Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander

quarterback for the Bulldogs from 1965 to 1967 and was the starter in 1966, throwing for more than three hundred yards against Southeastern Louisiana University. During preseason camp the next year, I looked up and saw a flock of geese flying over the practice field and thought to myself, “What am I doing out here?” I walked off the practice field and never went back.
    The coaches came to my apartment the next morning and found me cleaning a deer in my kitchen.
    “It ain’t season,” I told them. “I had to bring the meat inside.”
    No matter how hard they tried, the coaches couldn’t persuade me to come back. The quarterback behind me on the depth chart was a guy named Terry Bradshaw, who was a lot more serious about football than I was. Terry started the next three seasons at Louisiana Tech and was the number one pick in the 1970 NFL draft. He became the first quarterback to win four Super Bowl championships, with the Pittsburgh Steelers, and was selected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I still tell Terry that if I had never left, he wouldn’t have won four Super Bowl rings.

    The quarterback behind me on the depth chart was a guy named Terry Bradshaw.

    After I graduated from college, former Louisiana Tech running back Robert Brunet, who was playing in the National Football League, encouraged me to come to Washington, DC, and try out for his team, the Washington Redskins. Vince Lombardi had just been hired as coach.
    “You won’t beat out Sonny Jurgensen,” he told me. “But they’ve got this hot-dog rookie coming up, Joe Theismann. Robertson, you can beat him hands down. No problem. You make the team, they’ll pay you sixty thousand dollars a year.”
    Some people might think that was pretty good money in the 1960s, but it sure seemed like a pretty stressful way to makea living. I told Brunet, “I don’t know—you’re up there in Washington, DC, and you miss duck season every year. Do you think I’d stay?” He took a long look at me and said, “Nah, you wouldn’t stay.”
    As far as I was concerned, my football career was over. And as it turned out, my career choice of chasing ducks and whatnot turned out to be a pretty good one. Besides, at the time, I had a young wife and a baby boy. I had their future to worry about, too.
    I didn’t know I was about to find out how good of a woman my wife really was.

WHO’S A MAN?
    Rule No. 5 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy
    Always Wear Shoes (Your Feet Will Feel Better)
    A ccording to the Guinness book of world records, a police constable in India set a world record last year by running 150 kilometers (93.2 miles) in twenty-four hours in his bare feet. A couple of years earlier, a forty-one-year-old man in Oregon ran 102.6 miles barefoot on a rubberized track in less than one day. I’m not sure why Guinness World Records doesn’t recognize his feat as the record—it seems to me the guy who ran farthest would be the record holder, but what do I know?
    While I might not be Zola Budd or a world-record holder, I know neither of those cats have anything on me. When I was about twenty-five or twenty-six years old, I chose to go shoeless for about two years. I simply didn’t put any shoes on my feet day after day after day. Here’s what I found out: if you don’t wearshoes for about two years, you develop pads on the bottom of your feet made of about a half inch of solid, thick, tough callus. You wouldn’t believe how tough a man’s feet can get! You can literally walk on hot coals—or briars, hot pavement, cold ground in winter—without any shoes. I went duck-hunting with no shoes at all—no waders and no hip boots—just walked out into the water like it was summertime.
    We’d go duck-hunting in mid-January, and everybody would be covered up with clothes, but I would be barefoot. We would take people on guided hunts, and one of them would look down and say, “Good grief! This cat doesn’t have any shoes on!” I went like it was a summer’s day, even if it was only thirty-five degrees outside. I guess you condition your mind and train yourself to be oblivious to pain. On many nights, Miss Kay would have to remove embedded thorns from my feet with a long needle and magnifying glass. Of course, my hunting buddies and I were drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle, so that probably numbed the pain.
    After I gave up football at Louisiana Tech, I started running with a pretty rough crowd. It was during the turbulent 1960s, when people my