Bringing home the buckle: Bethel teen Tucker Guy wins team roping world championship
Jul. 22—While many teens are spending the summer enjoying the last precious months at home before school starts, Bethel 18-year-old Tucker Guy has been traveling the country with his family and winning a rodeo world championship.
Guy and his team roping partner, J.T. Hill, 17, of Weatherford, Texas, won the National Little Briches Rodeo Associations (NLBRA) Senior Team Roping World Championship at the NLBRA Finals July 10 in Guthrie, Oklahoma.
"This year has been the year that everything has come to fruition," Guy said, noting that there was a lot of trial and error in finding what horse, what rig and what technique worked for his roping style.
Learning to rope
Team roping, and rodeo for that matter, is not something Guy was born into, but his love of horses and steers started young.
"We used to have around 1,000 head of beef cows," he said. "As we were working them up, some friends showed up and started roping some of the calves."
It was the first time Guy, 12 years old at the time, had seen someone roping steers, and he loved it from the beginning.
"You've got all of these calves in a pen, so of course, it's fun," he said.
Guy wanted to get into roping himself, but he wasn't from a rodeo family.
"I started talking to a lot of people about it," Guy said, adding that he met many people at rodeos who helped teach him how to ride, rope and compete.
He's been competing for nearly six years, and this year finally put it all together.
"This year my skills have truly shown themselves," he said.
When Guy wins a rodeo competition, he earns money and a buckle, the premier prize in all of rodeo.
The top prize, and often the most elusive, is the world championship buckle.
Earning one took finding the right partner.
Finding a 'header'
Guy is a "heeler" in the two-man rodeo sport of team roping.
In team roping, the header chases the steer, ropes the head, and then the heeler ropes the back legs. The fastest team wins.
Without a solid partner, a "header," he can't compete.
As fate would have it, a partner came calling this spring.
"I knew who he was but I had never talked to him," he said.
Guy met J.T. Hill at a roping clinic put on by one of their mutual sponsors. It was there that Guy got turned on to the NLBRA.
"J.T.'s dad, Ronnie, asked me if I would be interested in heeling for J.T.," Guy said.
Guy was impressed the moment he saw Hill work a steer.
"I looked him up on YouTube and watched a few of his videos, and I said, 'This kid is really good.'"
Although Guy and Hill had formed their team, they were coming into the rodeo season a bit late.
"There are only so many summer rodeos you can go to," Guy explains. "You have to place on six steers. We only got the opportunity on 10 steers."
There were only two rodeo weekends left in the summer circuit before the NLBRA Finals.
If Guy and Hill had met earlier and began travelling across the country competing in rodeos, they may have run upward of 50 steers. With a small margin of error, it made every steer matter.
In true cowboy fashion, they saddled up and gave it their all, but mistakes plagued their early runs.
"The first rodeo we went to, I missed [roping] our steer,' Guy recalls. "We had never roped together. We'd practiced, but that was it."
The pair kept at it and, over one long weekend, Guy and Hill won the next three rodeos.
The next weekend, however, another obstacle presented itself: Guy and Hill were first team out.
In team roping, being the first to go isn't a gesture of kindness.
"A big thing in rodeo is knowing what the steers do," he said. "We had no idea what these steers would do."
As they chased down their first steer, it was Hill who faltered this time.
"Our first [steer], he broke the barrier," Guy said.
A barrier is a thin piece of rope attached to the steer's head and running across the front of the header's horse.
A header must wait until the steer breaks the barrier in order to chase it down, giving each team an equal playing field.
Worst of all, breaking the barrier, as Hill did, adds a 10-second penalty.
Guy said it's the little things, like not missing a steer's legs and not breaking a barrier, that separate champions from second place.
"Its all about having a good foundation in roping," he said. "The fastest way to get a good score is to be fundamentally smooth."
Guy and Hill dialed in and performed well on the rest of their steers.
The duo won first place and earned themselves a spot in the NLBRA Finals in Guthrie, Oklahoma, in July.
"You have to prepare for different situations," Guy said. "You're not going to take the same shot on the same cow every time."
Finals arriveAt the NLBRA Finals, only the top rodeo teams compete, making each steer matter all that much more over the course of the event.
The NLBRA awards money and buckles for first through seventh place in each round, and riders earn points through 15th place.
The NLBRA Finals are broken up into two initial rounds: the 1st Go Round and the 2nd Go Round.
In the 1st Go Round, Guy and Hill placed eighth after a time of 12.41 thanks to a rookie mistake.
When the steer broke the barrier, Hill gave chase, roped the steer and set up the animal perfectly for Guy, but Guy slipped a leg, meaning the rope only secured around one of the steer's legs.
The mistake added a 10-second penalty, a potentially fatal error in a sport where milliseconds matter.
In the 2nd Go Round, the team placed ninth with a time of 9.55.
The two rounds earned the team points toward the overall championship, but neither money nor buckles.
Thankfully, though, Guy and Hill had done just enough to earn a spot in the Short-Go: the final round consisting of only the top 20 teams.
Guy and Hill were the fourth "call back" team, meaning they were the fourth place team, with only five seconds separating the top 10 teams.
"We knew what we needed to do," he said. "Because J.T.'s parents are very good about watching steers."
When the steer burst through the barrier on their final run, Guy and Hill gave chase, their last opportunity to win the championship.
"JT is very good about setting up steers perfect, so I came around and roped him," Guy said. "I heeled him by two feet, but I sucked back and he slipped a leg out."
The error caused another 10-second penalty to be added to their 6.82 time, putting them at 11.82.
While not a great time, the preceeding teams did not score, so theirs was good for first place overall.
There were still the top three teams left to rope, though.
The third call back team missed their steer entirely and scored a "no time" meaning they were out, and the second call back team hooked a leg and the additional penalty time put them in second behind Guy and Hill.
The high call back team entered the arena, which was the top team over the course of the event at that point.
Guy and Hill were in first place so far, but a good performance and a solid time by the high call back could bump them into second place.
"Going into the Short- Go, they had the most advantage," Guy said, explaining that because that team got to go last, they also got to see how the steers were running and could adjust.
With nothing left to do but watch, Guy and Hill looked on from the crowd as the high call back's header and heeler broke out after the final steer.
"The header roped his steer kind of weird, and spun him around," Guy said, "And the heeler roped him, but couldn't get his dally."
In team roping, the act of wrapping your rope around the saddle horn after the steer has been roped is called "dallying." If the heeler couldn't dally his rope, it would be over.
"The rope burnt his hand," Guy said. "So they couldn't get a time. When that happened, we were flipping out, jumping off our horses."
When the judges came back with he results, Guy and Hill won the world championship by one point, placed second in the average and third in the short-go.
"They said that was the closest it had ever been," he said.
Guy and Hill earned world championship spurs, saddles and, of course, the all-important buckle, which Guy said is currently getting engraved with his name.
Now a world champion going on one week, he said it still hasn't sunken in.
"It's something you always think about [winning the world]. You wake up the same way, but it's so weird," Guy said.
All in the family
Guy will be the first to tell you he didn't reach the pinnacle of youth rodeo by himself. Aside from the help of his partner, his family is the driving force behind his success.
"People that have a great support team and a team that they can talk with and not be scared to ask questions means more than anything," he said.
His parents, Zac and Haley Guy, are the owners of Appalachian Antique Hardwoods in Waynesville.
The Guys moved from Fine's Creek and bought their property on Steepleview Ridge about four years ago.
Guy recently graduated from homeschool, an experience he credits with helping him compete in rodeo.
"I had so much time to focus on my rodeo," Tucker Guy said, noting that he worked hard to complete his studies so he could get outside and rope.
And he isn't the only son getting in on the rodeo action: his brothers — Walker Guy, 15, and Parker Guy, 12 — are champions in their own right.
Both Walker and Parker Guy compete in the National Team Roping League and have won numerous events, even state titles.
In 2020, the Guy brothers made rodeo history by being the first three brothers to qualify at the same time for the Junior World Finals Rodeo.
It helps to have the stock to practice on — the Guys's own about 25 roping horses, and recently bought two more parcels of land for roping.
"We'll be out here until 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning getting things right, getting ourselves right," Tucker Guy said.
And in team roping, horses are just as important as the cowboys.
On finding a good team roping horse, Tucker Guy said, "You want a feel about them. You got to ride a lot of horses to know a good one from a bad one."
He currently has four horses, but his go-to horse and the one he won the world championship on, is a horse named Bam Bam.
"The first 20 rodeos I took him to, he bucked me off," Tucker Guy said. "I've never had a horse do that. But he has the most heart and try of any horse I've had."
Tucker Guy chose to stick with Bam Bam, and it paid off.
"It was like we were testing each other. But he's come around and we hit it off. If I'm in a spot and I need to win, I get on Bam Bam," he said.
Bam Bam will play an important role again next year, as Tucker Guy completes his final year of eligibility in the NLBRA and starts online classes at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
He won't rodeo for UT until the end of his sophomore year to allow his eligibility for the youth rodeos to run out, but he's starting the search for his next partner now, since Hill will be attending Baylor University.
"My plan is to get a partner and rope with him all the time at rodeos, so when we get to the collegiate rodeos, it's just another run," he said.
In the meantime, Tucker Guy will rely on his parents and their unyielding dedication to help him compete.
"They've never said 'no.' They'll jump in the truck and ride 18 hours to the next rodeo," he said. "They're willing to do it all without saying anything and that's worth so much to me."
