Ex-Football Star Now Gets Hunters Ready for Big Game

Three-time Super Bowl champion tight end Jay Novacek likes to hunt antelope, deer and goats more than catching footballs.

“I guarantee my heart will beat more pulling the trigger on an animal than catching a touchdown pass at the Super Bowl,” the former Dallas Cowboy said.

Novacek has turned his love for the hunt into a business, putting up an 8-foot-high steel-wire fence around 1,800 acres of steep hills and rugged canyons near his hometown of Gothenburg in central Nebraska.

People pay $1,000 to get inside his fence for four days of hunting deer usually only found in Europe, antelope and sheep native to Africa, and buffalo and elk. For $575 a day, hunters also can bag pheasants, quail, ducks or geese.

Wearing No. 84, Novacek played for the Cowboys from 1990 to 1995. He won three Super Bowl rings and was named to the Pro Bowl five times.

Novacek, who started hunting with his father when he was 7, said tracking an animal is more exciting than playing football.

“That just got in my way of doing this,” he said.

Known as Jay Novacek’s Upper 84 Ranch, he built a 20,000-square-foot barn that sports an apartment for up to 12 hunters, an indoor basketball court, hot tub, archery range and pool table.

He offers a youth camp that introduces children to hunting, as well as tours of the rest of his 3,500-acre ranch where people can view zebra and longhorn steers--which are not hunted.

His business is a family affair. Jay, 39, and his younger brother, 35-year-old Jason “Bump” Novacek, guide hunts, run the youth camps and dress the kills. Their mother, June, cooks for guests, and father Jerry leads tours and helps care for the wildlife.

Novacek is laid back on the ranch, wearing a T-shirt and shorts during a recent visit, grabbing a snack in the kitchen and petting his many hunting dogs.

Six years after retirement from the National Football League, Novacek is still trim, but his relaxed attitude makes it hard to imagine the 6-foot-4, 230-pounder barreling down a football field.

Still, he keeps busy, running the ranch, a summer youth football camp in Texas and playing host to a cable television hunting show sponsored by Sidney-based outdoor outfitter Cabela’s.

Cornfields and flat prairie leading to Novacek’s ranch from Interstate 80 give little indication of the steep climb that awaits only three miles south of the highway. The landscape abruptly turns into peaked buttes dotted with cedar trees that look more like the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Many of the 500 game animals hunted on Novacek’s ranch are not native to Nebraska. They are raised in Texas, New Mexico and Colorado and trucked in at costs that include $75 for a fallow deer--native to Europe--and $10,000 for an elk.

Most of the big game can be hunted year-round, but the busiest time is the fall, when antler racks are big and coats are heavy.

Novacek is not alone in offering big game behind a big fence. People in Texas, Alabama and other states do the same. There are about 19 such operations in Nebraska.

Kenard Kreycik of Niobrara has an 8-foot fence around 500 acres near the Missouri River where people can hunt elk, buffalo, sheep and deer.

“It is trees and canyons,” said Steve Kreycik, who helps his father farm and run the lodge. The animals are “spooky wild,” he said.

People like to hunt behind a big fence because they know the animals are there and will not spend days fruitlessly searching them out, Kreycik said.

Hunting behind fences is criticized by some.

“A lot of people call them ‘canned hunts,’ ” said Bruce Morrison, assistant administrator of the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission’s wildlife division. “If you’re behind a high wire fence, you don’t have anywhere to get out.”

Novacek said the animals have plenty of hiding places on his land.

“The area has so many nooks and craters, it hunts like 20,000 acres,” he said.

Indeed, most of the fence cannot be seen from the highest point on Novacek’s ranch. Rugged canyons sweep across to a ribbon of Interstate 80 that is visible on a clear day.

“It’s not a pasture shoot, not a kill ranch,” Jason Novacek said. “You’ve got to be in a little bit of shape when you come.”

Hunters are not guaranteed a kill and pay as much as $6,000 in trophy fees for each animal they bring in.

Novacek bought the land 10 years ago and has invested more than $1 million in the enterprise. This fall is the ranch’s fourth season of hunting.

So far, Novacek has spent more on the ranch than he has made, but he hopes to turn that around. About 50 big-game hunters have booked time at the ranch this year, about as many as the previous three years combined.

Dick Hammett, vice president of sales and marketing for Winchester Ammunition in East Alton, Ill., has hunted twice at Novacek’s, using a .44-caliber magnum to bag an African aoudad sheep and a European mouflon sheep. The terrain was challenging and the sheep were wild, he said.

“It was quite a stalk, getting close to an auodad with a handgun,” he said.