PHILLIPSBURG — This week, the town of Phillipsburg welcomes 400 guests.
It’s time for the annual Kansas’ Biggest Rodeo, and 408 cowboys and cowgirls will visit the rodeo grounds north of town, all hoping to be the highest score or the fastest run in their event.
Some contestants will travel a distance to get to town, coming from as far away as Florida, Texas, and even from Marseille, France.
For others, it’ll be a quick trip to Phillipsburg.
Three of the more than four hundred cowboys and cowgirls are hometown-ers and are familiar to Phillipsburg rodeo fans.
Barrel racer Deb Christy and team roper Tyler Brockman are from Norton, and team roper Cody Ware is from Logan.
For Christy, she’s been attending the Phillipsburg rodeo since she was a young child. She grew up in Phillipsburg, the daughter of Bud Forell, a steer wrestler. At that time, local contestants who were not pro rodeo members were allowed to compete, so she ran barrels there as a young girl.
At this year’s rodeo, she’ll ride Blitz, a seven year old she raised and trained herself. Blitz, whose registered name is Dashin on the Blitz, is a brother to the best horse Christy has had so far, Choc, who died of an autoimmune disease in 2011. Choc was a phenomenal horse, and Christy thinks his brother Blitz will do as well. “Choc was a star. He was gifted,” she said. “Blitz is gritty. He’s had some adversities of his own,” one of them being a broken hipbone, which put him out of action for a year while it healed.
The partnership between the horse and cowgirl in the barrel racing is crucial, and Christy knows her horses as well as a mother knows her child. For horses, competing at rodeos is a learning process, and Blitz is learning. Phillipsburg will be his fifth rodeo, so it is new to him. “It takes a while for them to get used to the noise,” Christy said. The crowd noise, the carnival, and all the activity can be upsetting to a horse. For that reason, she will run in slack on Wed., July 29.
Christy finished second at the Phillipsburg rodeo in 2008, Choc’s best year. She made a 16.90 second run, “which would have won it,” she said, but was beat out by Mary Burger, who had won a world title two years earlier.
Not only is Christy a Women’s Pro Rodeo Association member, which means she can compete at pro rodeos, she is also a member of the Kansas Pro Rodeo Association, Nebraska State Rodeo Association, and the Mid-States Rodeo Association. She’s currently sitting in the top fifteen of the KPRA, NSRA and M-SRA standings.
Choc was an outstanding horse for Christy, but she thinks Blitz can be just as good. “He’s tough, very gritty,” she said. “The way he runs, the way he goes at it. He attacks whatever you ask him to do. He’s going to work as hard as he can no matter what.”
Team ropers Tyler Brockman and Cody Ware don’t have far to drive to get to their rodeo this week. Brockman lives in Norton and Ware in Logan, and they’ve been roping together for the past two years. Brockman, who grew up in Lawrence, Neb., moved to Norton four years ago, and Ware married Jesse Voss and moved to Logan two years ago.
Brockman competed in high school and college rodeo, growing up with a dad who roped. “I’ve been roping since I was seven or eight years old,” he said.
Ware grew up in a family that roped on a ranch in Floydata, Texas. He met Jesse in college at Panhandle State University in Goodwell, Okla., where she competed in rodeo as well. Jesse, a team roper, competes at jackpots.
The summer time is the busy work season for the ropers; Brockman works for a local farmer and Ware ranches with his wife’s family. But they both find time to get away and rope as much as possible. They compete at KPRA and NSRA rodeos more than pro rodeos, mostly because they are closer to home than pro rodeos.
Brockman, who is the header, competed in Phillipsburg last year. For Ware, this will be his first time. They will rope on Saturday night, and if they could win the rodeo, it’d be a big win. “They put on a hell of a rodeo,” Brockman said. “They get all the top names (contestants), and it pays good, and it’s a rodeo you don’t want to miss. It would be a nice feather in your hat to win that rodeo, especially living twenty miles away.” They will rope on Sat., August 1.
Among the other contestants at the rodeo are reigning world champions like the 2014 World Champion Bull Rider Sage Kimzey, tie-down roper Tuf Cooper, and team ropers Clay Tryan and Jade Corkill.
Kansas’ Biggest Rodeo will also see five of the cowboys in the number one spot in this year’s world standings: bareback rider Evan Jayne (from Marseille, France, via Texas), team ropers Tryan and Corkill, tie-down roper Monty Lewis, and bull rider Kimzey, whose father, Ted Kimzey, was a well-known barrelman who worked the Phillipsburg rodeo several times.
Slack competition is at 7 pm on July 28 and 29 and is free. On July 28, slack will feature tie-down roping, team roping, steer wrestling and barrel racing. On July 29, slack is steer wrestling and barrel racing.
The rodeo begins at 8 pm each night, July 30-August 1. Tickets are $15 for reserved adult seating and $11 for reserved child seating, and general admission tickets are $13 for adults and $10 for children. To purchase tickets, call Heritage Insurance at (785) 543-2448. For more information, visit the rodeo’s website at KansasBiggestRodeo.com or, on Facebook, search for “ksbiggestrodeo”.
Photo by Dakota Rose Photography.