For as long as there's been a North American Whitetail, it's had a special bond with the state of Ohio. For starters, Ohio was home to the "Hole in the Horn" buck, the legendary deer most whitetail hunters consider the greatest wild buck of all time, and the trophy whose existence we announced to a shocked public in the December 1983 issue. Ohio also produced Mike Beatty's world-record archery non-typical, whose story we broke in our February 2001 issue. And it's the state in which Stan Potts, my co-host on North American Whitetail Television Presented by Arctic Cat, shot the highest-scoring buck ever taken on our TV show. Thanks to these and the many other giants we've covered over the years, the Buckeye State occupies a unique place in the history of NAW, and we look forward to getting back there whenever we can.
The Deerasic Classic attracts an estimated 30,000 whitetail hunters from Ohio and neighboring states.
Stan and I don't get a chance to appear at many public events together, so it was nice to hook up with him for last weekend's 6th annual Deerassic Classic, the annual fundraiser put on by the National Whitetail Deer Education Foundation in Cambridge (www.deerassic.com). With an attendance of 30,000 or so avid deer hunters and their familes, this event is, to my knowledge, the largest outdoor show focused strictly on whitetails. It's also a lot of fun, because it gives outdoorsmen -- not just from Ohio, but from nearby states as well -- a chance to gear up for the rapidly approaching season.
Not only did Stan and I get to meet and visit with waves of NAWreaders and viewers, we also got to spend time with many of our good friends in the world of hunting television, including Michael Waddell, Nick Mundt, Ralph and Vicki Cianciarulo and Lee and Tiffany Lakosky. While you might assume we all get together fairly frequently, in this business everyone's schedules are so crazy that it's not often we actually can sit down and visit. So from that standpoint alone, traveling to the Deerassic Classic was time well spent.
Many of us take for granted how easy it now is to travel to such events, even halfway across the country. My wife, Catherine, and I drove up and back from the Atlanta area, and despite a one-way distance of nearly 650 miles, it was an easy trip. The only hard part was dealing with the truck traffic on Interstate 77, which runs virtually the full length of West Virginia. The Mountain State being aptly named, and summertime road construction there being what it is, let's just say there are flatter, less congested strips of pavement in America. But as the sun began to slip behind the mountains, we at least got treated to the sight of many does and fawns nibbling weeds alongside the highway.
One guy we met at the Ohio show had come all the way from New York to attend, and that was despite a recent health setback most of us would consider simply catastrophic. We first saw Brian Babb at our hotel in Cambridge, as he hobbled on crutches. Brian was sporting a new prosthetic leg and foot below his left knee, the aftermath of a recent accident in which his saw had struck a hidden wire and flipped the blade back into him.
NAW Television co-host Stan Potts (right) joins Michael Waddell and Nick Mundt of Realtree Road Trips in giving a thumbs-up to the fun at the 2008 Deerassic Classic.
As I visited with Brian, I learned that he's not letting this tragedy hold him back. Despite obvious issues with pain and mobility, he wanted to attend the classic; in fact, he even still plans to go on a Montana hunt he'd already scheduled for late October. This on top of having gone bowhunting last year in Canada shortly after breaking his right shoulder and having to use a special device to help him shoot his bow. (He got a bear on that hunt.)
So here's to you, Brian, and all of you other deer hunters who face more than the usual difficulties in getting to the woods and back every autumn. I'd like to think I'd be just as upbeat and tenacious as you are in the same situation, but I can’t be sure I would. All I know for certain is that your struggles remind me not to start whining when I'm a little run down in the middle of a hectic deer season.
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