By Caleb McClain
I grew up a normal suburban American kid, and baseball and fishing were all I looked forward to in the warm months. I don’t even remember the first time I emulated the Bambino by pointing my bat out towards centerfield, but I probably did it every time we had a pick-up game or batting practice going on. Every kid did. “The Sandlot” perfectly captured the average American boy’s intrigue with Babe Ruth better than I could ever express, but it wasn’t until later in life that I truly grew to appreciate baseball’s greatest player.
George Herman “Babe” Ruth was a personality larger than life. He grew up the son of a bartender, and he began drinking beer and chewing tobacco well before adolescence. The man never ran out of booze, even during prohibition, when he was said to have had a “bootlegger in every town.” The man drove sleek cars like Lincoln Continentals, and the ladies hung all over him. He gambled, he argued, he was arrogant, he ate whatever he wanted to, and he fought. As I said, he had a big personality. To top it all off, he hunted and fished like it was going out of style.
It is believed that somewhere around 1916, he was invited on his first hunt, which led him to being bitten by the outdoors bug for the rest of his life. After that, he chased every animal he could with rifles and shotguns. If it was spring training in Florida, he would be found fishing the coast. When he traveled for baseball games in the summer, he would wet a line in any body of water he could.
Babe Ruth, Ultimate Sportsman
Finally, once the off-season arrived, it was hunting time. Deer, ducks, quail, turkey… It did not matter to Babe what he hunted, so long as he was hunting. When the seasons ended, he would break out his auger and start ice fishing. Somehow, even with a regular season schedule of 150 games per year, he managed to hunt and fish more than any of us pencil pushers and desk jockeys can find the time to today.
In 1935, he retired, allowing him much more time to pursue his outdoor activities. In the fall of 1940, he shot a heavy whitetail buck, his biggest to date, on a hunt in New Brunswick. For the final eight years of his life, he was never able to beat that buck. In 1948, the same year he died, his taxidermist entered the buck into a Boone and Crockett competition, where it won second place in 1949. From the records we have, it was a typical nine-point with each of the main beams being over 26 inches long, and the inside spread was over 18 inches. The bases measured five and six inches, a trophy by any measure.
Unfortunately, for the Colossus of Clout, in the following year the Boone and Crockett Club changed the official scoring system, and the book was never re-scored. To this day, no one knows what the official measurements of the buck were.
