The Duck Commander Family

by Robertson, Willie

  In 2008, I went to St. Paul, Minnesota, to meet with Kyle Tengwall from Federal Premium Ammunition. Kyle called me and told me they couldn’t find me a hotel room because the convention was in town. “What convention?” I asked him. He told me it was the Republican National Convention.

  “Let’s go,” I told Kyle.

  “Willie, you can’t just go,” he said. “You have to be a delegate.”

  “Give me an hour,” I told him.

  Within one hour, I had a floor pass to the Republican National Convention, thanks to my good friend Rodney Alexander, my district’s congressman. While I was on the floor, several people took pictures of me, and I was starting to think I’d become a pretty big deal. What I didn’t realize was that I was standing next to Mitt Romney, who was the governor of Massachusetts at the time. A few hours later my mom called me. “Willie, am I watching you on Fox News standing with Megyn Kelly?” she asked.

  “Yep, who else looks like I do?” I told her.

  She and Dad didn’t even know I was at the convention. Kyle and I, along with Anthony Acitelli, or Ace as we call him, have had some classic trips. We’ve played golf at Pebble Beach in California, attended the Masters golf tournament, and even played golf with PGA Tour pro Boo Weekley and Larry the Cable Guy. We were at the Masters, and my friend David Toms came over. Toms has hunted with us before, and we talked for like five minutes while he was playing the Masters! Kyle and I were cracking up at everybody’s face looking at us. Right after Toms left, a guy ran up to me and asked, “Are you Gregg Allman [of the Allman Brothers Band]?” You can’t make this stuff up.

  Of all the crazy experiences, though, the one that really sticks out happened south of Nashville in a Walmart parking lot. My buddy Carter Smith and I took an RV to a hunting show. Carter dropped me off at Starbucks and went to Walmart for supplies. We planned to meet back at the RV. Now, if you’ve seen our RV, you know it has our pictures all over the side of it. I had a bag of stuff I’d bought and a cup of coffee. But when I got back to the RV, I realized Carter locked it and I was going to have to wait until he came back. I sat on the curb and waited. A guy pulled up to me and said, “Hey, man, you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m good,” I said, though I was a little confused.

  “You need anything? Food or anything?” he asked.

  Finally, I realized he thought I was homeless or just down-and-out. I’m sure my long, scraggly hair and beard were his clues. I just started smiling, and he finally looked over at our RV.

  “Is that your picture on that RV?” he asked.

  “Yep, I’m waiting on my driver,” I said.

  “I guess you are all right then,” he replied.

  I took no offense at his thinking I was homeless. He was a nice, kindhearted guy who thought I might be in a bad spot.

  I guess no matter how big-time you think you are, there’s always someone there to remind you that you’re not too far off from looking like a homeless person, or maybe even one of the Allman brothers!

  HE WAS A NICE, KINDHEARTED GUY WHO THOUGHT I MIGHT BE IN A BAD SPOT.

  I’ve told you these stories not to say, “Look what I’ve done,” but to say, “Look what God’s done.” I give Him all the glory. From being a kid who was on free lunches to today, a lot of good things have happened in my life. I’ve had a few tough times as well, but mostly I’m just happy to be here. I look around and think, “Wow, I’m eating the back strap off a monster deer that I killed in Kansas hunting with my best buddies.” Life is good!

  FRIED BACK STRAPS

  This one is a simple one. Hard part is getting the meat, but that’s also the most fun part. Back straps, for all you yuppies, are the back meat on the deer right along the spine. When cleaning a deer, it’s the easiest part to cut off, so go ahead and do this the same day you harvest your deer. When my children find out I got a deer, they know I will be frying that night, no matter what time it is. If the deer is old or mature, you can add a step to make it very tender.

  1 back strap

  milk (enough to cover the meat)

  a few shakes of Worcestershire or any meat marinade (we have our own)

  2 eggs, beaten

  2 cups flour

  peanut oil (enough for 4 inches in the pot; make sure meat is covered)

  Phil Robertson’s Seasoning to taste

  1. Cut back strap into thin steaks the width of your pinkie.

  2. Mix milk and marinade and put in a plastic bag or bowl with back strap.

  3. Put in fridge for an hour or two. (I shake up the bag during the process.)

  4. Pull pieces out of bag or bowl and pat dry with paper towel.

  5. Wash in egg.

  6. Dip in flour.

  7. Place in hot peanut oil; fry until brown.

  8. Season with Phil Robertson’s Cajun Style Seasoning as soon as it comes out of the grease

  9. Taste. If it’s good and tender, make your sauce (recipe follows), dip, and go ahead and eat. If tough, then do this:

  • Stack in big black skillet with onion, mushrooms, garlic, and sausage if you’re feeling sassy.

  • Put in oven at 300 for around 45 minutes. Should be very tender.

  My super-special, super-simple back strap sauce:

  1 cup of mayonnaise

  2 squirts of mustard

  1 shake of Worcestershire

  1 teaspoon of horseradish (or more if you want it spicy)

  Simply mix these ingredients together to make the sauce.

  17

  DUCK AND DRESSING

  “I LOOKED INTO IT AND SAW FOUR-FOOTED ANIMALS OF THE EARTH, WILD BEASTS, REPTILES AND BIRDS. THEN I HEARD A VOICE TELLING ME, ‘GET UP, PETER. KILL AND EAT.’ “

  —ACTS 11:6–7

  Nowadays, people often ask me what it’s like hunting with my dad. We’ve actually had offers of tens of thousands of dollars from people who want to spend a day in Phil’s blind. It always amazes us because when we were growing up, duck hunting was our everyday life. When we were kids, we were always in the blind with Dad. I don’t remember my first hunt or the first duck I killed, like other young hunters. It was a different time and Phil wasn’t exactly a traditional dad. He didn’t take pictures of our first duck. It wasn’t sentimental; it was just life. We hunted and fished because we wouldn’t eat if we didn’t. Phil’s number one concern was always safety. If you were careless with a loaded gun, you would not come back to the blind. You’d be stuck at home with Mom the next time.

  Also, you had to be prepared because Phil wasn’t gonna baby you out there. If you didn’t wear the proper clothes, you were gonna freeze your butt off. And I did many times! You had to get your stuff together as well: shells, guns, and whatever you needed. I will never forget a time when I was about ten and we were all going on a dove hunt. It was opening day, and we were all excited. I was shooting a .410 shotgun, but I could only find one shell. Since we were leaving early in the morning, Phil let me know we wouldn’t be able to stop at a store because none of them would be open that early in the morning.

  “You better make that shot count,” Phil told me.

  WITH ONE FLICK OF PHIL’S WRIST, THE DOVE’S HEAD SEPARATED FROM ITS BODY.

  So I shadowed Phil during the entire hunt, watching him drop ’em. I ran to fetch the birds for Phil, and if any were still alive, he would pinch their heads. With one flick of Phil’s wrist, the dove’s head separated from its body. I was fascinated and yet a little freaked out. You can’t be sensitive when you’re hunting with Phil. I kept throwing my shotgun up to shoot, but I knew I had only one shot. Finally, about eleven o’clock in the morning, I saw my opportunity. I told Phil I was gonna take my shot. He was supportive and told me to make it count. Boom! Wouldn’t you know I smoked the dove? I couldn’t believe it. I went one-for-one with only one shell. As I turned to look at my dad with the biggest smile ever, I noticed he was putting his gun down. He’d shot at the exact same time. He wanted to make sure my shot counted.

  “Good shot, Willie boy, put
your safety back on,” Phil told me.

  I didn’t know why the safety mattered since I only had one shell, but he wanted to instill the practice in my brain. We’ll never know who hit that bird, but believe me, I told Jase that I got it for sure.

  When hunting with Phil, the number one rule was always to follow the laws and regulations of the sport. He wouldn’t allow anyone to do anything illegal when it came to hunting. You had to have a license, wait for legal shooting times, and respect the rules of duck hunting. And safety checks were constant—and still are when we’re in the blind. Guns have to be put in a place where they will not fall over accidentally, even if a dog runs through the blind. Phil still tells us stories of when guys would come to him with one leg missing and blame their dogs for getting shot. When a dog accidentally knocks your gun down, it can step on the safety and its claws can pull the trigger. You wouldn’t believe how many people have been shot accidentally. Phil even invented a safety gun boot to put in a duck blind so it would never happen to us.

  As far as the duck-blind rules, they are sort of unwritten in Phil’s blind. He always does most of the calling. You wouldn’t dare pull out your duck call and start wailing. He’ll let you call a drake whistle, but not a hen call. In fact, Jase had to wait several years before he could call with him. And you really only need about two good callers in a blind. People ask me, “Why don’t you call in the blind?” I ask them, “Would you call with Phil Robertson in your blind?”

  It’s like pinch-hitting for Albert Pujols. It doesn’t make sense when you have the best duck caller in the world in your blind. The benefits of not screwing up are better than those of taking a chance on doing something stupid. Believe me: if you mess up, you’re going to hear about it. I never will forget when we had about twenty-five mallards almost in the hole. They were on their third pass down when the text message alert on my phone went off. After my phone buzzed, the mallards decided not to come in. Phil looked down the row of guys with a look that was a mixture of craziness, agony, and Satan himself.

  “What was that?” he hollered.

  Now, there was no way I was gonna fess up.

  “I heard something!” Phil yelled again.

  I didn’t feel like trying to explain to him that there was no way the ducks heard my phone from sixty yards away, so I didn’t say a word. I’m glad waterboarding isn’t allowed in the blind, because ol’ Phil would have filled our faces with water to find the culprit. There is always a lot of pressure to have 100 percent success. If we get four out of six ducks, we’ll sit there and debate for the next two hours why we didn’t get all six.

  Most of the quality time I spent with my dad was in the duck blind. When I was young I didn’t appreciate what it took to be so successful at the sport. We just knew that it was what Dad loved and you had to respect that. No matter what the weather was like, whether it was rain, sleet, or snow, Dad was out in the blind. I didn’t hunt nearly as much when I was in high school because I was into sports and girls. It wasn’t until I came home from college that I really started to understand how special duck hunting is. I grew up in and around the business of duck hunting, so it wasn’t as cool for me as it was for other guys.

  MOST OF THE QUALITY TIME I SPENT WITH MY DAD WAS IN THE DUCK BLIND.

  My most memorable hunts happened when I was older. We were in Arkansas one year, and it was a slow day. I talked Phil into moving to an area where we saw ducks going down. We decided to take a small crew—Phil, Jase, a camera guy, and me. The mallards were pouring in like we had been seeing all morning, so we didn’t even have to call that much. It was just one of those spots where the ducks wanted to be. We each grabbed a cypress tree and spread out. We limited out in like twenty minutes, all green heads! It was a special hunt.

  On another memorable hunt, a lone mallard came in. Jase told Phil, “Let’s let Willie take this one.” Now, I know why he said it. Jase was convinced I would raise my gun and miss. Well, I raised my gun and folded it. Phil looked at Jase and said, “Ol’ Willie’s been practicing.” We laughed and talked about my shot the entire morning.

  My favorite duck is an American wigeon. I just think they are prettiest. We don’t get a whole heck of a lot of them on our land in Louisiana, so we went to New Mexico to do some duck hunting. We scouted in the mornings on bluffs and looked at the potholes to see if they had birds in them. If we found ducks, we made our way down and hunted them. We found tons of wigeon there, and I loved it. It was a different type of hunting; we all like being in different environments. We also saw sandhill cranes, and those suckers came down like helicopters. Phil tried to bite their heads and that was a mistake. Sandhill cranes’ heads are much harder than the heads of the ducks Phil was used to. He nearly broke his teeth! But let me tell you something, they are some of the best birds I have eaten in my life. They call them the “rib-eye of the sky,” and they’re right. I also went and visited the UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico, while we were there. I couldn’t talk Jase or Phil into going with me, so I took our camera guy Jeremy Helm. It was, well, let’s just say, strange.

  We mostly duck-hunt in Northeast Louisiana in flooded timber. Phil has always believed a duck in flooded timber is the hardest duck to hunt. Usually, they’ve already fed and are looking for a place to sit and rest. Of course, there are a lot of other things that can get them in the timber besides us, so the ducks are always a little skittish.

  Honestly, hunting in the timber is the only way we could have filmed our DVDs all these years because it allows us to hide our equipment. I don’t think people realize how much equipment and personnel we have to hide when we hunt. There are sound guys, wires, camera guys, directors, gaffers, and a whole bunch of other equipment. We stick people in trees and anywhere else where we can hide them. Plus, one of the things we always try to capture on film is a duck with a background. Think about when you look up and the sky is your background; you lose perception on how far away everything is. But when there is a tree behind the duck you can tell the distance a lot better. If we shoot a duck at twenty yards, it looks like forty yards on TV. So we have to get the ducks as close to us as possible because it looks the best and it also helps your chances of getting them. We don’t do much pass shooting. It’s fun, but it doesn’t look good on film; the ducks look like little dots. It’s way more fun trying to get a big group hovering over your decoys—and it looks better on film too. But it’s hard because the closer the ducks get to you, the harder it is to get them to commit. A duck has way better eyesight than a human. You gotta remember they came down all the way from Canada, so by the time they get to Louisiana, well, they’ve seen just about everything.

  If you’ve ever been duck hunting, you know there’s a lot of idle time involved in the sport. You’re basically at the mercy of the ducks, weather, and God. Being Robertsons, we figured the best way to spend our free time in the blind is by cooking. There’s only one chef in the blind, and several of us take turns. Everyone tries to outdo everyone else when it comes to cooking. Phil likes to say that everything tastes better in the blind—even sardines. Over time, as the blinds got bigger and bigger, so did the kitchen. Now we have a fully operational kitchen in the blind we call the “Big Blind,” complete with a cooktop, boiler, and mini fridge. Most of the time, breakfast includes eggs, bacon, biscuits, and mayhaw jelly. But that’s only the start. On other occasions, we’ve eaten deer, dove, quail, ham, pot roast, steaks, and spaghetti for lunch in the blind. We even boiled Alaskan king crab legs one time. It’s a wonder anyone came back out to shoot ducks that day.

  BEING ROBERTSONS, WE FIGURED THE BEST WAY TO SPEND OUR FREE TIME IN THE BLIND IS BY COOKING.

  Of course, you never know what the chef is going to come up with out in a blind. Uncle Si likes to say he’s the MacGyver of cooking. Si says if you give him a piece of bread, cabbage, coconut, mustard greens, pig’s feet, pine cones, and a woodpecker, he’ll make a delicious chicken pot pie! My favorite duck to eat is a wood duck, or woodie, as we call ’em. They’re acor
n eaters, so their meat is very clean and tasty. Most of ’em are local ducks, and they live in trees. Our place is full of ’em and you can now harvest three a day (it used to only be two). They typically fly at daylight and fly really crazy, darting and dodging to avoid trees as they fly through. They also don’t fly very high in the air and stick to the treetops. Wood ducks are hard to call, although I have seen us peel ’em in from time to time. They squeal and make a noise in the air, but when they sit they have a different set of sounds. We always try to mimic the sitting sound so they think their buddies are on the water in front of us. They really don’t leave the woods much, which I guess is why they have their name. They are some of the most beautiful ducks, but I just love the way they taste. They’re my favorite ducks to eat hands down.

  Growing up like we did is scary to think about now. We did some dangerous things; there’s really no other way to say it. I shudder to think of my kids doing the things we did back then. It was a different time. I always feel like I came up in the last days of the good ol’ days. Now you would never think of letting your children do what we did. There seems to be so much fear nowadays. We’re concerned about lawsuits and predatory people, and I guess we know more about our surroundings and it’s caused us to see danger everywhere. When I was a kid, we always rode in the back of the truck on the way home from town. No one ever thought about what would happen if we got in a wreck or if one of the kids simply fell out. I drove for years without a license. We just survived. I guess God was looking over us. He had a plan for my family. He always provided for us, and we always gave Him the glory for what we had, and we still do.