HOT SPRINGS, Ark. – For the first time in professional fishing history, bass pros competed for a top prize of $1 million in the 2007 Forrest Wood Cup held Aug. 2-5, on Lake Ouachita in Arkansas.

The 2007 Forrest Wood Cup was not an open event but a season-ending championship featuring 81 bass pros who qualified from an array of different avenues in FLW Outdoors events.

Four Lucky Craft pros – Brent Ehrler, Gabe Bolivar, Anthony Gagliardi and Stacey King – all qualified to fish the prestigious event through different routes.

Ehrler and Bolivar qualified for the Cup through the FLW Tour, Gagliardi nailed down a berth via the FLW Series and King grabbed an invite through the Stren Series Midwestern Division.

When the four Lucky Craft representatives arrived in Central Arkansas for the Cup’s practice period in late July, they were greeted with tournament bass fishing’s toughest conditions: the dog days of summer.

Throughout the tournament, temperature rose into the upper 90s, and a stifling haze slithered through the Ouachita Mountain Valley, suffocating the Diamond Lakes region with humidity.

Many pros had expected to catch bass on Ouachita by “punching” a big 1-ounce jig through thick canopies of underwater hydrilla, but the lake’s grass growth was way behind due to heavy spring rains. As a result, many of Ouachita’s bass suspended out in the middle of nowhere.

During the event, pros talked of “seeing” bass with their graphs suspended in 22 to 25 feet of water over 60 to 80 feet, which, as most bass anglers know, are the hardest bass to catch.

Local pro Scott Suggs won the event by targeting suspended fish in submerged timber with a big worm and a spinnerbait. The key for Suggs was his local knowledge in pinpointing the exact trees the fish would be suspended in.

For the rest of the field, Ouachita was a challenge. While the first two days of the event saw some decent catches, the final two top-10 days were absolutely brutal as a field of the FLW Tour’s best anglers struggled just to get keeper bites over two days.

The Lucky Craft pro coming closest to cashing in on the million dollar payday was Anthony Gagliardi from Prosperity, S.C.

Gagliardi weighed in solid limits of 10 pounds, 10 ounces on day one and 13 pounds, 10 ounces on day two to qualify sixth going into the finals.

During the finals, he posted just one bass for 1 pound, 4 ounces on day three and four bass for 7 pounds, 7 ounces on day four to finish ninth.

Gagliardi’s Ouachita patterns were based on a one-two punch: He fished schooling fish in the mornings and deep brush piles in the afternoons.

His primary weapons on the schoolers were Lucky Craft Sammy 65 and Sammy 100 topwaters, and he switched to jigheads rigged with finesse worms on the brush piles later in the day.

“Going into a 10-man, two-day shootout for a million dollars is pretty exciting,” said Gagliardi after the event. “I know this sounds crazy, but even though I finished 9th and was some 10 pounds off the lead, I still felt like I was really close to winning it.

“Day three – when I only weighed in one fish – was my stumbling block. The fish came up schooling and I just couldn’t hit my marks. When fish school like that, you have to instantly put a lure within a foot of where a fish busts the surface, and that day I was off by 2 or 3 feet every time. It just made me sick. I’m not saying I would have won if I had caught a few more of those schoolers, but it certainly would have been interesting.”

Gagliardi’s painful lesson, which he discovered on day four, was to use a bigger topwater on the schoolers.

“After practice, I was convinced that matching the size of the baitfish was crucial to getting the bites on the schoolers,” he lamented. “The first three days I used the smaller Sammy 65 with a Norman Front Runner tied in front; it was harder to cast and not as accurate, but I thought the smaller profiles were critical.”

Frustrated with not being able to cast the Sammy 65/Front Runner rig accurately, Gagliardi switched to a straight Sammy 100 on day four.

“That Sammy 100 is bigger and heavier, and I can put it right where I want it,” he explained. “When they came up schooling on day four, I caught three keepers right off the bat on the 100 by putting it right on them – they didn’t seem to care one bit about the size of the lure.

“That’s when I started thinking about all the fish I missed the day before because I was not as accurate. I had four or five fish that blew up right in front of me, and I missed them by just a foot or two with bad casts.”

From now on, Gagliardi says he will find out the biggest lure schooling bass will bite before the tournament begins.

“Accuracy was much more important than size,” he added. “That was the lesson here. I’ll never make that mistake again.”

After undergoing bypass heart surgery in March of 2007, Stacey King was glad to get back to competitive fishing at the Forrest Wood Cup.

Though King missed most of the FLW Tour events this season due to recovery, he had qualified for the Cup through the Stren Series in 2006.

He finished 42nd in the Cup with a two-day total of 12 pounds, 7 ounces.

But King was not complaining about his performance. After a four-month hiatus from fishing after his surgery, he was relieved to be feeling good and fishing again.

“I fished the Detroit River FLW [tournament] in June where I battled wind and waves, and the Forrest Wood Cup in August where I battled extreme heat,” King said. “I felt fine in both of them. That’s a good sign that I should be back competing at a higher level next season. I was a little worried about how the rigors of weather and competition might take their toll on me at these last two tournaments, but I felt like my old self in both events.”

As for his fishing, King fished outside grasslines and timber in 30 feet of water with Texas-rigged worms.

“I only had one real good day of practice,” he said. “But I never really duplicated that bite in the tournament.”

Last year’s Forrest Wood Cup winner, Brent Ehrler of Redlands, Calif., finished 44th with a two-day total of 12 pounds, 1 ounce.