08/04/2026
This to infinity!!!!!!!!
Thanks for sharing Craig, well spoken as always.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/14quaegtw39/
Why We Reined
Before it was history.
Before it was a TV show.
Before social media.
Before it became international.
Before it was possible to be a Million Dollar Rider.
Before Million Dollar Owners.
Before Million Dollar Stallions.
Before the purses got so big.
Before horses were worth so much.
Before Oklahoma City and Las Vegas became the center of the reining world.
Before horses were bred specifically for reining.
When there were only three patterns—and no spins.
Before good ground.
When the holes in the arena were so bad it was perfectly acceptable to avoid them.
Before big coliseums.
Before arena drags.
When the arena was watered once in the morning by a fire truck and dragged every ten horses with a chain-link fence or spike-tooth drag. By the end of the day the dust was so thick you could barely see, and everyone went home filthy.
Before there was a judging system.
Before A General was written.
Before the Reining Horse Foundation
Before the Hall of Fame.
When the Hall of Fame was earned and couldn't be bought or petitioned into.
Before reiners migrated to Texas and Oklahoma.
Before there was a headquarters.
Before horse spas.
Before the veterinarians and farriers we have today.
When a mare could only have one foal a year.
When a mare didn't need a show record—just someone willing to ride her baby.
Before paid warm-ups.
Before circling on the even hours and stopping on the odd.
When fencing during open riding meant timing your takeoff between horses circling in both directions.
Before it took two years to train one.
When you could make a reiner out of a cutter, a pleasure horse, or a rope horse.
When a trophy meant more than money earned.
Before The Run for a Million, we ran for almost nothing.
Before sponsors.
Before the right saddle, the right bit, and the right subscription promised to train your horse.
Before judges sat in tall chairs with scribes.
When what is now considered the ideal width of an arena used to be the ideal length.
Before you even needed an arena.
When a pasture was your favorite place to train.
Before mega training facilities.
When ten horses made a full barn.
When you trained what you had.
When it was a training contest—not a buying contest.
Before EquiStat kept track of earnings.
When money earned in every association still counted, whether someone kept track of it or not.
Before year-end Top 20 lists.
When there were only two divisions: Open and Amateur.
Before there were enough categories that everyone could win money and have it count in an official database.
When a sliding contest was a drinking game.
When good horses could be found anywhere—and usually were.
Before just two airports became the shopping malls of the reining horse world.
Before being a horse trainer was lucrative.
When most trainers had another job just to make ends meet.
Before interpreters.
Before shirts became billboards.
When history and legends reached farther back than Grandpa.
When reining was simply an arena discipline played by a bunch of crazy riders.
Before it also became a corporate business.
Before NRHA headquarters.
When all the official NRHA business was done on a kitchen table.
Before Andrea and Casey.
Before Dale and Bill.
Before living-quarter trailers and buses.
When a six-horse trailer was considered big.
Before draw parties.
When the draw was done by the show secretary.
Then by a computer.
Then eventually seeded—low score first, high score last.
When we still had go-round runs.
When top trainers bought their own tack, feed, and equipment.
When training a reiner was still an experiment.
When there were many different styles of runs—and they were all acceptable.
When you could tell who was showing simply by the style.
When every horse could hear.
When color didn't matter.
When your work saddle was also your show saddle.
When everyone could ride in the big arena every night.
Before Taylor Sheridan.
When reining was the daredevil sport of the western horse world.
Reiners were the rebels.
Our heroes were cowboys.
It was new.
It was different.
Pleasure riders, lungers, and even many cutters didn't understand it.
Reiners didn't want to lunge, didn't want to go slow, and some didn't even want cattle.
It became the place for horses that couldn't lunge, couldn't win the pleasure, weren't fast enough to be racehorses, didn't love cattle, or simply weren't pretty enough for somewhere else.
You could find a reining almost anywhere there was a horse show.
Inside or outside.
On a racetrack.
In the wind, rain, dust, snow, or mud.
On black dirt, clay, sand, pea gravel, lime screenings, or rocks.
With fences or without them.
At county fairgrounds, trainers' ranches, 4-H shows, club shows, open shows, breed shows, stock shows...
North, south, east, and west.
Long before Oklahoma City, Tulsa, or Las Vegas became destinations.
We ran for ribbons.
For buckles.
For trinkets.
Maybe a trophy.
We had jackpots, calcutta pools, wagers, and side bets between trainers, hoping to win enough for supper or enough gas to get home.
I'm grateful to be old enough to remember some of those days.
Grateful to have heard the stories from friends and legends who lived them.
And grateful to be here now, watching this sport become something none of us could have imagined.
The opportunities available today for riders, owners, breeders, trainers, and everyone who loves these incredible horses are amazing.
But every once in a while, it's worth remembering why we reined before any of that existed.
We didn't do it for sponsorships.
We didn't do it for rankings.
We didn't do it for million-dollar earnings.
We did it because it was the most exciting thing you could do on horseback.
Because it was different.
Because it was hard.
Because it was the cowboy's version of a daredevil sport.
And because whether you won a ribbon, a trophy, or a million dollars...
A great stop has always felt exactly the same.
