His name is Keith Szablewski, but he’s called Ski.
Much to his chagrin, the Johnston City man spent Illinois’ 2018 firearms opener on the job. He didn’t manage to take his year-old 20 gauge afield until 2:30 p.m. on the second of the three-day season.
Ski went with his buddy, Steve Malroy, to a private 20-acre tract in Williamson County. His ladder stand was near the corner of a field flanked by a thicket and creek bottom, not too far from a national waterfowl refuge.
He hoped hunting pressure on the public ground might push deer onto theirs. And to sweeten the deal, he used Tink’s #69. Oh, and he prayed.
One or the other, or all three, worked.
Two hours into his vigil, when Ski first spotted a giant whitetail approaching through thick cover, he had no shot. He had to wait for it to step into a small window – so small only its neck was visible.
He’d seen only the left side of the deer’s rack.
“Because I had confidence in my Rossi, I felt certain that if I aimed for the center of the deer’s neck, the bullet wouldn’t pass through any brush,” he told John Phillips, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “When I squeezed the trigger, the animal took about six steps and fell.”
A half-hour later, Ski got down and walked over to the animal.
“I got eat up by that thicket as I plowed through it,” he said. “When I finally got up to my deer, I thought, Oh, my gosh. He’s really big!”
That was an understatement.
A conservation officer estimated Ski’s buck was at least 8 years old, probably weighing between 250 and 275 pounds on the hoof. It was the novice hunter’s third deer in four years of hunting them.
As mainstream journalists are wont to do every year, newspapers and their websites widely reported the “51-pointer” might be a new world record. Few reporters, however, understand how antlers are scored and that inches, not point count, are tabulated.
Ski doesn’t really care, however, because he wasn’t looking at numbers when he squeezed the trigger. The antlers have not been officially measured as of this writing, but a date has been set.
— Read Recent Blog! Wide Thing: The buck scores 182 3/8 on the BTR scale, thanks largely to its 32 7/8-inch inside spread.