Champion hog caller Bill Yount shares a few tips in a video for Clash Royale, complete with helpful subtitles. (Video: Supercell)
By Michael Morain
Editor
We get a lot of press releases here at dsm, but few are as weirdly irresistible as the one that landed in our inbox last Wednesday. The pitch: Would we like to interview a hog-calling champion who will judge a contest for a video game that millions of people play worldwide?
Why, yes. Yes, we would.
Let’s unpack this story chronologically, but here’s what you need to know first: The champion is Bill Yount, and the mobile video game is Clash Royale. If you’ve never heard of it, ask your kids or grandkids. As far as we can tell, players topple their opponent’s towers by deploying fireballs, rockets, goblins, etc. — and soon, flying pigs. The game premiered in 2016 and raked in more than $1 billion within its first year.
So back to Yount. A few years ago, he was just minding his own business as a school bus driver in Greenfield, where he livened up the routine with daily themes: Monday Mondays, Terrific Tuesdays, Hump Day Wednesdays and so forth. On “Animal Sound Thursdays,” his young passengers challenged him to mimic all kinds of animals, but they were especially impressed with his hog calls. One day a boy told him: “Bus Driver Bill, you should enter the contest at the state fair.”
And so he did. Yount entered on a whim in 2016 and ended up tying a five-time returning champion, who turned over his half of the $5 cash prize. “This is serious stuff,” Yount concluded. “I had no clue.”
He’s competed six times since then and earned two more blue ribbons, including this past summer. “My wife didn’t want me to go because she’s tired of it all, but this year was my comeback,” he said. (He now practices in the garage or outside.)
The Younts moved to St. Marys after the tornado tore through Greenfield two years ago, but he still works there as an insurance agent. Once again, he was just minding his own business when he got an email from Supercell, the company behind Clash Royale, inviting him to judge the hog-calling contest. He thought it was spam at first, but his grandson was impressed: “Papa, everybody plays this game!”
A few weeks later, Yount found himself surrounded by very real hogs and a camera crew at Heather and Steve Scar’s Meadowlark Farm in Adair. In the resulting 70-second video, he offers several pro tips about the finer points of hog calling, including rhythm and pitch. But the key, he says, is conviction: “If you don’t believe in your call, neither will the hogs.”
Since the contest opened Nov. 5, it’s received more than 275,000 entries. After it closes this Saturday, Nov. 15, online voters will cull the herd to 20 finalists, from which Yount will choose the grand champion whose virtuosic squeals and oinks will soon be immortalized worldwide. So far this year, game players have deployed the (non-flying, robotically voiced) pigs more than 1.9 billion times.
Yount seems to be taking his new fame in stride. He occasionally bumps into former bus passengers who recall his friendly shenanigans along the old route. “Good morning! Good night!” he said. “It was never boring with me as their driver.”
