a) Situation: On those kinds of deals, the Finals was tough. You had Dustin [Egusquiza] and Levi [Lord], and they started off with a 4.3, and the guys just kept coming with it. I think there were seven clean runs. That takes all the thinking part out of it. You just have to back in there, try to get a good start, throw whenever you think you can and see how things end up.

b) Game Plan: We kind of had an idea of what we had to be to place or if we could try to win it. We were the very last team, so we knew exactly what we needed to do and how we had to try to do it. That’s the part I liked about the whole thing—we were the last team out, so it was all on us. Everything that we wanted to do or didn’t want to do was all on us, it was on no one else.

c) Steer: He was supposed to be pretty good. [Aaron] Tsinigine missed him in an earlier round, but he was good enough. 

d) Throw: Those guys out here, they make you do that kind of stuff naturally. Nowadays you have to rope so fast that a guy has to learn to do that. When it comes time to do it, you’re not trying to think about, ‘Oh, how do I do this?’ The competitive side of it comes to me like, ‘Man, I want to try to beat these guys.’ That part comes out and it just makes you aggressive and makes you throw faster than you normally do and luckily enough it worked.

e) Loop: I was more smiling about the fact that I didn’t throw a very good head loop. It kind of caught the right horn, kind of split the horns a little bit and then went around the left not real clean. At the last minute it goes on, and then Colter heels him, we face, and it didn’t feel like we were fast enough when we looked at the clock and it was 3.8.

Learn roping fundamentals from 10x NFR-qualifier Derrick Begay. Subscribe to Roping.com.

—TRJ—