Thread by @ThreeTwoEephus

As many of you know, my dad was a rodeo cowboy. In the vein of @Adam_Jacobi, I have a story I’d like to share. [ahem]

In the mid-90s, there was a guy named Cody Ohl who burst onto the scene. He was a calf-roper, team-roper, and steer-roper. Dude ended up being a legend (you can read about him here: prorodeo.com/prorodeo/cowbo… ) but in 1994, he was still a rookie.

Back in those pre-internet days, a lot of young cowboys had to take context clues from veterans who’d been traveling the circuit for years. How to not burn out, what the best food places were, how to outsmart overzealous gatemen. This is where we got the term “learning the ropes”

During one stretch in the 1990s, the rodeo world began to splinter into factions. Cowboys from the North Texas region were at odds with cowboys from South Texas. It got ugly. Diesel syphoned from trucks, horses turned loose from trailers. Very ugly stuff.

Ohl was from Rosenberg, TX (which is just outside Houston) but due to his extreme confidence as a youth, he had made some enemies in the South Texas region. He was a young star and should have been a natural ally of his fellow South Texans, but any alliance was uneasy, at best.

Around this same time, there was a sea change in professional rodeo. Cowboys had long subsisted on steak, potatoes, and beer. But a few high-profile heart scares led contestants to consider eating healthier. It was around then we started to see an influx of cowboy hats in Luby’s.

One fateful day during the Cheyenne Frontier Days, there was a standoff. The North & South Texas factions both arrived at a local soup & salad place at the same time, and who should ALSO be walking in but Cody Ohl. It was like that Anchorman newsroom rumble scene. Very tense.

Ohl had tried to stay out of it all year, but here he was — well on his way to becoming the PRCA Rookie of the Year — standing between two groups of extremely annoyed cowboys outside the Soup Herb in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

It soon became evident, over ~10 min. of bickering: whichever side Cody Ohl chose was going to get to stay there and eat lunch, and the other was going to suffer a massive defeat and have to find another place to eat.

Did it make sense? Probably not, but these things never do.

Each side took turns stating their case. “Ohl is from South Texas!” the South Texans claimed. “You bullied him and rejected him!” the North Texans claimed.

It was getting heated and it was time for Cody Ohl to make a decision.

Back & forth it went, until one old South Texas cowboy had enough. He was hungry and sick of bickering. He looked the rookie in the eye and the ruckus came to a hush as he lowered his voice and made a proclamation...

“I’ve had enough,” the grizzled old steer wrestler said with a weary sigh. “You can do what you want. Come with us, go with them. It’s immaterial to me. But here’s one thing I know,” he said leaning in, barely a whisper now...

“The Dallas Cowboys are not going to the Soup Herb, Ohl.”