Welcome! To the ima EMAILER ~ November 2007 Issue
The monthly IMA EMAILER brings you news from IMA pro staff members Michael Murphy, Fred Roumbanis, Bill Smith and other Ima pro staff members across the USA and worldwide.
Michael, Fred and Bill have all three been key to help Ima design new hardbaits for the US market.
In this month’s issue, we are pleased to introduce you to Michael Murphy.
Murphy is designer of the ima Flit 120 jerkbait.
Introducing Ima Pro Staffer Michael Murphy
My family had always fished. My parents both came from fishing families. My father was a hard-working man and my mother worked in an office. Even still, we did not have a whole lot of money. So that’s why fishing and camping outdoors was what we did, because it was a low budget way to have fun.
My mom’s father had been in the Air Force. As a military kid, she grew up living at different bases around the country, including one in Alaska. She often told me about the fun times she had as a girl going fishing for salmon and camping in the Alaskan wilderness.
Dad’s family hailed from Canton, Ohio. Working was their thing. Fishing and outdoors is what they would do when not working. My sister and myself, we remember going to my grandparents. When they retired, they got a place on the lake. There were not a whole lot of other people who fished there. My cousins fished together all the time.
Michael Murphy (standing) and cousin Ryan Cage (sitting) on their grandparents dock. “I can not tell how many hours, days, years I happily spent on that dock. This was the dock I caught my first bass off of,” says Michael Murphy.
Michael Murphy (bow) at age 10 or 11 with cousins Brendan Cage (center) and Ryan Cage (stern) on Lake Melissa.
Michael Murphy has many childhood memories of fishing at his grandparents place on Lake Melissa with sister Karen Murphy (back left) and cousins Christi (not shown), Brendan Cage (left) Lindsay Murphy (left front), Ryan Cage (holding turtle in basket), Jenny Murphy (back right). Michael Murphy on the right is probably 6 or 7 years old here.
Grown up now: Joe Bertoletti who married Michael’s cousin Jenny Murphy (left); Oliver and Michael’s sister Karen (center) with daughter Olivia; Michael Murphy and his bride Kristi (right).Although all my cousins loved to fish a lot, I was probably the one who liked fishing the most, and I developed a close relationship especially with my grandfather. Since both my parents were always working, and my grandfather was retired, I spent a lot of time together with my Grandpa while my parents were working, and we fished a lot of different lakes together, the two of us.
When my Grandpa passed away, that hit me hard. He was my fishing partner and friend, not just a grandparent.
About that time, my Dad had gotten into club fishing and local tournaments. Since I did not travel with Grandpa any more, I bugged my Dad until he finally gave way to let me join his fishing club, the INBA or Indiana Non-Profit Bass Association.
Everyone in the club took me under their wing, and taught me a lot. This was my first real exposure to other anglers. What I realized right away was that most every angler was good at one thing. If a crankbait bite was on, you could bet this particular guy would probably do well. If it was a jig bite, that guy over there would be in the money, and so on. So I pretty much tried to learn different tactics from the best of the best at each technique in the club. They were all hard-working people, just like my family.
In high school, it seemed like Dad and his friends were more like my friends. I reckon they were forty year old guys, but I didn’t really notice that. Maybe from always having fished with my Grandpa.
Michael Murphy today, and on right, around the age he joined his Dad’s fishing club.High School
Starting high school, I participated more in various school sports, including wrestling, basketball and football. I got a job after school in the fishing department of a Galyan’s sporting goods store.
When summer recess came, my family always headed for Kentucky Lake. That’s where we vacationed after my Grandpa passed away. My Dad liked Kentucky Lake and he fished the BFL (called Redman then).
At the beginning of every week, we fished with a guide on Kentucky Lake, Ron Lappin. In this way, we could get a good feel and advice from Ron on what the fish were doing each week. Then we’d follow Ron’s advice to fish on our own the remainder of each week. So week after week, year after year, Ron became more than a guide, more of a friend and like family to us.
You could imagine there’d be a lot of fishing banter during family conversations at home. Whether we’d be discussing crankbaits or jigs or spinnerbaits, my Mom, sister and girl cousins knew the lingo too. So it kind of surprised me when I started dating girls in high school, that girls didn’t know a lot about fishing, not like the girls in my family.
By my senior year of high school, I had figured out that fishing was my thing. I had realized that I liked the mental challenge of fishing more than the physical challenge of other high school sports. Plus I liked the idea that fishing was an individual thing, not a team. If you did good or bad at fishing, it was entirely up to your own individual ability.
Like many high school kids, I just floated along. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do later in life, and I was not even sure what I would major in at college. On my SAT test scores, I scored pretty high on the math part, and that influenced me to take engineering in college.
College
I decided to go to college at Purdue because they had good mix of both outdoors and engineering. Really, I did not know what I wanted to pursue, but because of high math SAT scores, I picked engineering.
On campus, I ran into a fellow towing an A&W Root Beer wrapped boat. I sparked a conversation, and found out he was the coach of the Purdue fishing team. I decided to attend a meeting, joined the college fishing team, and during my freshman year, was voted the student president of the fishing team. This was the start of many relationships and friendships with other persons involved in the fishing industry.
One person, Dan Davidson, was in the fisheries program faculty at Purdue. To a college kid like me, Dan seemed like hot stuff, married, working, and he was knowledgeable about fish in ways I had not even considered.
I became good friends with Dan, and he had told me so much about the fisheries program that I decided that engineering was not what I wanted to do any more. I might as well do something I like, and I realized that studying fisheries and aquaculture science was it.
One day Dan came up and asked if I wanted to fish team trails together. Our first one was a Fishers of Men trail, and we won it. There were 120 teams, and we won a brand new boat on Kentucky Lake. We ended up selling it for eighteen thousand. As a kid in college, my nine thousand dollar half seemed like gold.
One day at school, in conjunction with the fishing team, Denny Brauer filmed question and answer segments for 2 seasons of his television show. As student president of the team, I worked on the arrangements, and I got to talk a lot with Denny. It impressed me how supportive of the team and how down-to-earth he was. He gave me his card and said to call any time. Because of the publicity created from that filming episode, the Purdue fishing team membership skyrocketed to 150 members.
After some time passed, I decided to call Denny Brauer one day. Reason is, as I continued with my fisheries classes at college, and became more familiar with what a fisheries career entailed, I began to wonder where it would take me and if that was what I wanted to be. So I decided to call Denny and run it past him to see if he had any ideas what else I could do.
Denny asked me, “What are you doing now?” and I let him know I had completed a major crayfish study, had put in over 1,000 hours electro-shocking fish and I described other major projects I participated in at school.
“Take more speaking and public presentation classes and stick with it,” was Denny Brauer’s advice to me. So I picked up a second major, sales and marketing. I felt this was a great move, to develop speaking and sales skills, not just biology.
On spring break and over summer vacation was always a family thing fishing. Other kids talked about spring break in Florida or elsewhere, but I always knew where I was going for spring break and looked forward to it. Once summer vacation arrived, I knew we were headed to Kentucky Lake as a family too.
Georgia on My Mind
So that was basically college life for me at Purdue, being on the school fishing team, studying fish and taking speaking classes kept me busy and out of trouble.
I just skated by in college. Meanwhile, for my best friend Dan Davidson, his life had changed a lot. Dan and his wife Julie had a baby girl, and they had moved to Georgia for Dan’s work.
I had not seen Dan in over one year. So the spring break before I completed my first major in fisheries, I went to visit Dan in Georgia.
Dan had to work during the day, so I borrowed his boat and fished lakes Lanier and Oconee every day. In the evenings, I spent time visiting with Dan and his family.
It was a pretty cold spell of weather in Georgia that spring, even for an Indiana boy like me. I’d tie up at the Dam Store (a tackle shop and grill) for lunch every day and to defrost my bones for the afternoon fishing session. Despite the cold, I was blistering the fish on jerkbaits and I had the entire lake to myself.
One day it was snowing, a blizzard, and Guy Firor who owned the Dam store, was laughing at me. “You’re the only one with no sense to be crazy enough to be fishing today.”
It so happened I had about 18 pounds of spotted bass I had kept in the livewell, and Guy came out in the snow on the dock to see them for himself. “Well, I’ll be. That’s amazing,” was all he said.
That spring break ended all too soon. I bid goodbye to Dan, his family and to my new friend Guy Firor. Back at school, I completed my fisheries degree that semester. Just before summer vacation started, I got a call from Guy Firor. He wanted to give me a summer job doing spotted bass guide trips and running the Dam store in between trips.
I accepted Guy’s offer, and the summer job proved to be fun.
I liked the area so much that I decided to stay in Georgia, and did not return to school or to Indiana after that summer ended.
In the off-season, guiding went south, and there was not much business at the tackle shop and grill. So I got two other jobs in different retail stores, working 70 hours a week to keep afloat.
Staying in Georgia proved to be the best decision I have ever made, for two reasons. First, a friend of mine from back home, Kristi, had completed her degree in pharmacology and she was moving to nearby Atlanta to start a job there.
Kristi and I had been swell friends and even dated back home. We kept in close touch by phone through our college years and while I was in Georgia. They say long distance relationships don’t work, and we were really only friends at the time, but what is interesting is Kristi and I grew closer by living so far away. I believe that distance forced us to get to know each other, to communicate more. If you go out on a date, you don’t need to say much or talk. You can watch a movie, go to the theatre, or to dinner, a party or in social settings, there’s a lot of conversation-less time where you don’t necessarily need to talk a lot – but being far apart and on the phone, that almost forced us to talk more and get to know each other better. So I’d say the long distance phone relationship and conversing so much was key to making us closer.
When Kristi moved to Atlanta for her job, I helped her move in. At the time I felt she was moving down mainly for her career. I felt I was a small part of her decision to move to Atlanta, but it was more like she would have a good friend nearby rather than not knowing anybody there.
Working in the Tackle Industry
The second reason why staying in Georgia proved to be the best decision I have ever made is that a good friend I made there, Paul Michele, landed me a job at SPRO. That’s a fishing tackle company Paul had worked at in Kennesaw. I moved there. The job entailed working with bass pros Dean Rojas, Roland Martin and Bill Siemantel who were designing new lure prototypes for SPRO at the time. I was to be the point of contact and liaison between the manufacturing engineers at SPRO and the pros. Basically, with each incremental version of each prototype lure, the pros would spend some time explaining to me what they liked and what they didn’t like. Sometimes the pros would give me cut and dry specifics of exactly what they wanted changed. Sometimes they just gave me abstract concepts or expectations of what they wanted the next iteration of the prototype to do. My job was to translate from fishing terms to engineering terms so the factory could make the changes.
As exciting as that job was to me, it developed into more of an office job and an engineering role. I felt I was good at the job, but not truly happy doing it, because I was not getting out to fish as much as I wanted. All the field-testing was done by the pros and I was stuck behind a desk.
One neat thing was that Yamaha’s Marine Division was right down the street. You see, I’ve always been a big fan of Yamaha engines, and I got to be good friends with Yamaha’s David Simmons. We had lunch together every week, and through our friendship, I had been able to help David some with promotions related to Yamaha.
One day at lunch David Simmons said, “I have a proposal for you. You have helped us with Yamaha promotions on your own. Now let me do one thing for you. FLW has given Yamaha several berths for Yamaha to fill on the FLW Series.”
David continued to me, “I know you well now, and feel deep down inside that you want to fish. If your job allows, I will give you a spot on the FLW Series.”
What David Simmons didn’t know then was I had already decided to look for a job that allowed me more fishing time, and now Yamaha’s proposal gave me the incentive to make a move. I found a new job with the Shakespeare fishing tackle company. How that happened is that my family had known the elder Mark Davis from Indiana, and his son Mark Davis was the marketing director at Shakespeare in South Carolina.
Shakespeare was willing to let me fish FLW for the first year, and after that, decide what I wanted to pursue more – the fishing or the job. So my job at Shakespeare was to take up some of the slack for Mark Davis, to work with engineering on new products, but also work with the media and outdoor writers and on PR projects.
I moved from Georgia to South Carolina. Through all the changes and uncertainty I was going through, my close friend Kristi was real supportive. She was the one who was there for me to pursue my dream of fishing, and I had fallen in love with her for that. Before moving, Kristi and I got married in Georgia. Dan Davidson was the best man at our wedding. Georgia will always be a special place for us because that is where Kristi and I grew together and became inseparable and decided to stay together forever.
Kristi and Michael Murphy.2006 ~ FLW Series
My first ever experience on the pro level at Lake Lanier in 2006, I look around and wondered what am I doing here? I felt out of my league, yet I came in 37th, cashing a $10,500 check. I was pretty excited as that would fund my entry fees and expenses for the next couple of FLW events.
At the second FLW event on Lake Cumberland, I did even better, coming in 22nd for $11,500. Now I had my whole year’s fees and travel expenses paid for, but the new job at Shakespeare took over a lot of my time for the rest of the season, and I did not get much practice time on the more unfamiliar lakes where remaining events took place.
However, I had proven to myself and to others that I could do it with rod and reel, finishing 62nd overall for the season on the FLW Series.
What’s funny and you could say, it is fate, is that two of my old friends were now working for FLW. You may remember Ron Lappin, the guide and family friend we had on Kentucky Lake during my high school years. Well, Ron Lappin was now working as a Tournament Director for FLW Outdoors. My old friend from Kennesaw, David Simmons of Yamaha, he was now with FLW Outdoors also. Through Ron and David, I got to know many of the other FLW organizers and they knew who I was.
Through those contacts, FLW asked me if I wanted to run a wrapped boat and fish full-time in 2007. Conagra Foods wanted to run a boat that year promoting their Slim Jim product line. They felt I matched the demographic they wanted to achieve with Slim Jim. They wanted a one man team, someone who could speak, talk, also fish – and young.
FLW rookie Michael Murphy in his new Slim Jim-wrapped Ranger boat.2007 ~ Rookie Year on the FLW Tour
2007 has been a big turning point for me with Slim Jim in conjunction with FLW. I finished 30th overall in my rookie season on the FLW Tour. I cashed a check in 5 of 7 events for $38,500 plus another $5,907 in FLW Series and Stren winnings, totaling $44,407 for 2007.
Right now, I am getting ready to go on the FLW Tour for 2008, my second season. I’m not too concerned about fishing new water and new locations. It’s something every angler faces, so that’s not something I consider a disadvantage to me. I’ll manage new water like everyone else has to also. Plus I’ve decided to buy a camper and camp outdoors right at event locations. So I’ll have plenty of practice. I can’t wait for that. It should be like the fun camping trips I enjoyed with my family during my childhood years.
I think that being out there, camping on location will help me discover what it takes mentally, help me find my niche, what my strengths are. I’ll have beaucoup time and few distractions in order to find my place where I fit in on the FLW Tour. I am aiming for the upper echelon.
People of all ages often ask me, “How’d you get to be a bass pro?”
Younger persons I meet, their question is more, “How might I become a bass pro like you?”
Well, to sum it up, I tell them that what they say is true, that family and friends are the most important things in life, and a loving and supportive spouse. Younger persons, I tell them that what they say to stick out school and get a good college education is true too. That is the combination that got me to the top level in bass fishing.
Thank you. I appreciate that you’ve taken the time to read my story. I hope you feel glad you’ve gotten to know me a little better.
Next time I write, please expect to get some good fishing tips about the new Ima Flit jerkbait that you can apply to your own fishing.
Murphy has designed Ima’s new Flit 120 jerkbait.I have my own website too, at:
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U.S. bass pros Michael Murphy, Fred Roumbanis and Bill Smith have helped IMA design new hardbaits for the USA.
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