match ropins

at one time match ropins were a populer event. ill bet x amount i can out rope ya! ive seen as many as 3 or 4 teams get a match up  for as little as 50 a man, then winner take all. it takes a whole different mind set to do that kind of ropin. at a rodeo you rope each go round as fast as you can, at a jackpot you try to rope all your cattle and win the average. a match ropin, you just rope a little better than the other guy, but not the absolute best you can.  you got to pay attention to what the other team is doin, what your doin and know the cattle by their first names!! there has been a lot of match ropins in the calf roping world, still a popular deal in states where they rope lots of calves.  team ropin matches have kinda fallin out of favour in arizona,  i dont realy know why, could be a lot of reasons. 
    the first match ropin i competed in was in tucson. my partner was a old gambler, roper pool player and down ride scoundrel, but he knew how to match rope. we won the match and if i would have known what we were ropin for i might have choked, but  A D didnt tell me. but what he did on each steer was tell me what the steer was, and where to rope him and how to handle him.  we won by just a few tenths of a second. but we could have won by more, but we didnt show them all we had. kinda like hustlin pool.  we matched those boys a couple more times before they give up. if we had shown every card we had all we would have got was the first match. plus no one else  would have matched us. i didnt know all this at the time we did this but learned as we went along.
       years later we belonged to a ropin club and some of the members thought it would be neat if we had a match ropin after the sat nite ropin.  after about 6 weeks of this those same fellers was wanting to ban the matches.  seems i had a partner who was a pretty slick header and could get the rope out of hand pretty quick, but he didnt think about what was down the road. the last match we had was a two header. there were 4 teams entered, i dont remember the amount we roped for, wasnt a lot, 25 a man maybe.  i had at the time a little blue roan heel horse who was as quick as i ever rode with a sudden stop. judd turned our first steer just across the line and the clock stopped at 5 flat.  the other teams were in the 7 seven second range, so i knew we had a lot of leeway. but judd didnt see it that way, second steer he turned even quicker, i tracked the steer 4 jumps and roped him by two feet. 6 flat!! at that time that was a arena record for that arena. the rest of the teams  went long and we beat them by a big margin. by the next ropin they had banned matches. dont get me wrong, i lost a lot of match ropins, probably as many as i  won, but i never complained about some one ropin better than me, i just went home and practiced harder.  or tried to make my horse better. not so today, everyone is handicaped, so those who dont want to work as hard as some one else still has a chance to win his money back. i hate whinners and  those with weak hearts.