You become one of the best heelers in the world because team roping has consumed you all your life. It’s your purpose. It’s just what you do.
So, when you’re a 9 heeler and find yourself, at 37, near death with an abdomen full of fluid and half a lung collapsed, the shock that comes with a cancer diagnosis rides along with the realization that you might never rope again.
That means it hits differently when the biggest win of your life happens just 15 months later on a horse you trained from a weanling, against the best teams in the world. At the pick-one/draw-one Clay Logan Open in Stephenville, Texas, on Feb. 4, Brandon Gonzales and his draw partner, gold-buckle-header Erich Rogers, split $42,000 as the champs of the five-header with 131 teams.
“I never thought in a million years this would come at this point in my life,” Gonzales said. “I mean, I had high expectations, or I wouldn’t have tried for so long to be good, but it was totally unexpected.”
Why was that? Well,
