Kyle Lockett: No Regrets

Photographed and written by Dee Yates

In 2006, Kyle Lockett was exactly where every young roper says they want to be. He had seven trips to the National Finals Rodeo behind him, a reserve world championship, and a place among the best heelers on earth. Then he pointed his horse toward home and mostly stayed there. Most cowboys cannot make that call in their prime, and the ones who do usually spend the rest of their lives wondering. Lockett made it without a backward glance. “No regrets. None,” he says. “I was out there ten-plus years and enjoyed every bit of it. Met a lot of great people and had a blast. At some point you just kind of get over it, and I enjoy being home, the life, the kids, the lifestyle we live.”

The life he was protecting started on a ranch in Ballico, just outside Oakdale, where his dad Jim ran stockers and Kyle grew up in the dust behind two older brothers, Blaine and Brent, who both roped and rodeoed. He fell in behind them the way youngest brothers do, and at fourteen he won his first Oakdale 10 Steer heeling behind Blaine, in the town locals still call the Cowboy Capital of the World. His mother Sharyn had babysat a neighbor boy named Wade Wheatley, and the two of them went to preschool together and grew up roping together, so Wade was always who he figured he would rope with. Kyle went straight from high school to the rodeo road, and it did not take the road long to notice him.

At twenty he made his first NFR heeling for Walt Rodman and was crowned the 1997 Resistol Rookie Heeler of the Year, and the nerve of that first Finals never really left him. Over the next several years he became one of the most dependable heelers in the game, roping to a reserve world championship with Wheatley in 2002, one spot behind the legendary team of Speed Williams and Rich Skelton. But the arena that would come to define him was not the NFR. It was the Timed Event Championship at the Lazy E in Guthrie, Oklahoma, the grueling three-day marathon they call the Ironman of ProRodeo, where one cowboy heads, heels, ties down calves, wrestles steers, and ropes steers across twenty-five head. In 2005 Lockett out-dueled Trevor Brazile on the final steer to win it, tying his calf down in 16.6 seconds when Brazile needed 46.8, then came back in 2011 and won it again with 308.8 seconds on twenty-five head, joining the short list of men who have taken the Ironman more than once. His resume runs deeper than most people realize. In 2010 he was named the all-around champion at the 100th anniversary Pendleton Round-Up, one of the oldest and proudest titles in the West, and across his career he has carried home checks from Reno to Houston, San Angelo to the Grand National in San Francisco.

Right in the middle of all that, at the top of his game, he pulled up. His wife Leigh was building a career as a labor-and-delivery nurse, and Lockett decided the family would run on his time at home rather than his time on the road. He rode colts, roped, changed diapers, and fixed bottles, and by every account he did it happily and well. The road that had noticed him at twenty had also changed underneath him. “Nowadays, if you want to go, you better be out there all the time,” he says. “Twenty-four seven. It used to be you were gone a couple months and home a couple months. Now you’re gone a lot and home for just a little bit.” That was not the life he wanted, and he said so without apology.

If Kyle’s name is the one on the buckles, Leigh is a big part of why the whole thing held together. She built a demanding career as a nurse, working one and at times two jobs on a labor-and-delivery unit that brings several hundred babies into the world every month, while Kyle ran the home front. The arrangement only worked because family was close on every side. His parents live a few miles down the road, and Leigh’s parents, Cliff and Lynn Garrison, are right there on the same property, so there was always someone to feed horses or mind kids on the weekends Kyle did slip away. She never pushed him out the door, but she never stopped believing in him either. For years she was the one quietly encouraging him to chase the world title he never quite caught, while he kept smiling and telling her he would rather be home.

Everyone, including Kyle, assumed his seventh Finals in 2005 was the last one. Then 2019 happened, and it happened almost by accident. A friend, 2015 world champion header Aaron Tsinigine, needed a fill-in partner for San Angelo, and the two of them won it on three head in 13.2 seconds. That carried Kyle to RodeoHouston, where he teamed with Ty Blasingame for the first time in their lives and won the whole thing, a check worth $55,750 apiece. By the end of March his name sat at the top of the heeling standings, and it stayed near the top all summer. Leigh found out the way a working nurse finds out. She slipped into an empty room during her shift at the hospital, watched the Houston win unfold on her phone, and let out a scream when it sank in that her husband was going back.

At forty-two, fourteen years after he thought he was finished, Kyle Lockett backed into the box at the Thomas and Mack for an eighth National Finals, this time heeling for fellow Timed Event champion Erich Rogers. What made it work was not weeks of tuning up together. It was trust. “I know what Erich’s gonna do,” Lockett says. “He’s got good horses, he rides good, and he’s going to give me the best chance to win. There’s no surprises.” The difference between 2005 and 2019 was never the roping. It was who was in the stands. In 2005 Leigh had been in nursing school and could not get away to watch him. This time the whole family rented a house in Las Vegas, both sets of grandparents moved in, and they home-schooled by day and watched Kyle every night, his kids finally old enough to understand what it meant to see their dad compete at that level.

Today the story has turned again, and this is the part Lockett seems to love most. All six kids ride and rope. Shayla, twenty, is off college rodeoing. Georgia, eighteen, just graduated high school, where she was named her school’s female athlete of the year, and is leaving for college to rodeo herself. Sutton, sixteen, and Blevins, thirteen, fill their days with junior rodeos and jackpots, cowboying on local ranches, and roping goats in the backyard, and Sutton has lately taken up steer wrestling. Collins, five, is already glued to her pony, and Kyle swears she is going to turn out more cowboy than the whole bunch of them. Ledge, four, named for the legendary steer roper Guy Allen, mostly just runs flat out trying to keep up. “I’ll go to a jackpot now and just sit in the chair and watch the kids rope,” he says. “Four of mine will rope in one day.” The man who once out-roped Trevor Brazile for the Ironman title now measures a good day in the short goes his kids make and the goats they tie down.

He can still win a big one himself when he wants to, and last year he did it at a roping that means as much to him as any on the calendar. The Oakdale Ten Steer has been a fixture of California team roping since 1956, produced every Labor Day weekend by the California Team Roping Association at the Oakdale Rodeo Grounds, in the town that calls itself the Cowboy Capital of the World. Its format is a throwback and a gut check, ten head across three days, a grind that rewards horsemanship and stamina and has drawn hundreds of teams and a roll call of legends over seven decades, from Leo Camarillo to Mike Cervi to Allen Bach. At the 70th annual running in 2025, Lockett won the CTRA Ten Steer heading for seventeen-year-old Ross Rivera, the two of them roping ten steers in 105.54 seconds for saddles and buckles. It was the same roping Kyle first won as a fourteen-year-old kid heeling behind his big brother, which makes the Oakdale arena one of the few places that has watched his whole story unfold.

He is California born and bred and proud of it, and he will tell you plainly that the money and the numbers have drifted to Texas while insisting the roots are still right here. “It’s still the capital,” he says of the Golden State. “At least it was the first one.” That pride shows up in the way he thinks about the next generation. Lockett would love to see a California qualifier for the junior Timed Event, something close enough that the state’s young ropers would not have to travel across the country for their shot, and he is looking for a way to help make that happen. He has three or four kids at home right now, he says, who would be ready for that stage, and he wants to see them get the chance.

He is not finished with the Ironman himself, either. He has answered the Timed Event call more than twenty times now, second only to K.C. Jones in the history of the event, and he keeps going back because it is still the most fun he has anywhere in the arena. “My mind and body think two different things,” he says with a laugh. “My mind still thinks I can do it really good.” The body does not always cast the same vote, but the standard has not dropped, and he talks about hanging around long enough for Sutton to qualify for the junior event, about maybe getting a few more good years, about the plain, hard-won truth he carried out of his second title. As he put it back in 2011, it is just good to know you can still do it.

What Kyle Lockett has built is the kind of thing a buckle does not quite hold. He has a reserve world championship and two Ironman titles and eight trips to the sport’s biggest stage, he walked away from the chase not once but on his own terms, and the sport kept calling him back, because that is what happens to cowboys who are that good and that grounded. Ask him what is next and the answer is not another title. “I’m super content,” he says, “hanging out and going to Salinas and Pendleton and Oakdale and Red Bluff and Clovis.” He is a California cowboy who figured out early what most of us spend a lifetime chasing, which is that the prize was never only in Las Vegas or Guthrie. A good part of it was waiting at home, in a chair, at a jackpot, watching six kids he raised do the thing he loves.