Jackie Crawford
Roper Jackie Crawford
Get out your cowboy boots — the rodeo is back in town.
The qualifying rounds of the Women's Rodeo World Championship, presented by World Champions Rodeo Alliance (WCRA) and Professional Bull Riders (PBR), are taking place right now at Will Rogers Coliseum, with the championship round taking place Thursday to Sunday at AT&T Stadium in Arlington.
More than 200 contestants are competing in four disciplines: barrel racing, team roping (heading and heeling), and breakaway roping. Two of those contestants — ropers JJ Hampton and Jackie Crawford — recently sat down with Fort Worth Magazine to talk about their sport.
According to Hampton and Crawford, there aren’t many technicalities when it comes to roping. In breakaway roping, the roper is in a box with a rope tied onto her saddle. The calf gets a head start, then the roper comes in behind a barrier and ropes the calf as fast as she can. As soon as the calf hits the end of the rope, it pops a string on the saddle horn, and the time ends.
The scoring of the event depends on how quickly the ropers get out and rope the calf. It’s a quick sport that could last one or two seconds — and it’s easy on the animals.
So what goes through a roper's mind while she's on the saddle? Well, we'll let Hampton and Crawford tell you.
FW: How long have you been riding/roping, and how did you get your start?
JH: I’ve been roping since I was six years old, and I’m 49, so I’ve been doing it for 43 years. I got started with my dad. He was a professional cowboy and roped, so I got my love of rodeo and roping from him. It’s really cool. I mean, I grew up around a bunch of amazing men, ropers, and cowboys, and it just stuck with me. It’s something I love to do, it’s in my heart, and I’m just blessed that I’m still able to do it at 49 years old. It was definitely a family thing for me growing up.
JC: I’ve been riding my entire life since I was little enough to sit in front of my mom on a pillow, but I started roping when I was a freshman in high school. I had moved to Oklahoma, and I saw a bunch of girls and younger kids, and there’s a bunch of opportunity for doing rodeos where people were roping. I just said, “I really want to do that.” I’ve always been a tomboy at heart, so I said I wanted to do a roping event — that looks awesome. So, I turned my barrel horse into a roping horse, and my mom found people who would let me go rope and help me, so I just kind of learned that way. Thank goodness that my mom was knowledgeable about it, and there were a lot of people that were willing to help and give somebody a chance.
FW: How often do you practice? And what's practice like?
JC: Every day. It just depends for me. I train horses and I teach, and I do a lot of things other than just go practice on my rodeo horses. So, we start in the morning, and we end about dark. We go all day long. Some people work different jobs, and that’s not their job. Like JJ does real estate, so other people have other jobs and come home in the evenings, and they have a certain amount of horses, and each horse takes about an hour to get something done. So, you know, they might go home and rope for three or four hours. It just all depends.
FW: How long does it take on average to perfect a skill?
JC: I mean, that’s what’s so crazy about our sport and really any other sport. Is it really ever perfected? It’s not. I mean, I’ve been doing this since high school, and I’m still learning stuff every day. I’m somewhere right now trying to get pointers from somebody else in a different event, just learning. So, I don’t think it’s ever perfected because our events and our stock and horses are constantly changing, so you never really hit that point of perfection. You’re just trying to get the best you can out of every trick and every horse and every cow.
JJ Hampton
Roper JJ Hampton
FW: What goes through your mind while performing your event?
JC: Honestly, while I’m performing, nothing. It’s muscle memory. By the time it comes to performing, I might just talk myself through the run before it and kind of tell myself what I need to see and how to just start the very initial part. But once I nod my head and the round is going on, I’m not telling myself anything because that part of it, to me, is what should be done in the practice pen so that you’ve trained yourself to just react because I can’t think it through fast enough. I have to be able to react to that run and just know what’s going on.
FW: Do you have any pre-performance traditions? Or a tradition for when you win?
JH: Well, usually when I get to an event, I go and check my draw to see what calf I drew. I go look at the calf and pull the barrier back to see how it’s going to be. That’s how I start my day off at an event, and then I just get ready and warm my horse up. But that’s usually the first thing I do, is see what calf I drew to get my mind wrapped around what I’m about to do.
JC: No, not really. I mean, we do this so much that I kind of go through the same routine, you know, because I think everybody goes through the same routine. I don’t have anything necessarily that’s set in stone, that I feel like I have to do before I rope. We kind of have this joke where if we lose, we’re going to eat good, and if we win, we’re going to eat good.
FW: Has COVID-19 affected anything related to this sport, whether it be practice or performing?
JH: No, I mean we practiced the same, and I was fortunate enough in Texas that they had a lot of rodeos. I know we had to skip a few and miss a few, but I rodeoed pretty hard all summer, so we were blessed that people took a chance and went ahead and had their events. We went to a lot of places that had them, even for my son. Maybe a few less rodeos but it didn’t really affect us as much. I got to travel and fly to different rodeos all over the country, and it was pretty awesome to be able to do that considering everything our world is going through. There were some protocols we had to follow, but we did it so that we could do a sport we love to do, and I’m blessed to get to do it.
FW: Is there any advice you’d like to give someone who is just starting out?
JC: Just know that there are no shortcuts; you have to go through it. I read something the other day, and it was so true when it comes to people about roping. He was talking about horsemanship, but he said, “One thing that rings true is that beginner riders always want to work on intermediate things. Intermediate riders always want to work on advanced things. And advanced riders always want to work on the basics.” It’s the same thing in roping. Everyone wants to get ahead of themselves. Work on the basics, and make sure you have good fundamentals and good basics before you try to advance because it is a long road, and the more you skip the basics, the more trouble you’re going to have.
