THE ORIGINALS

By the time Denny Gentry and roping’s computer whiz Gary Poythress combined their lists to create the earliest iteration of the number-system’s database in 1990, they had over 10,000 ropers on file.

Poythress put those first ropers into the system in alphabetical order starting at 1,000, so the original members of the USTRC have four-digit numbers, listed mostly alphabetically from there.

Many of them attended the first ever National Finals of Team Roping in Guthrie, Oklahoma—a roping that hosted 650 contestants who came to see what the talk was all about. That first edition paid out $185,000 and turned heads across the roping community, helping shape what would become today’s massive team roping industry.

Jim Brinkman, 60, Nebraska

In the late 1980s, remembers having a Fourth-of-July roping in a hay meadow at home in Nebraska, in a town with just over 90 people within its limits. The roping would draw