“There Aren’t Two of Him” The Inimitable Bubba Wood

by Tom Davis, Editor-at-Large

In A Hunter’s Road, Jim Fergus’s acclaimed chronicle of the 17,000-mile wingshooting odyssey he undertook in 1990-’91, there’s a passage in which he relates a telephone conversation with an unnamed Texan. Hopeful of finding someone in the Lone Star State who’s willing to take him quail hunting – and having been given this guy’s name and number – Fergus calls from a pay phone (remember those?) and makes his pitch.

“Jim,” the Texan replies, “I’m sure you’re just a real nice fella, but frankly, I’d rather invite you into my wife’s bedroom than onto my quail lease.”

I remember thinking at the time that that sounded suspiciously like something my friend Bubba Wood would say. That suspicion proved correct….

 

Like most of us, I’d always heard and read about people who are “larger than life.” But I didn’t know what that description meant, really, until I met Bubba Wood. (His given first name is Martin, but he’s gone by Bubba virtually since birth.) I was in my mid-30s then – Bubba, who was born in 1940, would have been in his early 50s – and I’d never been around anyone with such an outsized personality. It was kind of intimidating, really, especially for a guy like me who tends to be pretty buttoned-down. Everything he did, he did at high speed, full volume, and maximum intensity – the dials cranked, the throttle wide-open, the engine fueled by the caffeine hit from a steady stream of Tab, the diet soft drink. I learned in a hurry that you either kept up with Bubba or got left in the dust, because he wasn’t about to wait for you.

Something else I learned in a hurry was to keep my wallet in my pocket. In Bubba’s presence, my money was no good.

He was as opinionated as hell, too, also a walking factory of howlingly funny quotes, although a high percentage of said quotes could not be repeated in polite company. “Political correctness” was as foreign to Bubba as Swahili. One year when he got caught short and needed to fill a hole in his string of quail dogs, he took the previously unimaginable step of buying a Brittany.

“Admitting you have a Brittany in your string,” he lamented when he told me about it, “is like admitting that your son is a drum major.”

You have to understand that this is the same man who once declared, “Any breed but a pointer or a Lab is a compromise.”

Everything is bigger in Texas, of course, and at first I assumed that Bubba, whose father was a mega-successful oilman, was more-or-less typical of a certain class of high-rolling Texan. The more I was exposed to other high-rolling Texans, however, I came to understand that even by Texas standards Bubba was, um, unique.

“There aren’t two of him,” as our mutual friend Tom Quinn, the renowned painter, author, and sportsman, puts it.

Quinn was among the many prominent artists Bubba represented through Collectors Covey, the Dallas gallery that he founded in the 1970s – serendipitously, just as the wildlife art “boom” was happening. Bubba became a major player on this scene, his success fueled by the quality of the artists he chose to handle, yes, but even more so by his energy, enthusiasm, and flair for promotion. His vast web of connections among the Texas upper crust didn’t hurt, either.

The experience of Ken Carlson, one of the brightest stars in the Collectors Covey stable, was typical. “My career just took off when I met Bubba,” he recalled in his book From the Tundra to Texas (1994). “I couldn’t paint fast enough for him; he was literally selling my paintings right out of the crate. There’s no question that my career is where it is today because of Bubba Wood.”

Bubba wasn’t merely a salesman, though. He was also a keenly observant critic. Carlson, again echoing the experience of many Collectors Covey artists, stated, “Bubba unquestionably knew more about animal anatomy than anybody I had met in the business. He was just uncanny in his ability to pick out a flaw.

“I remember sending him a painting of a deer once. He called me and said, ‘Ken, this leg bothers me. It may be right, but it doesn’t look right.’ I said, ‘Bubba, I think this is a good painting.’ And he said, ‘Fix the leg and it’ll be a great painting.’ He sent the painting back to me – and he was absolutely right. I fixed the leg.”

 

This is where I need to mention, in the interest of full disclosure, that the author of record of From the Tundra to Texas is yours truly. It was the first of two books I’d write for Bubba, the second being Patrons Without Peer: The McCloy Collection (2009), a survey of the jaw-dropping collection of wildlife, Western, and contemporary representational art assembled by the Oklahoma couple Bob and Curtice McCloy.

“The most dangerous place in America,” Bubba once quipped, “is between Bob McCloy and a painting he wants for his collection.”

We’d begun work on a third book, too, this one on the great animal painter Bob Kuhn, a person both Bubba and I thought the world of. Then Bubba caught wind that the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole already had a Kuhn book in development, so he decided, regretfully but I think correctly, to drop “our” project. He paid me in full for all the work I’d done, though, and he did it without a nanosecond’s hesitation. Not every publisher would have done that.

I did one other piece of writing for Bubba, the Foreword to A Season for Painting: The Outdoor Art of Robert K. Abbett (2001). He called to express his appreciation – he always seemed to like my stuff – and eventually he got around to asking me what the damage was. When I told him, he said, “You’re an awfully cheap date.”

And when the check arrived a week or so later it was for double the amount I’d quoted him.

One more book-related anecdote. When Bubba published his first book under the Collectors Covey imprint – I’m pretty sure it was John P. Cowan: A Texas Treasure, a retrospective of the work of the legendary Texas sporting artist – he sent me a copy along with a note that read: “A year ago I couldn’t spell ‘publisher,’ now I are one.”

 

 

Still, while Bubba’s professional identity was as an art dealer and publisher, his exploits afield are ultimately what defined him. “When you think of a Texas outdoorsman,” muses Rick Snipes, the past-President of the Rolling Plains Quail Research Foundation, “the iconic one in our lifetimes is Bubba Wood.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is saying a mouthful. And while Bubba amassed serious cred as a big-game hunter and fly fisherman, with a shotgun in his hands he was in a league of his own. A legend in the world of skeet shooting, in the 1970s he put together a five-man squad, the Cosmic Cowboys, that went undefeated for two years and set records that continue to stand to this day. He was named to Jimmy Robinson’s All-American Skeet Team more times than he could count, and in 1992 received the sport’s ultimate honor when he was enshrined in the National Skeet Shooting Association Hall of Fame.

Just don’t ask him to talk about it. One of the things you learn about Bubba Wood is that, for all his crackling volubility, he’s painfully reticent regarding his personal accomplishments. He seems to think they’re unearned, or at least insufficiently hard-earned; and as a result he deflects praise, shuns the limelight, and, as hard as it is for those of us who know him to imagine, tries to the best of his ability to fly under the radar.

For years he’d been an obvious choice, if not the obvious choice, to receive the T. Boone Pickens Lifetime Sportsman Award, bestowed annually by Park Cities Quail, the Dallas-based conservation juggernaut. (The list of past honorees includes George Strait, Ted Turner, and Delmar Smith.) And, for just as long, his response had basically been, “Over my dead body.” The PCQ board of directors pretty much had to wrestle him to the ground to convince him to accept the damn thing, which he did – graciously, humbly, and to the applause of an adoring crowd – at a sold-out dinner in early June.

With the self-deprecation so utterly characteristic of him, Bubba called it “The greatest honor of my underachieving life.”

 

Somewhat ironically, Bubba will tell you that his favorite gamebird is the ruffed grouse, which he hunted in the aspens of northern Michigan for many years with Tom Prawdzik, the sport’s acknowledged master. I have a recipe in my files called “Bubba’s Mom’s Ruffed Grouse,” a scrumptious braise with sherry and apple cider whose only drawback is that it calls for six birds – about two seasons’ worth, these days.

Still, those of us who know Bubba think of him first and foremost as a quail hunter – one of the greatest of his generation. He is, after all, the man who observed, “The best proof for the creation theory of intelligent design lies in this irrefutable chain of facts: There is a bobwhite quail; there is a dog that points quail; and there is a 20-gauge shotgun. It’s too perfect to be random.”

When Bubba shot a covey rise, he resembled a human gun turret. Tom Quinn likes to tell of the time he traveled to Texas to hunt quail with Bubba on the Hapgood Ranch, the fabulously birdy spread in Clay County – near Bowie, if you know where that is – where Bubba held the lease for many years. One incident in particular from that hunt stands out.

“The dogs went on point,” Quinn relates, “at the edge of some plum bushes. It was on a kind of rocky peninsula, so there was nowhere for the birds to go; we knew they had to be right there. I was on the left, my friend David was on the right, and Bubba was in the middle. Bubba was carrying his 20-gauge Remington 11-87 autoloader, which held five shells – one in the chamber and four in the tube.

“Well, the birds flushed – and I choked. In the confusion of the covey rise, I couldn’t get on a bird. At the same time, I heard shooting and had the impression that it was raining quail. I assumed that David must have killed a couple, but when I called over to him, he said that he’d been screened and hadn’t shot, meaning that Bubba had killed five birds. It was the greatest display of wingshooting I’ve ever seen – but when I said, ‘Nice shooting,’ all Bubba said was, ‘I’ve done this before.’”

 

Then there was the time, fairly early in my relationship with Bubba, when I called to say that I was sending him a dog. Not just any dog, either, but as beautifully bred a pointer as there was on the planet, the pick of a litter sired by Elhew Snakefoot. A black-and-white female named Hannah, she was a little over a year old then. She had a world of natural ability but for a variety of reasons she wasn’t a good fit for me.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I wasn’t a good fit for her.

I had a feeling she’d be perfect for Bubba, though, and I knew he’d give her the kind of opportunities to hunt big country and find birds in it that I simply wasn’t in a position to provide. He had a big string of top-notch pointers in those days and employed a wonderful old-school trainer, D.F. “Hoppy” Hopson, who kept them polished to a high gloss. I could tell that Bubba was skeptical, but I assured him that there was no “catch” and that Hannah was a hell of a dog.

The long and short of it is that she blew his mind. He picked her up at DFW, drove to the Hapgood (it was January, the heart of the Texas quail season),

turned her loose just to see what she’d do…and watched in amazement as she pinned a covey less than a hundred yards from the truck.

He called that evening and wrong-footed me right out of the gate.

“Did you go to college?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I thought you knew that.”

“Did you graduate?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, I just can’t believe that a college graduate would be dumb enough to give away a dog this good….”

Hannah became one of the best bird dogs Bubba ever owned, ranking just behind his all-time great, Rocky – a dog Gene Hill wrote glowingly of.

Yep, Hilly was a friend of Bubba’s, too.

 

It was another Elhew pointer, my jowly, barrel-chested male, Traveler, who was responsible for one of the very few occasions (maybe the only occasion) when I got the better of Bubba on a covey rise. My friend Andy Cook and I had driven from Wisconsin at Bubba’s invitation, and while he was happy to let Traveler take his turn in the rotation, he noted that it typically took a few days for dogs that were new to the Texas quail “deal” to get dialed in.

In other words: Don’t expect much. Well, Traveler made a pretty left-to-right cast across a grassy flat, whirled onto point, and Bubba, having apparently decided he was pointing a dickey bird, walked in as if he expected nothing to happen. When the covey blew out, I doubled – and Bubba fanned. He undoubtedly remembers it differently, but I have Andy as a witness.

Bubba’s boon companion and right-hand man, Ray Hale – truck driver, dog wrangler, bird cleaner, general factotum, and all-around great guy – was along on that trip. Ray had gone to work for the Wood family in Wichita Falls when Bubba was a teenager, and over the years, the two had grown as close as brothers. Bubba always tried to shock the visiting Yankees by greeting Ray, who was black, with a torrent of faux-redneck B.S., to which Ray invariably responded with a bemused smile and something along the lines of, “Bubba, you’re the funniest white man I know.”

Ray had a tremendous sense of humor. There was a good restaurant adjacent to the motel where we stayed in Bowie, and one evening after hunting, we headed there for dinner. The four of us were walking through the parking lot when suddenly a car alarm began blaring. It was a Lincoln or a Caddie, something like that, and it just so happened that Ray was the closest to it.

“Will you look at that,” he said. “All a black man has to do is walk past a car and the alarm goes off.”

One of the rites of passage for first-time visitors to the Hapgood was that you had to bite the head off a quail. (Seriously.) Somewhere I have a photo of Ray demonstrating the technique to Andy, who’s wearing a smile as big as Texas.

Ray’s been gone a long time now; I need to try to dig up that photo.

Another photo I need to dig up is the one Bubba sent me, circa mid-1990s, when he took delivery of a brand-new, top-of-the-line Jones dog trailer. It was about the size of an aircraft carrier and was tricked out to a fare-thee-well. There was a sink for cleaning birds, not one but two retractable gas grills – you get the picture.

“The maiden voyage of the S.S. Wood!” Bubba wrote on the back of the photo. “Wait til the girls at the Dairy Queen see me now!”

I shudder to think how impoverished my life would have been if I hadn’t crossed paths with Bubba Wood. The Bubba Express could be a bumpy ride, but it was never dull – and it was frequently exhilarating. I’ve never understood how I rated being invited onto Bubba’s quail lease, but I thank my lucky stars I did.

This article appeared in the November/December 2021 issue of The Pointing Dog Journal. You can order this individual issue through our online storefront.