So You Want To Kill A World-Record Whitetail?

Are you ready for the sudden fame, social-media backlash, and crazed animal-rights crowd? Stephen Tucker says it’s all totally worth it. Here’s how the Tennessee farmer’s life changed after tagging the largest hunter-killed whitetail buck ever

- Will Brantley

On the chilly morning of Nov. 7, 2016, Stephen Tucker followed a sparse blood trail into a creek drainage in Sumner County, Tenn. His muzzleloader was loaded and ready for another shot, but it wasn’t needed. The blood trail improved, and at the end of it lay a 47-point nontypical buck. Tucker knew the deer was special. His brother-in-law suggested that it could even be a state record.

By the next evening, Capt. Dale Grandstaff of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, an official Boone and Crockett measurer, green-scored the buck at 3082⁄8 inches. That would make it larger than the nontypical, hunter-killed record of 3075⁄8 from Iowa that had stood for 15 years. Grandstaff said to Tucker: “Put this rack somewhere safe. What you’re holding could be life changing.”

It was. Within 24 hours, the words world-record Tennessee buck leaked onto social media, and the quiet, 27-year-old farmer was hurled into a media frenzy and a whirlwind of online rumors, speculation, and scrutiny.

More than a year has now passed since Tucker killed his buck. In this exclusive interview, he reveals in his own words what it’s like to kill a record- setting whitetail in the modern, always connected age of deer hunting. —W.B.

First time I saw the buck, I was on a tractor leaving a field where my uncle and I had been shelling corn. I knew it was a big deer, but I thought he had cornstalks or something caught in his rack. I didn’t realize it was all antler points until I got my first trail- camera photos of him. I didn’t sleep for three nights after seeing those first pictures.