Wisconsin steer wrestler leaves hockey to his boys
Jon Ragatz is glad to be able to compete with his sons old enough to appreciate it
Between Wayne Brooks and Brett Gardiner, Wednesday’s in-house rodeo announcers at the Calgary Stampede, someone received some incorrect information about Jon Ragatz.
Despite being from Beetown, Wisc., and having a Canadian-born wife from Penticton, B.C., he is not a hockey player.
The 37-year-old is a steer wrestler through and through.
“I don’t know where they got that from,” Ragatz said with a chuckle, hands on his hips and sunglasses pulled down over his eyes. “Wisconsin is a big hockey state but no. My wife is from Canada so she has my boys heavily involved in hockey and I’m very familiar with it. “But I’m not very good at it.” But what he is good at is sliding off a horse, tackling a steer, and trying to wrestle it to the dirt as quickly as possible. Ragatz did that in 3.9-seconds on Wednesday, the day’s fastest time, which was a rather difficult feat out of a pen of steers that seemed to be tough to take down.
Unfortunately, the horse he’d borrowed was fussing round in the box prior to exiting which went over the allotted time as per Stampede regulations. As such, he was slapped with a penalty that cost him three-tenths of a second, giving him a 4.2-second time.
He finished second, still winning a healthy chunk of day money.
Meanwhile Dakota Eldridge vaulted into first place with his 4.1-second time. He got the news by a call from fellow competitor Tanner Milan as he was pulling Jess Lockwood’s bull rope, prompting a last-minute trip to the stage.
“I heard one of the judges say it on the way out, but nobody said anything until Tanner called and made it official,” the Elko, Nev., native said. “They were tricky steers today. I was lucky to have a good one and make a good run.
“That’s the thing, if you have a good one, you have to use it because you don’t know what’s going to happen the next day … to win it off a default, it’s kind of bittersweet.”
Truth be told, both cowboys are in a good spot after the second day of Pool B competition Wednesday.
With his first-place finish, Eldridge is sitting atop the aggregate with $9,000 after two afternoons of work while Ragatz fell to fourth with $4,500. Still, the top four money winners after four days advance automatically to Sunday ’s final and both are in good shape to do so.
And it’s territory Ragatz has been in before, having finished second at the Calgary Stampede in 2005, the last time he and his wife Allison were last in Calgary when the couple were dating. Since then, Ragatz’s rodeo career has slowed down while Allison got a job as a physician’s assistant at a clinic in Wisconsin and the two farmed and ranched.
It wasn’t until last year that Ragatz decided to compete in a handful of winter rodeos and wound up qualifying for the Stampede again.
So, to return with their two boys is memorable, especially considering he only decided to get back into rodeoing seriously last year and wound up qualifying for the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth.
“This is one of the rodeos I really wanted them to come to,” Ragatz said. “I’m just very fortunate that they’re old enough and can see their dad here, competing on this stage. A lot of kids don’t get to see that of their folks. For a while, they might think their dad is pretty cool. It means a lot … I try to do right for them and be good ”