Mega-Mass Buck wins Bag-A-Buck contest

November winner from Williamsburg County

Mac Burgess bought himself a birthday present when he turned 34 last Oct. 21 – a Remington Model 700 rifle chambered for .270. It was a gift that kept on giving.

On Nov. 13, Burgess, an assistant principal at an elementary school in his hometown of Andrews, killed a heavy-horned, 192-pound buck with his “birthday gun.”

And the gift kept on giving at the end of November, when Burgess’ entry was drawn as the winner of South Carolina Sportsman’s Bag-A-Buck Contest presented by Rivers West.

For winning the November contest, Burgess will receive a prize package that includes a camping blanket from River’s West, a South Carolina Sportsman T-shirt and window decal, a copy of Cooking on the Wild Side by Ty Conti, the magazine’s publisher, as well as a Tink’s Scent Kit, Realtree caps and Monster Buck DVDs and a Plano storage box.

Burgess remains eligible, along with every other entrant, for the grand-prize package, which includes a complete set of River’s West hunting clothes, a Leopold scope, a compound bow package from Angler’s Sporting Goods in Monks Corner and Irby Street Sporting Goods in Florence, plus a 2-day hunting trip to The Territories, a Saluda River preserve near Ninety Six. The grand-prize winner will be drawn in time to be presented at the Palmetto Sportsman’s Classic next March.

The morning of his successful hunt, Burgess was about to get down from his stand when he saw the big buck enter a soybean field and run a handful of does off a corn pile where they were feeding. It didn’t take him long to squeeze the trigger and drop the buck at 210 yards.

“They weren’t ready for the rut, and he just came in and ran ‘em off the cornpile,” Burgess said. “I had been using a Primos bleat can. Maybe he heard that; I don’t know.”

What Burgess knew was that the buck was a unique one. It carried a 4×5 main-frame rack with a handful of sticker points, two extremely long brow tines – “The guy at Black Mingo Deer Processing said they were the longest brow tines he’d ever seen,” Burgess said – and some massive bases, one of which measured eight inches in circumference, earning the nickname of the “Mega-Mass Buck.”