Rompola Video
04-21-2004, 06:49 AM
#51
Nontypical Buck
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Virginia / West Virginia
Posts: 4,906
RE: Rompola Video
By human nature, humans (especially men) always want to think we are right. If someone calls you a liar....you immediately want to defend yourself, and prove that you are not. By his actions....IMO he has proven he IS a liar. He didn't allow the skull to be x-rayed, and then when confronted with a "put up or shut up" he signed on the dotted line, and shut up.
No matter what anyone says....way too many things point towards "fake".
And yes, many of his other kills have been in question too. Who's to say he hasn't made a carreer out of manufacturing record book deer? I'd love for him to step up and say "x-ray all my deer". Like Silent said, I'd gladly eat crow, and give the man all the recognition he deserves.
No matter what anyone says....way too many things point towards "fake".
And yes, many of his other kills have been in question too. Who's to say he hasn't made a carreer out of manufacturing record book deer? I'd love for him to step up and say "x-ray all my deer". Like Silent said, I'd gladly eat crow, and give the man all the recognition he deserves.
04-21-2004, 10:54 AM
#52
Nontypical Buck
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Heaven IA USA
Posts: 2,597
RE: Rompola Video
...."Is it real or is it Memorex"...Most of you are probably not old enough to remember that commercial now that we have CDs rather than cassette tapes. The quote does remind me of the Rompola saga.
I am always intrigued by the arguements both for and against the validity of the Rompola buck. I think the little kid inside me wants to believe that it is real. He has always loved adventure stories of make believe, King Kong climbing the Empire State building, Tarzan killing lions and crocodiles with nothing but a knife, and even 'Harry and the Hendersons'. However the adult in me holds the opposite view due to the powers of reason and common sense (what little I have).
What deer hunter was not interested in this story when in broke? It has all the ingedients of a hunter's version of a hit Hollywood movie. A reclusive man of modest resources, who as legend would have it spends all of his time in the woods scouting, planning, and analyzing ways and means to kill phantom monster bucks. Included in the saga is a buck with a rack so big it would easily eclipse the existing world record with a combination of symmetry, spread, and size; the likes of which have never been heretofore seen. To further add to the plot, this buck lives in an area that holds few world class animals and has only been seen by one man-our hunter hero! He is scoffed at, looked upon as a modern day oddity by many, but his walls are adorned with the heads of record book deer that very few hunters in his area even see....Great stuff eh!
Like most here I have read all of the information I could find on this story and being that I lived in Michigan at the time this all went down, perhaps I even found more than the average person.
Much of the deer related information in the saga I can swallow. I am not bothered by the low lying bloody ears, photos where the color might not be what I think it should, or even the distance between the brow tines. Blood can show up in the strangest of places and photos can be affected by light and so many other things it would make your head spin. As far as the space between the G1s I look at it this way. Assuming of course the rack is real, it is a world record for goodness sakes! Why wouldn't it be different from any other rack ever measured. Mother nature has created many oddities that are just that...odd! Different, unusual, exceptional, uncommon, unimaginable, unique, bizarre, strange, idiosyncratic, weird, and unthinkable, would be just a few of the adjectives that could be used to describe some of the freaky things "old Ma" has made. A larger measurement than normal between two brow tines is no more unusual to me than the fishermen that pull out a 20 foot squid when most of them are about ten times smaller.
So much for the little kid's voice...Here is what I can't buy into.....
I don't know Mitch Rompola so the only assessments I can make about the man are the known facts.
It seems to me that what I hear the most of when ever this is the topic of converstation, is that Mitch is a recluse, he hates publicity and doesn't want to have anything to do with it. Perhaps that is true. But here is something that bothers me about that statement. If he is that type of person, how come I see him on a video, pushing a certain deer call? If I am a recluse that hates any type of publicity it seems to me the last place I would want to be is on a video that is being shipped all over the country. Further, I have seen his picture in a book with his story detailing some of the big bucks he has killed before Rompolagate ever came about. Hardly reclusive behavior.
Another rebuttal I hear is that he is disgruntled with B&C and this is his way of "thumbing his nose" at them. Call me stupid but I can't see it that way. There is no record until certified. Until it would be officially confirmed he isn't "thumbing his nose" at B&C or any other organization. The ONLY thing it does is make him look phony. If you want to get B&C's back up, get the rack officially certified and then say no to their offer. Even a recluse knows that.
Then of course there is the lawsuit. The minute you sign a document like that your credibility is destroyed. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out. It is like hanging a sign around your neck that says fraud in front and fake on the back. Forget the money, forget the publicity you don't want (or secretly do), now your integrity and character are at stake. What is that worth? Wouldn't even the simplest among us fight for that?
That cotton pickin "grown-up" in me always brings rain to a parade. [&:]
I am always intrigued by the arguements both for and against the validity of the Rompola buck. I think the little kid inside me wants to believe that it is real. He has always loved adventure stories of make believe, King Kong climbing the Empire State building, Tarzan killing lions and crocodiles with nothing but a knife, and even 'Harry and the Hendersons'. However the adult in me holds the opposite view due to the powers of reason and common sense (what little I have).
What deer hunter was not interested in this story when in broke? It has all the ingedients of a hunter's version of a hit Hollywood movie. A reclusive man of modest resources, who as legend would have it spends all of his time in the woods scouting, planning, and analyzing ways and means to kill phantom monster bucks. Included in the saga is a buck with a rack so big it would easily eclipse the existing world record with a combination of symmetry, spread, and size; the likes of which have never been heretofore seen. To further add to the plot, this buck lives in an area that holds few world class animals and has only been seen by one man-our hunter hero! He is scoffed at, looked upon as a modern day oddity by many, but his walls are adorned with the heads of record book deer that very few hunters in his area even see....Great stuff eh!
Like most here I have read all of the information I could find on this story and being that I lived in Michigan at the time this all went down, perhaps I even found more than the average person.
Much of the deer related information in the saga I can swallow. I am not bothered by the low lying bloody ears, photos where the color might not be what I think it should, or even the distance between the brow tines. Blood can show up in the strangest of places and photos can be affected by light and so many other things it would make your head spin. As far as the space between the G1s I look at it this way. Assuming of course the rack is real, it is a world record for goodness sakes! Why wouldn't it be different from any other rack ever measured. Mother nature has created many oddities that are just that...odd! Different, unusual, exceptional, uncommon, unimaginable, unique, bizarre, strange, idiosyncratic, weird, and unthinkable, would be just a few of the adjectives that could be used to describe some of the freaky things "old Ma" has made. A larger measurement than normal between two brow tines is no more unusual to me than the fishermen that pull out a 20 foot squid when most of them are about ten times smaller.
So much for the little kid's voice...Here is what I can't buy into.....
I don't know Mitch Rompola so the only assessments I can make about the man are the known facts.
It seems to me that what I hear the most of when ever this is the topic of converstation, is that Mitch is a recluse, he hates publicity and doesn't want to have anything to do with it. Perhaps that is true. But here is something that bothers me about that statement. If he is that type of person, how come I see him on a video, pushing a certain deer call? If I am a recluse that hates any type of publicity it seems to me the last place I would want to be is on a video that is being shipped all over the country. Further, I have seen his picture in a book with his story detailing some of the big bucks he has killed before Rompolagate ever came about. Hardly reclusive behavior.
Another rebuttal I hear is that he is disgruntled with B&C and this is his way of "thumbing his nose" at them. Call me stupid but I can't see it that way. There is no record until certified. Until it would be officially confirmed he isn't "thumbing his nose" at B&C or any other organization. The ONLY thing it does is make him look phony. If you want to get B&C's back up, get the rack officially certified and then say no to their offer. Even a recluse knows that.
Then of course there is the lawsuit. The minute you sign a document like that your credibility is destroyed. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out. It is like hanging a sign around your neck that says fraud in front and fake on the back. Forget the money, forget the publicity you don't want (or secretly do), now your integrity and character are at stake. What is that worth? Wouldn't even the simplest among us fight for that?
That cotton pickin "grown-up" in me always brings rain to a parade. [&:]
04-21-2004, 07:38 PM
#53
Typical Buck
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Stafford Virginia Stafford,Va
Posts: 593
RE: Rompola Video
Posted this before, I dont know if it is real or not but one could be swayed either way. If it is real some have called it a one in a million deer....... NOT EVEN CLOSE.
DO YOU know what an octodecillion is? It's the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 57 zeroes. The reason I know is because of Mitch Rompola and his claim of killing a world-record deer in Grand Traverse County.
North American Hunter magazine did a story on Rompola that includes a mathematical analysis of his claims of killing a batch of record-book whitetails in Grand Traverse County over 31 years.
I listed those deer in a column a few months ago and noted that he seemed to be impossibly successful in killing record-book deer in an area where no one else was able to get more than one. But I didn't go to a statistician to see if we could figure out just how wild those claims were.
North American Hunter did, asking Dr. Steven Wise of James Madison University to calculate the odds of Rompola's claims. The estimates actually are conservative, because they count only deer that Rompola entered in the records of Commemorative Bucks of Michigan, Pope & Young or Boone and Crockett. It didn't include a bunch more (Rompola gave me different figures in different interviews) he says he never entered.
Here are Wise's calculations:
The odds of anyone taking CBM-quality bucks from Grand Traverse County in seven consecutive years are one in 100 trillion, or one in 100,000,000,000,000.
The odds of taking 11 CBM bucks from Grand Traverse in 31 years are one in 7.04 quadrillion, or one in 7,040,000,000,000,000.
The odds of taking four B&C bucks in Grand Traverse County in 17 years are one in 28.2 quintillion, or one in 28,200,000,000,000,000,000.
The odds of killing nine P&Y bucks in Grand Traverse in nine years are 1 in 16.7 quattuordecillion, or 1 in 16,700,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000.
And the odds of killing 13 P&Y deer in Grand Traverse in 31 years is one in 15.6 octodecillion.
That's one in 15,600,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,-000,000.
If you want to put those numbers in perspective, the magazine did some research and found that:
The odds that an airplane will land on you sometime this year are one in 25,000,000.
The odds that you'll get on a plane with a bomb aboard are one in 100,000,000.
The odds that you'll be hit by lightning tomorrow are one in 250,000,000.
Now I want you to look at the number of zeroes that follow the three instances above, then compare them to the number of zeroes in the odds of Rompola's chances of achieving his hunting records.
Each additional zero multiplies the unlikelihood of the event happening by a factor of 10. And Rompola claims to have killed not just 13 record deer there but about 20, which would add so many zeroes to the odds that I'd doubt we could fit them on this page.
Does that make you wonder? And not just about the world-record deer, but about a lot of Rompola's claims.
A column I did about Rompola last month drew enormous reader response. I was inundated with calls, e-mails and faxes, largely because this story draws interest not just from Michiganders but from hunters elsewhere who read the Free Press on the Internet.
I've spent a lot more time than I wanted on this story. I'll tell you straight out that I could never accept Rompola's "world-record" deer without scrutiny that includes an X ray to prove that the rack hasn't been faked. That decision was based largely on numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in Rompola's own story that are only reinforced by North American Hunter's analysis.
For example, Rompola has told friends he had his deer X-rayed to prove it wasn't a fake, although he won't produce the X ray.
The best reply to that came from Dr. E. Kevin Harmon, a dentist and deer hunter from Lafayette, La., who wrote: "In other words, he wanted to prove to himself that he hadn't accidentally shot a fabricated rack that happened to walk by his stand.
Harmon continued sarcastically: "Personally, I always X-ray every buck I take for the same reason. I don't want to be known as an unethical hunter who shoots fabricated racks in the wild, and if I'm ever asked to show any of the X rays, I always say no."
But there are people who still insist on calling or e-mailing to say they believe Rompola because they "feel" he did it. Is it any wonder that con men can sell the Brooklyn Bridge or "psychics" are hustling those 1-900 numbers on late-night TV?
As far as I'm concerned, there is no world-record Rompola deer. Milo Hanson's 213 5/8 buck, shot in 1993, will be the world's top whitetail until someone submits a bigger rack to Boone & Crockett or Pope & Young for any kind of verification they demand.
DO YOU know what an octodecillion is? It's the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 57 zeroes. The reason I know is because of Mitch Rompola and his claim of killing a world-record deer in Grand Traverse County.
North American Hunter magazine did a story on Rompola that includes a mathematical analysis of his claims of killing a batch of record-book whitetails in Grand Traverse County over 31 years.
I listed those deer in a column a few months ago and noted that he seemed to be impossibly successful in killing record-book deer in an area where no one else was able to get more than one. But I didn't go to a statistician to see if we could figure out just how wild those claims were.
North American Hunter did, asking Dr. Steven Wise of James Madison University to calculate the odds of Rompola's claims. The estimates actually are conservative, because they count only deer that Rompola entered in the records of Commemorative Bucks of Michigan, Pope & Young or Boone and Crockett. It didn't include a bunch more (Rompola gave me different figures in different interviews) he says he never entered.
Here are Wise's calculations:
The odds of anyone taking CBM-quality bucks from Grand Traverse County in seven consecutive years are one in 100 trillion, or one in 100,000,000,000,000.
The odds of taking 11 CBM bucks from Grand Traverse in 31 years are one in 7.04 quadrillion, or one in 7,040,000,000,000,000.
The odds of taking four B&C bucks in Grand Traverse County in 17 years are one in 28.2 quintillion, or one in 28,200,000,000,000,000,000.
The odds of killing nine P&Y bucks in Grand Traverse in nine years are 1 in 16.7 quattuordecillion, or 1 in 16,700,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000.
And the odds of killing 13 P&Y deer in Grand Traverse in 31 years is one in 15.6 octodecillion.
That's one in 15,600,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,-000,000.
If you want to put those numbers in perspective, the magazine did some research and found that:
The odds that an airplane will land on you sometime this year are one in 25,000,000.
The odds that you'll get on a plane with a bomb aboard are one in 100,000,000.
The odds that you'll be hit by lightning tomorrow are one in 250,000,000.
Now I want you to look at the number of zeroes that follow the three instances above, then compare them to the number of zeroes in the odds of Rompola's chances of achieving his hunting records.
Each additional zero multiplies the unlikelihood of the event happening by a factor of 10. And Rompola claims to have killed not just 13 record deer there but about 20, which would add so many zeroes to the odds that I'd doubt we could fit them on this page.
Does that make you wonder? And not just about the world-record deer, but about a lot of Rompola's claims.
A column I did about Rompola last month drew enormous reader response. I was inundated with calls, e-mails and faxes, largely because this story draws interest not just from Michiganders but from hunters elsewhere who read the Free Press on the Internet.
I've spent a lot more time than I wanted on this story. I'll tell you straight out that I could never accept Rompola's "world-record" deer without scrutiny that includes an X ray to prove that the rack hasn't been faked. That decision was based largely on numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in Rompola's own story that are only reinforced by North American Hunter's analysis.
For example, Rompola has told friends he had his deer X-rayed to prove it wasn't a fake, although he won't produce the X ray.
The best reply to that came from Dr. E. Kevin Harmon, a dentist and deer hunter from Lafayette, La., who wrote: "In other words, he wanted to prove to himself that he hadn't accidentally shot a fabricated rack that happened to walk by his stand.
Harmon continued sarcastically: "Personally, I always X-ray every buck I take for the same reason. I don't want to be known as an unethical hunter who shoots fabricated racks in the wild, and if I'm ever asked to show any of the X rays, I always say no."
But there are people who still insist on calling or e-mailing to say they believe Rompola because they "feel" he did it. Is it any wonder that con men can sell the Brooklyn Bridge or "psychics" are hustling those 1-900 numbers on late-night TV?
As far as I'm concerned, there is no world-record Rompola deer. Milo Hanson's 213 5/8 buck, shot in 1993, will be the world's top whitetail until someone submits a bigger rack to Boone & Crockett or Pope & Young for any kind of verification they demand.
04-22-2004, 07:03 AM
#55
Giant Nontypical
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Chatsworth IL USA
Posts: 5,012
RE: Rompola Video
And the odds of killing 13 P&Y deer in Grand Traverse in 31 years is one in 15.6 octodecillion.
That's one in 15,600,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,-000,000.
That's one in 15,600,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,-000,000.
04-22-2004, 07:47 AM
#57
Giant Nontypical
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Chatsworth IL USA
Posts: 5,012
RE: Rompola Video
I know DC, but a PY deer don't have to be huge. Almost any area in the country with whitetails will be holding atleast one PY buck in a year. Almost any 3 1/2 year old buck will go P&Y given the correct diet.
If his statement said B&C, I could believe that, but not P&Y.
If his statement said B&C, I could believe that, but not P&Y.
04-22-2004, 09:40 AM
#58
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: East Yapank NY USA
Posts: 3,457
RE: Rompola Video
Almost any 3 1/2 year old buck will go P&Y given the correct diet.
We have some of the best big bucks on the East coast on the Island. I can assure you that many 3.5 yr olds are not Pope around here. Lots of nice 110" mature bucks running around.
Now the Mid-West on the other hand............
04-22-2004, 09:45 AM
#59
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Inverness, MS
Posts: 3,982
RE: Rompola Video
The ole spoiled IL boys......................LOL
You're not kidding!!! I've killed a handefull of 4 1/2 and 5 1/2 old bucks that would not meet the P&Y minimum.
You guys in the midwest REALLY have it good.
I hunt about 30 days a season. If I SEE 2 popes the whole season, I am lucky, much less have them in range.
04-22-2004, 10:35 AM
#60
Giant Nontypical
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Chatsworth IL USA
Posts: 5,012
RE: Rompola Video
OK, so I have it good.
But I did notice that you guys never denied having the P&Y deer in your area!!
I take that back...I know rack does!!
And I don't know Double Creeks hunting & scouting habits, and I am deffinatley not putting you down. But with a whole lot more scouting could you have had opportunities at those deer?
I know I am arguing a whole other point, so forgive me.
I believe my above statement still holds true....
But I did notice that you guys never denied having the P&Y deer in your area!!
I take that back...I know rack does!!
And I don't know Double Creeks hunting & scouting habits, and I am deffinatley not putting you down. But with a whole lot more scouting could you have had opportunities at those deer?
I know I am arguing a whole other point, so forgive me.
I believe my above statement still holds true....
If his statement said B&C, I could believe that, but not P&Y.
