By Jay Langston

Editor

Sumner County’s Stephen Tucker recently received a Boone & Crockett score of 312 3/8 inches, net, after a scoring session at the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency headquarters in Nashville.

If the Tucker Buck’s B&C score holds up after rescoring by Boone & Crockett officials, no larger-racked whitetail is submitted to B&C by the last day in 2018, then in 2019 this buck will be the world’s new No. 3 non-typical of all time. It will also reign as the largest ever killed by a hunter.

The whitetail know as the Hole in the Horn buck was found dead along a railroad in Kent, Ohio in 1940. The buck was discovered by a group of railroad workers who had noticed the dead animal stuck under a nearby chain-link fence of the Ravenna Arsenal. The group of men freed the massive set of antlers. A shoulder mount of the buck was made by a local taxidermist and hung in the nearby Kent Canadian Club. The world-record class mount was virtually anonymous to the public and had never been officially scored until 1983. The antlers were scored for the first time on Aug. 27, 1983 by Phil Wright, chairman of the Boone & Crockett Scoring Committee. The initial score came out to be 342 3/8 non-typical points. Based upon the initial score, North American Whitetail Magazine declared the buck as the new world-record in the December 1983 issue of their magazine.

In 1986, the Hole in the Horn buck was re-measured by a judges’ panel of official Boone & Crockett scorers. The panel submitted a final score of 328 2/8, which placed it as the number two overall non-typical white-tailed deer, falling just short of the 333 7/8 measurement of the Missouri Monarch buck which was found in 1981 in St. Louis County, Missouri.

Opinions abound about the Tucker Buck’s rack conformation. Some decry its narrow spread, while others marvel about the rack’s extreme height and eye-popping 47 scorable points. It outscores the current No. 3 non-typical whitetail by several inches. Tony Lovstuen killed an Iowa buck in 2003 that scores 307 4/8 net inches.

“I love him,” North American Whitetail Magazine Editor Gordon Whittington said about the Tucker Buck in a recent Facebook post. “He’s truly awesome. He has an obvious typical frame and an insane number of well-defined non-typical points all over the place. I can’t tell you how incredibly rare this combination is, though the score should give you a pretty good hint.”

“But perhaps more than anything else, I’m invigorated by the thought that a 300-class deer just came from an area that was on no one’s radar as a potential mega-buck location,” Whittington added. “Yes, Sumner County butts up to the Kentucky border, and Kentucky has a history of colossal bucks... but nothing remotely like this new beast ever had come from the Volunteer State. For that matter, nor has Kentucky itself ever had a net 300-incher. And it’s safe to say nowhere south of the Tucker buck’s location has produced one, either.”

Who knows, with all of the mineral-rich soil in Marshall County, some nutritious habitat and some age, another world’s record whitetail might be walking around somewhere nearby.