For nearly 30 years, the Buckmaster brand has provided entertainment, community, and education for deer hunters across the nation through hunting expos, a TV show, and magazines.
It began as the brainchild of Jackie Bushman, who first got the idea as a teenager in Montgomery. Bushman recently sat down with "1819 News: The Podcast" to tell his story, from college tennis to nearly getting eaten by a grizzly bear in Alaska.
As a young boy, Bushman was obsessed with hunting and tennis. He attended Auburn University on a full-ride tennis scholarship and went on to play on the pro tour, but hunting was still his first love.
Bushman started the first Buckmaster magazine in 1986, the Buckmaster Classic in 1987 and "Buckmasters" TV show in 1988.
"So I had five celebrities, and one, to this day, and I'll say this, without this young man, he's a little older now, and this other one, I'd have never made it, and that's Bo Jackson, and my buddy from Auburn, and Dale Earnhardt Sr.," Bushman said. "Those are the two guys that I was able to get to the Classic. And then I had Lynn Dickey, the quarterback for Green Bay. I had Jodie Davis and Rick Sutcliffe, the Chicago Cubs, and I had a country western singer named Johnny Lee."
"So we've started as an event business. We're still an event business, but it started just with that one little old deal, and that's how we got on TV," he added. "And when we went on TV, then we were selling subscriptions. We went from like 12,000 subscribers to 100,000."
Bushman emphasized the critical role hunters play in wildlife conservation, beyond what so-called animal rights groups do, by trying to paint hunting in a negative light.
"Without the hunters and the fishermen, you don't have the wildlife. It doesn't happen," he said. "It's our time, it's our effort, and our revenue that's put in to conserve the animals, not any animal rights group. They don't put one single dime into conservation. You cannot dictate wildlife conservation on emotion or politics, and that's what they do. You cannot let that happen.
"They don't want to talk to me. I'll tackle any animal rights group there is. I will wear them out because they have no facts behind them. All they have is emotion and politics and lawyers."
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