More than a golfer, Trahan's all about the great outdoors

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D.J. Trahan knows how to do more than chase a white ball around a golf course.

The bull moose was, in a word, "ginormous" -- all 850 pounds of him.

D.J. Trahan had never shot a moose before last fall, so his first kill was certainly memorable. The head is in the process of being mounted and he has more than 350 pounds of meat to share among his friends.

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D.J. Trahan is the defending champion at the Bob Hope Classic this week.

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"I was like 'holey moley,'" Trahan recalled. "It was unreal."

Trahan spent five days hunting in Newfoundland last year during what was his first extended break from the game since his days as a junior golfer. He called being in the Canadian wilderness a "humbling experience."

Closer to his South Carolina home, though, Trahan owns what is essentially his private hunting preserve. He used some of the money he earned for winning last year's Bob Hope Chrysler Classic to buy the property, which came complete with a cabin where he houses his trophies -- the animal heads, that is.

"I try to make myself have to earn my off-the-golf-course pleasures," Trahan said. He is is a conservationist, as well as a hunter, so he plants crops on the land, as well.

"As much as we're doing it to hunt, we're also doing it for the betterment of the wildlife," he explained.

Trahan has only been hunting for about three years. A friend got him hooked, though, and when he's not staring down the sights of a rifle, the Clemson graduate simply loves the peace and quiet of the woods.

He's looking forward to hunting bigger game like elk and caribou, but right now, deer hunting is Trahan's favorite. The biggest one he's killed is an eight-point buck. Trahan also likes to hunt ducks, dove and quail.

"We try to do it all. It's a lot of fun," he said. "I'm a work in progress (as a hunter). ... I joined a skeet shooting club back home. I absolutely love that, too. It's a lot of fun to go out there and just shoot the heck out of a shotgun for a few hours."

When he's not hunting, not surprisingly, Trahan enjoys fishing. He has a boat, and he'll cruise the inland waterways around his Mount Pleasant home looking for trout and redfish. Several times a year, he and his friends go deep-sea fishing.

"I had about an 800-pound marlin one time," Trahan said. "Unfortunately, we didn't get her in the boat, but that's the biggest fish I've ever had on (a line).

"I'm just going to leave it at that because we shed a tear when we broke that fish off. Yeah, we cried. There was about five or six grown men crying."

The marlin, then, was as big - or bigger -- than the moose.

"You don't see fish that size very often," Trahan said, wistfully. "But you can see an 800-pound moose anytime. So it was pretty phenomenal."