Measuring Up

This article was first published in the July 2023 issue of North American Whitetail magazine.

There are watershed moments in our lives when old information presents itself in a new light, moments that force us to reexamine everything we once believed to be true. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, we fall to our knees in those moments and cry out to the heavens. The scales fall from our eyes, and we see the world from a completely different perspective. I was standing at the sink one morning last week, brushing my teeth and minding my own business, when I was blindsided by just such a moment.

For reasons that I cannot explain other than to say that I spend entirely too much time thinking about whitetail deer, it occurred to me as I finished brushing and spat into the sink, that 200 inches, the figure widely accepted as the benchmark of all truly giant whitetails, works out to be better than 16 feet. I stood there slack jawed, staring at my reflection in the mirror, a smudge of toothpaste in the corner of my mouth. Two hundred inches of antler. Sixteen feet of bone. That means that if you measured every inch of a trophy whitetail’s rack, the length of its beams and tines, its inside spread and its mass, added it all up and then straightened it all out, your tape would stretch the length of a bass boat, from bow to stern.

That epiphany so captured my imagination that I spent the next few days wandering around with a tape measure in one hand and a calculator in the other, measuring every random object that caught my eye and converting feet to inches. I started in the house and then walked outside and around the neighborhood where I came up with all kinds of crazy comparisons. Here are just a few:

Brian Stephens’ 2009 Ohio buck, the largest ever taken by muzzleloader in a state known for producing especially large deer, has a main beam that measures over 35 inches. The beam of that behemoth would stretch nearly from the floor to the knob of your front door.

I may well be biased, but one of the most impressive racks in the whitetail world hails from my home state of Oklahoma. Phil Scribner killed a buck in 2016 that scores well over 200 inches. On just a six point frame! Granted, the buck has lots and lots of kickers, but to score over 200 inches as a mainframe six point, a rack has to carry an unbelievable amount of mass. The Scribner buck does. Forty-six inches’ worth, to be exact. That’s the length of a kitchen table big enough to seat four!

Every bowhunter dreams of arrowing a Pope and Young buck, right? In order to qualify for the Pope and Young record books, a typical whitetail rack has to cross the 125 inch threshold. That means a Pope and Young buck has more than ten feet of antler atop his head. The basketball goal in my driveway is shorter!

There may not be a more famous whitetail deer in the world than the Milo Hanson buck. Taken in November of 1993, the world record whitetail in the typical category scores an astounding 213 5/8 inches. That’s pushing 18 feet. If you were to measure and then straighten out the Milo Hanson buck’s rack, it would reach halfway up the telephone pole that stands at the corner of my block.

The biggest free range whitetail deer rack in history belongs to the Missouri Department of Conservation. Picked up as a dead head in 1981, the rack nets a staggering 333 7/8 inches. Next time you step out into the backyard, take a long look at the distance between your corn hole boards. There ought to be 27 feet between them, and if there’s not, well, then you’re a cheater. The Missouri Monarch has nearly a full foot more length in its rack than the distance between those corn hole boards!

All of those comparisons are academic, though. I’ve never actually laid my eyes, much less my hands, on any one of those whitetail racks. So I turned my attentions to a whitetail rack a little closer to home.

My best buck to date, when given every benefit of the doubt, grosses nearly 163 inches. I remember thinking as I took a seat in the leaves next to him that I would never kill a bigger buck and so far, I’ve been right. That buck’s stately shoulder mount wears 13.5 feet of antlered crown. Straightened out, that winds up being just a couple of inches shorter than the overall length of my hunting rig, a 1997 Jeep Wrangler.

Of course, even converting those inches to feet and seeing that old information painted in a new light can’t truly capture or convey the majesty of the whitetail deer rack. You can trust me on that. I’ve done the math.