Records are made to be broken. That’s an old cliché, not a fact.

There’s no accurate number of how many people have hunted deer on public land in this state over the past five decades. It’s likely to be in the millions. Regardless, the big buck record that every public land hunter dreams of breaking turned 50 years old last week. It went by virtually unnoticed.

The name Willie Martin is recognized by only those who study Alabama’s big bucks. The late Woodville resident (he died in 1996) was hunting the Black-Warrior Wildlife Management Area in the Bankhead National Forest on Nov.10, 1973. The buck he took that day remains as the largest typical-scoring buck ever recorded from public land in this state. It scored 203 1/8 typical inches and weighed an incredible 190-pounds field-dressed. Its actual weight was close to pushing 250 pounds.

The story of the Martin’s record buck seems hard to comprehend these days. Keep in mind that there was no social media, no Alabama Whitetails Records book, or the effort of documenting big bucks that you’ll find today. Had it not been for the efforts of Tanner’s Ed Jones to find Alabama’s forgotten bucks, Martin’s buck may have just gone unnoticed.

“When Dennis Campbell started putting together the first edition of the Alabama Whitetails Records book, I traveled north Alabama looking for big buck mounts that people told me about,” Jones said this week. “I heard that Willie Martin had taken a really big buck on the Black Warrior WMA in the early 1970s, so I went to his house and knocked on his door.”