About: Ted

LAS VEGAS – In a couple of months Jurnee Jarrett will turn 3 years old, but she wants everyone to know she can do big-girl stuff. The biggest thing she’s doing in Sin City this week is keep her daddy, tie-down roper Ryan Jarrett, content through each day as he prepares to compete at his 13th National Finals Rodeo, his 14th qualification – he also qualified in steer wrestling in his inaugural run in 2005, the same year he won the all-around world championship. “It’s tough,” said Jarrett, 37, originally from Summerville, Georgia, but now living in Comanche, Oklahoma, with Jurnee and his wife, Shy-Anne. “The first night, I thought, ‘Heck yeah.’ It’s gone downhill since then. I didn’t make a great run tonight by no means, and I just got lucky that I placed. I will take it.” Yes, he will. He stopped the clock in 8.3 seconds to finish in a tie for fourth place in Wednesday’s seventh round, pocketing $9,144. It’s just his first paycheck since the opening round, when he finished third. In all, he has earned $35,255 in eight days. It’s not bad, but it’s not what he came here to do. No matter what happens inside the Thomas & Mack Center, he has a small section of people that are always in his corner. Jurnee has a wide grin and a big hug for daddy when he makes his way from the arena floor to the seating area inside the longtime home of the NFR. “I focus on the roping some throughout the day, but we are busy doing stuff with her and enjoying it,” he said. “It has been fun.” She’s growing up a cowgirl much like her mom, who went to college on a rodeo scholarship and is still a barrel racer. “She’s getting to the point she will help you,” Jarrett said of his daughter. “She is figuring out she wants to feed and give horses hay and put them in the stalls.” It’s for her and his wife that he wants to have a little better luck at the National Finals Rodeo. This is his primary business, and he hopes to do well every year to provide for his family. So far this year, he’s pocketed $127,188. That’s great, but considering the expenses that come on the rodeo trail, it’s not a great profit.   “I just can’t get tapped off,” he said. “I’ve been late at the barrier. Usually, I can get pretty close to the barrier out here and feel confident. I’ve just been a little late. I’d take a chance a reach a little bit, missing. I roped a leg one night. Just one thing, then 10 more. “You just have to think about, ‘I’m ready for tomorrow night.’ He’s running out of “tomorrow nights.” There are just two rounds remaining in the ProRodeo season. He’s been down this road before. He’s experienced all the highs and lows that come with the sport, especially on its grandest stage. “For 10 nights, you are going to have a little bit of everything thrown at you,” Jarrett said. “There’s nothing like rodeoing in Vegas. The crowd is on top of you, and they are way into it. It’s just a different feeling.”

LAS VEGAS – Clayton Biglow doesn’t have to worry about his place in ProRodeo history. At just 25 years old, he’s a six-time National Finals Rodeo qualifier. He’s not had the run in Las Vegas that he’d like, but he keeps plugging along. That, in an essence, might be the definition of a cowboy. Sometimes the horse doesn’t cooperate or the steer is elusive. In rodeo, cowboys make a living eight seconds at a time. For bareback riders, it’s a rough-and-tumble game that features a roller coaster of results and emotions. Biglow won the 2019 bareback riding world championship in record-setting fashion. He rode 10 horses for a cumulative score of 886.5 points to set a new standard. He also earned nearly $245,000 in a week and a half in the Nevada desert. On Wednesday night in Las Vegas, he rode Calgary Stampede’s Yippee Kibitz for 86 points to finish in a tie for fourth place in the seventh round. That was worth $9,144, and it pushed his NFR earnings to $29,739. He had earned $110,000 by this point two years ago in that magical campaign. But rodeo is a humbling sport. In a short span of time, a cowboy can be riding all highs that come with the sport, then see the underside of the horse. But none of that has bothered Biglow of Clements, California. It’s all part of the game he plays. Still, he’s fifth in the world standings with $171,743 in season earnings. The best part for him is that there are three nights remaining in this year’s NFR, meaning he has three more opportunities to cash in. He’s won at least one round in each of his five previous trips to the championship, so the odds are in his favor to continue that at some point this week.

LAS VEGAS – Not everyone clocks in to work the way Jess Pope does. Most blue-collar workers punch a time clock, labor for eight hours and collect a paycheck at the end of the week. Pope rides bucking horses, and he takes his job seriously. He’s competing this week at the National Finals Rodeo as one of the elite bareback riders in ProRodeo, and he’s doing very well. Pope has placed in six of the first seven rounds, including three go-round wins. He is No. 1 in the seven-ride aggregate with a cumulative score of 615 points, and he’s pocketed just shy of $130,000. That’s a heck of a payday for a week of work in the Nevada desert. “There are 15 guys here that ride bucking horses outstanding,” said Pope of Waverly, Kansas. “My job is to show up every day and take it one at a time. That’s what I’ve done. It’s a separate rodeo all 10 nights. Tomorrow I’ll show up for one, and once it’s over, it’s over. I’m excited to see what the rest of the week is going to bring and see what happens.” What has happened so far has been magnificent. On Wednesday night, he rode J Bar J’s All Pink for 88.5 points to win the seventh round and collect $26,997. He has pushed his 2021 annual salary to $239,913 and is second in the world standings. He trails the leader, five-time champ Kaycee Feild, by just $11,550. “I was really excited to have that horse,” Pope said. “She used to be a TV-penner, so I knew she was going to be really good for this round. I was tickled pink to have her.” The “TV Pen” features the most electric bucking horses in rodeo, and it’s dubbed that way because of how the NFR was broadcast years ago – it was only shown during the 10th round. The TV Pen bucks in the fifth and 10th rounds still. “These horses were the buckers,” he said. “Our pens are so close together, and they dang sure buck. There are a couple in there you can consider eliminators. Our TV Pen is pretty much buckers that get a little more up in the air.” Pope won the aggregate title a year ago during the championship’s one year in Arlington, Texas, because of COVID restrictions in Nevada. While he’s a two-time qualifier, this is his first venture to the NFR in Las Vegas. “I’ve had a lot of fun,” Pope said. “Texas is a whole lot different than Vegas. There is a whole lot more electricity. It is compact and it is fast. I really like it. It doesn’t give me much time to think about what is actually happening; you just have to react to it. “There are 17,000 people in the stands that pay a ticket to get in here; I want to make sure they get the best show that they possibly can.”   He takes a blue-collar work ethic with him in the arena, but he also recognizes the showmanship that happens when big-time bucking horses are matched with the world’s greatest bronc busters.

LAS VEGAS – It may have taken three rounds, by Wyatt Casper has found his comfort zone in Sin City. He’s put together four solid rides in a row, placing in three of them and just missing out on payday on Night 6. He rode Big Bend’s Broken Camp for 89 points to win Wednesday’s seventh round of the National Finals Rodeo to collect just shy of $27,000. “I talked to my traveling partner, Jake Clark, about him,” Casper said, noting that Clark lined out the rein measurement that fit the horse. “He said (the bronc) was going to feel awesome, and he wasn’t lying. I thought he was a little stronger than what Jake put on. Every jump coming around there, he was just getting stronger. I just lifted on my rein a little harder, and it worked out good.” It’s bronc riding at the most basic level, but Casper and others who have qualified for ProRodeo’s grand finale have perfected it. Lifting on the bronc rein helps the cowboy make a better spur stroke, starting over the breaks of the horse’s shoulders and back to the cantle of the saddle while in rhythm with the horse. “It all goes hand to hand,” he said. “I think bronc riding is a real basic sport. It might not look that way, but the mental side of it is. I just try to get a good start on every horse I can: Two jumps, spur out and never miss a lick. I feel like that helped me out a bunch.” It goes with his training, first at the Deke Latham Memorial Bronc Riding School in Goodwell, Oklahoma, as a youngster, then while attending Clarendon (Texas) College while under the training of rodeo coach Bret Franks, a three-time NFR qualifier. “They all drilled that into my head,” said Casper, who was living in the Oklahoma Panhandle town of Balko as a youngster but has since moved to Miami, Texas. “When I was in high school, I’d go over to Goodwell and practice with (the Oklahoma Panhandle State University rodeo team). I was over there a bunch.” Robert Etbauer, a two-time world champion, is the coach at Panhandle State. Even though Casper didn’t attend college there, he learned a great deal at those practices. “I think Robert says if you fall off, it’s probably because you weren’t lifting hard enough,” Casper said. “Maybe that’s what I wasn’t doing earlier in the week. Finally, thank goodness, I got it figured out.”   He has pocketed $62,688 in seven nights in the Nevada desert and pushed his season earnings to $147,635. He sits seventh in the world standings, but there are three nights remaining in the ProRodeo season, and he has his eyes on the prize. “It’s been good,” he said. “I’m just trying to get as much money out of here as I can, get a little nest egg to go back to Texas with.”

LAS VEGAS – Slowly but surely, bareback rider Richmond Champion is getting to where he wants. He just wanted to do it a bit faster. After all, the National Finals Rodeo has a payout of more than $10 million, and he wanted his fair share of it. “I’ve just been building,” said Champion, 28, a seven-time NFR qualifier from Stevensville, Montana. “I feel really good. My body feels good. They just need to keep putting good horses under me. I’ve been happy with all my rides so far, so that’s a good thing. I’ll just keep plugging away. There are three rounds left, and there’s a lot of money left out there.” He collected another bit of cash with an 87-point ride on Hi Lo Pro Rodeo’s Wilson Sanchez to finish third in Wednesday’s seventh go-round. He pocketed $16,111 and moved his NFR payday to $57,136. He is eighth in the world standings with $156,081 in earnings. “It is my third time on her here,” Champion said of Wilson Sanchez. “It’s kind of funny: The last three rounds in a row, I’ve drawn my third trip at the NFR on all three of them. I was equally excited for all of them. “Wilson Sanchez had a better trip than we’ve ever had. When I went out there and put my rigging on, she was pretty amped up and jittery, and I was like, ‘OK, she might really do it today.’ Back in the day, she was the one. She was a ‘TV Pen’ horse. I got on her in the 10th round and the fifth round. She’s gotten a little harder as she’s gotten older.” That’s why she’s not mixed with the most electric horses at the NFR and fits more into the “Bucker Pen,” which bucks in the second and seventh rounds. With just three nights remaining in the 2021 ProRodeo season, Champion has worked through the soreness that comes with riding bareback horses for 10 straight nights in December. He’s developed a routine over the years, and that has served him well. “You constantly adapt as the rounds go on,” he said. “You might get sore; you wake up sore in a place you weren’t sore the night before. You’ve just got to pay attention to that and listen to your body. This is probably the best I’ve ever felt out here. “You get whipped back into bareback riding shape, and when they put you on the buckers, they stretch you out a little bit and you’re fine.” He seems fine now, and he has an extra $16 grand to account for that.