JX2 Team Roping awarded its first-ever Classic Cadillac and single-horse bumper-pull trailer to Abdiel Zamora for winning the high-point title in the #10.5 Slide at the Georgia Big Dawg April 17 in Statesboro, Georgia.

[Read More: Eastern Sensibilities]

Zamora, of Okeechobee, Florida, won fifth in the roping with Garet Young, sixth with Austin Roebuck (plus the short-go fast time) and ninth with Will Springer to take home the 1975 Cadillac and one-horse trailer, plus $10,500 in prize money.

“I’ve given away trucks, Harley Davidsons, everything you can imagine,” Producer John Johnson said. “But I’ve never given away a rig like that. I wanted to give ropers who don’t often have a chance to rope for that kind of stuff something special. It was such a cool rig. Next year I’ve got to come up with something even cooler.”

Full Results from the NTRL/WSTR Qualifier: Global Handicaps

Johnson even tried his best to buy the rig back to keep, but Zamora wouldn’t sell it. Zamora gave the rig to his mother, who was born the same year the Cadillac was built.

“When I was still in high school, we didn’t have a truck to drive from Florida to Wyoming for the National High School Finals Rodeo,” Zamora, now 22, said. “About a month before, I won a truck, and we drove it to Wyoming and I won the NHSFR in the calf roping. After that, I let my parents drive the truck. Now my dad has that truck, my mom has the Cadillac and I have my little work car.”

Zamora, a father to a 9-month-old daughter Catalina, works on the Adams Ranch in Fort Pierce, Florida, and he made the five-hour drive with his boss Billy Adams to Statesboro.

“It had been a while since we’d both gone to a roping like that, because we don’t get to go as much as we like,” Zamora said. “I told him I probably wasn’t going to be riding back with him because I was going to win that car. How everything worked out, God is watching all the time. You do right, and good things come your way without stressing much about it.”

Zamora won the rig on the same horse he won the National High School Finals Rodeo aboard in the calf roping, a gelding he calls Grumpy.

“The cool thing about that horse is we bred him and raised him,” Zamora said. “He’s not the best horse, but he’s just a winner and I believe in that. He’s cut out to win. I used to not think much about it, but whenever I’m riding that horse, I can feel it in him. He gets in a game mode. Some horses get to a roping and act a fool but he’s the opposite. He’s all business. He’s just a gelding, we should have kept him a stud.” TRJ