Main Street Boon—the cutting-bred sorrel gelding who failed at the discipline he was born and priced for and became one of the most decorated heel horses of his era under Oklahoma’s Joseph Harrison—has died.

He was 22.

Harrison had the gelding euthanized Monday, July 5, 2026, after a partially collapsed trachea left “Street” unable to sweat or breathe well in the heat.

“I kind of looked at it like, if it was me, and I’m laying there on my deathbed and I’m miserable, I hope somebody pulls the plug on me,” Harrison said. “I don’t want to lay there like that. So we made the decision, and it was tough. I ain’t gonna lie to you.”

For a man who has ridden more horses than most ropers ever will, the loss cut deeper than the rest.

“Honestly, we don’t get that many of those in our career,” Harrison, 39, of Marietta, Oklahoma, said. “He’s still probably the best one I’ve ever rode, the most trustworthy. When the chips were down for the biggest money, that’s what I always got on while he was in his prime. So that tells me there’s a lot of horses went through here while he was here, and he was still what I got on for the money.”

Harrison and his wife, Jodi, announced the gelding’s death in a tribute posted to Facebook.

“It’s the day that everyone dreads. Your trusty old steed that’s been with you through the majority of your career, and most of your adult life is tired. He’s been through all the highs and lows with you. You’ve rode him at the jackpots, amateur rodeos and the NFR. He won The American with you. He won you your first AQHA World Championship, all while they told you that it couldn’t be done on a ‘rodeo horse, especially a gelding.’ After it was time to retire him on the big stage, he throttled down and let your wife rope on him. So many memories, we could write a book. We will keep searching for that next ‘Main Street’ but I’m betting we won’t find him. Until we meet again old buddy, I hope the grass is green and knickerdoodles are plentiful. Thank you Street.”

A $100,000 Cutting Prospect Who Didn’t Cut

Street was foaled in 2004 at Phil Rapp’s ranch in Weatherford, Texas, bred by the NCHA Hall of Famer with over $9 million in earnings. He was by Peptoboonsmal and out of Playboys Ruby, by Freckles Playboy—a mare Rapp called the second-all-time-leading producer in the cutting business—with Doc O’Lena on the bottom side through Lenachick.

“He came out red, and we were hoping for a roan,” Rapp told TRJ in 2018. “But we named him Main Street, because you don’t get more main-street in bloodlines than him. And Boon came from BOOM but to play off Peptoboonsmal, we went with Boon. So Main Street Boon.”

As a yearling, Street sold at the 2005 NCHA Summer Spectacular Sale for $100,000 to Waco Bend Ranch. He was cut on for about three years, didn’t pan out in the cutting pen and changed hands. Word got back to Rapp only that the colt had gone on to be a rope horse.

“His dam Playboys Ruby had a couple of brothers that were very well known AQHA rope horses that had several hundred AQHA rope horse points,” Rapp said. “It’s not surprising he went on to do what he did.”

Pedigree: Main Street Boon

2004 sorrel gelding · 15.1 hands, 1,310 pounds · Registered: Main Street Boon (AQHA) · Barn name: Street · Breeder: Phil Rapp, Weatherford, Texas

• Sire: Peptoboonsmal (Peppy San Badger x Royal Blue Boon)
• Dam: Playboys Ruby, by Freckles Playboy (out of Lenachick, by Doc O’Lena)

The ‘Trader’ Horse That Got Really, Really Good

Street came into Harrison’s program as nothing special—a started cutter, bought to trade.

“He was 6, and he was big. 15 hands even, and bigger than some of the head horses we have today,” Harrison said back in 2018. “He was started as a cutter, and we just bought him as a trader horse really. We sold him once, but we got him back. He just got really, really good.”

He got good enough for the show pen — almost by accident. A sweepstakes entry at Lincoln, Nebraska, qualified him for the AQHA World Show, and in 2015 he gave Harrison the first AQHA world championship of his career, winning the Level 2 senior heeling world title the first year the class existed. He was also a reserve world champion at the open level.

Harrison, characteristically, didn’t count the Level 2 globe at first—until reminded it was his.

“Oh yeah, no, I did win the Level 2 the first year they ever had it,” he said. “That’s a win. That’s a win for his column.”

All told, Harrison figures he showed Street about six times in front of the judges and won a little over $30,000 doing it—a horse he never entered anywhere that didn’t pay. He wasn’t the flashiest gelding compared to the show horses Harrison rides now—but he was nothing if not wildly effective at his job of stopping the run.

“He was just super easy and very trained and good at his job, but he probably wasn’t as fancy,” Harrison said. “He might not have had quite as much butt drag and some of the cool stuff that some of these are going to have, but he was the one that, no matter what, I could get money on him every time, even showing him.”

Old Faithful

Street made his NFR debut with Harrison in 2017, earning $82,346 and finishing fifth in the average. He was back for the 2018 Finals after getting hurt in the trailer that year, and Harrison closed 2018 third in the world standings. And he stayed the go-to: even as Harrison filled a barn with young futurity prospects on his way to becoming the rope horse futurity industry’s first million-dollar rider, Street remained his Thomas & Mack anchor—a mount he was still naming as late as his fifth straight NFR in 2021.

He was that horse for other ropers, too. Jake Long, Travis Graves and Billie Jack Saebens all threw a leg over him, and Paul Eaves—a world champ with his own string of good ones—swung by Harrison’s place on his way to a WCRA event in Kansas City, borrowed Street and won on him.

“He stopped and picked Street up and took him and rode him and kicked their butt on him,” Harrison said. “That was really cool that he thought that highly of him.”

Every one of them came back with a version of the same verdict: outside of their own once-in-a-lifetime horse—Long’s Colonel, Eaves’s Cadillac —Street was the best they’d ever been on.

The through-line, every time, was that anyone could ride him. Harrison said sometimes his horses have a reputation for fitting only Harrison; Street was the exception he loved to point to. When a heavily pregnant friend—World Champion Jackie Crawford—came by for help before a roping, he sent her down the road on Street instead of her own horse.

“She’s really pregnant and just wears them out on my old trusty rodeo horse that I rode at the Finals several times,” Harrison laughed “So that was kind of a—for all you people that think they’re hard to ride, there you go.”

The Biggest Check of His Life

The gelding’s biggest single day came March 8, 2020, at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, when Harrison heeled behind header Luke Brown to win RFD-TV’s The American—worth $100,000 a man.

But the memory he tells isn’t the run. It’s what happened after. In the chaos of photos and interviews and collecting the biggest check of his career, Harrison had handed Street off, loosened his cinches and lost track of Street. After all the photo ops, TV interviews and fanfare, he and Jodi got to the rig—with no horse.

“I walked back down the tunnel, and he’s just tied there by the bridle reins, just hanging out,” Harrison said. “There’s no other horse, no person, nobody in there. He wasn’t distraught, he wasn’t nickering. He was just as content as if he had another horse there with him. Still had the boots on and everything.”

A horse who had just won $100,000, alone in a going-dark stadium, waiting on his people. It was, Harrison said, exactly who Street was.

The Million-Dollar Question

Harrison believes Street won him more than $1 million across his career—though he’s the first to admit he can’t prove it.

The countable portion, from The American and his just his NFR runs, comes to nearly a half-million. The rest lived in the regular season, the amateur rodeos and the jackpots Harrison never bothered to log.

“I know for sure I won over a million on him,” Harrison said, before adding the honest caveat: “I wish I would have kept a record of that stuff and wrote in my book like I was supposed to. But I didn’t.”

For a horse Harrison once sticked at 15.1 and weighed at 1,310 pounds—“a big old soggy rascal” who stopped steers on sheer size—the number, provable or not, tracks.

Joseph Harrison’s Bit Master Class

A Good Retirement

After the 2021 Finals, Harrison felt the old wheels going and stepped off Street mid-round. Jodi made the call for him.

“I probably said something ugly about him being old and fat and slow,” Harrison said. “And so she said, ‘Yep, that’s it. You can’t ride him anymore.’ She just kind of took him.”

She spoiled him from there—loping him in a halter, hauling him to the vet at the first bumped knee. Harrison credits the crew at Josh Harvey’s Outlaw Equine who carried Street through his last hard summers, singling out Sarah Novotny for keeping the old gelding comfortable.

“He paid for a lot of stuff around here and made a lot of money around here,” Harrison said, “but he was slowly but surely getting it all back at the vet.”

When the heat finally won this summer, the man who’d trusted Street with every big check of his life let him go. What Harrison keeps in his mind is the picture of a content horse alone in the empty AT&T Stadium, having just won it all.

“I’m just glad to have had the time that I had with him.”