Mike Speaker was modest and low-key when acknowledging the national publicity recently bestowed on him for bagging the largest scored buck ever recorded in Northwestern Pennsylvania’s history.
The story of Speaker’s 21-point non-typical buck, harvested in the 2015 rifle season in the Bradford Township area of McKean County, was chronicled in the December/January 2017 edition of North American Whitetail magazine. The author, Steve Sorensen, a national outdoor writer, is a regular contributor to the sports pages of The Bradford Era and Olean (N.Y.) Times Herald. Stories and photos regarding Speaker’s buck initially appeared in both local publications following the 2015 hunt.
The North American Whitetail article, which leads with Speaker’s photo and story, also features another large non-typical buck taken by Brice Jenney in Bradford County, some 130 miles away.
Speaker said Sorensen visited him in Bradford a few months ago to start piecing the story together. Speaker said his story also had appeared in the October issue of Rack Magazine, an official publication of Buckmasters Whitetail Trophy Records.
“He came to the house after I got the mount back and took pictures,” Speaker said of Sorensen. “He actually weighed it for all the official scoring to get done through Boone and Crockett.”
According to Sorensen, the Speaker buck “tallied 197 4/8 inches gross, netting 193 ⅛. That surpasses Lawrence Leggett’s 1943 McKean County record by 8 inches.”
Sorensen’s article also praised a pair of drop tines on the Speaker buck “that would be impressive anywhere in North America.”
Speaker acknowledged there was national buzz that followed him after bagging the buck, but said the publicity began to die off several months ago.
“There’s been a new season passed and big bucks killed again, and the writers have all moved on to other deer,” he said dismissively.
Speaker also noted that he’s not sure how the nickname “Goliath” originated for his deer, as he had never heard of the moniker before he bagged the animal.
As for this year’s hunt, Speaker said he harvested an eight-point this year, that was “nothing to brag about.”
His daughter, Rachel, who had been hunting with him the day of the 2015 hunt and had bagged her own buck, wasn’t able to hunt this season. A pharmacy student at the University of Findlay in Ohio, she was just too busy.
“She still in school and it’s her last year,” he explained.
As for Sorensen’s assertion that the antler restrictions set in place in 2002 have improved buck age structure, with more mature bucks harvested, Speaker is in agreement.
“In the past few years we’ve started to see big deer because of the management system,” he said. “I definitely believe it’s worked (antler restriction), absolutely it’s working.”
Speaker said he doesn’t believe, however, that bagging the magnificent buck will pull large numbers of hunters back to the area, as experienced in the past, “unless the deer population explodes and I don’t see that happening.”
