CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.– Thirty hours of competition across four days at the Major League Fishing (MLF) O’Reilly Auto Parts Stage 4 Presented by OPTIMA Batteries boiled down to the final 20 seconds. Separated on SCORETRACKER® by just 6 ounces, Jake Lawrence and Jacob Wheeler both set the hook.

Wheeler and Lawrence had long since distanced themselves from the rest of the field during Sunday’s Championship Round on Nickajack Lake. The latter half of the day morphed into a one-on-one prize fight: Wheeler, the winningest Bass Pro Tour angler of all time, who caught all smallmouth in the current beneath Chickamauga Dam, versus Lawrence, a rookie who caught all largemouth roughly 40 miles down the lake. Lawrence had led most of the day, but with 6 minutes left, Wheeler finally passed him. Still, both anglers felt like if they could just muster one more scorable bass, they’d secure the trophy and $150,000 top prize that comes with it.

With 45 seconds left before lines out, Lawrence made a bomb cast with his Buckeye Buzzerk buzzbait . About halfway back to the boat – 21 seconds left to be exact – a massive mouth engulfed it. Nine seconds later, Lawrence swung the bass over the gunnel and hung it on the BUBBA scale: a 5-pound, 9-ounce buzzer-beater, easily enough to put him back in the lead. At virtually that exact moment, Wheeler hooked up with another smallmouth, but he couldn’t get it in the boat before time expired. It might not have been enough to overcome Lawrence’s late lunker anyway.

With a total of 83-2 on 27 scorable bass, Lawrence had won his first Bass Pro Tour title in what might have been the most dramatic finish in the seven-year history of the tour. More than an hour later, he still couldn’t come up with a way to describe the ending other than divine intervention.

“The only thing I can say is, man, He wanted me to do it,” Lawrence said. “Wheeler jumped me there by a couple ounces, and I said out loud, ‘Lord, if you want me to do this, you’re going to make it happen.’ I had 45 seconds left, and I had just gotten my buzzer back to the boat, and I said, alright, you can throw right, which is where I had been catching them, or you can throw somewhere totally new. And I chose to throw somewhere totally new, and it was the deal. Unbelievable.”

Link to Hi-Res Photo of O’Reilly Auto Parts Stage 4 Presented by OPTIMA Batteries Winner Jake Lawrence
Link to Photo Gallery: Fast track to Nickajack finale for Stage 4 Championship Round
Link to Photo Gallery: Lawrence scores his first Bass Pro Tour win
Link to HD Video of Highlights from Day 4 Championship Round Competition

The tournament may not have been decided until Lawrence’s literal last cast, but his win was a week in the making. Stage 4 offered the Bass Pro Tour field a unique challenge, with the two-day Qualifying Round taking place on Lake Chickamauga, then the Knockout and Championship Rounds relocating to neighboring Nickajack Lake, one reservoir down on the Tennessee River chain.

Like many in the field, Lawrence chose to spend most of the three-day practice period on Chickamauga. The Paris, Tennessee, native didn’t make it to Nickajack until Wednesday afternoon, when he got his first clue about how to attack the mysterious fishery, which had never hosted a tour-level MLF/FLW event: He caught a few bass that looked to be feeding on spawning bluegill.

“I was very fortunate in the 4 hours that I had the last day of practice that I saw several cruising shallow,” Lawrence said. “I actually caught a 2-pounder that was real close to a bluegill bed. I assumed that she was relating to it, kind of hanging around that area. And that’s really what I ran with.”

Just to make it back to Nickajack, Lawrence needed to finish among the Top 20 anglers on Chickamauga. After a lackluster Day 1, he sat in 21st. But on the second day, he showed off the offshore ledge fishing skills he’s honed during a lifetime fishing Kentucky Lake, blasting 91-11 to rocket all the way to second place.

That stellar Day 2 performance actually briefly put Lawrence in the top spot on SCORETRACKER®, but Justin Lucas edged him with a couple late catches to win the Qualifying Round. That might have turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. While Lucas skipped Saturday’s Knockout Round and advanced straight to the Championship Round, Lawrence got an extra day of competition on Nickajack. He stacked up 40 pounds by the midpoint of the second period and used the latter half of the day to practice. He later said he “100%” would not have won without that extra time on the water.

Lawrence wound up keying in on Mullins Creek in the mid-lake area. While the rest of the lake got dirty following the thunderstorms that hit the area earlier in the week, the water in the spring-fed creek stayed clean.

“It seemed like everybody on the lower end really struggled, and I have to imagine it’s because of the water quality,” Lawrence said. “The clarity just got really, really bad down there. This lake is generally really clear, so it’s kind of a shock the first couple days that happens. However, my little area back there stayed clean because of that spring-fed creek in the back of it.”

The final piece of the Nickajack puzzle was figuring out how to trigger the bass relating to bluegill beds and other bare spots amid the carpet of eelgrass in Nickajack. Lawrence primarily leaned on a Yamamoto D Shad and a Yamamoto Senko during the Knockout Round. However, even though it doesn’t necessarily have a reputation as a tournament winner, he always keeps a buzzbait handy when trying to cover water up shallow this time of year, and it quickly became apparent on Sunday that’s what the big ones wanted.

“I actually caught a couple non-scorables on it (during the Knockout Round), and I had like a 5- or 6-pounder in that area that came off,” Lawrence said of the buzzbait. “It was just enough to kind of keep me interested, keep me going with it. And in such vast areas like this – and when I say vast, it wasn’t like the area was humongous, but there was no change. And so, I’m not super confident in slowing way down and dragging when there’s just nothing to really key on. So, that was a really big deal for me to cover a bunch of water.”

Lawrence got on the board Sunday morning with a couple scorables on the D Shad. Around 9:30 a.m., he caught consecutive fish on the buzzbait, including a 4-4, which gave him the confidence to keep it in his hands. Thirty-five minutes later, he threw it over a hole in the grass at the base of a tapering point, and the water exploded.

Lawrence wrangled a giant into his Phoenix. At 8 pounds, 3 ounces, it easily earned Berkley Big Bass honors for the day, clearing the next-biggest bass caught over two days at Nickajack by more than 2 pounds. Perhaps more important, it clued him into the spot that would provide almost all his shallow fish for the rest of the day – a series of sandy patches around that point.

“It was just light enough that I could see the hole up there in probably 10 to 14 inches of water,” Lawrence said. “My first cast up there was that 8-pounder. And it just kind of materialized from there.

“When I came back to it 30 minutes into that third period, oh my goodness, it was unbelievable. It was like every third cast. Had a father and son that was bluegill fishing right on the end of it, and their bobber was going down, and (bass) were blowing up on my buzzbait. It was just mayhem there for about 20 minutes.”

Lawrence followed up the 8-pounder with consecutive 2-pounders in the final 10 minutes of Period 1, which gave him the lead at the intermission. When competition resumed, he made the decision to swap his casting rod for spinning gear and move to deeper water. Using his one allotted period with forward-facing sonar during Period 2, he targeted bass that were suspending around submerged timber in a nearby creek channel. Lawrence racked up 33-3 on 11 scorable bass during the period, pushing his lead to more than 7 pounds.

That Lawrence, one of the best on tour with the technology, put together the best forward-facing sonar period of the day didn’t come as a shock. But part of what will make this win so memorable is the fact that he combined his forward-facing prowess with offshore ledge skills and shallow power fishing to get it done. Lawrence prides himself on his versatility and willingness to change course on a dime.

“That’s really how I fish,” he said. “I mean, I don’t generally like to do four or five different things, but I really try to stay very open-minded and keep my options open.”

That diverse skill set has powered Lawrence to one of the best starts to a pro career in bass fishing history. Since Lawrence, who will turn 34 this month, decided last year to try his hand at tournament fishing full time, he’s been as good as anyone, amassing an astounding eight Top 10s and two wins in 11 career tour-level events to the tune of $430,000 in earnings.

Every time he moves a rung up the tournament ladder, Lawrence just keeps winning. He now has at least one victory at every level of MLF competition – Phoenix Bass Fishing League, Toyota Series, Tackle Warehouse Invitationals and Bass Pro Tour – in the past three years alone. Across all those levels, he has an insane seven wins and 19 Top-10 finishes in 25 events since the start of 2023. Oh, by the way, he also won the Fishing Clash Angler of the Year award in the Toyota Series Plains Division last year and finished second in the Invitationals points race. He moved up to fourth in the current BPT standings.

With the lock box back on his transducers for Period 3, Lawrence returned to his shallow honey hole. It didn’t take him long to reignite the buzzbait bite. Within the first 45 minutes of the final frame, he’d added another four fish for 11-7. With less than 2 hours left to fish, he led by more than 15 pounds.

But Lawrence never doubted that Wheeler would figure it out, and the world’s No. 1-ranked angler lived up to his reputation. While Lawrence hit a lull, Wheeler – the only competitor who was able to make the smallmouth bite below Chickamauga Dam last on Sunday – ignited a flurry that added 10-10 to his total in the span of 10 minutes.

Especially after he fell one bite short of the win at Stage 3 on Lake Murray, it felt inevitable that Wheeler wouldn’t be denied again. Multiple times during the final hour, he pulled within one scorable bass of Lawrence’s lead.

“I knew that I had to keep catching them,” Lawrence said. “I knew that (Wheeler) was going to. Just the feeling of ‘oh my gosh, I think I may win this,’ to ‘oh no, now I’m going to let it slip.’”

Finally, with 6 minutes left before lines out, Wheeler got over the hump. He boated a 3-12 that put him 6 ounces clear of Lawrence – which meant Lawrence would have to catch at least a 2-pounder to retake the lead.

Lawrence pleaded for another largemouth to eat his buzzbait. For a few casts in the final minutes, he actually put down the bait before deciding to live or die with the tool that had already produced 12 of his scorable bass.

However, he did decide to stop casting to the spot that had produced most of his buzzbait fish, instead throwing to the other side of the point.

On his first cast that way, the bass struck so violently, Lawrence initially thought it had missed his bait. He set the hook, flipped it into the boat, grabbed its lower lip and unleashed a guttural scream of celebration.

“She hit it with such force coming at me that it threw a bunch of slack in my line, and I honestly though she missed it,” he said. “I started to go wind it in fast to make another cast, and when I started winding it down, she was there. I was like, ‘oh my goodness. There is no way this is happening.’”

Every angler likes to end an outing with a fish. Growing up fishing alongside my dad and brother, we’d always ask for some “last cast magic” as everyone threw one final time.

Of course, the last cast usually doesn’t turn out to be the last cast – until you catch one. But with the Bass Pro Tour’s live scoreboard, Lawrence almost certainly didn’t have time to make another cast and fight a fish before lines out.

That 5-9 – the second biggest bass of the day not only for Lawrence but the entire Championship Round field – delivered the ultimate last-cast magic.

“That’s God’s work right there,” Lawrence said in the seconds after his win became official. “That’s the way to end one.”

The top 10 pros at the O’Reilly Auto Parts Stage 4 Presented by OPTIMA Batteries on Nickajack Lake finished:

1st: Jake Lawrence, Paris, Tenn., 27 bass, 83-2, $150,000
2nd: Jacob Wheeler, Harrison, Tenn., 27 bass, 77-15, $45,000
3rd: Cole Floyd, Leesburg, Ohio, 17 bass, 48-14, $35,000
4th: Ron Nelson, Berrien Springs, Mich., 15 bass, 42-7, $30,000
5th: Wesley Strader, Spring City, Tenn., 15 bass, 37-14, $25,000
6th: Michael Neal, Dayton, Tenn., 12 bass, 37-4, $23,000
7th: Matt Becker, Ten Mile, Tenn., 12 bass, 29-9, $22,000
8th: Drew Gill, Mount Carmel, Ill., 11 bass, 25-9, $21,000
9th: Justin Cooper, Zwolle, La., seven bass, 21-12, $20,500
10th: Justin Lucas, Guntersville, Ala., six bass, 15-8, $20,000

A complete list of results can be found at MajorLeagueFishing.com.