Points North: The Biggest Buck That Maybe Never Was

October 25, 2024 Interlochen Public Radio

By Interlochen Public Radio

October 25, 2024

By Max Howard

Points North is a biweekly podcast about the land, water and inhabitants of the Great Lakes.

This episode was shared here with permission from Interlochen Public Radio.

A northern Michigan hunter named Mitch Rompola is sitting in a tree stand waiting. When the sun rises, Mitch watches two big bucks spar below him; the deer smash their antlers together violently. But Mitch doesn’t shoot. This isn’t the buck he’s looking for; he’s waiting for a massive whitetail he’s been tracking for three years.

Then suddenly the deer stop sparring and run away. Something even bigger is coming. And then, Mitch sees it – his massive buck.

He pulls back the bowstring and releases an arrow. The arrow strikes. The buck wanders a short distance. Then falls and dies.

“God, I knew he was big,” Mitch said during a video he recorded while recovering the animal. “Look how wide he is. A good size deer too. Holy criminy.”

The buck is so big, people start saying it could shatter the world record for whitetail deer. All Mitch has to do is submit the buck’s score.

But he doesn’t. He just goes silent. And instead of becoming a famous hunter, Mitch Rompola becomes an infamous one.

Credits:
Producer: Max Howard
Host: Dan Wanschura
Editor: Morgan Springer
Additional Editing: Ellie Katz
Music: Blue Dot Sessions, Cell Phone Ring by Jordanielmills from FreeSound

Transcript:
DAN WANSCHURA, HOST: It’s November 1998. A hunter named Mitch Rompola is sitting in a tree stand in northern Michigan waiting to get a deer. It’s early morning, and he’s deep in a swamp. This is how the Detroit Free Press described the day.

When the sun rises, Mitch watches two big bucks spar below him – the deer smashing their antlers together violently. But Mitch doesn’t shoot, this isn’t the buck he’s looking for. He’s waiting for a massive whitetail he’s been tracking for three years.

Then suddenly the deer stop sparring and run away. Something even bigger is coming. And then, Mitch sees it – his massive buck. He pulls back the bowstring and releases an arrow. The arrow strikes. The buck wanders a short distance. Then falls and dies. Mitch recorded the recovery of the buck on his video camera.

MITCH ROMPOLA IN A VIDEO RECORDING: Look at him. God, I knew he was big. Look how wide he is. A good size deer too. Holy Criminy.

WANSCHURA: Mitch told the Free Press he thought he just shot the world record for a whitetail buck. This could be life changing for him. Sponsorships could start rolling in. Hunting trade shows could pay thousands of dollars just to exhibit the antlers. And then, of course, there’s the fame that comes with it too.

DENNY GEURINK: Now how can you sleep at night? I mean I was so excited coming up here to see the picture and the film.

WANSCHURA: This is an interview with Mitch from the show Outdoor Adventures with Denny Geurink.

GEURINK: I was really excited in the car. I don’t know how you can sleep at night knowing you’ve got this big buck waiting to dry up, waiting to get scored.

MITCH ROMPOLA: Well, actually, if you look at my eyes right now, I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep. My phone’s been just ringing off the hook. Wednesday I had over 120 calls, yesterday around 90 some we logged. And it’s been very busy.

WANSCHURA: This is Points North, a podcast about the land, water and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. I’m Dan Wanschura.

At this point, Mitch’s trajectory seems obvious. If he has a world record, he’ll become a famous hunter. But instead, he becomes an infamous one. And that happens because one day, Mitch goes silent. Producer Max Howard tries to figure out what happened. That’s right after this.

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MAX HOWARD, BYLINE: The week after Mitch Rompola killed his buck, the Detroit Free Press, one of the biggest newspapers in Michigan, ran a story about it. They printed a picture of Mitch and the buck with a headline saying it could be a world record deer. And that article took off. The story went national. The Free Press said it was their number one story online by a wide margin that year – the same year they were covering Jack Kevorkian, Michigan’s own Dr. Death. Readers had to know – was this a new world record?

I didn’t grow up in a hunting family. I’m actually a vegetarian. But when I heard about the buck this past year – more than twenty years after Mitch shot it – I was hooked. Because there was this unsolved mystery. And I wanted to solve it.

So, let’s start at the beginning, before things got weird. First things first, Mitch had to prove he’d shot a world record buck. I reached out to him for an interview, but I couldn’t find a phone number and my letter went unanswered.

The way to prove it was actually a world record buck, was to submit the antlers to a hunting club – one well-known and respected. A club like Boone and Crockett.

RICHARD P. SMITH: They’re the most prestigious, well-known record keeping– national record keeping organization.

HOWARD: Yeah.

HOWARD: That’s Richard P. Smith, an outdoor writer who’s covered Mitch’s hunting exploits since the 80’s.

Official scorers would take measurements of the antlers and rank them against other high-scoring deer.

SMITH: Most high-scoring deer that qualify for Boone and Crockett are genetic freaks.

HOWARD: But even if Mitch’s buck was one of these genetic freaks, people would have to wait. The club enforced a 60 day waiting period so the antlers could dry. Then hunters could invite official scorers to come take measurements. So, people waited. And anticipation started to build. Richard says Mitch was already a well-known hunter and had a number of Michigan whitetail records under his belt. Mitch was doing news interviews and tons of people were talking about the buck online. But then something strange happened. Richard tried to call Mitch.

SMITH: And I couldn’t get through because he disconnected his phone.

HOWARD: Best guess was, Mitch unlisted his number. There were no more interviews, and Mitch went silent. Finally, though, the waiting period ended. Mitch could now bring the official scorers in to measure the antlers. But that didn’t happen. No official score was announced and it was like the world record deer had vanished.

HOWARD: Do you remember what’s happening? Like once those 60 days passed, and it’s like, people are looking around going, ‘All right, you know, where’s the deer?’

SMITH: Right. There was all kinds of discussion and rumors flying all over the place about the deer. … But there’s a lot of false information and myths and total bullshit.

HOWARD: The rumors grew louder. If Mitch wasn’t getting the buck scored, something might be wrong. Some people thought the buck wasn’t even a buck, but a doe Mitch had sewed antlers onto. Some speculated that the buck wasn’t wild but raised on a farm. Some were even convinced the antlers were completely fake.

SMITH: Talking about the coloration of the antlers being off to show that they were synthetic antlers.

HOWARD: And then people were doubting all of Mitch’s records. He had too many records. He was too good to be true. The Detroit Free Press even interviewed a statistician. The statistician looked at the probability of one man getting so many state records. The verdict? It was, quote, “Incredibly implausible.” But Mitch’s biggest skeptic was a guy named Craig Calderone.

(sound of phone ringing)

CRAIG CALDERONE: Hi, it’s Craig.

HOWARD: Hey Craig, my name is Max Howard… (fade out)

HOWARD: Craig is also a deer hunter. And, back then, he was so sure the antlers on Mitch’s buck had been altered that he wanted them X-rayed. So to put some pressure on Mitch, he publicly offered to pay $5,000 to a charity of Mitch’s choosing if Mitch would just get the antler’s X-rayed. This was a very unusual request.

CALDERONE: Well, originally offered him $5,000 then I doubled it… I just doubled it to $10,000. I should have made it a million. I didn’t even have $10,000 at the time, but I knew it wasn’t real.

HOWARD: Mitch never took Craig up on his offer. But he did do something. Finally, five months after Mitch shot the deer, he brought over three local scorers – one of which was a Boone and Crockett official. And he had them measure the antlers. All three official scorers told the Traverse City Record-Eagle the antlers were real and gave it an incredibly high score. The score they reported to the newspaper would shatter the world record.

SMITH: The only thing that was lacking is Mitch had to sign the score sheet for it to be officially entered in state records.

HOWARD: But Mitch never entered the score.

The biggest challenge to Mitch’s world record claim came around this time too. Even without the official record, Mitch had already made some money off the buck, the Record-Eagle reported. He’d sold some pictures of the buck for small change and was sponsored by a local hunting company.

And that ticked off a guy named Milo Hanson – the whitetail world record holder. In a legal document, Milo claimed he was losing money. So Milo and one of his sponsors took action. They asked Mitch to sign a legal agreement saying he would never enter his buck as a world record. And Mitch signed the agreement.

For the skeptics, this was their confirmation. The buck was a fake. Why else would Mitch sign the agreement? But Richard says that’s not how he sees it at all. He thinks Mitch signed it for different reasons.

SMITH: He didn’t kill the deer to make money. That’s something most people fail to understand. He’s been killing big bucks for many years because that’s a passion of his to outwit mature bucks.

HOWARD: Richard says he thinks when Mitch initially went to the press it was just to share this huge buck with the world. It wasn’t about fame. But then, the world doubted him.

SMITH: It hurt him deeply. He knew what he accomplished. And he thought the world would be excited in sharing his excitement.

HOWARD: So let’s dig into the doubt. The rumors. Were the skeptics’ accusations even possible?

With that question, I reached out to a professional, a local taxidermist named David Hoffman. I met him at his house. He’s got long hair and kind of got a millennial ex-rocker vibe. David looked at pictures of Mitch’s buck that had been posted online, and then we got to business. To start, I wanted to know could you really attach antlers to a doe?

DAVID HOFFMAN: I don’t know, that doesn’t make sense. Because when you look at the size of the body, the size of the animal, you look at the size of that neck, you don’t see does running around with 26 inch necks.

HOWARD: David does think there’s something weird about the buck, though, and how it matches other bucks Mitch has killed.

HOFFMAN: There’s a couple of them that are just so eerily similar to the buck he shot here in Traverse City.

HOWARD: Really?

HOFFMAN: Yeah.

HOWARD: What do– like the facial structure, or the antlers?

HOFFMAN: The antlers. It’s wild how many deer that he shot that are very similar…

HOWARD: Specifically, they’re all pretty wide, which David says is a unique trait. Maybe, David was implying, Mitch swapped one big set of antlers between different bucks. But even if he didn’t do that, David says there are other tactics.

HOFFMAN: Us taxidermists have our little tricks of fixing broken antlers and ways of altering things.

HOWARD: One method is to graft additional parts of antler onto the rack with a metal rod insert and extend the length. David says it’s been done before.

HOFFMAN: Theoretically, if you were to extend the length of an antler, … if you were to X-ray that deer, you would clearly see a piece of rod going through that antler.

HOWARD: So that explains why Craig Calderone wanted the antlers X-rayed. And it answers my question – some of the accusations lobbed at Mitch were possible.

I felt like I was at a dead end, but I kept digging for more evidence, hoping I’d figure out if the buck was actually a world record. And then I came across something. And it involved Joe Rogan.

STEVE RINELLA: Then people are like, just get the buck X-rayed.

JOE ROGAN: What does he say when they’re like, we want to X-ray it?

RINELLA: Well, he first off…

HOWARD: About two years ago, Joe Rogan had this Michigan hunter Steve Rinella on his podcast.

RINELLA: So there’s this guy, Mitch Rompola, is this Michigan bowhunter. And weirdly, my old man knew Mitch Rompola. Because my dad, he used to measure bucks.

HOWARD: You’ll notice how he pronounced Mitch’s last name differently. There are a lot of pronunciations out there, but we went with rahm-POLE-uh because that’s how the people closest to him seem to say it.

Anyway, interest in the Rompola Buck had already been growing, but when the story was on Rogan’s podcast, it added gasoline to the fire. Soon all kinds of creators and podcasters started talking about his story again.

PODCAST A: It seems like everybody now suddenly has discovered the Rompola Buck

PODCAST B: Have you ever heard of the Rompola Buck? The who?

HOWARD: And then in the middle of all this, a scorecard suddenly appeared on the internet.

PODCAST C: If people don’t know what this is they probably will when they see the picture.

HOWARD: It was apparently THE scorecard from Mitch’s record buck. The one that Mitch never turned in. It had what was thought to be the correct score, the right date, and it had a nice Boone and Crockett insignia. People passed the scorecard around different internet forums as a kind of final evidence. The buck was real, they said. So, of course, I had to call Boone and Crockett.

But, when I asked them for scorecards from that time in the late 90s, they couldn’t give me anything that matched the scorecard. The one circulating online was a better match for their most recent scorecard.

So much for that.

I made one last attempt at talking to Mitch this summer. I could never find a phone number for him. I guess it still could be unlisted. And like I said before, I’d sent him a letter but got no response. I’d found an address for a Mitch Rompola on tax records. So I decided to go to that address.

HOWARD: All right so I am outside Mitch Rompola’s house where I think his house is not gonna lie I’m kind of nervous going here. … Hopefully I don’t make ‘em too angry. … All right, going in.

HOWARD: I turn off my recorder and head for the door. At first I’m not sure if anyone lives at the property. It’s rundown. A mossy roof covers the enclosed porch which is filled with old furniture and what seems like trash waiting to be thrown away.

I knock. And wait. A man comes to the door. He kinda looks like Mitch but younger. I introduce myself as a reporter and say I’m looking to interview Mitch. But just as soon as I say this, he tells me “We don’t do interviews anymore.” Then he shuts the door.

When he shut the door, I could viscerally feel how close I’d been to the answer. Almost like I could reach out and grab it – if not for Mitch. And that sums up why I was interested in this story in the first place.

Still, today, all Mitch has to do is just say something or show the antlers, and the last 26 years of speculation would be erased. But by not saying anything, Mitch becomes a legend in his own right. Whether that legend is about a man not owning up to his mistake or if it’s about a man who knew what he accomplished and didn’t need the recognition.

For now, there are extreme skeptics, but there are others who hope the buck is real. Like David Hoffman, the taxidermist.

HOFFMAN: I hope he’s that good. I hope that we are in the midst of like, The Dude.

HOWARD: Yeah, totally.

HOFFMAN: Like, I hope he is, like the Tiger Woods of hunting. He’s just like, the Michael Jordan of hunting

HOWARD: And I hope so too.