ROUND #5

Wrangler National Finals Rodeo (WNFR)
Las Vegas, Nevada
December 5, 2006

Calm After Storm
Now it gets interesting. Five rodeos in the books; five to go. Our Wyoming contestants have been great competitors and each is doing everything possible to win. Steer wrestler Jason Miller knows what to do and how to do it. Luck hasn’t been on his side thus far. He lost his grab last night and took a no time. This is a determined, yet calm, big man who will not give up – that much I can assure you.
It was a stormy Sunday and maddening Monday for Casper team roper Jhett Johnson. First, last night. Sunday is a story that will take some telling. In the Monday performance Jhett and partner had the job done in 3.8 – a time that would have won the round. But a barrier penalty added ten seconds. They still stand a strong fourth in the average nearly 20 seconds up on the next team and only 2.5 seconds out of third.
Jhett’s Sunday trip out is one only he can recount since the rest of us are still scratching our heads. One of the announcers told the crowd that this team roping run appeared as though the animal was working through a “bad acid trip.” Jhett tells it this way: “These steers are a little trashy and untrue. They don’t run the same pattern every time. When my partner went to rope, the steer ducked in front of the heel horse causing my partner to catch nothing but the nose. The steer fell down and when he got up the catch came off the nose. The steer ran up the arena to the front gate left open by the judges. That ran me and the steer into the heel box and then the gate was shut.” Get the picture. A heeler stuck in a box with the steer during the run. No one seems to ever remembering that happening. The box got opened in a few seconds. The steer was roped but it took 31.8 seconds. To say Jhett was displeased would not come close to describing his initial reaction. “Once I calmed down, after the saddle bronc riding, we negotiated with the judges,” he said. Wouldn’t you like to have been a fly on the fence for that discussion? Johnson saw it as potentially making a $40,000 difference in his WNFR and was not going to leave that money on the table. “We looked at the rule book and they decided we could run the extra steer after the rodeo with ten seconds added,” Jhett said. The crowd was on the way home when Jhett and Travis Tryan made their run in five seconds resulting in a :15 second total or more than half off the initial time. Told you it would take awhile.
Let’s run down the rest of Monday for Wyoming. Bobby Welsh of Gillette was one of only five bull riders who made the 8 seconds scoring a 62.5 on Rock Kandy. Since so few succeeded, Bobby got a check for $4,100. “That’s the best 62-point-ride I’ve ever had,” he said. Kelly Timberman won $6,700 in the bareback riding competition. The rest of the Wyoming field finished out of the money.
Dandy From Daniels
A really special part of this years’ WNFR has been seeing and hearing music from some of the great traditionalists of country music to start the evening. We’ve had performances from Randy Travis, Tanya Tucker and last night Charlie Daniels. When he passed by in the hall afterward I thanked Charlie for his help a few years back in recording a special version of “Wyoming on my Mind.” I also expressed my thanks for his support of our great western tradition – rodeo. To which Charlie replied: “When you’re 70 years old you ain’t got much choice but to keep tradition alive.”