Kyle Lockett thought he’d thrown Salinas away until he walked back to the trailer.
It was July 23, 2006, and Lockett and header Wade Wheatley had come into the short round at the California Rodeo Salinas high team back with a chance to win the whole thing. Lockett slipped a leg.
“I was kind of bummed that I got a leg in the short go and was back at the rig,” Lockett said. “Then they came and found me and said that I won the all-around.”
With $2,166 in team roping earnings and an entry in the tie-down roping, Lockett had won more than anyone else roping in multiple events—nobody had placed in two—and the all-around championship at one of the biggest old-style traditional rodeos in the country belonged to him. Waiting at the trailer were his parents, Jim and Sharyn, his fiancée, Leigh Garrison, and his daughter, Shayla Jeanne, born 11 days earlier in San Luis Obispo. The buckle traded hands as soon as it got back to the truck.
“It’s been a heck of a week,” Lockett said that day. “I got a healthy little girl, she got to come to her first rodeo and she got her first buckle.”
More Than a Win
At 28, Lockett had nothing left to prove as a heeler. He’d been the 1997 Resistol Rookie Heeler of the Year straight out of high school and roped at seven National Finals Rodeos through 2005 behind headers including Walt Rodman, Jason Stewart, Wheatley and Tee Woolman.
What Salinas proved was something else: that the decision he’d already made—coming off the road after the 2005 NFR to raise a family in Tulare County—didn’t mean the winning was over. “I wasn’t going to be gone for seven, eight months out of the year and not be a part of the family, like I should be,” he said. He married Leigh that Oct. 7, and while she worked as a labor-and-delivery nurse, Lockett trained horses, hauled kids and roped at California circuit rodeos on weekends.
The Road Back to the NFR
The bet paid off in a way almost nobody saw coming. In 2019, at 41 and 14 years removed from his last Finals, Lockett won San Angelo with Aaron Tsinigine and RodeoHouston with Ty Blasingame and roped his way to an eighth NFR, finishing ninth in the world.
But the Salinas buckle stayed singular. Twenty years later, it’s still the only one he’s won there—and here’s the part that says the most about what it meant: Nobody in the family has ever put it on.
“I don’t know if anybody’s ever wore it,” Lockett said. “I might’ve wore it when I got married, maybe.”
He still enters Salinas every year he can. “For one, it’s a great spot to be for a week, and it’s a great rodeo,” he said. “It’s a blast.” This July, he placed second in the first round and was 40.6 seconds on four steers—a time that, by his reckoning, had never before failed to make the short round there. It didn’t.
The Life Behind the Buckle
Lockett and Leigh have six kids now. Shayla, the newborn at the trailer, is about to start her third year at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo—the same town where she was born 11 days before her dad’s biggest win—where she’s college rodeoing alongside her sister Georgia, who joins her this fall. Lockett, meanwhile, is staying home, working heifers, hitting a few ropings with the kids and a couple of circuit rodeos, with maybe Pendleton in the fall.
The buckle stays put away. The life it validated is the thing on display.
—TRJ—