Ryan Barnes for SPLIT REED
SR: What’s it like being one of the most iconic goose callers and goose hunters in the world?
Grounds: I don’t like to think like that. I’m just your everyday person who was lucky enough to fall into this. I mean, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I feel very, very fortunate to be where I am, cuz I know there’s a lot of people that would give anything to be in this position, but I’m no better than anyone else. I get up and put my pants on one leg at a time, just like everyone else. There are maybe some guys out there that put themselves on a pedestal, or they think they’re above this guy or that guy, but I don’t ever want to be like that. If someone ever calls the shop with a certain order or they need help with their routine, or they just want to talk hunting, I want to help them. That’s one thing my dad taught me, you know, that was one of the things I saw growing up; he’d have to be somewhere at 7:00, and here it is quarter to seven, and he’s in the driveway fixing to leave and two guys pull in and are like ‘hey we were just passing through and we’re wondering if you could help us tune up some calls?’ and he wouldn’t say ‘oh I gotta be somewhere’ or ‘just send them in’, he’d put that thing in reverse, and say ‘come on in!’. That’s a forgotten thing now. It’s either automated, so you’re talking to a recording, or you just keep getting passed around to people who don’t quite know how to help you. When someone calls, they want to talk to someone who knows about the product and that gives the time and the help that they need. And customer service, that’s a forgotten thing now, in my opinion. If someone’s gonna spend $120, $150, even $200 on this stuff, I think giving them a little bit of our time is worth a lot, and that’s not gonna change. I’m gonna make sure to give everyone the time and the help they need.
SR: Do you think learning to blow a goose call was expected of you? Or was it something that you wanted to learn to do on your own?
Grounds: Honestly, I didn’t have any other choice, I don’t think. Every night Dad would blow a goose call against my mom’s belly. I just don’t know what else I’d be doing, to be honest with you. If I wasn’t goose calling, and if I wasn’t in this industry, man I’d hate to stay, cuz this is what makes me happy. I’ve always been competitive. It’s always been a passion of mine to win, I don’t like second place. No one likes second place. That’s the number one loser. What really really got me going the most was I went like, two years, without getting beat. It was just like ‘no big deal, no big deal, no big deal,’ well, then I got beat. It was Derrick Damron from the center of Kentucky who beat me. We were in Big Sandy near Paris, Tennessee. It was some big outdoor show and they had a calling contest there, and he beat me. That was the first time I’d been beaten in two years in the juniors, and I didn’t like that at all. Well, that really started it all. That was the main turning point where I really wanted to beat him. And it showed me, there’s always someone out there, I don’t care what it is, there’s always someone out there that’s better than you, and someone who can beat you. And anybody can get beat on any given day. After that, I thought ‘I didn’t like that too much. That ain’t gonna happen again’. So I started practicing more, and won and lost a few times. Then I made it to the senior division, and there were a few years where I didn’t even make it in the top five. Well I was starting to get a little disgusted then, and Dad never would tell me “Hey you did good”, he would just say “well it was alright but you needed to do something else” and he would just tell me what I was doing wrong. And that’s the only way you’re going to get better is if you take what you did bad and fix it, instead of just pretending like everything was perfect. There’s always stuff to improve on, I don’t care what it is, you can always improve. If you ever think you have nothing to improve on, you’re wrong. You’re never going to be perfect. There’s no such thing as a perfect score in my opinion. The scores are 70-80, 80-90, 90-100. There should never be a score of 80, 90, or 100- period! Anyone who gives those scores, I disagree with that, there’s no such thing as a perfect score. Nobody’s perfect. You gotta try to do as good as you can do, but you gotta lose, lose and lose, until you finally win, and that was one of the better things I ever learned from my dad. He would tell me what I did wrong, and that’s what I would fix to try to better myself. That’s just the way that I’ve always gone about it. I had to learn how to lose, and that made winning feel even better. When I did start winning though, it was like a light switch though, it was just instant. It started in ‘02, and it was like top 5, top 5, top 5, and then it started to be win, win, win, and I just kept getting more and more. It took me two years but it went from not even making the top 5 to always making the top 5 and even winning some, and then in ‘03 I won the World Championship. It was a roller coaster ride is all I can say. I don’t call as much anymore. I call in a few here and there, but I mean hell, all these boys are so good anymore if there’s 20 in a contest, 18 of them can win. It just comes down to who’s gonna bobble and who’s gonna mess it up. There’s a lot better instructional material out there nowadays, but there are not as many kids out there getting into it. That’s the sad thing that I’m noticing about it. At World’s, there are only 8 or 10 kids, and out at Roger’s there’s maybe 5, and that’s not good. I mean that’s what’s going to carry on this heritage and I’m seeing a big, big loss of interest. Not just on the contest side of it, but on the hunting side of it too. I don’t know if it’s lack of interest or hunters not being able to get them out or what the deal is but I’ve noticed a big decline in all of that
SR: How old were you when you started blowing a goose call?
Grounds: Ever since I could hold one pretty much. I’ve got pictures of me where I wasn’t any more than two years old running around with a call. So it pretty much has been something I’ve done since I could walk. I started getting into contests when I was like 6 or 7.
SR: What was it like being so influential in the contest world at such a young age?
Grounds: Well I’ll tell you this, that first world contest at 16, I was just going out there to win the Junior World’s in my last year, that was my goal. And I just thought, whatever happens after that is a bonus. And they called my name for the final 5 in the world, and that was the final contest of the evening, and I just thought ‘5th place, I’ll take that! That’s awesome!’ cuz I had made the top 5 in the senior world goose in 1999 when I was 12, that was the year Kelley Powers won. I didn’t make it in the top 5 the next three years, so in 2003 I had no clue I was gonna win, and I had no idea but I was winning by a landslide if I remember right. That last round all I had to do was go up and blow a simple round, and not mess up, and it was mine. But I didn’t know that, I just thought ‘go up there and blow smoke, go for broke!’ and that’s what I did. Out of all three of my world titles, that was probably the most special. It was more surprising. After that, those next two, I was determined to win. That was what I was expecting to do. But that first one, I mean I was 16 years old. I had no idea I was going to win it. I didn’t have a clue what I was in for.
SR: Out of all the contests you’ve won, what’s been your most memorable contest win?
Grounds: Well, with the way the situation is now, probably that last Roger’s win. That was my last win with Dad. That was the last one I got to win while he was still alive. He died a month later, and that last one I just won at John A Logan, in honor of my dad; I didn’t pick up that goose call from the first weekend of August, all the way through September, until 9:00 AM that morning. I didn’t have any drive, I was busy with things at the shop, and a bunch of other things, the last thing I wanted to do was go blow that goose call. With my contest calls, I’m really particular. I want them a certain way, and when I get it that way I baby it. I set it on the shelf and I don’t touch it, I just leave it alone. If it isn’t a certain way it won’t work for me. So I picked my call up at 9:00 AM the morning of the contest, and all I did was started easy with a few murmurs, and got it going. I did my hails, I did my comedowns, put it in my pocket and walked out like ‘I ain’t gonna do shit’ I was just thinking that this was gonna be embarrassing. Well usually after a routine I’m out of breath, but after that first round I got off that stage and it was like, ‘it was fun, it was easy, I hit everything I wanted to hit, the way I wanted to hit it; that wasn’t me up there. I’m telling you right here he was up there, cuz that was his contest. He started it 32 years ago. He had like 53 or 54 guys from 13 different states and he gave away a bunch of different prizes. That was something that he started, then Jeff (Foiles) picked it up and did that whole deal with it, and I mean I won by a pretty good margin. I won all three rounds, man he was there, he walked me through it. There was no doubt about it. I mean I can’t do that type of stuff like I could back when I was practicing all the time, and everyone came up to me like “dude, that was awesome” and I just told them “that wasn’t me up there”. I mean I won by like 7 or 8 points. Those two contests right there, my last win at Roger’s and the one this last September, those ones were really special to me.
SR: Besides goose hunting and goose calling, what are some of your hobbies?
Grounds: The only thing I do besides the stuff that everyone already knows about is I get in a boat and I bass fish. I don’t really have any other hobbies. I did play a little bit of golf, I was really into it when I was younger. I got into it again a couple of years ago. Me and dad and a bunch of us started going almost every week, going on scrambles after work, but I’ve kinda got out of that since my dad died. But if not having to work, and if it’s this time of the year, after honker season, I’m usually out in a boat. If I have any downtime at all I’m fishing.
SR: Where do you see the world of contest calling headed?
Grounds: Not very good. Not very good at all. It just takes so much to get the prizes and the money and to get the contests going, and then it takes so much to get to the contests, as far as your airfare or your gas if you’re driving. Then you’ve got a motel, your food, a rental car. All to go win a thousand bucks. I mean, a lot of these contests aren’t even $1,000, they’re like $500. Well, it takes $500 just to get to the contest and back home, if not more. The economy’s blowing up and everything is a lot more expensive than it was in say, ‘05 or ‘03. Hell, even 2010! It was just a lot cheaper to get to these places, now everything is blowing up in cost except for the prize money. And it’s hard to get the cash and to get the donations you need to get the callers to come out to compete in these contests. People aren’t gonna come if the money’s not there. I just don’t see it going much longer, I really don’t. I hate to say that, but with the lack of interest and with the way things are going, I just don’t see it hanging on. I mean, I remember when there used to be 50 guys in a lot of these contests. I mean one of the years I won out in Easton, Maryland it was starting to dwindle down, there were only like 30-something guys in it, and in years past they had been getting close to 50 or even more than 50 guys. I know the one in Burlington, Iowa, the Mississippi Valley, Robbie Iverson won it this year using our call. It’s like his 6th time in a row I think, maybe his 8th, I don’t know some ungodly amount. But there used to be 40-50 guys in that contest, now you’re seeing 8, 9, 10. I mean even at the world in Easton there was only like 20 guys there. I mean you hate to see it but it’s dwindling slowly but surely, I can tell you that right now.
SR: You’ve had a huge impact on how guys model their contest routines, what changes do you think guys need to make to the contest routines that are being used today?
Grounds: Well I can tell you this, a lot of the things that people do today, are things that have been around since the ’90s. The spit note, or the comeback call, that’s been used since ‘98, ‘99, that’s when that started, and nobody has changed that yet. The problem is if you do something off the beaten path, or you vary a little bit, you get docked for it! I guess someone’s just gonna have to take the risk and do a different comeback and try something different, but I can tell you right now, I can already tell you what’s gonna happen, if you get outside those lines too far, you’re done. I’m just gonna come right out and say this, the guys that are supposed to be judging out there, are the ones that are calling. Most of the judges out there aren’t giving credit where credit is due. There’s a lot of guys out there that are getting docked for things that they shouldn’t be getting docked for, and there are a lot of guys that are getting points for things when they shouldn’t be. The “level of difficulty” on a contest routine has dwindled tremendously. As far as how well can you control your call and the tone and everything like that, cuz when you hear a goose and a gander come in, they’re cutting each other off really quick, and this time of the year when they’re getting paired off, that’s when I listen to them the most. I fish a hot water lake here by the house, and there’s a bunch of geese raised on it, and they get real territorial, and when that happens, that’s when I sit there and listen the most. You can hear so much when you just sit and listen to geese. There are some sounds out there that you just can’t do, I’ve tried. I’ve done just about everything you could do with hand position, air pressure, and there’s still 3 or 4 of the notes that I just can’t replicate. But what we’re trying to do is sound like a goose, and when we sound like a goose, sometimes those judges aren’t giving you credit for sounding like a goose. I mean I’ll say it again, I’ll say it to anybody, the ones that need to be judging are the guys calling. Those are the guys that are up to date on all the notes and all that stuff. I mean Kile Jones, Robbie Iverson, Jordan Keil, Forrest Carpenter, Mike Benjamin, John Walls and several other guys out on the East Coast, those are the guys that need to be judging. The problem is, if they’re judging, who’s gonna be calling? And it goes right back to contests dwindling, you know.
SR: Do you feel any pressure to carry on your dad’s legacy?
Grounds: I’m never gonna fill those shoes cuz those are some big shoes to fill. I’m just gonna do my thing and wear the shoes that I got, and just do the best that I can. I’ll never top him, he was as good as they come and as good as they get. So I’m just gonna do the best that I can do and carry on what he taught me.
SR: We’ve talked about the challenges of contest goose calling, what are some of the challenges that you see in the world of goose hunting?
Grounds: We could sit until daylight on this one. We’ll never know why the geese aren’t doing this or why they aren’t doing that or why they aren’t migrating anymore. But I know this, a lot of it has to do with man. With the decoys and how pretty they look nowadays, and all these hot water ponds, golf courses now, and all these resident flocks. I tell you, the man upstairs didn’t make geese so they could be handled and transported all over the place. They were made to migrate! That isn’t happening anymore. We’ve taken the wild out of them, we’ve put our hands on them and planted them here and planted them there, and now the ones that do migrate get mixed in with these nuisance geese and then they won’t leave. You can kill them for the first few weeks but once they get mixed in with those smart ones it’s all over. See ya! We don’t get the weather either. In just this 100-mile stretch we used to hold almost a million birds on these 5 different refuges. It was unbelievable. This is where it was at! It was unreal. I got in at the tail end of it, but this is where everyone from Chicago or all the other big cities came to shoot Canada geese. Now, you can’t even hardly kill one. They just get around Chicago, Springfield, Central Illinois and they stop. Back then they wouldn’t stop until they got here. Like I say, we don’t get the weather anymore, I didn’t hunt in snow once this year. Usually, the first hunt in snow is a blood bath, and we didn’t get any snow. I never even had to hardly wear gloves this year! I ran my ice-eater for a week. I just think a lot of the migration is moving West. I really do. I mean, Oklahoma, Colorado, all that out there is just awesome hunting right now. I think the Earth and the axis have something to do with it too, I think it might be a little off. Maybe it’s not but man it sure seems like it. I know we don’t get as much of the migration from out of the East like we used to. That used to bring in a lot of birds down the Ohio river, and now I think they’re all going down the Mississippi. There’s a lot of different factors, and we’ll never know exactly what’s going on, but I do know we messed up by putting our hands on those resident flocks. That’s a big problem right there.
SR: So with hunting being tougher, what are some things you’re doing to increase your chances of success?
Grounds: A lot of it depends on the situation. We’ll hunt the same field, and same spot every day, and we don’t get a lot of the geese like we used to, but we still get some ducks. The ducks know us just like we know them, and they’re nocturnal. They’re just like hunting a 200” whitetail. They’re night-timers. They know where it’s safe and they know when that shooting time is at. If daylight is at 5:01 they come at 5:02. It’s all weather related anymore. It doesn’t matter how good of a caller you are or how good your decoys look, if they don’t get up and use those things on the side of their body to move, it doesn’t matter what you got, or where you’re at, you aren’t gonna get them. That’s been a problem with us for the last couple of years, but with geese, if you’re on the X, it’s up to you to mess them up. All it takes is a couple clucks and a flag. If you’re right in the goose shit, and they don’t do it, you’re the one messing it up. Just let them come and don’t overuse the call. Just enough to keep them interested. Everybody likes to call, but there’s a time when you don’t need to.
SR: What would you want Tim Grounds Championship Calls to be known for; killing geese, or winning titles?
Grounds: We’re known for both. We don’t have any call that we offer that’s just for contest calling, and there’s not one that’s just for hunting. It’s all about the tuning. The Half-Breed that Dad came out with back in 1989, I’ll put that against any hunting call that anybody wants to put it against. It’s killed more geese than any of them. To this day it will still pull them in. The Guide’s Best, it may not win contests, even though it did win contests today, but I guarantee you it’ll kill a goose. It’s all about the tuning. I could tune a super mag for a contest, or I could tune it up for hunting. A lot of guys get misled there thinking that’s just a contest call, or this call is just a hunting call. It’s all about the tuning. Any of them will kill a goose, and most of them will win a contest.
Hunter wants to extend his gratitude and thanks for everyone’s support, and let everyone know that if anyone has any questions, or needs any help, he’s happy to answer any questions that they may have. Visit Tim Grounds Championship Calls on Instagram or on their Website
