Kalamazoo, Mich. ? Kevin VanDam didn’t fare very well in his first national fishing tournament, but he was hooked anyway. He knew then that he wanted to become a professional angler.

VanDam, who was 18 at the time, apparently made the right vocational choice. Nearly 20 years later, with more than $2 million in career earnings, four angler of the year awards and two Bassmaster Classic titles, he’s among the elite in his sport.

“I love what I do and you have to, to compete at this level,” VanDam said while taking a break in the living room of his spacious home just outside Kalamazoo.

This year’s Classic, held in late July in Pittsburgh, marked VanDam’s third straight Bassmaster Tour win, tying a record set by Roland Martin in 1980-81. The Classic win earned him $200,000.

The other two tour victories, in Texas and Wisconsin, were worth $100,000 each to VanDam.

“I’m not afraid of anybody,” said the 37-year-old VanDam. “I compete against the fish, not the fishermen. I can’t control what the other anglers catch. I can only control what I do.”

The Classic attracts the world’s best anglers. They have a five-bass limit each day and the winner is the one with the largest total weight of bass caught by the end of the third day.

VanDam, who also won in 2001, had a three-day total this year of 11 bass weighing 12 pounds, 15 ounces – giving him the dubious distinction of having the lowest winning total in the event’s 35-year history.

He shattered the old record low of 15 pounds, 5 ounces set by George Cochran in 1987.

ESPN, which has owned the Bassmaster Tour since 2001, is making several changes next year as the network expands its television coverage of the increasingly popular spectator sport. The tour is adding three new “majors” – each with top prizes of $250,000 – and increasing the first-place money for the Classic to $500,000.

“The Super Bowl of bass fishing,” as VanDam calls it, also will be moved from midsummer, where it has been the tour’s season finale, to late February, where it will become the tour’s kickoff event.

During his 15-year pro career, VanDam has won 10 tournaments, placed in the top five 29 times and finished in the top 10 69 times.

He has pocketed more than $1.87 million from the Bassmaster Tour, leaving him only about $33,600 behind the career-earnings mark held by Denny Brauer.

The 56-year-old angling legend is a close friend of VanDam who still competes but had an off year in 2005.

“If someone is to pass me, there’s nobody I’d rather have do it than Kevin,” Brauer said in a telephone interview from his home in Lake of the Ozarks, Mo.

VanDam is likely to surpass him soon after the tour resumes next year, but Brauer won’t give up the top spot without a fight.

“I’m certainly not fishing as good nowadays as I did in the past, but that doesn’t mean that next year might not be a totally different story,” Brauer said.

A key to VanDam’s success is his willingness to take chances. He’d rather take a risk that fails and leaves him out of the money than play it safe and give himself no chance to win just to ensure a payoff.

He also has “an uncanny ability to read water and to make immediate adjustments” that other anglers might take hours to figure out, if they figure them out at all, said Louie Stout, a senior writer at Bassmaster magazine who has co-authored two books with VanDam.

“He is in the hunt in almost every event, and that is almost unheard of,” Stout said.