For many residents in my home state of Wisconsin, hunting season is as much of an anticipated event as any major holiday. You might go to your parents' house for Christmas and all of your relatives might gather at one location for Thanksgiving, but come hunting season, you hit the woods. That's a given!

Barry's hard-earned purple tag looks awfully good on his 16-point giant. Much heavier on its right antler, the main-frame 6x7 Wisconsin megabuck grossed 214 6/8 typical points before deductions.

As I learned more about Barry Rose's great 2006 buck during our interview, I couldn't help thinking about the fact that this could be the story of any typical hunting family in Elmwood, Wisconsin. Barry's mother and father, Kathy and Jerry, both hunt, as do his two brothers and his sister, Brenda. Toss in Barry's three sons -- Cody, Brady and Payton -- and you have a typical Wisconsin hunting family.

OK, I'll admit that most Wisconsin families don't own a Super Bowl ring like the one Barry received while playing wide receiver for the Buffalo Bills in 1992. However, along with deer hunting, football is also about as "Wisconsin" as you can get. I'm even fairly sure that most of Barry's neighbors have forgiven him for not playing for the Packers.

After all, he played at the University of Wisconsin in Stevens Point during college, and it wasn't his fault that the Bills drafted him in 1992.

Barry's first look at his dream buck was even a family event. On a late September afternoon in 2006, he'd taken his youngest son, Payton, to the woods with him.

"Hunting has always been a family thing for us," Barry said. "It was that way growing up, and I keep it that way with my family today. However, when taking an 8-year-old boy hunting, it's important to remember that the hunt is about him. When I'm hunting this property, I usually go to the back side, but I didn't want to put Payton through all of that work. So we took the easy way.

"Thirty minutes before dark, Payton started getting antsy. Rather than make him miserable and ruin the hunt, we sneaked out early. We'd just started driving out when we spotted the huge buck crossing an open lane. I won't pretend that I knew he was a B&C record, but I knew he was bigger than any of the four bucks I had on my wall. He had good mass and long tines, and he was definitely in a class all by himself!

"That one glimpse changed the way I approached the season. With three boys in our household, we go through a lot of venison. I usually shoot a couple of does every year.

The year before had been Brady's first year to hunt, and he shot two does. After that I decided we had enough meat, so I didn't shoot one myself. But as the 2006 season got under way, I realized that I didn't have a purple sticker that would give me the right to shoot a buck. Since our area (Dunn County) is in an Earn-A-Buck unit, I had to first fill a doe tag before I could get my purple sticker.

"What's more, if Payton hadn't been with me I would have gone in the way I usually do and I would have stayed in my stand until dark. Either way, I never would have seen that buck. I knew right there that I didn't want to see him again until I had my buck sticker."

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