The Blacktail Coach Podcast
We're here to share tips, strategies, and stories of hunting the Pacific Northwest.
Whether you're a seasoned hunter or just getting started, we'll help you turn preparation into achievement and passion into results.
So gear up and get ready, because SUCCESS IS NO ACCIDENT!
The Blacktail Coach Podcast
From Double Shovels to Do-It-Right: Smokey Crews on Records, Dedication, and the Hunt That Never Stops
A record is a number; a trophy is a feeling. That line sets the pace as we sit down with Smokey Crews to unpack the mindset, effort, and odd twists of fate behind a lifetime of tags—from a rare, double-shovel caribou taken on the first morning to a hilariously gnarly velvet bull chosen for pure character the next day. We explore how to decide what you’re hunting for, how to hold out when it matters, and when to shoot the one that makes your heart jump.
Smokey breaks down the myths around blacktails, arguing they’re no mystery if you treat them like deer—calls, scrapes, predictable patterns—while being honest about what really limits success: access and effort. We talk timber company gates, paid permits, and the Western shift toward leased ground, plus the unglamorous work of baiting legally, setting cameras, and logging dawn-to-dark sits. Then we dive into moose calling and two unforgettable bulls that died in the road, proving that preparation can turn “luck” into inevitability.
Along the way, Smokey pays tribute to Chuck Adams and Randy Ulmer—mastery forged by practice, not chance—and lays out a practical blueprint: practice three to four times a week to weld form; scout year-round with a map in one hand and edges in your eyes; and build next season from a clear-eyed review of the last. If you’ve ever wondered why some hunters fill tags year after year, you’ll hear the truth: extreme dedication, smart access, and a personal definition of a trophy that keeps the fire alive.
If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a hunting partner, and leave a review with your definition of a “trophy.” Your take might spark our next conversation.
Welcome back to the Blacktail Coach Podcast. Today, part two with Smokey Cruise. Okay, so let's talk about species. Have you hunted like everything in North America? Or what all have you?
SPEAKER_00:I haven't I've hunted most of the stuff in North America, in uh lower 48. But my wife and I did go to Quebec and hunt caribou twice, and about three years apart. You got the number three all time, right? Velvet Archery, Velvet, Quebec, Canada, Quebec, Labrador, Quebec, Caribou. Yes. It was number three in the world when I killed it. And uh it lasted a year, and then the guy in Oregon wrote Blacktail book, Cameron Haynes, he killed one 15 or 20 inches bigger the next year. Mine was 354, and I think it was 354 even. And I think his was like 373 or something like that, or maybe 378. But I'm not ashamed of it. It's a pretty damn nice caribou, I think. Oh, yeah, it's a gorgeous caribou. Yeah. I shot that. It was 10 o'clock in the morning, the first day out of a five-day hunt. As soon as I seen it, I knew I wanted to shoot it if I had the chance. And it had double shovels. A lot of the caribou, when you're hunting, get three on two on one side and one on the other, or you get one on each side. But double shovels are not really as often as the other way. And so that's very impressive to me as far as the looks of a trophy. And then it's also makes a heck of a difference in the score. And I'm kind of a score meat hunter. I mean, over the years I've usually shot the first bull, elk, or deer, or bear that I had a chance to, because I like to eat them. And my brain thought is too, I'm going to shoot this one because I may not get admitted another chance. But when we went to Quebec, you're allowed two adult caribou, and you didn't have to do nothing special except buy your tags for him. So when you went out hunting, depending on the person and is what he was looking for, most of them are hunting for a caribou. Well, I wanted to kill a really nice caribou, so I was going to try and hold out and kill one. But at the same time, uh when I shot that caribou, I didn't know how it scored. I just knew it was a nice caribou and it was worth shooting because it was a double shovel with seven or six or seven or eight points on each side down top, which is what you're looking for. And it was decently wide, so it was a good caribou to shoot. The next morning I went out and three or five of them ran right over to me, and I shot a little one in there that probably wouldn't come within 200 points of getting in the record book. But it was in it was a solid velvet, and it looked like it had rickets. The horns are all just crooked as heck, and everything else. I could have shot four caribou that ran in and stopped at 20 yards. But when I seen that one, I said the heck with it, I'm going to shoot that one. That's the most unique one.
SPEAKER_02:That was the trophy.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I already killed the trophy.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and that's one of the things that like Dave has talked about a lot is there's shooting for a record, and then there's shooting for your trophy. And your trophy is whatever your trophy is. So you got the trophy. It's it was the uniqueness makes it the trophy.
SPEAKER_00:A way to state that is the first time I ever killed a black-tailed deer, buck, out of a tree stand, and I'd put up several tree stands and salts and things like that and bait, was a spike buck that come in, and I'd got in a tree stand at two o'clock, and I shot and killed him at four o'clock, and he died right there. I shot him in the back and he broke down and died right there. And I had more fun shooting that buck than I've a couple of the four points I've killed.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But because of the way I did it, and it was right behind my house and the whole situation, I'm telling you, I was ready to jump out of that tree stand, clean down to the ground and yell.
SPEAKER_01:No, I I absolutely get that. It's the accomplishment that you feel.
SPEAKER_00:Well, everybody, I've been trying this black tail stuff for 40 years, bake them and salt them and stuff. And I I've told my wife time after time after time that blacktail are no different than mule deer or white tail. They'll come into calls, they make scrapes. Some are easier to call in, and some are more prolific about making scrapes, but they're all kind of predictable, and they all got their traits that makes them harder to succeed in getting. So the only reason that whitetail are the number one deer in the United States, in my opinion, and I have killed white tail, is 48 out of the 50 states have whitetail. Yeah, they are more prolific, but I've been on mule deer hunts and black tail hunts and white tail hunts, and and another thing, people think other in Iowa and Illinois and are the best white tail places. I said Washington's got one of the best population of monster whitetails in the country. Not very many people know that, or they don't try and hunt them over there. I've done that, went there and done that. My wife succeeded better than I did. She got 137 inch after the score's over. I think it was 142-inch 10-point over there. But we got pictures on cameras of 200-inch white tails, 160-inch white tails, lots of 10 points and everything. Out of where we were had our cameras set up at our stands. There's you get the right place. There's a lot of private land there. You can't just go out and find them everywhere. And most people won't put out the effort to bait an animal to where you're going to be able to be picky about whether you're hunting a trophy or whatever comes in. And that's it don't make a difference where it's blacktail, mule deer, white tail, whether you're hunting bears or hunting hound dogs or you're looking for antelope. Most people won't go through the effort it takes to succeed in those. I have I go to all the extremes that's necessary to succeed in killing all the game that I hunt for. I get up an hour or four day night, two hours or three hours of I have to travel a long ways. I got up at 2.30 in the morning, went to Yakima. I hunted late season mule deer over there and elk, because elk was on at the same time. Drove all the way over there, started at 2.30 in the morning, and hunted all day long, got in my truck and drove home, turned around and did the same thing the next morning, and the only time I had to hunt was weekends. So my unfortunate little wife put up with that. But that's how I will go to extremes to hunt. Very few guys will do what I've done. Not that I'm bragging. Like I said, I'm addicted to it, and I gotta do whatever I can to if I was hunting fleas on my dog, I would go to the extremes to put the right kind of poison on it. My wife can tell you that I said years ago, 40 years ago, that there will be a time in Washington where you won't be able to hunt unless you lease a land like they do back east for Whitetail.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And it's almost there. 85 or 90 percent there because Warehouser owns everything now. Yeah. They finally got the idea of eight or nine years ago, start charging us if we wanted to go on their property, partly because people would go on their property and damage stuff. And the other thing is because somebody funny told Warehouse, hey, we don't have to do this. We can make money on letting guys through our gate and give them a key. And that's what's gone on back east, but it took some time to get out here.
SPEAKER_02:And eventually everybody else is gonna catch on, Sierra Pacific or Port Blakely, which everybody's gonna catch on to baiting Blacktail.
SPEAKER_00:Now our great governor that we got here stopped Blacktail, which is a whole new series of stories and feelings and stuff all in itself. But for years, very few people even tried to blacktail, bait them. They didn't even want to put salt out, and they didn't want to put grain out. And it just happens that I had planted several apple trees in my one little aco around that I got, and blacktail comes into my backyard quite often. Two or three that come into my place right now almost every night, about six, somewhere between six and seven.
SPEAKER_01:So, Smoke, uh I'm sorry, can you just and as I've always been curious about this, but can you give a guesstimate to how many record book animals you have?
SPEAKER_00:I got three Roosevelts that I can remember off right hand. I got seven by eight, a couple of five points that you were in the record book. They were taken out because they raised a minimum 10 or 20 points. I got a couple of six, a seven by eight and a six by six. I might have a couple of five points, but I can't remember right offhand. How many deer? I got three black tails that are I won two national black tail contests with them. One was 116, one was one twelve, and uh the other one I won third place. I don't remember what that is. I got three or four bears that are in the blacktail book. I got a twenty and an eight, and I got a couple of nineteens and an eighteen or something. Heck, my wife, she's got eight, I think, or four. She got four record book black bears. And I think she's got more than any woman in the state in the country, I'm not sure. She did it one time. And I got a caribou that was number three in the world. I got a mountain goat that's in there. I drawed six mountain goats and state tags in the state of Washington. I don't know anybody, gun or bow and arrow, that's drawn six goat tags in the state of Washington.
SPEAKER_02:Now it's just once in a lifetime, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00:No, no, you can still one every five years. It feels like it's once in a lifetime. But when I I drew a goat tag the first time they ever had an archery tag in 1967, uh-huh. I drew a mountain goat tag, and the Olympics killed a goat. And then it was every three to five years, somewhere in between that, I drew another mountain goat tag. And so I've killed four goats in the Olympics and three in White Chuck Mountain in the Darrington area. I blacktailed caribou, caribou moose. I drew a once-in-lifetime moose tag, but it's just a 37-inch moose. It wasn't a wasn't a record book moose to them, but it was to me. I'll tell you, I wouldn't tell you that story. My wife and I put in together and she drew a tag at 10 years. I drew one at 14 years, I think it was. So she got to hunt them first. So she actually hunted him with a bow and arrow for two weeks, and then she got mad and wanted to go home. She shot at several, never got him. We came back, and she sat there for a few days and she said, I'd shoot one with a gun. So I said, Well, let's go see my son, or our son. And we went and seen him. He gave her a 7M08 with scope and everything on, thousand-yard gun. And we went over there and got up at 8 o'clock in the morning and got out of her camp trailer, drove up in the woods at 8 o'clock in the morning. She shot a bull right in the middle of the road. And she had never shot that gun in her life. She had never shot a rifle with a scope on it in her life. It ran out in the road and round the corner, and I called out the window. Cal called out the window and it stopped. And I said, It's right there, right in front of me, about 80 yards. She raised up and shot for the shoulder, and then you missed the shoulder and hit it in the base of the neck and broke it neck and killed it right there in the road. So we never had to pack it out. When I had my tag a few years later, I think I had 14 points or something like that. We went over there and hunted for four or five days. Glenn Barry was with me from Barry Game Calls, and he had to go home because he had a transmission problem in the little car he was driving when he was hunting with us. And so when he left, my wife and I went out and looked on the side of this hill with our binoculars that night. And lo and behold, when I put my binoculars up, there was a moose in it. And he was about a thousand yards away. And I told her, I said, the most important thing to me is when we get a moose, I want you to be right beside me. I want you involved in it by being there, watching the whole thing. And that's important to me because this is a once-in-lifetime thing. We never may ever get the chance to hunt a moose again, which I have, but that's a different story. But uh in Canada, I seen this moose at a thousand yards. Wife says, give it a call. I said, Actually, that's a thousand yards. That moose ain't gonna pay attention to me. And she says, We'll try it. So I got out of the car and got up there and give a cow call, and this bull turns around and looks like this. Just on a trot across it. He was grunting and groaning all the way across. And only time we couldn't hear him grunting was when he stepped into a gully and came back out of it. We heard him, but while he's in that gully, it was about 10 minutes we didn't hear him coming out. And then he came trotting across around, stopped at 40 yards or 50 yards, looked at us. And why she said, shoot him. I said, Well, I don't want to shoot him. I'll give him another call. I gave him a little call and he raised his head and looked at us, and down the hill he came. And he stopped at 18 yards from us on the side of the hill off the road. And we had walked about 100 yards downhill from my truck on the road that we'd seen him from. And so he stopped at 18 yards, and I asked my wife, I said, Can you see him? She says, Yeah, I'm recording with my camera. I said, Okay. So I raised up and shot him behind his shoulder, and he ran down the hill and died in the middle of the road that we were standing on. So you didn't have to pack that one out either. No, all I had to do is get in my truck and back up, open the tailgate.
SPEAKER_01:That is so not my luck.
SPEAKER_00:So we've had chance at two different moose and shot them both on the road. And that's the way I like to do it. On the way home with my moose, it was really hot. It was super hot. We'd skinned it out and laid the skin on a bit of the truck and laid the moose meat on a hide. And we could see Spokane from the place we shot it at. It was down the hill from us about five or six miles, maybe more, 10 or 15 miles cross-country, but it was up in the air quite a ways, and we could see the town. I said, let's go down and get some ice and put on that meat. So we drove down and bought, I think about 12 bags of ice. And the moose was laying on the hide, and I just took the ice and I opened it up and I spread them 12 bags of ice all over that moose hide so that we could drive home and not spoil the meat. And so we left there and started driving across country and got about 50 or 60 miles, and I needed to get some fuel. I got out and started putting diesel fuel in my pickup. And I looked back and the water was melting out of that ice, and there was a big pool about that big around, look just like blood on a pavement right where my truck was setting. And a lady walked out and was looked at our truck and stuff. I didn't know if she seen the blood or no whatever. But I got done putting the fuel in the truck and I told my wife, I says, let's get out of here as quick as possible. I said, That moose is bleeding all over the ground. So we got in the car and left the big blood spot right there in front of the pump. It was just funny. I wasn't trying to be serious. It's just the way things jerked out. I thought it was pretty appropriate. My wife don't always think it's as funny as I do, but I don't know how many trophy animals I've shot. I think 11, 12, something like that, 15. I got a bunch of certificates because I put them in the Pope and Young book. Uh-huh. And I got quite a few in there. Sometimes you just don't think about looking in a book anymore. You know, I haven't done it for four or five years. We got these portfolios and stuff you put your things in. And uh if it makes a book, I put it in it. One of these days I'll catch a Chuck Adams, but I doubt it. I would like to say I think that Chuck Adams is probably the world or national champion, in my opinion, about who's the best bow hunter. Chuck Adams has got over 300 Pope and Young record book animals. Oh wow. He has more world record animals than anybody in the country. When he went to college, he was on an archery tournament team shooting recurs. He still prefers recurs, I believe. And he says he loves it because it's so long and it pulls just like he could shoot it with fingers versus recurs. The next best the guy closest to him, I think, is Randy Ulmer. And I just got done reading an article about Randy Ulmer. I think he's got 25 really huge mule deer, typical and non-typical. And he goes out and spends days and weeks out in a desert and high country searching for mule deer. And that's his thing. And I don't remember I read a lot about the guys that hunt and stuff a lot and shoot tournaments. I can't remember if he's hunted elk. But if he hunted an elk, it bled before he was done. That's my feelings about Randy Homer. He's as close to anybody I think and think of that would be anywhere near Chuck Adams about being the greatest hunter in the world. Now, I could be wrong about it, but I know that nobody's killed as many record book animals as Chuck Adams, and I mean he's hundreds ahead of everybody. He also was a tournament shooter in college, and he's proud of that. But he was raised in archery and hunted in California and killed lots of black-tailed record book animals, killed several different kinds of animals, and he spends days at a time. He's killed sheep, and I can't remember how many days he spent in freezing weather hunting sheep in Canada, killed sheep and stuff. It takes a pretty good guy, even with a gun, to compare with what Chuck Adams has done in his life. And he writes about 300 articles a year. That's a lot. That is a lot. A lot of information about a person that most people don't know. And I'm not bragging about what I know. I just like reading articles about if what I see a Chuck Adams or a Randy Olmer article, I get on it as fast as I can, and I try to remember everything about it because in fact I was going to bring a book here. It's in a bow hunter this year. It's on the very last page of Bow Hunter this month, just come last week. And it's about Randy Olmer and why he hunts. And it's a very sentimental. It's a very articulated beyond belief how articulated that guy is as far as big words and knowing what he's talking about. He should have been a Zane Gray book writer because he really can write. And so that's my opinion about big hunters. And I used to give some seminars to people. I'd go all over pro staffer for Quaker boy for a couple years. So I gave a bunch of seminars and I would tell people in my seminars that people like Chuck Adams, I talked to Chuck Adams at the Portland Sports Show and asked him how many hunts he had coming up. He says, Well, I got 14 two-week hunts, guided hunts coming up this year. And I says, Are you eligible for a seminar? He said, Yeah, I charge$3,000 for a seminar, and they got to pay my expenses both ways to get there.
SPEAKER_01:Boy, I got to raise my prices too.
SPEAKER_00:And he says, I'm booked. Well, by far. And and he says, I've got three-year backlog. Wow. Yeah. A three-year backlog.
SPEAKER_01:But you look at him and you look at his career. I mean, that's a guy that's earned it. It's not like he's been a flash in the pan. It's like you say, I mean, he's been around since the conception of modern archery.
SPEAKER_00:I think he's younger than me, so don't hurt my feelings.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean, you you know what I mean, though, because archery is always there the whole compound bow was not a thing until I remember when the Kurt Val and compound bow come in. Yeah, about 60 years ago.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And so before that, it was all recurve or longbows. And it was when it turned to compounds, and I'm not putting down recurve or long, because that's fun. It is an absolute kick in the pants. And that's how most of us got started. To go back to that is always fun, you know. But compound bows have taken it to another level. For someone to have been in it that long, like Chuck Adams has, there's just very few guys that have.
SPEAKER_00:Very few guys. That's another thing. See, most people don't stay in archery for a lifetime. I probably should say something about how I kill a lot of animals that most people don't. I made fun of myself a while back, a few hours, hours or so ago about going through three wives. But this third wife I've got, I've been married to her for over 40 years, and she's been a hunter, a fisherman, and she's a good flycaster and good fisherman. Can't get her to quit until after dark, and then she doesn't want to come home. I have to pull her off the boat. And she'll go anytime, rain, snow, fleet. Now that's a kind of a boy fisherman partner a guy wants. But she's as good as I could ever ask for and has been. And when it comes to hunting, it's the same way. She's mountain goat hunted with me. She's moose hunted with me. We've gone everywhere from Texas to Alaska hunting together. She's never complained about the weather or the distance, the time. And another thing, we get up at two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock to get where we want to go hunting. We're there at daylight. And we don't leave until it's pitch black dark. And if there's any way we can take a camp in there, we'll take a camper there and hunt the next day from the camper. But when we're in that camper, and I got a story about that too, and Dave's involved, we'll do that. I think that a lot of the people that are bow hunters, rifle hunters, muzzle loaders, they get up at eight o'clock in the morning, they go hunting, and they hunt two or three hours on a sitting on a hillside or walking through a patch of timber, go get in their car and go home.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:My wife and I don't, and never have done that. We don't leave the house fishing or hunting unless we know that we get there as early as we can. We don't stay until the latest we can possibly be. We got home obligations, do feeding the cat or the dog or sh throwing rocks at the neighbor or something, but we we try and spend it every minute we can out there. You cannot be successful as little as I have been successful, you can't be as successful as I have unless you've actually pushed yourself and your family to the point of hating you. I'm just being serious. Yeah. And I feel this way. And you can't be as successful as I have unless you poured a lot of money into it. Now, I've not been rich, and and I don't have a sponsor, and I I don't have a wife that makes more money than I do. Why are you staring at me? And I've given them seminars on this and told people this before. You can't be successful and be able to hunt Canada, Alaska, Texas, Missouri, Washington, Quebec, like OED and stuff, unless you poured a lot of money into it. Now, I've talked to Larry Jones and Dwight Shua and a lot of other guys at the sports show and stuff and listen to them. I usually listen to them guys getting them seminars and wait until after everybody's left, and I try to be the last guy to talk to them. Because sometimes they'll tell you something that won't tell anybody else because there's too many guys there and they don't want to reveal it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Or I've made a point of asking a specific question that they don't want to bring up. You understand what I'm saying? And so you got to do special things, and I'm not bragging about myself. I just happen to be this way when I hunt and fish. I go to extremes, not because I want to, because I can't help myself. And I'm tickle-pinked that I'm that way. Because just before I come here, I talked 15 to 30 minutes before I come here, I tied two really sweet-looking leech flies before I put them away and come to find Dave. And because he had to he had to come out to the road to tell me where he lived. And I've been here three or four times and I could find him. It's the Bat Cave. I tell people this in my seminar. Somebody says, How lucky have you been at drawing moose tags? I said, Well, I don't think I don't think it's luck. I don't believe in luck. Well, how can you not? You're lucky enough to dry tags. Well, because I wouldn't have drawn that tag unless I applied for it. That it wasn't luck. And I grabbed my bow every time I go outside and I got arrows and a quiver. And I walk out that door. If there's a moose in my front yard and I got a tag, I kill him. It wasn't because I was ready. And I worked at it. I learned how to practice all week or every week, I chance I get, and I worked at being a good shot or good enough to at least hit the animal. And I didn't have anybody to teach it to me. I fortunately had to learn it myself. And I was never really a great reader until I got out of the military and got home. And I got magazines like you can't believe on Bo Hunter, Sportsman's Outdoors and stuff. At one time I had five magazines that I ordered every year. And every time they'd come home, I'd sit down and read that magazine from one page to the other. One magazine, it cost me$100 a year for a prescription. And it was a great hunting magazine. And the guys had great ideas, give you great information about where to go and stuff. You have to live it. When I go down a road, I don't see the neighbor's house. I don't see other elder's house. I'm looking for deer trails. I'm looking underneath the apple tree to see if the limbs are I I can't help it. That's the way I am.
SPEAKER_01:So there's a certain level of dedication that follows your success. So if you're not very dedicated, you're probably not going to be very successful. But if you are extremely dedicated, you're going to all this stuff is just going to be second nature. You're going to want to do this.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I want to do it because I want to see the deer trails are.
SPEAKER_02:It's interesting when you say that because like I said, I've only been hunting for about three years, but net knowing Dave now for 30 years, Dave and I have known each other. Riding with him is just one of the scariest things that you can ever experience because he's looking nonstop for habitat.
SPEAKER_00:I understand that.
SPEAKER_02:Dear habitat. Okay. I didn't understand it. I just keep your eyes on the road, freaking out. But since I started, now I'm driving down the road and driving off the road because I'm looking up into the hills at all the habitat. Yeah, me driving church. Driving to California now, I risk my life every time I drive down there because I'm looking in like Oh, I like that edge. Oh, oh, there's a good uh John for a patch there. I wonder, is this public? Maybe I should look at on X, pull over and look at on Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I'm doing that now, but it's it is addicting though, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. You get started. It's a way you live. You you can't help it. I c every time I go over a creek or a river or by a lake, I'm looking for dimples in the water or fish jumping, or see how many guys are parked at the parking lot, see how high the water is on a little piece of ground that sticks up there above the bridge when I go over the Calyx River in another county. We even drive spatials. We go up to Blue Creek just to see how many guys are out there fishing or if they're catching fish, because I use that information to tell me how I can do if I go downriver from them, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. A lot of guys, maybe their success varies or fill a tag once every five, seven years. Those are the guys that are typically picking up their weapon two weeks before season and saying, okay, it's time to start thinking about hunting. But guys that are successful year after year after year are guys that are thinking about hunting all the time.
SPEAKER_00:Day before hunting season, you start before hunting season's over, you start hunting for the next following season. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I don't even wait until the last day of hunting to start looking. Not just yeah, and not because I want to. I can't help it.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and it actually we do that with the guys who go through coaching, is our last session is they create a PowerPoint. What did you learn this year, and how's that going to affect your next year? And they basically have to create a report to build next season off of last season.
SPEAKER_01:You immediately start prepping for the next season.
SPEAKER_00:I can I can you can relate this to Archery, but I'm going to relate the whole little bit I want to say to coaching. Because I coach one year my boy's little league. The first day I was out there, the other people on the practice range and in the ball games, the other coaches started whining at me about not hollering out and telling the players what to do. Not telling them, don't tell them not to swing at the ball unless it's between your shoulder and your knees. And I says, I'm coaching these kids to teach them how to play baseball. I'm not telling them how to cheat. I'm telling them how to win. If you don't like it, that's tough. But there you guys will stand there and not say a word to your students or your ball players or whatever you want to call them. And I can see things that the kid is doing out on second base that he ought to be told. And I holler my brains out until he hears me and starts paying attention. Because I'm his coach and my job is to teach him how to play ball, not to duck as low as he can when he's at the bat and box because it's got to be between his shoulders or the top letters and the knees. I tell him to stand up and get ready to hit that ball. And if it comes over that pen, you better be hitting at it. I said, if you go out because you let the balls run by and you hadn't struck at a ball that was holding a pen, I'm gonna holler at you. And I got mad at the guys on the field. I took over a team my son was playing on. The guy went on a vacation for a week. I took over a team and they had not won a game. When I took over the team, he came back a week later and they never lost for 23 straight games. And that's because I did not teach the kids anything but how to play ball. I told them to get the ball back as far as their shoulders they can get and don't let it sit on your shoulders. Have it off of your shoulders. When that ball comes up and if it's not a strike or you strike out, I don't care. I want you to swing at the ball when it's right to swing at, and I want you to swing it. And if a guy's running for first to second, I don't want you to throw it if you're the catcher to the second place because of pee-wee baseball, yeah, he can't get the ball down there the second baseman, then that guy can't catch it. So hang on to it because the guy can't get best. If you throw the ball, then he can go to third and maybe even home. I taught him things like that because that's part of the way you play baseball as an adult and you win games that way. But if you throw the ball away, or you throw it when you don't need to, then you lost the game for yourselves because you didn't think up here about where that buddy of yours that is on third base can catch the ball. So listen to me and I'll help you along. And I don't care what these other coaches like it or not. And then when the other guy that was a not a second, I was a second string coach, not his first coach, just his helper. When he got back on vacation and the kids won games, and he came to me and he says, What'd you do to them kids? I says, I taught him how to play baseball. And that's what archery's about. When I practice archery, I thought, if I don't get at least three games practice a days in a week, I'm not going to be a very good shot because I don't weld that form, follow-through, and technique in my body and my brain together enough. And if I didn't practice three or four times a week, especially when I was shooting bare bow and fingers, you had to practice tons to be ready for a shoot or a tournament or a play day. And that's why I finally learned that I didn't really like it as much. I won state championships, won local championships, all kinds of trophies. I still got them plastered to the wall in the house when I was shooting barebo, mostly second and third place. But when the guys that started going to releases and stuff that were beating me all the time went to back to the releases and stuff, I started winning first place. And I don't mind telling you, sometimes I won state championships when two guys in a state that won every time I'd ever played with them beat me. But they didn't show up today, and I won state championship. I was a state champion, but and and I in my own life tried to tell myself only because Dave Eatman or Steve McClellan didn't show up or you were right or so you gotta when I'd go to turn around, I'd try and tell people the truth. If Chuck Adams has got 14, and I'd say I can remember saying this in some seminar, Chuck Adams got 14 two-week hunts, and he's kills a world record elk in Montana, super big antelope in Wyoming, and a big mule deer somewhere else. You give me 14 two-week paid guided hunts, and I'll be a Chuck Adams this year. I'll even write a couple stories about it.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:You understand what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:It's super hard to be successful all the time, and you've got to do something extra to get there.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:My wife and I, we would drive to Clicket. If we got up at 10 o'clock in the morning, we wanted to search that area, we'd drive to Mount Adams and hunt all day until it got dark at 9 o'clock, and then we'd drive home. And if we didn't find what we wanted, we'd go back the next day and do the same thing. Sometimes we'd get up before daylight and go do it. And I'm not telling you that I am a great hunter. I'm just telling you that that's what I feel that great hunters are people that give more effort than everybody else.
SPEAKER_02:If you want what you've never had, you got to do what you've never done. Yeah. As Dave has said. So thanks for joining us for part two with Smokey Cruise. Talk to you all next week.
