White-tailed bucks killed by Chad Richardson of Fouke and Zack Watts of Mena won Best of Show honors at the Arkansas Big Buck Classic on Sunday at Barton Coliseum in Little Rock.
One of the nation's largest deer hunting expos, the Big Buck Classic was canceled in 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic. This year's event honored deer killed during the 2020-21 and 2021-22 deer seasons in separate categories. The 2021 and 2022 winners received identical trophies and prize packages, including Tracker side-by-side UTVs provided by Bradford Marine.
Richardson killed his buck with a muzzleloading rifle on Oct. 23. The buck appeared near the end of legal shooting light. It was warm, and mosquitoes swarmed, but Richardson said his Thermacell kept them at bay.
"I saw him at about 200 yards," Richardson said. "I watched him the whole time with binoculars. I was about to have a heart attack. He was bobbing and weaving in and out of the grass. I kept losing him in the grass. I kept praying for him to keep coming, and right there in the last, he showed up in the feed about 50 yards away."
Richardson shot his deer at close range. He used a CVA Wolf muzzleloader with a Powerbelt hollow point bummer and 150 grains of Pyrodex pellets.
"I put the hammer on him," Richardson said.
Richardson said his buck was about 5 1/2 years old. He said his buck's rack looked identical to its proportions in 2020, but it gained considerably more mass in the main beams in 2021. He said he will display the buck on a pedestal mount beside his fireplace.
Watts killed his buck on Nov. 14, 2020, in the Ouachita Mountains of Pope County. He said he was hunting with a group that was getting ready to run a pack of deer hounds, but the dogs were still in their boxes when Watts' buck appeared.
"They were getting ready to let the dogs out," Watts said. "I got off my four-wheeler waiting for the dogs to go off, and he came up out of a holler kind of shaking his head. He stopped broadside looking at me in daylight, and I shot him."
Watts said nobody in his circle knew the buck existed until a few days earlier. A friend killed a big buck that he entered in the Big Buck Classic, and Watts said the bigger buck was running with it.
Watts shot the buck at about 50 yards with a rifle chambered in 6.5mm Creedmoor.
Five bucks in the show qualified for the Boone and Crockett All-Time Awards book. A typical rack requires a minimum score of 170 to qualify for the Boone and Crockett book, and a non-typical rack requires a minimum score of 195. The buck that exceeds the minimum by the largest margin is named the show winner.
Watts' non-typical was the larger of the two 2020 qualifiers with a score of 196 2/8. Richardson's buck outpointed two other Boone and Crockett qualifiers with a score of 172 0/8.
Additional Boone and Crockett qualifiers from the 2021 class included a typical buck killed by Aubrey Davidson of Marvell that scored 171 3/8, and a typical buck killed by Jeff Teeter of Grady that scored 170 0/8.
The other Boone and Crockett qualifier from the 2020 class was a 170 7/8 typical killed by Colby Evans of Almyra.