This past week my family and I have been watching the national finals rodeo on TV.
There have been some exciting rounds all week long. We root for our favorite cowboys, cowgirls and drool over the best roping and barrel racing horses. We even have some arguments about which one is the best and for what reason. I guess you’d say we armchair quarterback the dickens out of the NFR.
When I was younger I used to pay attention to the breeding/ bloodlines of each of the really good roping and barrel racing horses at the NFR, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve kind of quit that. For every good bred horse out there, there’s also one someone got from the local salebarn. Clay Smith’s great head horse Marty is one example of a grade horse at the NFR. I’m sure there are others, I don’t know about.
One thing about this year’s NFR that I’ll always remember happened outside the rodeo arena. At a buckle presentation after a go round win Hailey Kinsel made a comment to the effect there’s a difference in rodeo horses and barrel horses. She was referring to the ground being slippery, but it seems every arm chair quarterback there is jumped all over her on social media. I think the armchair quarterback club labeled her as an arrogant primadonna.
Hailey Kinsel won the last three rounds and won the barrel racing world championship. When the they interviewed her after winning the world championship I could tell she was trying very hard not to offend anyone with anything she said. I couldn’t help but think she was robbed of her “moment” by all of the negative people and their comments.
She has one of the best barrel racing horses of all time and she has the talent to win at the highest levels of professional rodeo. To all of her critics I have to point out one simple fact, look at the scoreboard.
Theodore Roosevelt said it best, “It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly…who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat.”
My hat’s off to Hailey Kinsel, she won her fourth world championship, and conducted herself with grace and dignity in the face of severe persecution, that’s cowboy right there, or in her case, “cowgirl.”
James Lockhart lives near the Kiamichi mountains in southeast Oklahoma. He fools with horses, cows and writes cowboy stories.
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