CANADIAN farmer Milo Hanson tried to come up with a reasonable explanation as to why Traverse City hunter Mitch Rompola signed a legal agreement that he no longer would claim to have killed the world-record whitetail deer.


"I don't know why he would sign that agreement unless the deer is a fake," Hanson, the real record-holder, said Wednesday. "I know I would never have signed something like that. If it was me, I'd have just sent my $25 in to Boone & Crockett, had the deer entered in the books, and been done with it."


By signing the agreement, Rompola staved off a threatened lawsuit by Hanson and his partner, Arkansas businessman John Butler, who say their earnings from Hanson's record buck have been compromised by Rompola's unsubstantiated claims.


It was Nov. 13, 1998, when Rompola killed in Grand Traverse County what he later said was a deer that scored 216 5/8 on the Boone & Crockett scale, three inches bigger than the Boone & Crockett-record whitetail Hanson killed in Saskatchewan five years earlier.


A reporter for Rompola's hometown paper, the Traverse City Record Eagle, and I were the first to report it a few days later, and when hunters around the country learned of the claim through those newspapers' Internet web sites, the explosion of interest was incredible.


And therein lies the real root of Rompola's problem: He just never realized how big this thing was going to be.


Rompola dumbfounded the hunting world by announcing that he was angry at B&C and wasn't going to enter the deer in the books. During the ensuing months, he also claimed that four scorers flew into the state to measure the deer secretly, then dropped that claim and had it scored by three Michigan measurers, who said it indeed surpassed Hanson's record.


But they only saw the rack mounted, and Rompola refused to allow it to be X-rayed, although by then several experts were saying it was a fake, cobbled together from bits of other racks or plastic resins. And Rompola still didn't submit to Boone & Crockett.


He continued to make bizarre and contradictory statements and refused to talk to reporters. But while he suddenly announced that he never claimed it was a world record (a statement that wasn't true), he still said it outscored Hanson's deer by three inches, and the photo of "the Rompola Buck" was being used to sell everything from bows to deer scents.


Hanson wasn't going to do anything about Rompola's claims until the next B&C panel scoring in 2001, when the top deer from the previous three years will be measured and officially accepted as records.


"I thought he might be waiting until the panel score, and then was going to come forward and say, 'Here's the world record,' so I was going to kind of wait and see," Hanson said.


But Hanson's beautiful whitetail mount earns a fair amount of money for him and Butler through outdoors shows, reproductions, caps and the like. Butler became upset when Rompola's claims started to affect them financially.


"Some shows were kind of reluctant to book us," Hanson said. "They said they figured the Rompola buck would be coming down the road pretty soon. And we had just come out with nice prints of our deer, and here they were selling pictures of Rompola's buck."


So Butler, a no-nonsense guy, got a lawyer and called Rompola's bluff. And Rompola folded.


The agreement says Rompola won't claim his deer is a world record and won't try to enter it with B&C unless somebody kills one bigger than Hanson's. That last bit is legal language required, because in that case, Hanson's deer wouldn't be the record and he wouldn't have anything to complain about.


The agreement may have staved off a suit but otherwise won't make life much easier for Rompola.


Craig Calderone, owner of the Whitetail Hall of Fame Museum in Grass Lake and a longtime Rompola doubter and critic, said: "What do you say about something like this? Of course it says the antlers are a fake. And the bigger question is, what does this say about all those other record deer he claims to have killed over the years?"


Publicity about the world record already had caused people to analyze Rompola's claims to have killed anywhere from 12 to 21 record-book deer (he entered only a dozen but says he killed nine more) over a 20-year period in a part of northern Michigan where no one else has killed more than one (and where deer that score 150 are big).


A mathematical analysis of those claims by a statistician found them to be incredibly implausible.


And when I looked at Rompola's claims to have killed his first deer with a bow at age 9 (and with a field point) and to have killed the Missouri record non-typical with a bow at 14, they looked very shaky. In one instance, he claimed to have used a broadhead that wasn't sold until a couple of years later.


Oh, there still will be a few people who will claim Rompola is simply a martyr to never-identified powerful "interests," or that he's just an independent good ol' boy who wouldn't bow to the powers-that-be.


And there also are people who believe the U.S. Air Force has the bodies of little green men from Mars stashed in a hanger somewhere in the desert, and that the world was going to end Jan. 1, 2000.


But when I looked this morning, we were all still around.