Cookville Cowboy won world championship

From East Texas Journal, June 1994

By Hudson Old, Journal publisher

Cookville, Texas – Billy Ray Rosewell hollered for his wife, Teresa, her being the person in the family who knew how to run the VCR. Seeing his boss fiddling with the TV, Gypsy the border collie sat down smack in front of the screen like a kid waiting for cartoons.

Instead, a clump of cattle bunched at the end of a riding arena popped on the screen. A horseman rode into the picture and the cattle shied away, running to the forefront of the shot. Gypsy slunk over to the TV, stood up and nipped at the cattle.

“Lay down, Gypsy,” Billy Ray ordered. With the tape up and running, Billy Ray settled back on the couch and took charge of the remote control. A caption popped up on the screen: “National Cutting Horse Association Finals,” it said, and Billy Ray began fast forwarding through the competition. Horses and cattle darted at unnatural speed, jerking from side to side of the picture. Gypsy was doing his dead level best to hold still, but now and again, when it looked to him like a cow might come busting out of the set and into the living room, he’d pop up and nip at the picture, earning another “Lay down, Gypsy,” from the slim, 60-year-old cowboy on the couch.

In case you’re tuning behind on your stock magazine reading, that’s Billy Ray Rosewell, of greater metropolitan Cookville, aboard a horse called Show Biz Sandy gracing the cover of the April, 1994 issue of Cutting Horse Chatter.

They won the world championship in this cutting horse deal.

Billy Ray grew up in a Cookville farm family, got his first job in town working at the fertilizer plant after they got their crops in. He ran heavy equipment for road contractor H. E. Spann and rode bareback and bulls on the weekend rodeo circuit.

After coming home from the service, he settle down some and gave up rodeo riding — for 10 years he drove dozers out on the old Pewitt Ranch, which is now the sprawling, 40,000 acre Broseco Ranch on the Titus-Morris County line.

At night, he worked training horses. “Training ranch horses is different,” said Billy Ray, who hardly trained any ranch horses, except maybe as a favor. “As long as a ranch horse has the idea of cutting cattle in his head and responds to your handling him, that’s about all a cowboy needs.”

A competition horse is different.

When you start getting the sense that the horse can feel you thinking, that the horse is anticipating what’s going to happen, you’re starling to get there,” he said.

After a lifetime on horseback, the animals are still a mystery to him that anticipation mode that separates the ranch stock from the show stock is either trained into animals, or it’s a real, cowpony instinct that’s honed. Either way, it’s one of two essential elements. In this age of fiery pedigrees and rich bloodlines, the animal has to be nothing short of magnificent to make a bid at being the best.

Along back in the 60s, Billy Ray gave up his day job aboard the dozer and started working day and night training horses. For 25 years he made the NCHA competitions, just enough to mingle in the circle and get known as a top trainer.

He stabled upwards of 20 horses at a time, horses brought to him by owners ranging from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Brownsville into Canada. In the world of cutting horses, he’s a known quantity.

In a business where trainers come and go, where retirement money is poured into visions of grand blue grass facilities, he’s a steady hand, a journeyman toiling from morning into midnight.

“If you see him in the house before the late news comes on, it’s the same as him taking an afternoon off,” his wife said.

He first saw Show Biz Sandy when his brother’s boy Ricky Mac, was training her.

“She was sort of silly, a little wild,” Billy ray said. “She was just flouncy and bouncy — like a puppy.”

They weren’t characteristics he hadn’t seen before.

But Sandy did have something unique-fine conformation coupled with a grace and fluid style of movement.

There was just something about her,” he said, and he made a couple of tries at buying her. She wasn’t for sale.

But in that way of horses and race cars and land, she happened to come up for sale at a later date, and Billy Ray’s buyer, DeKalb businessman Starkey Smith grabbed her.

“Everybody who trains cutting horses dreams about winning a world title and that horse was our chance to do it,” Billy ray said. “We bought her to win it.”

Starting in July of ’92, he dedicated himself to the horse. He trained her the way he’s trained hundreds of others.

Some days he pushed her, finding her limits and some days she’d just be ridden and groomed.

He trailered her around the country the last part of ’92 and she won. Over and over, $800 here, $400 there. The wild and the silly disappeared by degrees as Show Biz Sandy hunkered down to business, dazzling judges with her speed and instinct, giving them cause to grin with that flouncy, puppy dog heart.

By mid-season of ’93, Show Biz Sandy was staking her claim to her crown. Before the year ended, she made 100 competitions, won money 84 times. She jumped out in front — way in front — then came her slump.

The schedule had been brutal at times. In one 8-day stretch, she traveled from Cookville to Athens to California, back to Texas, then up to ‘Montana, then back to California before coming home.

And then she ran out of gas. She quit winning. She wasn’t moving right. For a while, it looked like all the kings horses and all the kings men wouldn’t put her back together. She showed to be healthy in every respect, except the way she moved.

“She still wanted to, she still tried, but she just couldn’t move the way she’d been moving,” Billy Ray said. “She was sore.”

He took her to a renounced horse-world vet, Texan “T-Bone” Buchanan of Navasota.

“He did some blood-work on her, identified a potassium deficiency and in no time she was up to speed,” Billy Ray said. “Except for that, she’d of gone into the finals untouchable — she’d of been up $20,000.”

Back on track, she leaped back into the forefront, taking a narrow $1,300 lead to Houston and the NCHA finals. There, the nation’s top 15 horses get one last chance to win Money for the year — the champion is determined by total winnings.

Going into her last of three runs in Houston there would have been a $2,600 money shift. Show Biz Sandy was down $1,300.

“Here we go,” Billy Ray said, and let go of the VCR fast forward. Gypsy the Cowdog has been all but frozen, coiled and intent on the TV screen and when the picture cleared up she launched a gentle nip at a calf that got too close.

“Lay down, Gypsy,” Billy Ray said.

“Ladies and gentlemen, for the world championship!” the announcer declared, and Sandy was down like a lineman, head down eyeball to eyeball with the calf, curled down on her haunches ready to explode. The calf leaned one way and another and the horse tossed her forequarters with him, moves like a dancer.

The calf turned to run and she skirted sideways, nothing to it except eyeball to eyeball.

The calf froze a split second, then broke and ran, and Sandy stayed with him step for step, moving sideways and backwards — the calf nailed a 180, broke the other way and the crowd roared to life as Sandy cut a donut, skirted sideways and hunkered down again eyeball to eyeball for about that long, but it was non-stop now.

Billy Ray was up there on her all night, reins held high and loose in one hand, upright in the saddle, sweeping from side to side like somebody on that octopus ride on the state fair midway.

A buzzer sounded and Billy Ray’s face split into a smile as big as the chrome bumper on a pickup. As he brought Sandy to a halt, the calf broke to get back to the herd; Gypsy leaped up and nipped at the TV screen.

“Lay down Gypsy,” Billy Ray said.