Blake Shelton Funny Hunting Video Lee and Tiffany
We had the opportunity to talk with Lee and Tiffany Lakosky, the stars of Crush with Lee & Tiffany on Outdoor Channel April 11, 2014. The interview was conducted by Jake Dybedahl, Tom Kacheroski and Jeff Snyder of Sportsman's Guide. Read what America's favorite hunting couple had to say about the outdoor industry, their most memorable hunts, plans for 2014 and more.
Can you give us some history on where you're from and how you got started in the industry?
TIFFANY: We're both from Columbia Heights, Minnesota. Both of us grew up there, born and raised, and then about 11 years ago, we moved down to southeast Iowa, where Lee had bought some land. And how we got started in the outdoor industry – go ahead, Lee.
LEE: It kind of fell in our laps. We never actually tried to. I was a chemical engineer and Tiffany was a flight attendant, and I just loved hunting. We always would film, had a camera with us all the time – not to film each other; just to film the deer and wildlife coming in. After doing that for a few years we went to the ATA show and met Michael Waddell and the Drury boys and Don and Kandi Kisky and Jay Gregory, and then we just hit it off as buddies with all those guys.
TIFFANY: And you had been writing articles there for a while, too.
LEE: Yeah, and I'd been writing articles for a few different magazines. We had just bought our first farm, which was in Kansas, and we went turkey hunting down there with Michael Waddell. Then they filmed some of the turkey hunts forAll-Stars of Spring, so we got to see how they did all that, and then David Blanton asked us if we would want to start filming some of our deer hunts forMonster Bucks. The first year we did, we had a great year.
TIFFANY: Probably our best year ever.
LEE: I know. I shot a 196, a 174, and a 170, and this was Tiffany's second year of hunting ever – because she didn't hunt before we met and she shot three bucks as well, 150s and 140s. Just really good bucks for your second year ever even hunting. We never asked for any money for it or anything like that; we just did it for fun. We were just thrilled to be part of it.
Was that bow hunting or firearm hunting?
LEE: Bow hunting. Tiffany had never even shot a gun probably until the fourth year of doing our show.
TIFFANY: And if you ever saw my first goose hunt or duck hunt, you would know that. Terrible. (laughs)
LEE: Right. We were just doing it for fun, and then about our third year into doing video stuff onMonster Bucks and different stuff with Don and Kandi Kisky, a couple different companies came to us and asked if we'd be interested in hosting a show for them. Scent-Lok gave us a great offer; they let me do it the way that I wanted to. I didn't want it to be just an infomercial for a product.
TIFFANY: And it did work out perfectly, too, because right at that exact time, Lee had quit his job up in Minnesota because he just wasn't happy, and he's like, "I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. I don't want to live in a city." It actually worked out perfect that I was a flight attendant, because when he called me, he's said "Uh, I just quit my job. Do you want to move to Iowa?" I'm like, "Yes!" So we literally picked up and packed up that week, and a couple weeks later, that's when the phone call came about "Do you want to do a show?"
LEE: We did, and 10 years later, we're still here
What do you think makes your TV show different from all the other TV shows out there? Other than you're a husband and wife team.
TIFFANY: I think it shows us having fun and just being ourselves. Especially for me, I'm not going to be something I'm not. You're never going to hear me going, "You need to do this because of this." I'm not any whitetail expert whatsoever, but I'm out there all the time, so I've learned a lot over the years. I think people like to watch our show because they like to see us having fun, because really, what do we all hunt for? To have fun. I think that for a while there, people really weren't showing that.
LEE: I think a lot of the success has been just the humor and stuff in it, but also just really good, solid deer management. We go to very few outfitters, especially for deer. Nothing like that. So every deer you see is just something that we started from scratch. It started on farms that we bought and started managing.
If you shoot a deer at our place, it's on a food plot that we dozed out and planted everything. It's more rewarding for us that way.
How many days a year do you two hunt?
LEE: About every day that it's open. We start August 16th this year, and we'll hunt basically every day till January 10th, other than there might be a few travel days in there. But we hunt basically every single day. After January 10th, then we've got shows. You've got ATA and SHOT Show and all that kind of stuff, but then we have a place down in Arkansas, so we duck hunt every day in between.
TIFFANY: We also both have dogs now, who are all trained by Tom Dokken…so we get them out as much as we can. That has added a lot more hunting onto our schedule than we used to do.
Are you filming all the time?
TIFFANY: If we're anywhere out hunting, it's always filmed. I've actually never shot anything that's not been on film. Is that not the craziest thing ever?
Tiffany – What did your friends and family think when you said you were going to be a professional hunter and TV show host?
TIFFANY: I remember when I had first started dating Lee, and it was so funny. My dad had died a long time ago and it was just my mom and I at home. I told her one day I was going to shed hunt. She's like, "What's that?" I'm like, "I don't know. I don't have any idea." She's like, "Well this must be love."
Once I started to just do a lot of this stuff in the outdoors with Lee – some of my girlfriends were wondering what in the world I was doing. Once they kind of got used to it, they would say "Good luck! Call me if you shoot anything!"
I also worked for the first three years that we did our show, because it takes a while for everything to come out. Overall, It was pretty accepted as a whole. But everybody was caught back a little bit. I remember I was like, "I'm going deer hunting," and they're like, "What? You don't deer hunt." I'm like, "Well, I do now."
Do you think it encourages more young women to hunt when they see someone like yourself on television?
TIFFANY:I like to think so. We do so many appearances and types of shows and we have young girls and women that have been married 25 years and they're showing us pictures of their deer and their turkeys when they come through the line. So I definitely think it's helped.
LEE: Oh, definitely. It's probably easier even for me to say, because I get so much of it. Husbands and fathers that will come up to me and say, "Man, thank you so much for the show," because they have their young daughters, and before, they never really had anyone to look up to. It was always like "Hunting is for guys or for tomboys" or whatever.
They said now they see Tiffany, who can still wear fingernail polish and jewelry but still hunt. So they finally had a good role model that they could see that "Hey, it's not just for guys." So I hear that a lot from these kids' fathers, just thanking us for that. Now they've got their daughters out hunting with them, where they really couldn't get them out before.
Is the industry doing enough to get kids involved? They have the National Archery in the Schools Program now, and it sounds its just been a huge success.
LEE: Oh, it's been huge. We've worked on that several times.
TIFFANY: That's a great example. One of my little cousins who is in ninth grade started a Trap League with his dad. Nobody thought it would be a great success, but they had 55 kids sign up!
LEE: I've trapped my whole life.That's the way you want your kids to be. You want them to respect guns. When you know them and are familiar with them, you're not going to have any problems.
Do you have any tips that you have learned along the way that can help people hunting for the first time find early success?
TIFFANY: That's actually an easy one. #1, if you're married, don't have your spouse be the one who teaches you most of the time. #2 is, especially if it's just bow, go to your local archery shop and get set up with the right equipment right off the bat, and I tell you, if you're successful right away, you're going to want to shoot.
LEE: I think bow hunting is the way to start because it has an early season, you've got nice weather, a longer season and you're out in shorts. When you go during gun season, it'll be cold.
If you get them shooting right with the right trainers and right techniques to begin with, it's so easy. You start with that, and then you go out hunting and start with success.
Over the years, you have had some amazing hunts, but is there one that sticks out in your mind as the most memorable?
TIFFANY: That's a hard one to answer, but the one that's probably most memorable right now is Lee's sheep hunt that he just came back from. I wasn't even hunting with them; I was just there to be along for the ride on that hunt. It was just absolutely amazing – just to be able to watch it all transpire.
LEE: That was mine, too. People ask us that a lot, and for the last couple years, both of our answers are always when her mom shot her first buck. That is one of our most memorable, for sure.
But I just shot this desert bighorn sheep a month ago, so it's fresh in our minds. It was out on Tiburon Island. The outfitters that we were there with said they've never had anybody shoot one with a bow. They've had people try, but it's just so difficult.
We know you love to shed hunt, have you been out this year?
TIFFANY: Oh yeah. Absolutely. That's one of our favorite things to do, especially now that I have my own dog. We shoot, every day that we're home, between the shows and everything, we're out shed hunting.
LEE: Normally we'll find 350, 400 sheds every year, and this year a little less than that. I haven't actually counted them this year, but I'd guess maybe 250 to 300.
We just lost so many to Bluetongue this year that there are just not as many bucks around, and then we had snow cover for such a long time. It was fun, though, those days that we went out.
Speaking of your dogs, how do you care for your labs? Do you treat them like your kids?
LEE: Oh my gosh, yes. Me, yes, but for Tiffany, absolutely yes. (laughs) They sleep in bed with us. She cares for those dogs more than most people do for their kids.
TIFFANY: Our dogs have very, very good lives. When we travel places and they come with us, they're in their own bunk on the bus. We haven't had kids yet, because we can't be gone all the time and be the parents that we want to be. Fortunately, my mom's home all the time and can help take care of the dogs.
Who has the better success rate while hunting?
TIFFANY: I would say the better hunter is Lee by all means, but who has the better success rate? That's kind of up in the air.
LEE: It depends. On whitetails, it's about even. Because we have specific deer we want to shoot, and it's not really at all about numbers for us; it's did you get the deer you're after, make sure it's five years old, all that kind of stuff. But when it comes to elk and others like that, I probably have a better success rate.
TIFFANY: Lee's has so much more experience, especially on the spot-and-stalk stuff. Now, I've gotten a little bit better just these last few years. I feel like they've probably been my best few years. I've really gotten more confident with myself and my hunting ability.
What has been the most difficult part of your success in the hunting industry?
LEE: Boy, I think the most difficult part – I know for Tiffany, for her, even more so than me, is just never being home. All the things that people take for granted – most people are like "Ah, I got to go mow the lawn," and it's a bummer for them, but for Tiffany, she loves to mow the lawn, but you hardly get to. Just the little things that you wouldn't even think of, just the sacrifices that you make.
We would also love to have kids, and we still hope that we will. But you've got to be responsible parents. That's the most important job you'll ever have, so you've got to take it seriously. While we're doing this and being on the road so much, we can't be the parents that we'd want to be. So you make a lot of sacrifices for doing what we do. A lot of it is fun, but a lot of it is exhausting.
TIFFANY: During the hunting season, every once in awhile I do have an all-out meltdown, because there'll be so many men around here, my house is a disaster. I mean, it's just all chaos.
LEE: How many people's wives would put up with people in their house all the time? Since we've been married and lived here, Tiffany could not get up in the middle of the night in her underwear and go get a drink of water from the refrigerator. There'd be guys piled on the couch.
TIFFANY: You know what's funny, when I have a meltdown, it'll be over the stupidest thing. It'll be like when they keep shoving garbage in the trash can. I'm like, "Really, you guys? Do you really think anybody, one of you out of the ten that are sitting here, maybe could've taken that out? How long are you going to wait for me?" So it'll be something like that that I have a meltdown over.
LEE: It's so much better now, but it's taken us a lot of years to get the right group of people and people that you mesh with. And people would always say, "Oh, Tiffany doesn't even cook?" and you get guys that'll come, like cameramen, "Oh, what's for supper?" I'm like, "What do you mean – why are you asking her? She's been out the same time as you have, working harder than you have. What are you making for supper?"
TIFFANY: We have a great team. Now they really realize it is all of our teamwork that keeps everything really going smooth. And they figured out quickly if I'm happy, then the entire house is much happier.
What's next for you in 2014?
TIFFANY: We're competing in the Shed Dog Trials in Northfield, Minnesota starting tomorrow, and I'm running both dogs now because Lee is out of commission. As far as the immediate future goes, you'll start seeing a lot more bird hunting from us, just because we have our dogs, and they're just phenomenally trained. We have some great stuff this year coming out.
LEE:The whitetail stuff is always our staple, but we have just found our love for Western hunting in the last few years. We do four weeks straight of elk hunts, and we're going to do it again this year. And then, of course, I had to go sheep hunting one time – people tell you that you go one time, you'll be hooked, and I am 100% hooked on sheep hunting. We're also getting back into duck hunting. I really do love the upland and waterfall hunting as well.
You can stay up-to-date with Lee and Tiffany at TheCrush.TV or by following them on Facebook and Twitter.
Source: https://guide.sportsmansguide.com/exclusive-interview-lee-tiffany-lakosky/
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