Have you ever attended a clinic or gotten a lesson and then gone home and missed more steers than you did before getting help?
It’s not that you received faulty instruction – it’s just that you became a little too mechanical. You started to concentrate more than usual on different aspects of your roping and forgot to put a priority on your actual delivery.
Not many coaches out there encourage you to focus on the delivery itself, because it’s dangerous. We tend to teach people first things first, which means working on horsemanship and swing mechanics.
Still, everybody knows that your delivery is what determines whether you catch or miss. Think of a pro golfer with a lot of money on the line, trying to make a 15-foot putt. A lot of things are going through his mind about how to keep his head down and his chest still and what to do with his wrist – but his main focus is the point of impact when that club head meets that ball.
I like to read “Mental Management” materials written by Lanny Bassham, an Olympic medalist rifle shooter. He says that a shooter is always most accurate when he’s able to pull the trigger between his heartbeats. Think about that kind of concentration.
And he’s right about it affecting accuracy. Consider Junior Nogueira. After traveling in the rig with him and watching him rope all summer, I realized that some other guys might have ridden better position this year, but they weren’t as consistent as Junior. He roped more two-footers than almost anybody out there while using less-than-textbook positioning. What does that tell you about the value of delivery alone?
I am always training people to isolate their weak areas. For instance, I like to have someone devote one practice session only to working on body posture or only on positioning or only on swing. But thanks to Junior, lately, I’ve been coaching people to isolate and work on nothing but delivery.
I was more like Junior when I was younger. I wasn’t as disciplined with everything leading up to the delivery – in fact, I was pretty free-spirited about coming around there and if I saw the shot I’d take it, even if I was a little out of position. It didn’t occur to me that anything could prevent me from catching. And if people teased me about catching from an unorthodox position, I’d just say, “They don’t write that on the checks, do they?”
So more than anything these days, I’m working on making sure I come around there and take my first good shot without missing. I’m trying to become less mechanical by practicing my focus at the moment of delivery, so nothing can prevent me from catching.
That’s what it will take for you to go catch four in a row this weekend at the jackpot. Let the bulls be mechanical. You just need to learn to stay relaxed and focused every time you throw your rope.
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