To get through the week, you have to get a strategy on where to place your horses. The horses you send to Greeley will be the same ones you ride at Red Lodge, Cody and Livingston (Mont.), because of the geographics involved. If you get done over there, you can send them to St. Paul, because it’s logistically feasible. The horses you send to Pecos usually go on to Prescott and Window Rock (Ariz.) and maybe Oakley (Utah), if you can fit it in. The headers typically send their short-score horse up North to the one-headers. Pecos and Prescott are long scores, so they send their average horse down South. Those horses have to battle the heat, while the horses that go North have to go more miles.

There are back-to-back big weeks in a row right now, starting with Reno and the BFI. Reno (Nev.) basically kicks off your summer, then we’re off to the Fourth of July run, then Salinas (Calif.) and Cheyenne (Wyo.). Everybody looks forward to this time of year, when you can really capitalize on some big-money opportunities. Once you leave Reno, it takes quite a bit of juggling and scheduling to get it all done. If you’re going to go to seven to nine rodeos in a week, you’re going to have to have two rigs on the road and be buddying with another team to cut the costs, so each team has a rig on the road. If you have to charter planes, you also have a buddy team to split the cost of that.

The Fourth of July run is kind of a unique week, because you compete in all kinds of different setups and scenarios. There are some really good one-headers, some two-headers and some two and a shorts, so we really have a diversity of runs. Cody’s (Wyo.) the biggest one-header, and if you can win that one it’s like having a great Fourth, because it pays $7,000-$8,000 a man to win it. If you can do good at a Greeley (Colo.), a St. Paul (Ore.) or a Pecos (Texas), you can win $5,000-$6,000 pretty easily. So you want to get the ball rolling right off the bat and make some big runs. That makes it easy to get going. If you start out not putting any runs together, you start pressing a little bit, because you’re wanting to win and you get to counting the runs you have left.

The weather’s all over the map over the Fourth, just like the rodeos. St. Paul is about as nice as it can possibly be in the morning slack, and so is Greeley and Cody. Red Lodge (Mont.) can even be kind of cold. Then you go to a place like Pecos (Texas), and it’s an absolute cooker. Morning or evening, when you’re in Pecos, it’s just nasty, blistering hot. It’s no surprise that we don’t get a lot of rest over the Fourth. Speedy (Williams) and I have a nine-day run scheduled, so for about a week and a half, it’s going to be go, go, go.

There are good opportunities North and South, so if you have two good horses on the road you can really capitalize at this time. (Clay will be riding Scout and Vico over the Fourth this year.) If you have one horse, you have to get mounted, which makes it a lot harder to compete. It’s harder for me to get on someone else’s horse and feel confident. (David Key is heading here.)

A lot depends on how you get up when you enter. How you draw up, when and where, can make it an easy traveling Fourth or it can make it hard, if you have to start doubling back. If you get up to where you can get done before leaving town, it really cuts down on your travel. That’s the luck part of it. If you don’t get up good, and get your runs split at the same rodeo, then you get into trying to find trades. Everybody else is in the same boat, so the guys who get both steers the same day aren’t going to want to trade them away. Everybody’s trying to hit the middle.

I’ve had some really good Fourths, then I’ve had some when I didn’t win much at all and all kinds in-between. When it all comes down to it, they’re just rodeos and you just have to go compete, make good runs, try not to get ahead of yourself and not get caught up in the moment of the big Fourth of July run. It’s just one week of rodeoing, so a person’s got to put that into perspective also. It’s not going to make or break you whether you do good or don’t, so you just have to do your best, try to be smart and not run over yourself just because it’s Fourth of July week.

Jake and I really cut back, and only went to the rodeos up North one Fourth. We still won $10,000 or $11,000, and that was over 10 years ago. We just didn’t feel like going crazy and going everywhere, and we had just as good a Fourth as a lot of other years. You can pick five or six rodeos that you can drive to, and if you rope good you can still win $10,000 or $12,000 over the Fourth. There are usually a handful of teams who knock themselves out and go all out, because if you really hit a homerun you can win over $20,000, which is a big boost. You just have to go with your gut on what you want to do. Speed and I are going to try to enter as many rodeos as we can over the Fourth this year, because we’re giving up 20 rodeos to the rest of the pack because of the schools we’re doing. We don’t have any schools scheduled for that week, but over the course of the year, we’re going to 40 rodeos when everybody else is going to 60.

It’s kind of nice after the hustle and bustle of the Fourth of July to kind of even out and start going at a little more moderate pace through the rest of the summer; to go to a (ProRodeo) Tour rodeo and maybe another one with it each week throughout the summer. It’s nice to spend four days in Salinas right after the Fourth, and rest up in that cool weather. There are really good rodeos each week. After Salinas, there’s Cheyenne and Dodge City, then we go to the Northwest, and the weather’s good up there in the late summer and early fall. It’s enjoyable to me, because I like all the places we go—the scenery and the rodeos—and not only the competition part, but just the atmosphere of each place. I feel blessed to get to do it.