Glenn Teixeira: Green as Grass

With a new knee and his first futurity colt, Glenn Teixeira found himself a beginner all over again. Fifty years into a life in the roping pen, the Nipomo horseman still measures the whole thing by the people it put him next to.

Written and Photographed by Dee Yates

The trailer was pointed at Hamilton, Texas, and Glenn Teixeira wanted it understood up front that he was not an expert at any of this. He had a colt entered in the futurity, a trainer with a broken leg, and a substitute rider lined up, and none of it resembled anything he had done in the fifty years since he first picked up a rope. “So far, this is my first futurity,” he said. “I’m green as grass.”

Glenn Teixeira is a team roper and horseman from Nipomo, California, who has been roping for half a century, winters in Wickenburg, Arizona, and owns the futurity stallion Frosted Quinton. He is also, by his own cheerful admission, a man who came to the sport late and never got over the feeling of being behind.

He grew up in Santa Maria in a farming family, which he is careful to say is not the same as a cattle family. “I don’t know if it’s as much the cowboy ways as agricultural,” he said. There were five boys. One of them cared about horses as much as Glenn did. The other three, by his accounting, could not have been made to care if their lives depended on it. He liked horses from the start without any way to act on it, and did not own one until he was out of college.

He went to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and studied ag business, then loaded his schedule with animal science because that was where the interesting part was. Some of his roommates were cattlemen’s sons, and he went to their family brandings and made himself useful, which put him close to the life without putting him in it. Cal Poly Rodeo was fielding one of the strongest college teams in the country in those years and Glenn never went out for it. “The guys that were on the rodeo teams were so good already,” he said. “They’d been roping since they were seven.” He was not going to catch that from a standing start.

What he had instead was an uncle. Gene Teixeira was his father’s youngest brother, a horseman in a family that farmed, and he is the reason any of the rest of this happened. He got Glenn started, and then he did the thing that mattered more, which was to tell him when he was wrong. Glenn still goes quiet talking about him. “Years ago, they didn’t have all the teaching tools,” he said. “If you didn’t have somebody that helped mentor you, you did the same mistakes over and over again.” There was no video to study and no phone in a pocket holding a thousand hours of instruction. There was one man willing to tell you the truth about your loop, or there was nothing.

He got good enough. Ropers Sports News results carry his name going back years, including a check in the National Nine at Rancho Rio and a short go fast time with Jared Biely at the Pacific Coast Shootouts in his own backyard at Santa Maria. But the one he reaches for first is Salinas. Glenn won the Gary Gist Invitational at Salinas with Joe Stone in the roping’s first year. Gary Gist is a team roper and the silversmith behind Gist Silversmiths, whose trophy buckles have been a standard in professional rodeo for decades, and a Salinas buckle carries a weight that has nothing to do with silver. “That buckle, without a doubt, is the nicest, prettiest,” Glenn said. When he gets dressed up, it is the one he puts on.

Ask him what he looks for in a partner and he does not describe a skill set. “Just somebody that tries their best, because we all miss,” he said. “Somebody that enjoys the sport, somebody that works at it.” He had roped the day before and won something. He had roped that morning and, by his own honest read, let everybody down. Fifty years will teach a man that the arena is not a referendum on his character, and that the partner who tries and misses is worth ten of the partner who is only there when it is going well.

The sport he came up in barely exists anymore. He talks about a roping at the Elks in Fresno, in February, on one of those valley days where the high is thirty-eight and the low is thirty-six, and he is almost fond about it. The bleachers were metal, which he figures is the only reason they are still standing, because dry lumber would not have survived the crowd that night. They roped for three dollars and five dollars in those days, and fifteen if somebody was feeling flush. “You worked all day and if you had a place to practice, you practiced at night, and you craved it,” he said. That version of him is gone and he does not pretend otherwise. “Now I don’t rope unless the weather is my age.”

The money changed and the standard came with it, and he has no patience for showing up unprepared. “There’s no worse feeling than going out there and doing bad and realizing, you know what, I haven’t practiced,” he said. If a fellow wants to enter and donate, he thinks that is a fine way to spend a Saturday and he means it. He also confesses to an opinion he has since been forced to abandon, which is that the over fifty ropings were something for old men. He has long since aged past that line himself, and the joke is entirely on him. The knee is part of that. He had it replaced and took two years away, and he is honest about what age does to a practice schedule.

Where he has not slowed down is horses. He came into the breeding side sideways, following his son Adam Teixeira, who runs G Lazy T Livestock in Nipomo and got him into what Glenn calls the rope horse fraternity. His philosophy starts with pedigree and does not apologize for it. “If you want to make a bird dog, you don’t buy an English bulldog,” he said. Most of his good ones trace back through Driftwood, and a good many have come out of David Gill’s program at Will Gill and Sons on the historic Adobe Ranch at Madera, a family that has been raising Driftwood and Hancock horses since the 1940s. Gill’s stallion White Lighting Ike is in the background of Glenn’s best ones, and the newer Adobe Ranch stud JW Adobe Guy traces to Frenchmans Guy. Glenn has two mares out of a Gill sale.

His futurity colt runs straight down that same line. Frosted Quinton is a 2021 bay stallion by Frosted Sunman out of JW Alisa Wood, a mare by White Lighting Ike, which puts Driftwood on both sides of his papers. He stands fifteen one and weighs twelve hundred pounds, and his lifetime earnings have passed seventy-four thousand dollars. Andy Holcomb trains and shows him and rode him to a reserve championship at the Royal Crown Futurity in Rapid City, South Dakota, and a fourth place finish in heading at the Old West Rope Horse Futurity. When Holcomb broke his leg, Kaleb Driggers stepped on and won a round at the inaugural Solo Select Heading Futurity. Frosted Quinton now stands at Santa Lucia Farm in Santa Ynez, California, and his first foals are due in 2027.

Glenn will tell you he had nothing to do with any of that, which is only partly true. What he says next is the part that costs him something. “The sad part of it is I’m getting all these really good horses, but I’m getting too old to ride them.” He said it plainly and moved on, but it sat in the air, the arithmetic of a man who spent decades learning what a good horse is and arrived at the answer later than he wanted to.

He is generous about how far the industry has come. He remembers when a jackpot might have five or ten good horses in it and the rest were whatever a man could find, a lot of them cold blooded ranch horses with a little draft in the woodpile, tough as anything and about as refined. One of those old heads, he said, could take a drink out of a fifty five gallon drum with two inches of water in it and look you in the eye while he did it. What has changed is access. Better breeding has come down to a price an ordinary roper can reach.

The other mentor in his life arrived when he was already well into it. Glenn started going to Arizona around 2008 and stayed with John Miller and his wife Barbara at Cave Creek, a couple of weeks the first time and three the next. Then he bought property in Wickenburg on the Martinez Wash, a mile from the Rancho Rio arena, put in corrals, built himself a practice arena and started stretching the winters out. A month became two, two became three, and eventually a builder he had befriended put a little house on the place. He is there most years from October into April. “It’s people from Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Canada, but they’re all in the western line,” he said. “They’re just good people.”

John Miller became something more than a host. They roped together in the gold cards, and Glenn does not dress up what he thinks of him. “He’s the bomb,” he said. “He knows so many people.” Miller also took Adam in hand on the heading side, and Adam came home catching noticeably better, which put Glenn right back where he started fifty years earlier, watching a young man improve because somebody was willing to tell him the truth.

Ask him for the single best moment and he cannot produce one, which turns out to be the answer. There was the Elks rodeo with his son. There was roping with his wife. There was roping with both boys, one of whom lives in Oklahoma now. And this past year there was his granddaughter Charlee Teixeira, who ropes out of District 7 in the California Junior High Rodeo Association, who qualified for the national finals, and who is six foot one at thirteen and has lately discovered basketball because she likes having teammates. “Instead of one moment,” he said, “being able to rope with my family.”

Glenn has been a member of Rancheros Visitadores since 1988 and counts the friendships from it as too many to number. He met Ropers Sports News founder Bob Feist there. He has watched a lot of men come and go and has arrived at a short list of advice for anybody starting now, none of which involves a horse. Know your level and be at peace with it, because every sport sorts people out. Do the work if you want to be at the top. And be careful whose truck you follow out of the driveway. “You’re gonna meet a lot of good people,” he said. “There’s people that probably you don’t want to be associated with.” Surround yourself with the first kind. Not the one with the fanciest rig. The good ones.

There is a line he heard on The Cowboy Channel that he has been repeating ever since, about how the West does not need more people in it, it needs more West in the people. He thinks whoever wrote it was smart. It is also, more or less, what he said when asked what he wants to be remembered for, once he had finished waving off the question and the accolades that came with it. Not the buckles. Not the saddles.

“Just being a good person,” he said.

He is well into his seasoned years, he has a new knee, and he is green as grass at something again. That does not appear to bother him in the slightest.