Buckmasters: The Whitetail Magazine and Hunting Organisation Founded by Jackie Bushman in Montgomery

Buckmasters is a deer-hunting magazine and organisation based in Montgomery, Alabama, founded by outdoorsman Jackie Bushman. The organisation was founded in 1986, and Bushman created Buckmasters Whitetail Magazine in 1987 with the goal of promoting sportsmanship and wildlife conservation within the deer-hunting community. Its official website is buckmasters.com, and its publications include Buckmasters Whitetail Magazine and RACK Magazine, alongside Buckmasters TV and The Jackie Bushman Show.

Buckmasters grew from a hunting club and membership organisation into a multimedia brand: magazines, television, events, competitions and charitable programmes, all centred on the white-tailed deer, the most widely hunted big-game animal in North America. In 2026 the organisation marked its 40th anniversary at the 31st annual Buckmasters Expo in downtown Montgomery, a measure of how completely a magazine founded to unite deer hunters became an institution of Alabama's outdoor life.

Overview

Buckmasters describes its work as entertaining and educating deer hunters with current strategies and technology from respected experts in the field. The magazine publishes hunting tactics, gear coverage and stories for whitetail hunters: how deer behave across the season, how to scout, hang stands, manage habitat, read sign, use calls and cameras, and how other hunters succeeded on particular bucks. Reader stories of record-book deer are central to the brand; a 2002 Lyons Press book, Hunting Trophy Deer: The Best of Buckmasters Whitetail Magazine, compiled fact-filled tales of record-book bucks from the magazine's editors and readers.

The organisation behind the magazine is broader than publishing. Sources describing Bushman's work note that Buckmasters began as a hunting club and expanded into multiple magazine publications, events and competitions and a television programme. Its programmes have included the annual Buckmasters Expo, the National Deer Classic hunting competition, the Top Bow Indoor Shooting Series and a World Champion 3D competition, alongside charitable work described below. Membership, rather than newsstand sale alone, is the brand's organising principle.

History and Founding

Jackie Bushman, a Montgomery native and lifelong deer hunter, launched Buckmasters after a successful career as a world-class professional tennis player and coach. Accounts of the founding vary slightly by what they count: Tertulia's biography of Bushman says he launched Buckmasters, Inc. in 1985 after his tennis career, armed with an idea and determination, hitting the road selling memberships one at a time; the Montgomery Advertiser and other accounts say Bushman founded Buckmasters in 1986, crediting the late Bassmaster founder Ray Scott with helping him get started; and podcast and magazine histories say that in 1987 Bushman created the deer-hunting magazine called Buckmasters. LinkedIn's company profile lists Buckmasters as founded in 1987, with specialties in Buckmasters Whitetail Magazine, RACK Magazine, The Jackie Bushman Show and Buckmasters TV.

Those dates together tell a coherent story: an organisation built membership by membership in the mid-1980s, then a magazine in 1987, then television. Bushman recalled travelling to outdoor shows across the country alone when he started, erecting his booth, taking it down and moving to the next show, signing up every subscription himself. Television followed quickly: Buckmasters TV began airing on TNN in 1988, and Bushman later described the 2026 season as the start of the 39th year of filming for Buckmasters Television, running hunts from September through February on camera from Kentucky onward.

Publisher and Ownership

Buckmasters is a privately held company based in Montgomery, Alabama, with Jackie Bushman as founder and chief executive. LinkedIn classifies it as an entertainment provider with 11 to 50 employees. The Montgomery base is not incidental: Bushman is a Montgomery native, the Expo is a downtown Montgomery event supported by the Governor's Office, the City of Montgomery and the Montgomery Chamber of Commerce, and the organisation's recent move into a new space for content creation in Montgomery was covered by Alabama outdoor media as a local business story.

Ownership continuity is a defining feature. Unlike many hunting magazines that have passed through outdoor media conglomerates, Buckmasters remains identified with its founder four decades on. Bushman is also the public face of the brand as host of Buckmasters TV, described in book publisher biographies as the longest-running hunting show in television history, and of the award-winning Jackie Bushman Show. That founder-host-publisher combination gives the magazine an unusually personal voice in a field dominated by corporate titles.

Editorial Content and Sections

The magazine's editorial content is practical, seasonal and story-driven. Tactics come first: stand placement, scent control, rattling and calling, food plots, trail-camera strategy, rut behaviour, late-season feeding patterns and shot placement, presented by hunters presented as respected experts. Gear coverage follows the tactics, testing and explaining the bows, firearms, optics, clothing and accessories that advertisers sell and readers buy, with an emphasis on technology that changes how whitetails are hunted.

Stories supply the emotion. Buckmasters has always traded in the narrative of a particular buck — years of history with one animal, a change of properties, a new plan and finally a velvet-season opportunity, to borrow the shape of a recent Big Buck Blueprint podcast episode about a Tennessee giant. Big Buck Blueprint, the brand's podcast, breaks down the story behind a specific trophy hunt, including, in one episode, a Nebraska buck taken by a new mother who made time to hunt during one of the busiest seasons of her life. RACK Magazine, the sister publication, extends the trophy focus, while the main Buckmasters title mixes instruction, gear and reader success stories in each cycle of the deer season.

Audience and Circulation

Buckmasters' audience is the whitetail hunter, whom Bushman calls the participant in the largest sport in the hunting space. Book publisher material has described Buckmasters as having grown into the largest deer-hunting organisation in the world, with more than 400,000 members, a monthly magazine and a weekly television show. Those figures date from the 2000s and should be read as a historical peak description rather than a current audited circulation, but they show the scale the membership model achieved.

The audience's loyalty is visible in person. The 2026 Buckmasters Expo drew, by the organisation's account, more than 25,000 people to Montgomery. Attendees are families as well as solitary hunters: Bushman has said his goal through Buckmasters was always to make hunting fun for the entire family, and the Expo's entertainment, from Bulls & Buckmasters to racing pigs added from the Alabama State Fair's most popular attraction, is programmed accordingly. Entry has historically been effectively free with a donation of a canned good, tying attendance to the brand's food charity work.

Print and Digital Editions

In print, Buckmasters Whitetail Magazine remains, in Bushman's own recent assessment, a product readers still want: they still like the print Buckmasters magazine, he told Alabama outdoor media, while the organisation's day-to-day focus builds content in the formats people now use. RACK Magazine serves the trophy-focused segment in print alongside it. Subscription offers promoted on television have marketed Buckmasters as the nation's number one whitetail magazine, with membership bundles built around the print title.

Digitally, buckmasters.com and the brand's social and video channels carry tips, videos and seasonal coverage that expands beyond deer in the off-season to turkey hunting, fishing and cooking wild game. The Big Buck Blueprint podcast adds long-form storytelling in audio. Buckmasters TV continues on the Outdoor Channel along with The Jackie Bushman Show, making the brand a genuinely multi-platform operation in which the magazine is the membership anchor rather than the only product. Bushman's stated strategy is to provide outdoor content in any form readers want it.

Notable Editors and Contributors

Jackie Bushman dominates any list of Buckmasters people, as founder, chief executive, magazine creator and television host. His honours are tied to that body of work: numerous Golden Moose Awards for Fan Favorite and Best Comedy for his shows, the Golden Moose Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement, and induction into the Outdoors Hall of Fame in 2010. He is also the author of Jackie Bushman's Top 50 Whitetail Tactics, published by Lyons Press in 2006, which presents his hunting techniques in book form.

Beyond Bushman, the magazine's contributors are the expert hunters whose tactics fill its pages and the readers whose trophy stories fill its story wells. The 2002 compilation Hunting Trophy Deer was edited by the editors of Buckmasters Whitetail Magazine with an introduction by Bushman, and a companion volume, Hunting Trophy Whitetails, was edited by Darren Brown with Bushman's introduction. That reader-contributor model — members sending in the stories of their record-book bucks — has been part of Buckmasters since Bushman signed up the first members personally at outdoor shows.

Awards and Recognition

Formal recognition for Buckmasters has come mainly through its television and its founder. Bushman's shows have won numerous Golden Moose Awards, including Fan Favorite and Best Comedy categories, plus the Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement, and his 2010 induction into the Outdoors Hall of Fame recognised a career that began with Buckmasters in the 1980s. Alabama recognition is equally concrete: the Buckmasters Expo is a signature downtown Montgomery event backed by state and city leadership, and coverage of its 28th annual edition in 2022 already treated the Expo as a fixture of the city's calendar.

Charitable recognition is woven into the brand's public record. Since 1991, Buckmasters has run Project Venison, a national programme described as feeding more than half a million needy people a year. The organisation also conducts hunts for the physically challenged, provides college scholarships for students pursuing careers in wildlife management and conservation, and runs hunting education programmes for children who would not otherwise be exposed to the outdoors. At the 2026 Expo, attendees' canned-good donations produced, by the organisation's account, 10,997 pounds of food and $10,725 donated to the community, with food distributed to the Friendship Mission and the Salvation Army; Bushman has said the Expo has fed millions of meals over the years.

Recent Developments

The headline recent development is the 40th anniversary in 2026, celebrated at the 31st annual Buckmasters Expo in downtown Montgomery on August 14–16. The Expo began in 1994 and would have marked its 32nd year in 2026 had it not cancelled once during the global pandemic. The 2026 event launched collaborations such as the Rocky Phantom Ridge x Buckmasters Collection of hunting boots, unveiled at the Expo, and Bushman, approaching his 71st birthday on September 30, reflected publicly on four decades of the brand.

Buckmasters has also moved into a new Montgomery space oriented to content creation, signalling the shift from a print-and-TV organisation to a studio-based content business producing video, tips and podcasts alongside the magazines. Bushman noted that the COVID pandemic, for all its damage, increased outdoor participation and demand for outdoor products, and that the industry's hope is that new participants keep their enthusiasm. Buckmasters' recent programming — family entertainment at the Expo, off-season turkey, fishing and cooking content, and member storytelling — is built to hold that wider audience.

Place in Hunting Media

American hunting media has consolidated heavily, with many famous titles absorbed into large groups. Buckmasters stands apart as a founder-led, membership-based brand from Montgomery that grew from one man selling subscriptions at outdoor shows into magazines, the longest-running hunting television tradition in its publisher's account, a major annual expo and national charitable programmes. Its magazine, created in 1987 to promote sportsmanship and conservation among deer hunters, remains the printed core of that community.

For whitetail hunters, Buckmasters' appeal is identification: the magazine is written by and for people for whom a single buck's history across several seasons is a story worth following in detail. Forty years after its founding, that focus has not diluted, and the crowds in Montgomery each August suggest it does not need to.