Has anyone ever seen calf-roping at a rodeo? How is it organized? How is it judged? Is it a time thing like bull-riding?
Also, in rodeo circles, does anyone know if it's considered a "lesser" activity? Leser difficulties, lesser injuries, less "macho" in other words? This was the impression made on me by an article in Saturday's Globe and Mail (Toronto) about three young cowboys starting out on their bull-riding careers in British Columbia. (Images of our Jack, of course, kept popping up in my mind.) Anyway, when talking about themselves, they saw bull-riding as "the top of the food chain", thereby placing calf-roping somewhat lower down on the scale.
This contrast between bull-riding and calf-roping can be seen in contrasting the two fathers - del Mar, Sr., and Twist Sr. Ennis's father is associated with calf-roping. We learn from Ennis early on that he was a "fine roper", though he seems to have used his skills mostly on ranches as Ennis tells us he "didn't rodeo much". Ennis, before he has met Jack, has rodeoed a little and I suspect this was as a calf-roper. His story at the Thanksgiving dinner about his three second bullride sounds as though this was his one and only attempt it.
Ennis's father, too, has a fairly disparaging view of rodeo cowboys in general and maybe bull-riders in particular. According to Ennis, he thought they were all *beep* ups". Jack, of course, comes to the defence of the bull-riders in that splendidly warmhearted scene where he ends up tumbling to the ground.
Twist Sr., on the other hand, is firmly placed in the bull-riding category. In his younger days, according to Jack, he was "pretty well knowed" but his essential meaness of spirit is shown when Jack tells us he "never taught me a thing" nor ever came to see him ride. I wonder if Jack, in taking up bull-riding, was trying to emulate his father or perhaps get his respect.
One last comment on calf-roping. When Jimbo, the rodeo clown, leaves Jack at the bar, he joins a group of men. Did anyone spot that these were all calf-ropers? I'm not sure how anyone could tell from just watching the movie but it's explicit in the script:
Watches JIMBO walk over, sit down with a table full of calf-ropers,
all of them wearing pigin strings over their shoulders like bandoliers.
Maybe it's the pigin strings - any one know what they are? - that identify them as calf-ropers. I'm not sure if there's any significance in the fact that Jimbo joins the calf-roping group. Maybe rodeo clowns were thought of as well down the pecking order and therefore never invited to sit with the big boys, the bull riders.