don’t consider it an aluminum boat. I consider it a bass boat,” Christie said. “I feel like an armadillo in it. Nothing can stop me. I’m not scared to run across shallow water, but I can also pull out and catch them 30 feet deep like I did in the Classic.”

The Bassmaster Classic is the championship event for the BASS organization. Christie won the Classic March 6 at Lake Hartwell in South Carolina by weighing in 54 pounds in three days. That’s an average of 18 pounds per day.

“I’ve been fortunate,” Christie said. “There have been some years where you get a 5-pounder on. That fish has got in the boat for me, but it doesn’t get in the boat for everybody. That fish changes difference between winning and tenth place. The harder you work, that’s typically when things start working out.”

In his book “Outliers”, Malcolm Gladwell theorizes that it takes 10,000 hours of performing a task repetitively to master a skill. Christie has put in the hours, but he said he is far from mastering the art of fishing.

“I don’t know about the mastering part,” Christie said. “I don’t like that word mastering. That means you stop learning. I never stop learning. I’ve been lucky, and I’ve been blessed, but I’ve worked my butt off.”

Like the word or not, the work has resulted in Christie’s mastery of the sport he now dominates. He also won a Bassmaster Elite Series event Sunday at Lake Chickamauga in Tennessee, as well as an Elite Series tournament on the Sabine River in April 2021.

“I’ve spent a lot of hours over the years fishing,” Christie said. “One thing about this sport is there’s not a book to read. There’s not a show to watch to learn it. It’s always evolving. That’s what I want to tell these kids. My goal is not to win trophies. My goal is to outwork everybody around me. And I try to. Hopefully that pays off.”

Ryan Kemp, a research and development specialist at Xpress Boats, proudly told Christie that he built Christie’s boat.

“I did, yes sir,” Kemp said. “I’ve been working on that model for a couple of years. When Jason came onboard and Xpress began to sponsor him, he had some ideas about some improvements he wanted to make. He wanted a 50-gallon gas tank and lots of rigging things.

“I did more of the structural aspects of the boat, but we took all that into account. We went to the drawing boards and spent another year working on it.”

Kemp said he is immensely proud that a boat he helped bring to the water is now an ascending exemplar for the fishing industry.

“As a person that’s involved in the creative process, I see that as a reflection of myself and a reflection of the company I work for and a reflection of the teams that I work with,” Kemp said. “It’s really cool that aluminum boats are coming around to that level of prestige. It’s exciting.”

An aluminum boat represents a fresh start for Christie, who returned to the Elite Series in 2021 after a stint fishing the Major League Fishing circuit. As one who emphasizes family, Christie said Xpress is a perfect fit.

“When I left MLF and came back to BASS, that was a fresh start for me, and I needed a fresh start with my boat,” Christie said. “These guys took a chance on me. I wanted to be more involved in a family owned company than a corporate owned company. My rule with sponsors is that I want (to work with) people that I would invite over for supper. Rory Herndon (president of Xpress Boats) is definitely one of them. They listen to what I have to say about the boat and things like that.”