Thursday Houston Thoughts

Hoge is doing an excellent job in Houston, just not much else to say about it.  Unless you’re an absolute zealot for one particular trait, be that on the soundness side or the power side, it would be hard to disagree with what he’s been picking.  He’s taking as complete a steer as he can find to win and then playing give and take without being overly discriminatory regarding any particular trait.

He’s also been flat out outstanding on the mic.

He knows what he did.  Let’s admit the obvious, he wasn’t the only guy that was too quick in evaluating calves lately.  He just went way overboard with it and the stage he was on created a tidal wave of anger.

The long term result of Ft Worth is that every judge to enter the ring from now on is going to know what they’re there for and what’s expected of them.  

…is “will they acknowledge I exist.”  It’s no surprise that the mixture of the tone of this blog and the amount of large egos in this little niche don’t mix well but sometimes I’m not even aware of it when I tick somebody off.

The only negative experience I had at Houston was catching a shuttle bus out to the park and ride to meet my wife.  I got on the bus and needed to know how long a trip it was so I could let her know when to pick me up.

I asked the driver how long the trip would be.  She had the radio pretty loud and evidently didn’t hear me.  I said “excuse me” in an effort to get her attention.  She still didn’t respond so I spoke louder, “EXCUSE ME, about how long is this trip?”

She went off on me with a full waving finger snap for yelling at her.

After her rant about how she “done have to take dis disrespec” I said “mam, I wasn’t trying to be ru…”.  She cut me off and tore into me for calling her “mam” because it’s evidently a racist term.  She said she didn’t have to talk to me if she doesn’t want to and that was that.  It was an awkward bus ride being the only passenger.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the city of Houston.

We’ve had steers class out, we’re not rubes, it’s part of the game.  The reason I was so pissed Tuesday was we worked seven years to get a calf that could play with the best Brahman cross steers in the state and you know what…

The champion Brahman steer was a calf that just wasn’t going to get beat by anything else in that barn under a Midwestern judge.  He was so unique in his design and build that you just weren’t going to beat him unless you had some Brahman aficionado that likes a more traditional build and even then it would be almost impossible to get by the design.  He had the thing won about two seconds after Hoge put eyes on him and rightfully so.

It wasn’t an accident either.  He was bred by a family that it would be hard to argue are not the top of the Brahman steer breeders in the state right now, the Naeglins (who also bred the reserve champ and ironically, had their kid's Brahman steer class out).  He was sold by and fed a few miles from Lucherk who is as good at the American game as it gets.

That calf has won almost every time he’s been in the ring and took grand overall against even the exotics at a couple solid prospect shows. 

I say almost every time because he was beaten head to head in the ring once, just once.

By our calf.

The one that classed out.

That’s not saying we would have beaten them, we wouldn’t.  We didn’t have the power to take the reserve steer either.  For all I know we could have been two spots out of the sale in the Brahman steers the same way the calf I’m whining about ended up two holes out in class 3 of the ABCs.  But I highly doubt it.

What I was pissed about was the effort and work to produce one of those finally paid off and we had a calf that could play with the big boys and we didn’t get to do it.

It was a reminder I'm taking this stuff too seriously and need to chill the heck out before my ego gets so big that I won't even acknowledge that I exist in my favorite little game.