Dick Yates, Patriarch of Team Roping’s First Family, 1940 to 2026

By Dee Yates

Ask around team roping about Dick Yates and the stories come quicker than a header can dally. The trailer pulled behind a Buick. The buckle handed over by a sitting president. Three generations of one family carrying the same last name to rodeo’s biggest stage. Richard L. “Dick” Yates passed away on Friday, June 19, 2026, and the sport he loved lost the man who did as much as anyone to build it, quietly, from the ground up. He was a horseman, a competitor, a teacher, and the patriarch of what southern Colorado came to call the First Family of Rodeo. The saddle he leaves empty is a big one, and the boots that filled it walked a long, good road.

He came up hard and honest in southeastern Colorado, near McClave outside Lamar, where his father Raymond farmed sorghum, alfalfa, and sugar beets and ran a few head of cattle. Dick milked cows every morning and separated the cream the family sold with their eggs to pay the grocery bill, and that work ethic became the spine of everything that followed. Weighing just 100 pounds out of high school, he was built for the racetrack, and he rode racehorses at fair meets across Colorado, Oklahoma, and Kansas and in the side-bet match races where one cowboy swears his horse can outrun another’s. He roped calves, rode bareback horses, and even climbed on a few bulls and broncs, and for 15 years he made his way through the amateur rodeos on calves and bareback horses, joining the PRCA at age 20.

The turn came with a wedding and a new event. He married Jan on April 19, 1958, they settled on a place outside Pueblo, and about that same time team tying was giving way to team roping across southern Colorado. Dick was curious enough to enter, and with strong early heelers like George Draper and Gus Webb, he won regularly. Then he found the partner who would define him, and that partner was his own son. Beginning in 1975, Dick headed for J.D. at the National Finals Rodeo, and their first trip together made history on its own: at 15 years and 4 months, J.D. became the youngest cowboy ever to qualify for the NFR, heeling for his dad. The two of them would rope at 13 National Finals together.

Then came 1984, the year the Yates name went in the record book for good. Dick, J.D., and daughter Kelly became the first and only father-son-daughter trio ever to qualify for the National Finals in the same season, Dick and J.D. in the team roping and Kelly in the barrel racing. A year before that, the whole family had touched something few cowboys ever do. They traveled to the 1983 Presidential Rodeo in Washington, D.C., where Dick and J.D. won the team roping and were handed buckles engraved “Presented by the President of the United States” by Ronald Reagan himself, with Jan touring the White House and the family lunching with the president on the lawn. Dick liked to remember how they’d gotten there, hauling a three-horse trailer behind a Buick Electra 225 with the air conditioning he called “two-by-55,” two windows down at 55 miles an hour.

What made Dick Yates matter, though, reached past his own back numbers. He was a renowned horse trainer who handed the gift straight down the line, and the horses that came off the Yates place near Pueblo carried the family to dozens of AQHA world titles across the years. He built things nobody remembers to credit him for, too. In 1984, when he and J.D. noticed the steers wearing out fast in the practice pen, Dick invented the lining lane, a fixture of roping arenas everywhere today. And during two terms on the PRCA board, he led the push to make team roping a standard event at PRCA rodeos and to pay it equal money with the rest. The next time a team draws a full check at a big rodeo, that is Dick Yates’s fingerprint on the sport.

He never lost the itch to compete, and Father Time never quite caught him. Even in his eighties, after rotator cuff surgery on both shoulders, he was still a 4 header who practiced daily with J.D. and Trey, and at the Ariat World Series of Team Roping Finale in Las Vegas one year he caught every steer he drew but one. He understood exactly what kept him winning. “If you have a good horse and he scores good, you don’t have to throw all that rope,” he said. “I want to just give that heeler a chance.” He placed at the last roping he entered, riding into his final year the same way he’d ridden into all the others, horseback and hunting a catch.

His influence ran wider than his own household. His nephew Jay Wadhams, who now runs the American Rope Horse Futurity Association, grew up learning to rope in Dick’s arena, one of countless kids the Yates family never charged a dollar to come practice. The family creed was short and it held: treat people right and with respect, and the roping will take care of itself. It’s the line Dick and his father lived by and the one that reached grandson Trey, a three-time NFR heeler whose saddles now sit in the family trophy room beside J.D.’s.

Jan, the glue that held them all together, headed to Heaven in the spring of 2019, and now Dick has ridden on to catch up with her. He leaves his children Kelly and J.D., his grandson Trey, a wide circle of extended family, and a sport permanently better for his having been in it. The scores are shorter now and the cattle are smaller than they were in his heyday, but the standard he set has not moved an inch. Ropers Sports News tips its hat to a life well lived. Rest easy, Dick. The gate’s open, the horse is caught, and the good work down here goes on because of you.