Big boot-loads of money to be made at World Series of Team Roping

They divvied up the last of the $6.3 million purse at the record-setting National Finals Rodeo following Saturday night’s final performance. Load up the livestock and alfalfa bales, pardners. Y’all come back now, ya’ hear?

But on Sunday morning at Vegas Cowboy Central — aka the South Point Arena and Equestrian Center — guys sporting black hats and fluorescent-colored lariats still were roping stuff: mostly steers, or mechanical steers, sometimes each other if one didn’t leave the cocktail waitress a nice tip.

They were roping stuff for big boot-loads of cash.

The South Point has so many rodeo-centric events during NFR week that it takes both sides of a four-panel brochure to list them. The most lucrative, besides the bars and honky-tonks where Jack Daniel’s is sold, is the Priefert World Series of Team Roping.

Whereas the NFR won’t pay $10 million to contestants until next year, the World Series of Team Roping already is there. The posters said $9 million, but when more than 3,700 headers and heeler qualified, they decided to bump the purse to around $10 mil.

And that’s $10 mil for ropin’ stuff in one rodeo discipline, not ropin’ and ridin’ in seven like at the NFR.

The World Series of Team Roping was thought up by Denny Gentry, a friendly and distinguished looking cowboy from Albuquerque, N.M. If it wasn’t for the black hat, Gentry would remind you of Roger Sterling from “Mad Men.”

Golf on horseback, that’s what Gentry calls it.

Headers and heelers are assigned handicaps based on previous performances. They get a number, 1 through 10, with 10 being NFR-caliber and 1 being Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in “Stir Crazy.”

The headers and heelers rope in divisions based on their combined handicaps.

If a header is an 8 and a heeler is a 4, they would compete in the No. 12 division, as would a 6 and another 6. A 6 and a 5 would compete in the No. 11 division, and so forth.

The beauty of the system is that cowboys — and cowgirls, for women also are eligible — of different skill levels and ages are allowed to compete for major greenbacks. Even a husband and a wife can rope together, though this is not recommended for obvious reasons.

Each class pays around $300,000 to win.

So it’s partly like golf, and partly like those bowling high roller tournaments. Also, a retired NFR cowboy sometimes will show up with his lariat. So it’s also like a senior tour for rodeo, though the grounds are a bit more odoriferous than at the U.S. Senior Open at Oak Tree.

It costs $2,000 to enter. But if you win, you can afford to put a roof over the roping arena on the back 40 of your property or pay off a lot of alfalfa bills.

Gentry said he got the idea for the team roping event from running the Cattlemen’s Association in New Mexico. To drive membership, he would put up big money for roping competitions, but one had to join the association to be eligible.

Pretty soon, the Cattlemen’s Association in New Mexico had a bunch of new members from Arizona, Texas and Colorado you’d never see again. It was like when Wisconsin football fans would purchase UNLV football season tickets just to see one game.

“These fees are astronomical,” Denny Gentry said of the World Team Roping ante. “When we started out, we felt there weren’t that many people who would put up that kind of money. But we’re at the point now where we are more than twice as large — from last year to this year, we’re at a 33 percent increase” in prize money.

The ropin’ is pretty good, too. The untrained eye would have trouble telling the amateurs from the NFR pros up the road at the Thomas & Mack Center.

On Thursday, a couple of Texans named Philip James Shurden and John Coltharp clinched the big check for $300,000 with one toss of their lariats. Shurden, 30, is a golfer who works in the Wyoming oil fields. Coltharp, 63, is a retired school teacher and equine dentist, because somebody’s gotta do it.

Shurden, whose sister married Speed Williams, the eight-time NFR world champion header, said there were a lot of things he could pay off with a big check like that. Coltharp said he’d probably enclose the roping arena on his property back in Stephenville, Texas.

First they had to fill out 1099 tax forms, for this was income not derived from wages, salaries and tips. This was serious income derived from twirling lariats.

Denny Gentry says he can’t believe how the World Series of Team Roping has grown since he thought it up. It now offers the second-highest purse of any event featuring natural horsepower. Only the Breeders Cup for horse racing ($26 million) pays more.

Unless Michael Gaughan builds a couple of more parking garages and rodeo arenas, it would appear the team roping event will be stuck on $10 million for a while. With every barn within a 25-mile radius having livestock and alfalfa bales inside and Dodge Rams with mudflaps and Wyoming license plates in the driveway, there’s simply no room to grow.

“Michael wanted to have a world class event in here during the NFR, and he had a lot of choices,” Gentry said.

So no, Denny Gentry says. The World Series of Team Roping absolutely will not be moving from Vegas Cowboy Central to Florida or to AT&T Stadium in Dallas, at least not while he’s in charge.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.