10/12/2024
🌻 it’s the journey, the struggles, the perseverance, the surviving heartbreak, and a special angel that has me cheering for this team!
About Kassie Mowry and Jarvis winning Round 4 on Memorial Night…The 2024 Nutrena Barrel Horse of the Year’s registered name is Force The Goodbye. Under the circumstances you may or may not know about, that gives me chills. You see, Jarvis was the pride and joy of his owner and Kassie’s fiancé, Michael Boone. Kassie and Jarvis made the fastest run here last year, and won the very next round, too, to go back-to-back in the Thomas & Mack. Before they left Vegas last year, Michael told Kassie she had to do whatever it took to get Jarvis back here again, because, “He deserves to go 10 rounds.”
Kassie, who’s the winningest barrel horse jockey of all time with career earnings of now $7.5 million, is famous for barely making the 25-rodeo minimum that’s an NFR-qualification requirement. Last year, she went to 26 rodeos, and this year just 27. Think about that, when there are people here…and plenty who didn’t make it this far…who went to 100 rodeos. Kassie kept her word to Michael. But this time, with a broken heart.
Michael died without warning in an accident on June 1. I had no idea when I first picked up the phone to talk to her for a Horse of the Year story for the American Quarter Horse Association on Jarvis’s peer-voted honor the Sunday before this NFR started. Kassie was making the very long drive from Dublin, Texas to Cowboy Town that day, and when I asked her about Jarvis’s owner, there was an impossible, painful break in her voice before she tried to tell me about it.
Then it was my turn, as I told her it reminded me of being here in 1989, when Tuff Hedeman had to make the trip without his traveling partner and best friend, Lane Frost. Or when Mary Walker won the world on Latte in 2012 after she and Byron lost their only child and rising rodeo star son, Reagon, at 21 in a road accident, and Mary overcame a crippling horse accident that could easily have ended her cowgirl career. I sure didn’t expect to cry on that call with Kassie, but those kinds of catastrophic losses leave permanent scars that dredge up deep emotion when we go back and relive them, even years later.
Anyway, Kassie and Jarvis clipped a barrel on opening night, but even with a slip on the second one would have turned in the fastest time of the night and eclipsed the world-famous Hailey Kinsel and Sister by four-hundredths of a second for first in Round 1. Those two are on a tear hear, going tic-tac-toe, three in a row in Rounds 1-3, then finishing third last night. But how cool knowing what I now know about what Kassie’s overcome just to get Michael’s beloved Jarvis here this year to see them rally back and place second only to Hailey and Sister in Rounds 2 and 3 before taking last night’s victory lap (Hailey and Sis finished third in Round 4).
I don’t pretend to know Kassie well, but from what I can tell she’s one classy, humble, handy horsewoman who’s earned every penny of that $7.5 million she’ll hit this week, as she’s already closing in on $100 grand in the first four rounds. And that, ladies and gentleman, puts her in the same rarified air as rodeo royals Trevor Brazile and Jb Mauney. Enjoy the ride, cowgirl. I know that cowboy angel of yours is running up that alley with you. You say you’re “in awe of this horse.” We, Kassie, are in awe of you.
Update: Kassie and Jarvis struck again in Round 5, a couple hours after I posted this!!
Kenneth Springer photo thanks to WPRA
These are the stories of No Spin Rodeo.
