Of Ropes and Rascals

My Obsession With Trick Roping - Gill T.

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Roping Europe

This update is delayed but I took a trip in June to England, Ireland, and France. This was just for vacation and sightseeing for 15 days but I did bring a rope of course! Here are some photo highlights of roping in Europe, sorry but most of my pictures are from London. I didn’t manage to catch any roping shots in Paris, I was too busy enjoying the city. The weather was wonderful when I was there but since then they’ve had two very harsh heat waves. Glad I missed that but at the same time we’ve gotten to 116 F here at home.

London, by Trafalgar Square:

London Parliament:

By Tower Bridge

London, Russel Square:

Ireland, Cliffs of Moher

Joan of Arc in Paris:

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Back In Action, Weather and Parades

After hurting my knees through overwork last month I was lying low for a few weeks letting them heal, the left one was particularly worrisome but they started feeling better and I’m back to doing some moderate jumping and hopping. Hopping high in the air with both feet simultaneously gives the most strain so I am limiting that kind of jump and trying to do more leaping from one foot to another only as high as I need to. I love jumping in, out and through ropes so it takes self control to hold back. Once I start I tend to want to run it just about until I drop so I have to pull back. A natural limiter has been the weather this week, we had a day at 95 deg F. So that slows me down a bit. 

I had been taking lunch breaks at the park once or twice a week pretty regularly since December to get rope training in but I’ll cut that back considerably now with the warm weather. To cap it off I edited together some clips of me at the park over the last months into a five minute video. This documents the main tricks I’ve been working up in that time. A lot of bounces and jump throughs.

Video: Roping at the Park - Gill T.

From the video you can get a sense of how mild the winters are here in Arizona. We have some cold mornings but nothing that would do you any harm. There was a big snowstorm in the high country that gave us some nice diversity, snow was even seen around many parts of Tucson, but at my house we didn’t see any of that. I got to rope in the Tucson Rodeo Parade on Feb 21st. What a great opportunity, if you get to rope in a parade then I highly suggest it, it’s a fun challenge. The snow actually came in the day after the parade so it was perfecto! The Daily Star caught a great shot of me, second photo in their photo album.

I used a 17.5 foot rope with a metal thimble, which is basically asking for a challenge because it’s a heavier rope and needs to be spun on the quick side to maintain flat loops. The parade route was 2 miles long and I’m trailing the Tucson Boys Chorus wagon the whole way trying to pull off tricks and keep up at the same time. You can see why I call it a fun challenge. There was wind too which definitely makes a difference on the rope. First thing in the morning my hands were cold, but once I started spinning that rope I warmed right up. I took a few days to recover after that.

Photo: Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus Wagon that I followed

I was participating in the Parade as an alum of the chorus and was quite excited that they extended the invitation. It was exactly 30 years ago that I roped in the very same parade as a boy! Most of those years between I have not been roping but still I know better tricks now and was able to get some oohs and ahhs from the boys, hopefully I passed some roping inspiration along. Safety measures now prohibit children under 14 from walking in the parade so boys can no longer rope so they ask old men like me to do it, lucky me, I had the time of my life! If I hold up another year I may just get to do it again.

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Bad Knees and Over Training

I have been working on fixing my bad form on the jump through, a trick similar to the classic skipping through a vertical loop except this one is done with a smaller loop size and can be mixed in to a butterfly routine. I wrote about it earlier as I was preparing to learn the “Texas” Skip and I noted my tendency to lift the loop up so that I went headfirst through instead of the loop passing directly horizontally around the body. Well, I have corrected my form on that and in doing so I have totally overworked myself and caused injury, hopefully not permanent but I’m not sure yet. 

Photo: Gill T. doing a jump through and wrecking his knees 19 Mar 2019

I came out of a week recently where I had trained too hard on other jumping tricks, spoke hops specifically. So my knees were already partially strained, but I didn’t realize the extent of it. After taking some down time I felt ready for another workout, I was loving the feeling of doing the jump through so on Tuesday I took one of my regular lunchtime getaways to the park near the office and roped for a good hour. I started out on many other tricks but the last half of the workout was all about jump through. I was practicing them repeatedly, working towards the point where it’s solid and I would hardly miss, that’s the goal, performance ready.

It was feeling so good I didn’t want to stop, but the time was requiring me to return to the office. After finishing some work that afternoon I picked up my rope and ran the jump through for another 20 minutes, still feeling pretty good, tired, but good. After dinner I started to feel it, my knees were aching and cracking and popping every time I bent them. It wasn’t a muscle ache but in the joint and the swelling began. These warnings came far too late and as I went to bed that night I knew I wouldn’t be doing that or any other jumping trick any time soon. It’s a very depressing feeling.

I lay there pleading with my maker to give me a healing miracle so that I could once again do these tricks, I was just at the point where I felt ready to show my skills to the world! I found my limit by pushing it and exceeding it in a destructive way, and I hope that now that I know this information I can use it to know how hard I can train before taking a break next time. But if I don’t recover to the point where I am able to do these tricks again then I learned a lesson that I cannot directly apply, which would be just a really terrible thing. I might be over-reacting, I really hope that’s what’s going on here and after a few weeks I’ll be well enough to start working these tricks back in, but at a much more reserved pace. I resolved to wait at least a week before doing any sort of jumping trick and that if I do recover enough to do these tricks again, I will practice it a little here and a little there, never again replicating such an intensive training schedule.

I am 41 years old, and although I usually feel rather fit, I am feeling the unavoidable physical degradation that comes with age. It’s suddenly hitting me hard. I thought that staying vigorously active would be a great thing for my body, but the yellow light didn’t come on soon enough, or I was so wrapped up in the joy of jumping through a spinning loop that I didn’t notice it. I have had some joint issues in the past, and I’ve been aware that it’s a weak spot for me. My first knee issues started around age 13 when I was skateboarding in the emptied out swimming pool in our backyard. I heard a pop followed by acute knee pain, I rested and recuperated for a while and then talked to a doctor about it who said it was probably Osgood Schlatter, an issue common in teenage years. Eventually both knees were similarly afflicted and I was told I would grow out of it, which indeed seemed to happen. I don’t know if that has any connection to my current state but over the years I have had other wrist and ankle issues in addition to frequent popping and crackling noises coming from my knees. It’s never put me down like this though.

Alright, I am being a baby about it, I can still walk right now. I’m avoiding stairs if possible and bending especially my left knee. My left ankle was aching too but not as much. I iced it a few times, last night it was feeling a little better but was still noticeably swollen and I feel like I’m a far ways off from being able to safely jump up and down. It’s just a quite different experience than how I felt 3 days ago, shocking that it can turn around like this without even a specific point in time during training where I felt like I was injured or getting injured. Age is a stealthy killer.

I got video of some of that last practice session, to check to see how my form is coming along. If I can never do it again, at least I’ll have that video proof that I could jump through a loop with the best of them. I can re-watch it as I feel sorry for my old-man-self. Self pity is not becoming, so I will have this day of lament and then I will move on. There are many other roping tricks besides high impact jump throughs, so I can’t throw in the towel that easily. Plus I still have faith that the human body can heal, I’ll be older and wiser for getting through this bump in the road, definitely older.

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Some History - Is Skip From Texas?

Usually one of the most dramatic moments in a trick roping performance is when the roper spins a large vertical loop and then skips through it as it swings back and forth on either side of the roper. We call it the Texas Skip, and it has a ring to it, but I don’t have any proof that the trick has any strong connection to the grand state of Texas and I haven’t even heard of any anecdotal rumor that would link the two together. I have a theory about why we call it the Texas Skip, which is that someone started calling it the “Texas” skip only for a flashy title and to evoke the classic Western imagery that comes along with a word like Texas. At the risk of hurting one’s Texas pride, I venture to say that Texas doesn’t have a claim on this trick’s origination and I will lay out my thought process and the supporting evidence that brought me to this conclusion. Along the way I hope you find this history to be as fascinating as I do.

I have become somewhat obsessed with all things to do with roping so digging into the history of it going back more than a century has been inspiring and eye opening. I feel like I have just scratched the surface though, as there is probably much detail hiding in hard to find places or even lost with those who have passed on. There very well may not be a lot of official documentation on the subject, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is no definitive answer to be had on the origin of the phrase “Texas Skip”. Learning Spanish would probably be a great help to really get into roping history because I’m sure there are insights from the charro and vaquero perspective that can’t be found from the cowboys and in English records.

Google’s ngram viewer, a tool to search the usage of words and phrases from a large library of cataloged written books and media, comes up completely empty for the phrase Texas Skip. I was surprised to see that so I had to proceed with other means of research and I found some fascinating facts along the way, many of which I’ll save for another day but in regards to Texas Skip, or Skipping through a vertical loop, here’s what I know:

The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame website states that champion roper and rider Flores LaDue was reputed to be the first person to have done the Texas Skip, although it refers to it as “the trick known as the Texas Skip”. That they refer to it somewhat indirectly like that makes sense to me because at the time of its origination and for some years after I have found that ropers did not use the phrase “Texas Skip”, but would call it by more of a descriptive name like skipping through a vertical loop. Many rope tricks are called different things by different people as I’m finding out, or just have no name at all. It might be true that LaDue was the first to do this trick, but I don’t believe she, or any of her contemporaries called it as we call it today.

Flores LaDue born in 1883 was from Minnesota, at a rather young age she ran off to perform with various western shows, met fellow performer Guy Weadick and they got married. They did some traveling in the US, Canada, and around Europe. Back in the states she had a short stint with a show Will Rogers was running in late 1910 to early 1911 but soon after settled in Canada and started up the Calgary Stampede. No account that I found mentions any association with the state of Texas, she has no personal connection to the state and there is no reason it would be called “Texas” skip on her account.

James F. Taylor  of The Pittsburgh Press Oct 1, 1916 describes LaDue doing a trick which sounds exactly like the one in question, which shows us that it was indeed a trick that she could do and included in her performances: “With the end of the rope in her right hand she jumps through the revolving loop from one side to the other. And all the time twenty or thirty or forty feet of rope is whirling around so rapidly, in a great circle, that one cannot see the loop.”

In the 2011 book “The First Stampede of Flores LaDue” Wendy Bryden, author, says that Flores was the first woman to do the trick known as the Texas Skip, which is a little bit different of a statement than that made by the National Cowgirl Museum which was that she was the first person to do the trick. In any case, I don’t doubt that she was very influential and has a strong association with the trick. Most tricks don’t have traceable attribution anyway since they are usually passed around in such a non-formal way, but a rough idea of the time and place of origination can sometimes be deciphered. 

The first video I know of the trick is from 1918 made by Ford motor company which shows Will Rogers doing rope tricks for a few minutes, some nice 2 rope tricks and the skip. We also have video of Will Rogers in his 1922 film “The Ropin’ Fool” doing this and many other tricks and catches. Video recording was not common at that time so I don’t expect to find much of it, but with photographs and written accounts we can still decipher a lot. Will Rogers, Oklahoma’s favorite son, was such a popular figure that there is a lot written about him and I haven’t reviewed nearly half of it but so far I haven’t come across mention that he did the skip in his earlier Vaudeville days in the first decade of the century.

There is photographic evidence seen above in a 1913 product brochure from Plymouth Rope of 2 ropers apparently skipping through vertical loops at Miller Brothers and Arlington 101 Ranch in Oklahoma. These ropers are Hank Durnell and Chester Byers, Durnell was from Indiana and Byers was born in Illinois but moved to Oklahoma as a young child and there was inspired to become a trick roper and cowboy; at age eight he ran into Will Rogers and fell in love with roping and cowboy culture. Byers wrote a book called “Roping” published in 1928 where he calls the trick simply “Skipping - through a vertical loop”. Speaking of Oklahoma ropers who were inspired by Will Rogers, Sam Garrett, a friend of Byers’ was a very famous roper who has been photographed doing the trick. It is recounted that Will Rogers at least had some part in passing on some tricks to both Garrett and Byers. Another 1913 photo exists of cowgirl turned movie actress Jane Bernoudy doing a trick captioned “Jumping through a vertical loop” at the Pendleton Round Up seen below and published in “The World’s Work, A History of Our Time Vol 27″ in a sub-article called “Let ‘er Buck”.

It’s clear that by 1913 the trick was well known among top ropers performing the circuit, none of which were from Texas that I can tell (many of which were from Oklahoma though). Furthermore, none of them seem to be calling the trick the Texas Skip. But a snappy name means a lot, and at some point somebody called it that and boy did it stick! I am a little put off by it as it is historically misleading, but I admit that it’s an easy name and I probably don’t have the influence to change it at this point so I’ll live with it, but I will also use it cautiously and perhaps only when necessary.

I wish to make just a few more points clear. I’m not claiming to know who created this trick or that it must be one of the ropers that I have listed in this article, but I do believe that there is a good chance that it is one of the ropers listed here. There is also a very good chance that different people came up with the same rope trick independently. Another possibility that I don’t discount is that a Mexican charro did it first and passed it on to ropers in the states. It is widely said that Vicente Oropeza was a great influence to other ropers as he performed in Buffalo Bill’s Shows and was influential in bringing the tradition from Mexico. It has also been said that Oropeza’s talents inspired ropers such as Will Rogers to build upon the repertoire and add new tricks that didn’t previously exist. We may never know exactly, but it sure is fun trying to figure it out.

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Acrobatic Trick Roping

Roping is a versatile art, if you consider it an art at all. It could be thought of as many different things depending on your approach: a practical skill, a hobby, a performance, a sport, a dance, or even acrobatics. I have not myself taken much of an acrobatic approach to it and I think most people don’t, but if I were more of a gymnast myself, I should like to. Roping has its roots in labor, a tool for the rancher to get the job done. From there it found its way to the stage, whether rodeo, vaudeville, or circus. In the early days of American roping, after being passed to the cowboys by the Mexican charros, there was strong representation on all three of those stages with some of the same performers making appearances across the board. Western culture is romanticized with the image of the rugged free spirit cowboy on the ranch but we shouldn’t ignore the parallel path that trick roping has taken as those early pioneers developed it into a performance art by the likes of Will Rogers who after being influenced by Vicente Oropeza’s rope demonstration in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show went on to hone his own trick rope act in New York City and on the Vaudeville circuit. 

I see trick roping pop up in some unexpected places and by those who never set foot on a ranch in the Old West, and I’m not complaining about it either. I myself, although from a town with rich Southwest and Mexican culture, was essentially a city kid as I grew up in Tucson Arizona but I have the belief that any who love and embrace the rope can be adopted in as true and authentic rope bearers no matter how physically far removed from the ranch you are. This is how the tradition can stay alive, grow, and thrive.

Many have taken the rope to the circus ring, England born Vince Bruce was one of the greatest to do so. Much of his act retained a western feel, but his unicycle mounted Texas Skip was a fusion of trick roping with a more standard circus technique that he performed both in the big top and in the rodeo arena as seen in this video at the 1 minute mark. 

Video: Vince Bruce performing the trick rope skip on a unicycle.

This isn’t exactly acrobatics but it’s a representation of the mixing of western arts with circus skills. I don’t know if he was the first to do this trick, I have seen it one other time by a Chinese circus performer but I have no idea if they got the idea from watching Vince or not. That point requires some investigation, which I intend to do. 

A recent video I found shows another fusion of circus arts and roping, this example is a mix of tumbling gymnastics and roping, not paying much homage to western culture stylistically but the performers are spinning ropes while performing quite impressive acrobatic feats. It’s a very stunning performance, I image that these performers started out as gymnasts foremost and then added trick roping to that, instead of the other way around. It gives you a sense that there is a lot more that can be done with a rope. They do various flips while spinning a wedding ring, some backward rolls, and a very impressive one handed back handspring run also with a wedding ring. Please view the performance yourself, and I’ll remind you that youtube has a setting to slow down the video which is helpful to see how they flip through the rope like that.  

Video: Nanjing Troupe, China - Lazo (Icarian Games with Lasso)

They are using rather long ropes, probably cotton, with swivels on the handles as it appears to me. I only know what is included in the title and description of the video, and this was from an October 2018 performance in Italy. I hadn’t seen this type of acrobatic work with trick roping before this, so I thought it might be a rather new phenomenon, but just last week I found a video that Chris McDaniel posted of some cowboy style acrobatics from an old movie clip that had some similarities. This one has more classic tricks but also a cartwheel and a running front flip into a wedding ring. Very cool. I wish I could tell you what movie this is, and who the ropers are but that’s another research project for me apparently (it could be Cuba Crutchfield 1891-1969, known for acrobatic roping, he lived in Nevada).

Video: Acrobatic Trick Roping in an unknown old western movie (Nevada?)

A more popular (although not very widely used) trick I’ve seen a few contemporary ropers do that goes in this direction is the headfirst jump into the wedding ring, or handstand jump. I’m not sure what it’s called but it’s a trick where you spin a flat loop and dive down into it using your non spinning hand to brace yourself and your feet kick up over your head. The rope vaults up and over your body as your feet come back down. How I’ve seen it, the rope goes up and over the body and is directly lifted off back to a flat loop. You can see Loop Rawlins do this in his routines, including in this 2014 AGT performance at the two minute mark. It’s quite a crowd pleaser, and rightly so.

Video: Loop Rawlins performs an acrobatic headfirst jump into the rope

I really enjoy this kind of blending of trick roping with other skills and I hope to see more of it in the future, I believe we will. I myself am working on some ideas that I will share when the time comes.

UPDATE 11 Mar 2019

I must add this in here because I saw a roping video over the weekend that was wonderful and had some very fresh elements; it is the work of a roper named Shena Tschofen. She has great dance elements and some very flexible body moves mixed in, this is a look at the frontier of roping performance. “Please Go Around”

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The Butterfly - a tutorial

A favorite trick of ropers is the butterfly, La Mariposa. Named thus because the shape the loop marks out as it traverses it's cyclical pattern resembles left and right wings of a butterfly (in another world it could be called the Tie-Fighter). The challenge it presents comes with rewards in the form of a trick that is beautiful and satisfying to execute. It lends itself to variation and layering more tricks on top of the base butterfly pattern, so it is a standard part of a comprehensive trick roping routine. Limited to a smaller loop size, the trick gets it's appeal from the dynamic multi-dimensional movement of the loop and by the quick subtle movements of the arm and wrist needed to maintain it. Although never entering the category of big loop tricks, the trick can still be manipulated on a range from small to tiny loop, where the skill and speed needed is inversely proportional to the size of the loop - a point not always recognized by the general audience.

The trick consists of a vertical loop and is moved back and forth to the left and right side of the roper in a pattern that can be repeated continually. The vertical spin is in the forward direction, it spins like a wheel that would roll forward. A full cycle of the trick takes 4 revolutions of the loop, with 2 on each side. In the second half of the spin on each side you pull the rope over to the other side and the loop passes in front of the roper. The Reverse Butterfly can also be done by spinning the loop in the opposite direction, this will become handy when doing tricks like the Arrowhead and others where the pattern is taken around the body or the roper does a 180 degree turn. If you are familiar with Texas Skip then the cycle of the butterfly will be very familiar, the difference is in the size of the loop and that the loop passes in front of the roper instead of the roper jumping through the middle.

I am familiar with cotton ropes, so that is the perspective I give here. There are other varieties of stiffer ropes that you can use for this and many other tricks, but I don’t know enough about those yet to make any useful comments. I do know the feel of some ropes can be quite different, but some of the same principles will still apply. The rope I learned on and that I use in the video is a 12 foot limp cotton rope with 2 pennies added to the honda for weight. You can do this trick without the extra weight, or with a little more weight but don’t go too heavy or you’ll throw your shoulder out trying to spin fast enough to keep the loop open. Use a rope that is 9 feet or more for a comfortable butterfly. I start with about 9 or 10 feet of rope to make the loop and spoke combined, with the spoke initially being 1 to 1.5 feet and that leaves a loop that can be around 3 feet in diameter. When you first start spinning the loop will often decrease a little so don’t start too small.

You can start on either the right or left side, I switch between both ways and although most references will recommend starting on the left side for right handers, I find starting on the right side comfortable. On the right side you find yourself in a natural position but on the left you cross your right hand over your left so you can throw the initial spin forward, it gives some good momentum out of the gate. Either way, once you are in the trick it’s all the same because it just keeps alternating sides. And there is no difference in the pattern for right handed or left handed butterfly, you can pass off between hands without interruption to the pattern once you have developed the skill in both hands.

For the sake of balance, I suggest you learn right and left handed butterfly at the same time instead of learning first with your dominant hand then starting the process again with your non-dominant hand. I give you three reasons why:

1. Practicing repeatedly with the same arm only, gives you an uneven workout.

2. You can practice longer without fatigue when you alternate arms.

3. Once you have it down with your dominant hand, it feels frustrating to go back to ground zero when you start with your non-dominant hand. It’s better to work them up simultaneously so one doesn’t get jealous of the other.

When I started learning this trick, just last summer, I could hardly get started and the loop would close up and even at best I had a distorted and flailing pattern. It was very hard to control. I worked on it for a while and made some progress, but it was still not smooth and I could not run it for very long. I decided to try it with a tighter eye of the honda, so I pinched down the honda and put a piece of tape there to keep it tighter around the rope and not let it slip as freely. This does make it easier to spin the butterfly but the feel is different and you don’t have the control over the loop size to make it bigger or smaller intentionally. I had difficulty controlling the loop size anyway so this was actually a temporary help for me. A big problem I had was the loop would sometimes get too big and the spoke too small and I would compensate by spinning my arm in a bigger circle, on the other hand I had times when the loop would rapidly close up and I would lose it completely. Not having to worry about that made it easier to focus on the coarse motions needed to run the pattern. I kept it for a few days before I took the tape off and was ready to learn it properly. It just takes time to get total control over the loop, I still have a ways to go on that journey, but it has gotten a lot better. I made a lot of mistakes, but I try not to make the same mistake too many times, at least make different mistakes, then you find that some of those mistakes aren’t mistakes at all, but you can learn something from them about how a certain motion of the hand influences the rope. 

I learned that for a smooth flow, you don’t apply equal force as you spin around all 360 degrees, it can be good to do a swift flick to get the honda over the top of the loop and then back off while the momentum carries it around again. I learned that keeping the loop close to the arm instead of letting it fling out to the far left and right side makes it easier to build up a bigger loop, and conversely I learned that a more elaborate left and right swing movement can help decrease the loop size, or keep it from growing. There are other ways to control the speed, size, and position of the rope but these are just the first helpful things I’ve noticed.

I hope this helps you get your butterfly off the ground quick enough and out of the caterpillar stage. The best tip for that is relentless practice, so never leave home without your rope!

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Injury! - a sprained foot

Nothing makes you more grateful for times of health and strength than having downtime because of an injury. I have experienced very few serious injuries in my time, so I'm quite fortunate. I don't think I realize fully how blessed I am to be free of ailments and disease, I try to be grateful, but it's not always the first thing on my mind until I actually hurt myself and go out of commission. I've had all the usual mortal pains of course: aches, colds, fevers, etc. but aside from my poor vision and slightly crooked spine I have come off rather able bodied. 

A week and a half ago though while barefoot in my living room I stubbed my second toe into the hard tile floor, it was briefly painful and then I moved on and forgot about it. Later in the day as I started having pain while walking and it took a few minutes to remember that the stub earlier must be the cause. I thought I would quickly get over it but into the night it progressed into being more debilitating. I iced it and walked tenderly for a few days but after 3 days I decided to get the opinion of a health professional since I didn't notice any improvement.

It was a foot sprain, no apparent bone fractures so that was reassuring. I will just have to be patient for a few weeks while it heals, try not to bend my foot excessively and stay off it as much as possible. This is not easy for me, I've been super excited about learning the skip this past month and I'm frustrated about the prospect of putting it on hold and refraining from all hops, steps, skips, jumps and such. I go about my daily routine, but frequently prop up my leg on the desk at work, and sometimes ice it in the evenings which gives relief. Thankfully it's not acutely painful, I just feel pressure along with some ache and discomfort.

After about a week I could tell it was healing, and that's dangerous because then the temptation comes stronger to push it and do things you probably shouldn't be doing, which is exactly what I did, I pushed it and worked on my Texas Skip at lunch one day and that evening was icing my foot again. But it wasn't a complete regression, it's still getting better day by day.

While roping is primarily an activity for the wrist, arm, and shoulder, it can be quite a full body workout. There is enough to practice just in a standing position and I can stand for long enough, so I'm not completely down. I can work on my butterfly, or the slippery reverse butterfly which I've been meaning to get at. Today I came back around to juggling, I just got some of my clubs back in my possession so I can start working on 5 clubs and make a routine with roping and juggling. In another week I expect to be back in the rope completely, I need to hone my Texas Skip to be performance ready. Patience, patience...

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Rope Tech - Tie That Honda

I’ve seen a lot of cotton ropes that are taped, or even glued together, I’ve sewn a few together, but what about the good old fashioned method of tying a knot? Why haven’t I seen that? It is actually routinely done for catch ropes but no so much with cotton trick ropes specifically. I ran a quick experiment to see if tying a honda knot in a Samson rope would be a worthwhile endeavor, and the verdict is success. I give you instructions, pictures, and a video below to show you how to tie a honda but first I’ll give you 3 reasons why it’s a good idea:

It looks authentic - it gives off a classic vibe of western culture.

You need no additional equipment - it just takes a rope and your hands

It’s effective and versatile - You end up with a medium weight rope but there is flexibility to change the weight by tying different sized knots. The extra bulk of the knot has never gotten in the way or caused a problem for me. 

Before working on the honda, you should have your rope ends secured in some way from fraying, either by whipping, fusing, or taping. Since I’m mostly referring to cotton rope it rules out fusing because your rope will just burn instead of melt so that leaves whipping or taping and the irony of using tape to seal the end of your rope and then tying a honda instead of taping it is not lost on me, but I won’t fault you for doing this as I even did it myself. For the full tape-free experience you must whip the end or securely braid it off somehow. You should look up how to whip a rope if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s also not too hard but requires a strand of smaller rope or twine. I let the ends of one of my ropes fray out about 5 or 6 inches and then used some of those individual strands to whip and tie off the end. It was rather effective and aesthetically pleasing.

Figure 1. A (blurry) whipped end of rope

The Simple Honda Knot Explained

You don’t need to have secret knot tying skills to do this. The simple method I propose consists of just 2 overhand knots, that’s the easiest knot you can imagine which just looks like a little pretzel. 

You simply tie one knot 9 or more inches from the end of the rope

Make a loop eye with the short tail end of the rope

With the remaining short end, tie another knot below the first knot 

Pull it together tight. 

Figure 2. 4 steps of tying a simple honda knot

It’s easy, trust me. Watch this video and the first two minutes walks you through the simple honda knot. The remainder of the video discusses altering the weight of the knot and then a version with a metal thimble held in place with a special knot that is suitable for doing Texas Skip with, which I show at the end.

A knotted rope works great for medium to large loops, even for a large butterfly. The version with the thimble and knot which is shown in the video is what I am using now for Texas Skip. So save the duct tape to patch holes in your boots and just tie your rope!

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Learning Texas Skip

This is a travel log detailing my journey of learning Texas Skip. I'm not calling it a tutorial because for one, that would imply a level of proficiency on my part that I don't think I have yet, but if you're a beginner at the skip you can use it as a tutorial for lack of a personal coach. I will walk you through my methods which I believe have been effective. If you're experienced at skip then maybe you just love roping so much that you want to read about it anyway; I will do my best to make it interesting by mixing in some personal antics because at heart I'm an entertainer after all. There is a companion video to go with this post, embedded below (while you’re there like, follow, subscribe etc.).

I have been roping a lot lately, nearly every day in the last three months and at least regularly for the last six months. I started this kick when I took a summer vacation to San Diego and brought with me a rope and juggling balls. I got a nasty sunburn spending a day at the beach juggling and roping, it was well worth it. I'm full on obsessed with roping at this point and don't plan on stopping. I went from thinking more about juggling to almost completely consumed with roping at the expense of my juggling progression, although I have a goal to get a solid 5 club juggle down this year so I'll be coming back around to that.

I thought I was a decent roper previously, but now I see I've made more progress in the last six months than at any other period and I have a lot of room to go, so by comparison I wasn't anything special, just someone who knew a few tricks but would go years at a time without touching a rope. I've repented of all that now and I keep a rope by my bedside at all times, a fact to which my wife can attest, or detest as it may be.

I knew I would need to learn the butterfly and the skip if I were to take myself as a serious roper, and I didn't have the right rope for skip so I started with butterfly. It's much easier to find room indoors to practice that one anyway. The struggles of learning the butterfly kept me busy for a while but as I had success there I knew it was time to take the plunge into Texas Skip. It's scary because it's bigger, but that's no reason to run away from it. I can just move some furniture out of the way.

After ordering 100 feet of rope, I turned my mind to procuring a brass honda, which I have heard about so often in relation to the skip. Before I followed through with that, I got curious about an 18 foot rope I bought a while back but never used very much (It was actually a little less than 18 feet, but I'm not counting). I picked up a metal rope thimble at the hardware store on my way home from work one day and then all the fun began. I'm assuming this thimble is not as heavy as most brass hondas, I haven't measured it though.

My previous entry discusses how I eased into this longer and heavier rope. I won't recount all that here, just what's directly relevant to skip. I can sum most of that up by saying that a heavy honda took some getting used to, and although at first I was a little confused and distracted with a jump through trick I had already learned, I soon decided to put that out of my head, back up, and just learn the standard skip as explained in the reference material I have been reading.

So now you know the reason I'm using such a short rope, because I procrastinated ordering the honda and was too lazy to put together a longer rope. I do wonder if the shorter rope means that the spinning cycles are faster though; with many other tricks I find I need to spin faster when I use a smaller loop and can slow it down with a bigger loop. When I say slow I mean the RPMs, not the actual speed of the honda. At a fixed RPM, a bigger loop requires the honda to actually move faster around the circular path of travel than it would with a smaller loop. That's a tangent though, more experimentation needed on this later.

When I had thrown that rope around enough, I felt ready to get down to work at learning this trick in earnest. It's a cyclical trick, consisting of a repeating sequence not unlike the butterfly. As with all rope tricks, speed and timing are critical, the other critical element is smoothing out the trajectory of motion. What is different about this trick compared to most other tricks is the size and the intensity. Those are the same factors that cause it to be such a crowd pleaser too. It feels like you are cranking a big propeller back and forth as you jump up and down without even a second to rest. There is a great aerobic benefit to this, I'm not so young anymore myself so If I can pull this off I'll consider myself fortunate enough to have a second childhood. Naturally, the novice must exert extra effort but as the technique is refined, some unnecessary work is eliminated leaving only an elegant efficiency. I'm not at that point yet needless to say.

Since the full trick is a complicated sequence of moves, I broke it down into individual elements that I could practice separately and later put back together. Some of what I discuss is demonstrated in this video, but you could get some additional insight from reading through, so don’t stop here.

Now I will explain right handed texas skip, standard direction spin (as if you set the loop down and it would roll backwards) here's the full Gill T. Rundown:

Spin a vertical loop clockwise on the right side. I don't start with the full length of loop out, I build up to it in the first 5 turns or so. Two challenges are starting the loop and keeping it steady. Once it's started, I had an easier time building it up than keeping it steady after it was full size.

With a continuous loop, the next step is to understand the rhythm to know when to skip through. As you swing the spoke down, get ready to jump. When you pull up, also pull to the left as you jump and the loop will ideally pass around you. You should be in the air as the spoke rises up and over by your left shoulder. I got tangled in the rope at this point a number of times, but eventually I cleared it; the loop didn't continue spinning on the other side but just making it through was a win.

Check now to make sure you can turn a steady loop on your left side with your right arm crossed over to the left, counter clockwise spin. This is what you will need to do as soon as you clear your first skip.

A big milestone is being able to start your loop on the right, skip through when ready, then continue the loop steady on the left. Indeed this is a trick in and of itself. Congratulate yourself and celebrate your achievement when you get here, you’re not far off from a continuous skip.

Being able to skip through from left to right is now what you need to add, it can be approached in the same stepwise fashion as you learned the right to left skip, just be aware that your body might not have perfect symmetry in ability. You may find certain aspects harder or easier on the other side.

At this point you should focus on spinning multiple spins on the side, skipping through, spinning more on the other side and then skipping back when ready. This can be repeated as long as desired or till you run out of steam. You can imagine now that if you eliminate the extra spins between skips, then you are running the classic Texas Skip!

The full cycle of the trick consists of 4 complete rotations of the rope. I think of the rhythm as 1 & 2 skip 3 & 4 skip repeated over and over, with the numbers counted when the spoke is going downward and the &s and skips when the spoke is going upward. 1 and 2 are on the right side and 3 and 4 are on the left. I highly recommend going through the motions without the rope, you could even start with your arm only and then add the jump when you are ready. A big advantage to this is that you can slow it down as much as you need. When you pick up the rope physics will force a minimum speed on you, for me and my current rope I clock in at 126 RPM, I know because I measured it while watching a video playback. You can get a free metronome app so go ahead and practice the motions to a steady click (full disclosure, I didn’t practice with a metronome, but it’s not a bad idea). You could start around 90 - 100 BPM (beats per minute) and work up. Your friends won’t be impressed that you can swing your arm and hop around so you’ll have to eventually pick your rope back up and do it with the rope. You will get tired and tangled, the rope will slap your face, back, legs etc. but over the course of a few dedicated practice sessions you should start to see some improvement. I had spun ropes a lot before trying this trick so it might have come faster to me than average, but after a few weeks I was doing something resembling the Texas Skip.

From here I’m going to get the trick more solid and then work it up with a forward spin and try the fast skip, which only gives one turn on each side instead of two. I’ve seen 180 degree body turns too which add nice variety, but one step at a time...

[ropergillt-blog]

Long and Heavy Ropes - Prepping for Texas Skip

A weighted honda was an unfamiliar thing to me until recently. I taped a few pennies on one of my smaller ropes months ago and didn't notice a big difference right away, later as I switched between ropes I could tell a subtle difference, and I started liking a little extra weight. A few pennies is small change though when it comes to honda weight, that would only be applicable to smaller ropes to do flat loop and butterfly tricks. Those aren't heavy ropes, just light ropes that have been "balanced" to taste. There is another breed of rope that has a different purpose and feel; heavy ropes that are good for large vertical loops and large wedding ring tricks, but the number one attraction seems to be the Texas Skip. I've seen a few Texas Skip videos and read a few brief tutorials but I haven't seen a lot of detailed accounts on the subject of transitioning from light ropes to heavy ropes so I hope to share something meaningful from my experience. I'm not intending to move away from light ropes of course, I love those ropes. I'm just expanding my repertoire. 

The video below demonstrates most of what is discussed in this entry.

Video: Adventures In Trick Roping - Long and Heavy Ropes

I have a 25 foot length for a long skip rope but I haven't put a brass honda in it yet, I'm experimenting with just tying a big fat honda on it which upon first test does well for large wedding rings but I don't think the weight of the knot is quite enough for the large vertical loop needed for skip, I'll probably transition to the traditional brass honda soon. 

Photo: A simple but effective tied honda.

Before going to a 20+ foot rope, I dive in with my 18 foot rope that used to seem too long and floppy so I hardly used it, that's before I added weight to it though. A month ago I put in a metal thimble and now it's a different beast. I just picked up an off the shelf 3/8 in rope thimble from the hardware store and taped it in snug to try it out, figuring that if I liked it I could sew it in later. I’m pretty sure at this point that I will sew it in permanently.

Photo: Honda weighted by a metal rope/cable thimble.

The first thing I noticed when spinning this rope is that I really had to crank it to get a good loop to open. I can do a horizontal loop with a moderate to large loop diameter. Sustaining a small loop with a heavy honda does not seem to work for me, I didn't expect it to work but just wanted to try it out. The weight has a tendency to close the loop on you quickly, especially when your loop size is smaller. It's clearly more of a workout with your arm and shoulder to spin these loops, you will feel it. Even with the weight, a loop will still open up bigger when you accelerate enough so you can start at a medium size and work up to a big loop. Be careful though, you can still get to a point where the loop will ride up your spoke and if you've got no more rope to let out the loop will lose its circular shape and at that point and start flopping around which could get dangerous. There's more rope and more weight, in addition to sometimes faster speeds so it packs more of a wallop when you smack yourself with it. I've gotten hit in the face and other sensitive ares when working with light ropes, and I really want to avoid that with a weighted honda. That aspect brings a new fear, and fear is prohibitive to development. We should keep ourselves safe, but also take appropriate risks. Tread slowly enough at first to build some confidence, then ramp it up to try new things and open yourself to improvement. It didn't take too long to get used to it, I haven't smacked myself yet but I'm sure it's inevitable. I’m happy to risk it, they used to call me Danger Boy after all.

It can get uncomfortable to spin a large flat loop, heavy or not, the positioning of a vertical loop is probably easier on your posture because you don't have to worry about keeping the loop away from your shins but the spinning feel is different for a vertical loop as gravity is working with the honda half the cycle and against the honda the other half instead of equally all the way around like with horizontal loops. I started with a medium size flat loop and tilted it up into a horizontal loop to get the vertical loop feel. Then I tried starting right into a horizontal loop. The start takes some getting used to, there's no quick secret trick to it that I can share, you just have to start cranking. I did have some starts where the rope got all tangled up in my arms right away, I think it might be a question of how fast and how big of a circle you swing your arm from the start, but I don't know exactly. From the start I experimented with spinning direction, a few items of clarification are in order on the subject of spinning direction. Standard "forward" butterfly uses a counter clockwise loop when it's on your right side but will then be a clockwise loop when it's on your left side. Of course the loop doesn't change spinning direction, it's just that your perspective changes as it passes from one side to the other, just like someone on one side of a door says the knob is on the left while someone on the other side of the door says the knob is on the right. The standard Texas Skip loop however uses a clockwise loop when it's on your right side but it becomes a counter clockwise loop on your left side so it's more akin to a reverse butterfly in the direction of spin. That's the convention, it's supposed to be a little easier that way but I can't say from any experience yet. I know that when I try reverse butterfly it feels strange and hard to spin it that direction, but maybe just because it's different than what I'm used to.

One of the first things I wanted to do after getting a little feel for a stationary vertical loop was transitioning from a vertical loop into a wedding ring. This one is not a lift-on but a gradual tilt of the rope till it's in the horizontal position. I thought it shouldn't be too difficult of a trick, and I was mostly right but I'm not quite solid on it every time. I had a few wobbles and instances of getting tangled up in it but in a short time I had success too. My main focus was in smoothing out the loop as it transitions. I started the vertical spin in a clockwise direction with my right hand, built up the loop a little and then started tilting. It wasn't so steady for me in the in the transition and I think that the speed of your spin is very critical. When it goes horizontal it feels like you can ease up a bit compared to what you need to keep the vertical loop going. It's just a new, unfamiliar feel but I'm getting used to it. You can start your vertical spin in the other direction (counter clock wise) but mind you, when it falls to a horizontal loop it will then be going in the opposite direction from what most people are used to for wedding ring. While in training, you may quickly feel the muscles straining in your shoulder and want to alternate between left and right arms to balance it all out, that's what I did and my left arm was actually pretty good out of the gate.

The next little step was going from flat loop, to vertical loop, to wedding ring. Which is really just putting two things together that I already did so I found it not really any more difficult. It's interesting to consider that this works with a heavy honda, but now if you pick up a light rope and try this you will likely get it into a vertical loop for a few seconds and then it goes all wet noodle. Now I see why we have weighted hondas. So I then started thinking about doing the trick in reverse order? From wedding ring tilting into a vertical loop, I tried it a few times (with a heavy rope of course) and it didn't feel easy but I got it to work once. I haven’t tried it since because I don’t want to tarnish my record. ;)

I then decided to try some horizontal loop tricks with a heavy rope. Flat loop, step in, wedding ring, handshakes, spoke hops, lift-off, and even lift-on were all do-able while keeping the loop size in check. Some of those tricks felt quite different with a large heavy rope but I want to keep working them so I have the option to make a continuous routine going back and forth between horizontal tricks and vertical skip tricks.

Here is an interesting question: can you do the butterfly with the heavy rope? and my answer is for practical purposes no. To keep the movement of the rope manageable in front of you it's best to not have too big a loop for butterfly but these heavy ropes work best with bigger loops it seems, so that's against you, the loop closes up and you end up fighting it pretty hard to try to keep it open. Try it if you want a difficult physically intensive challenge, let me know if you have success. Now a medium weight rope would probably be a yes for butterfly but I’d steer clear of it with heavy ropes.

I turn now to Texas Skip from my beginner's perspective. I've heard it's not quite as hard as the butterfly, and I can do at least a passable butterfly at this point so I have some confidence going into this but I've got to tell you, once I see that big spinning loop next to me, skipping through it does not come too natural. But one nice thing about these ropes is that if you spin the right speed and motion, you can spin a stationary vertical loop for as long as your arm holds out and you can stare at that spinning spoke for as long as you like while contemplating jumping through. The loop will hold there till you're ready to jump through, compare this to learning butterfly and you've got to keep that loop moving left to right and back, you can't easily stop and hold the loop on one side till you're ready to bring it back to the other side again. Maybe you're better at coaxing your butterfly to stay put but mine loses shape if I try to hold it on one side for more than a few spins. For me, it feels easier to jump through when I'm turning the rope in the opposite direction from the standard skip. A counter clockwise loop on my right side seems easier to jump through from a timing perspective than a clockwise loop. I haven't really tried very much yet but I'm just backwards I guess.

My skip was not immediately feeling smooth. I did make it through the loop sometimes as you can see in the video, and I don't always lose the loop after I go through it but I can't keep skipping through multipe times and what I've got isn't pretty, it's a struggle. This first rope I'm trying is smaller than standard which probably causes some issues, but I'm sure that's not the source of all my issues. I've only spent a few sessions trying this trick out, so right now I just need to spend more time with it, review some video of my flaws and work to correct them one at a time.

Photo: Jump Through Sequence with 15 ft. rope.

I think that the reason why I feel more comfortable spinning the rope in the "other" direction for skip is because that's how I did the jump-through trick from my younger days (see the first blog entry: Choir Boy Beginnings) and it's hard for me now to approach this trick as something different, but I feel it should be considered as such. The Texas Skip as I see it performed by others looks very different to me than my old jump through trick and not just because of the differences in the rope used. During skip the rope stays very vertical, it should anyway, straight up and down; and the body should stay facing forward, just moving the arm to the right and left to keep the loop going on either side of you. The rope should also be at the same height on both sides, not going up and down at all. I have really bad technique in all those areas, I'm afraid I learned bad habits young but I'm sure I can break it. The jump through I did was probably borne out of copying and approximating the actual Texas Skip, I learned the jump through from other chorus boys at a time when I hadn't ever seen the actual Texas Skip but I think someone saw it and figured a way to do something similar with a shorter rope and then passed it on to me. So now looking at my jump through shortcomings with a critical eye: I tilt the rope so it's not quite vertical, it tends to be lower when on my right side, my head leans in and goes through the loop first, and I face my body more to the left side. Wow, I have a lot of work to do to clean this up, but at least I now have a rope more suited for the job. 

Happy roping to you, and if you are also learning Texas Skip then let me know, we can trade tips and stories.

[ropergillt-blog]

Poor Technique and Bad Form - on Video

In Carey Bunks' online trick roping guide he makes this claim: "The simplest Flat Loop tricks are those which consist of passing the loop around the body". I strongly dispute that. This claim is followed by a tutorial on the Merry Go Round, a trick in which a flat loop is passed around the body and to this day I have not mastered the trick. Now that I have come to terms with my failure I believe I will very soon conquer it but I have to admit it didn't feel easy to learn and I'm just realizing that I'm not doing it correctly. I didn't start learning it until long after I had learned many other flat loop and wedding ring tricks. Stepping in and out of the wedding ring feels a lot easier but it could be that I've just been doing those tricks for so much longer, even with that in mind I have no hesitation saying that the one handed merry go round is hard and my technique is terrible.

Photo: how not to do merry go round

Thanks to handheld digital devices it's very easy to capture video of yourself to review as a training tool, I highly recommend it and I wish I had taken advantage of that resource more, no time like the present to get on board though. I usually feel a little self conscious when I take video of myself and re-watch it. It can be embarrassing to perform for the camera, I'm trying to get over this but it helps your development so much, we all need to get over ourselves and utilize the tools available to us. Hoop performer Trixie Turvy has an instagram feed with tons trick roping videos, it seems that in addition to hoop skills, she has taken up trick roping in the last few years and has documented in video the progress she's made, which progress is very impressive and entertaining. That's a great example to me which I am working to emulate. In so doing, I am seeing the good, the bad, and the ugly in myself, and today the bad is my version of merry go round.

Moving the rope around behind you is hard, for one because you can't see it, and another thing our arms have much more range of motion in front and happen to be quite limited when used behind, that's true for me anyway. I attempted to keep the loop open while moving it behind me many times and failed. The loop has a tendency to close up quite remarkably back there so when it comes back around the rope just splays out into a whip-like behavior. I soon learned that the location of your spoke/honda in the circle of the loop as you move the rope behind you is super critical. You can't just move it back there at any time in the cycle and have it survive, it's all quite logical when you think about it but in execution it's not easy.

During a normal flat loop the center of the circle is stationary, but in the merry go round you must move that center point around your body and maintain the cyclical spin of the loop around it. It's not unlike the earth orbiting the sun while also spinning on it's daily axis all the while. If the loop is spinning counter clockwise you can only coax it to move to the left when the honda is going through the top half of the spin cycle, around 3 to 9 o'clock, which is when the honda is naturally moving to the left around the loop. When the honda is spinning back from 9 to 3 o'clock (to the right) a motion to move the spoke to the left will quickly kill your loop. This principle is easier to demonstrate and experiment on in front of you but of course it applies at all points around your body.

I finally got the loop to stay spinning all the way around by changing when I started pulling the loop around behind me in relation to the honda's position in the loop. After a while I got a decent feel for when to do it, starting with four cycles to make a complete go around and then reducing it to three cycles when I got smoother. At this point I thought I had learned the trick, I felt good, and then I saw what I looked like and compared it to how Chris McDaniel demonstrated it in this video while visiting the Dube showroom in 2013. I realized my technique was grossly lacking. He calls it the "flat around" and says that none other than Vince Bruce taught him how to do the trick to roll the loop across your back and not to contort yourself moving your arm behind your head. Well the whole thing is an awkward contortion when I do it, and thanks to training with video I now know what my homework is. Go ahead and watch that Vince Bruce video linked above, it's rather amazing. Then go video yourself to see how you match up and where your weaknesses are. 

In writing this I have started thinking that spinning a counter-clockwise loop while doing a clockwise merry-go-round might be possible if timed correctly. I don’t know if ropers are doing this, somebody must have, but I haven’t seen it. It will no doubt be a harder trick to do than going the same direction around you as your loop is spinning and the added difficulty will probably be lost on audiences but I’m putting it on my list. Wish me luck.

[ropergillt-blog]

Tutorial - Wedding Ring "get hitched"

Video Tutorial now included below!

There are 3 classic images in my head of roping cowboys: 1. Swinging the rope overhead, often times while riding horseback about to make a catch 2. Skipping through a large vertical loop a.k.a. "Texas Skip" and 3. Spinning the horizontal loop around the body in what's known as being "in the wedding ring". The wedding ring is the natural next step after mastering the flat loop. There are 4 ways that I can think of to get yourself into the wedding ring, 2 easy ways and 2 advanced ways. The easy ways are to start with a flat loop and step into the loop as you bring your arm over your head and continue spinning, or to start from holding the rope in a resting position directly into a wedding ring by giving it a spin overhead as your first rotation, thus skipping the flat loop altogether.

The advanced ways are to start with a flat loop and do a lift-on (or pop on?) over your head instead of stepping into it, or you could start with a vertical loop and gradually tilt the axis into a horizontal loop centered around your body but you shouldn't think too much about those options until you first get the hang of the 2 easier ways to get into the wedding ring. I will give you some details on how to do that, but first keep in mind that the rope will still get twisted as you spin, so you will eventually need to counter twist with your spinning hand to keep the rope free of kinks. You won't need to worry about twisting in your fingers during the step in transition though because a helpful feature of transitioning from the flat loop to the wedding ring is that the two tricks twist the rope in different directions because of the proximity of your spinning hand. So if your flat spin is getting slightly twisted and you step in the wedding ring then the first few twists in the ring will untwist it without any additional effort! You could plausibly continuously alternate between flat loop and wedding ring keeping the same number of spins each and never have to twist the rope in your fingers. It works well up to about 6 spins. But before we get ahead of ourselves too much, let's lay out the steps of how to get in the wedding ring:

Photo: caught in the act of stepping in

The step in - This is my preferred method. I actually found it a bit easier than starting directly from resting position but not all have that same experience so go ahead and try both out and see what sticks first. Do a flat loop big enough to fit your body in and with some buffer, but don't use an excessively long rope. While it's possible to do the "big loop" as it's called with a very long rope, you are adding more difficulty managing all that length and weight so for adults I recommend about 15 feet of rope, no need to add much extra weight to the honda. I am 6 feet tall with broad shoulders and although I can do these tricks with a 12 foot rope, I find it easier with 15. The following instructions are from a right handed, counter clockwise perspective (but please extend this to the 3 other combinations as described in the flat loop tutorial).

Start with the flat spin and monitor the movement of the spoke in its spinning cycle to see when your window of opportunity is, you must step in when the spoke is passing on the far side of the loop in order to avoid spoke collision. You can step in right foot first, left foot first, or hop in with both simultaneously but since the right leg is closer to the loop, I will describe the method of right leg first. Keep a steady moderate speed in your spinning hand throughout the whole process. When the spoke gets to 9 o'clock you can lift your right foot and start the movement to step in quickly. My foot actually touches down inside the loop when the spoke is between 6 and 3 o'clock followed directly by my left foot around 12-9 o'clock.

If you do nothing different with your spinning hand then you will find yourself inside the loop but with the spoke now hitting your legs and game over. The trick is to coordinate your stepping while at the same time lifting your spinning hand over your head. Start to raise your hand around 12 o'clock which may be before your left foot is all the way in, step high with the left foot so it doesn't catch the rising loop. Raise your hand up while still spinning from 12 o'clock to the 6 o'clock position, at which point the hand should now be just above the head with the spoke spinning around the back of you. Now maintain the spin with your wrist and work towards keeping smooth enough motions and constant spinning speed to not distort your loop because that could cause it to hit your arms or body.

There are a lot of elements going on in this maneuver so you should break it down into smaller parts and master them one by one. You won't be able to get them learned all at once. Assuming you have a solid flat loop that you can maintain comfortably at different speeds then the next thing to get is the timing of the step. It's ok to practice stepping in and have the loop stall out on your body a moment later. Just try to get smooth with your step before worrying very much about raising your spinning hand. With your step in place then you should start refining the upward movement of the spinning hand, keep smooth fluid motions and perhaps hardest of all is to maintain a steady constant spinning speed. When you concentrate on the step and the raising hand it's very easy to neglect your spin and to have the rope slow down (remember Dory - "just keep spinning"). A slower rope will be much more prone to stalling out at the least bit of opposition such as rubbing on the elbow or boot, so don't let it drag. Conversely you shouldn't go too fast because you need time to step in and to raise that hand in a half cycle without a jerky motion. It is tempting to accelerate your spin once you get your hand up over your head, but quick changes in speed can also distort the circular shape of your loop and cause it to hit your body. Keep working at it, making small adjustments till you have success and your muscles will learn what to do.

The over the head start - Going straight into wedding ring from a resting position eliminates the timing challenges of stepping in but the challenge on the flip side is that your are just starting a fresh loop and you probably know by now that it can take a few cycles for a loop to establish a nice steady circular shape. With your body in the middle there is not a lot of wiggle room however. Still, it's quite similar in difficulty to stepping in and the two can be worked on in parallel. If you happen to get the hang of this method before the step in method then it can eliminate some trouble with the step in method because once you get in the loop you'll already have the knack of continuing the spin of the wedding ring.

Drawing1: the starting position for the over the head start (same as for flat loop)

Start in the same position you take when about to start a flat loop. Again start with a right hand motion similar to the flat loop by swinging the hand out but this time lifting upwards more than out so that the honda moves up diagonally across from by your right knee to up above your head on the left side. Up to this point you should still be holding the loop in both your right and left hands. The honda will continue back to behind your head and with your left hand still holding the rope in front, you will now essentially be inside the loop. Practice this motion without letting go of the loop and the honda should flip around behind you to end up back on the right side close to your right elbow as your right hand comes to rest above the head.

When you have done this multiple times and are satisfied you have ended up in the loop properly you should then give another attempt but now release the loop with right and left hand simultaneously at the moment when the honda is passing your right elbow or just after it passes. The left hand releases the loop without any fanfare but the right hand will release the loop with a flick of the wrist towards the left to get the loop to fully open and the spoke to pass in front of you. From here on, the loop is maintained with wrist rotations above your head.

Next Steps Both the flat loop and wedding ring starts have been described from a two handed resting position but they can also be accomplished one handed without holding the loop open with your non spinning hand, just make sure your rope isn't twisted and give a good initial flick to open that loop up. The one handed start doesn't add too much more from a performance perspective but when you start to do two handed, two rope combo tricks it will be necessary to be able to start one handed. Now that you're in the wedding ring you will want to add tricks. More likely, you will first be left wondering how to gracefully get out, stepping out can feel a little harder than stepping in. You will rightly guess that to get out of a wedding ring you can roughly reverse the steps you took to get in, get creative and you will figure it out. You can make a trick out of just stepping in and out of the ring, done quickly over and over it gets your blood pumping too. Other common wedding ring based tricks are handshakes, body bounce or "juggling", lift-off, and lift-on. All of these deserve their own tutorials so I won't go into details here. Don't forget to try it with your non-dominant hand and spinning in opposite directions for a challenge. You can pass the rope between your hands rather easily once inside the wedding ring. This is a good technique to use if your right arm starts to get tired.

Video has flat loop and wedding ring tutorials. Skip ahead to 6:00 for wedding ring.

[ropergillt-blog]

Tutorial - The Flat Loop, where it begins

Video Tutorial now included below!

If I remember anything from first learning the flat spin, it is just a faint recollection. I was in the back yard by the pool just spinning that rope over and over. I remember enjoying it, and I don't think it took very long to get. It was over 30 years ago though. I knew how to get into the starting position and I had seen others do the spin, once you have that much it just takes a single dedicated session before you can get your loop to open. Then a few more sessions to smooth it out and get your finger twists going.

You should start with a rope about 10 to 15 feet in total length, but go ahead and try with whatever you've got handy. Adjust the spoke to be about 2 feet long, maybe a tad longer but keep it less than 3 feet. The starting position looks like this for a right handed counter clockwise spin:

Drawing1: Roping Starting Position

As you look down at your hands this is how the rope should be held:

Drawing2: How the rope is held in hands

The spoke is between the right thumb and index finger and the loop is held with the remaining fingers of the right hand. The honda is hanging down towards your right leg and your left hand is opening the loop on the left side with the rest of the rope hanging down to the floor.

Drawing3: The honda as it hangs down on your right side

Smooth floors are easiest for this and many other tricks. Dirt, carpet, and especially grass will slow a rope down and possibly kill the spin when the rope is allowed to drag. In these environments you will need to either speed the rope up so the momentum of it outweighs the drag, raise up your arm so it doesn't touch the ground or both. Speeding up your spin will also naturally cause the loop to rise up a bit.

First motions 1. Swing your right hand out in front of you in a counter clockwise direction. Your left hand doesn't need to do much moving, it just holds the loop open to start with and lets the loop drop free just as your right hand starts the first spin. 2. When your right hand is extended out to about a 9 o'clock position you release the loop with your fingers but keep holding the spoke. With this starting spin the force should open the loop horizontally in front of you. 3. Your right arm should be extended out so the rope doesn't get too close to your body (and start to hit your legs). The arm makes a small counter clockwise circle smoothly continuing from your initial throw and without bending the elbow too much. As the loop gets established it will take less motion from your right arm to keep it going and ideally just wrist motion in small and steady counter clockwise circles to maintain the flat spin.

Pitfalls 1. Jerky motions are generally bad for the loop, try to keep it smooth. If your initial throw causes the rope to spring out away from you rather than down in front of you then you need to readjust your aim, the center of the loop should stay in the same position and not be moving around. 2. Irregular spinning speed will cause distortions in the loop and possible failure. You need to maintain a rather brisk tempo at least at first, but if you speed up too quickly the rope won't react well, likewise if you stall or hesitate then the loop will close up and fall.

As with all new tricks, the primary problem areas are usually in speed and timing. Try small alterations in these parameters to find a spot that gets you the result you want. If the loop is closing up then usually you will need to make larger motions to correct it, a larger circular spin with your arm and maybe at a little faster pace to open it up again. Then when established, try to scale it back slowly to a small steady motion.

At some point the rope can be beyond saving, if it closes up and is very twisted then it's best to just stop and untwist the rope before another attempt. The rope will get twisted as you spin, it is best to first learn to get the loop spinning and get a feel for the basic arm, wrist, and hand motions before trying to learn the next step of continuously untwisting the rope in your fingers. Your first attempts will have to go like this: get into starting position, throw rope out and spin for a while, the rope gets twisted or closes up so you must stop and untwist the rope before repeating. It can be a little tedious untwisting the rope and resetting for each attempt but you will quickly get the hang of it with a little persistence.

After you can repeatedly start a good flat loop and maintain it for a number of turns, you are ready to start thinking about twisting the rope in the fingers as you spin, or rather - untwisting it. Your spinning actions twist the rope so your fingers must therefore untwist it to keep it free of kinks. This is accomplished in 2 ways simultaneously, you must let up on your grip so the rope can twist easier, this makes you more at risk to drop the spoke so you must develop a nimble finesse with your fingers. You can also help the rope along by twisting between your thumb and fingers but if the rope gets enough twisted tension in it you may feel it turning on its own just as you let up on your grip. Waiting for it to turn on its own is not a good enough long term solution though, you generally don't want it to get to that point where force of the twist is enough to spin it in your fingers so please learn to help it along. It just takes some time to get good at it.

After you have mastered the right handed counter clockwise spin then it doesn't take much imagination to realize there are 3 other combinations of flat spins: right handed clockwise, left handed clockwise, and left handed counter clockwise. If your goal is roping mastery then you should work on all 4 variations. I never thought about this when I was starting, I only did the one variation until recently I wised up and am working my left hand in overtime to catch up. I want an even workout and two handed flexibility for future complex tricks so my goal is to learn most everything on both sides, both directions. It can be frustrating to do but it's humbling and when mastered, it sets you apart a step above.

Video includes flat loop, wedding ring, and a few extras.

[ropergillt-blog]

Do I Look Like I Care? - About Physics

Figure1: Liftoff, 3 steps in cartoon form

When you've been around the block a few times, you don't need to know Newton's laws to understand how stuff works. If you stop spinning the rope it will fall to the floor OK? That was enough to get me by for a while, our brains are really good at learning a lot of things without really needing to know the nitty gritty details. Try spinning faster, slower, pull it up when it's on the left, make a flick with your wrist and see what happens - whatever the motion may be that makes the rope dance how you want it to, you start to get the hang of it after enough trial and error. To be honest, knowing the nitty gritty can sometimes even get in the way or at least not really help you to learn a trick better or quicker anyway. But to contradict my own point, without giving you any equations and numbers I'll proceed to go into a light discussion on the ups and downs of the forces at play while spinning a rope. It can't hurt to think about, and it might just help a little.

If you want equations and numbers then you'll love this quite amazing scientific paper from the research of Brun, Ribe, Audoly - An introduction to the mechanics of the lasso. It's quite a doozie, and they only even analyze the flat loop! Expert roper Jesus Garcilazo makes a cameo appearance in the paper. Think of all the head exploding that would go on if they wrote a paper on the butterfly or body rolls or something tricky like that, but who would even put themselves through such analysis? You're better off picking up a rope and doing a few months of straight wood-shedding to develop some amazing new trick that couldn't be put into an equation even by all the world's supercomputers.

Another reference I must mention is Carey Bunks' The Lasso, A Rational Guide To Trick Roping. It's a long standing free online book which you have likely already come across, an extensive explanation and guide for learning many tricks with the rope, he also gives his take on the mechanics of it in a not-too-rigorous way and therefore it can probably be useful to a lot of people.

In my rebirth of roping, my second wind, I have found occasion where I dissect a subtle motion or rethink the speed at which I spin the rope during a particular section of a trick in order to get it more solid, or to increase the success rate of the trick (or to even get a first success). And with good results too, so I believe it does pay to take the effort to put a critical eye on your methods while still sticking to rough and ready trial and error technique to really learn the thing on the street. Go at the concepts with broad strokes and let your miracle brain work out the exact finesse behind the curtain of grey matter, that's my approach.

The loop always has this angular momentum which just means it's spinning in a circle, it will keep spinning in this behavior on its own for a short time but it's constantly being diminished by gravity and air resistance a little so it needs your hand to keep nudging it in the right direction. You can feel some tension where the rope is pulling back on you through the spoke, greater tension when the speed of the loop is faster. This tension is a good thing, it means that you can control where the rope goes next. If you slow down too much or pull on the rope in the wrong direction then you can feel this tension die and you no longer will be able to influence the rope, it will just fizzle out, close up, or go limp unless you make a larger motion in time to correct it and get the control back.

I'll give a crack at a layman's description of what keeps a spinning loop open: Looking down at a loop from above we have a spinning loop (spoke omitted).

Figure2: counterclockwise loop

Newton said something about an object in motion will just keep on goin' how it's been goin' unless you give it some contrary force. Well that means if it's moving it will go in a straight line unless something pushes it to turn it, speed it up, or slow it down. A loop is going in a circle so it's always turning, therefore there must always be some force maintained on the loop to keep it always turning around and around. I can't really understand all of that unless I imagine the loop not as one rope but as a bunch of little connected points. These points happen to be connected as a rope so they end up pulling and pushing each other along in a circle but if they were disconnected from each other let's imagine what they would do. Every point on that loop will want to just keep going straight, here's a diagram to show what would happen if these points were not connected and allowed to keep going straight.

Figure3: independent points on a spinning loop

They would spread out and make a bigger circle. This in essence is the force that keeps pushing the loop open, a centrifugal force as it may be called. Since the rope is all connected together it's not so easy for the loop to open up though. You should feel this pulling force as you spin the spoke and you exert a force pulling back against it to keep the loop going at a constant size.

Speed does matter, spin a faster loop and the outward pull is greater, you'll feel more tension pulling on your spoke hand and have to exert a little more force to keep that loop in place. If your spoke is allowed to freely slip through the honda then you should see changes in the size of your loop corresponding to how fast and abrupt you are spinning. The loop will increase in radius but at the expense of the spoke length. A growing loop eats up spoke so it must either raise up towards the hand as the spoke length decreases or you must feed it more rope if you have any extra bunched up in your other hand. Spinning speed is not a linear correlation to loop radius though, because the friction of the rope rubbing on the honda will make the loop less responsive to speed changes. So up to a certain point you can have small changes in acceleration and the loop will stay about the same.

I've bored you up to this point but now I'll give you something more interesting. I learned a trick as a kid which I could do good enough most of the time but my loop would sometimes close up and I'd have to spin like the dickens to get it to open up again. It was lifting off from a wedding ring to a flat loop in front of you. Follow the sequence in images below. 1. it starts with a wedding ring. 2. take it down to a single handshake. 3. pull it up from the handshake with a good upward tug. 4-5. pop it up directly above the head. 6-7. pull it out to the right side as it starts to come down. 8. *transition from spoke under loop to spoke above loop, pulling the spoke to the side of the loop while in transition. 9. loop comes to lower position and you continue spinning. 10. settled into flat loop.

Photo: The Liftoff Sequence, 10 steps

The transition at step 8 gave me problems stemming from the fact that the spinning hand must move from it's position in the middle of the circle and go outside the circumference of the loop for a bit before being able to move your spoke hand back to the center of the loop's circle when the loop is in the down position in front of you again. My problem was that I was tugging the rope to get it to move down but I wasn't tugging at the right time in the circular phase of the spin to keep the loop open and my rope would get to the floor as a closed up mess.

The upward and downward motion is one aspect of the trick but all the while you must keep the cyclical spinning motion going and not do any tugging on the rope at a time when your pull will cause the loop to close. Before I knew exactly how to correct myself  I thought about how the rope must move and about what might be causing the problem. I figured I was either flicking the rope to the side at the wrong time or not aggressively enough to keep the loop open. Most problems are usually a matter of timing or spinning speed. So I started experimenting with pulling down sooner/later and with different flicks of the arm and wrist at different times. I became much more aware of the cycle of the loop, meaning the position of the honda in relation to the loop's circle and after a bit of trial and error I had an awakening.

When the loop goes to the side it's critical where the honda is, if it's about to go around the far side of the loop then a motion to pull towards you will close up your loop. You can only coax the rope into certain positions when the time is right. Sometimes you have to wait and let the spin ride out till the honda is good and ready, this was integral to learning the butterfly also. It's a good feeling to get that connection with the rope and although awkward at first, with concentrated practice and a fair amount of trial and error I'm starting to get in a comfortable groove. I know physics is busy at work in it all but whenever possible I prefer to just keep it in my subconscious while I physically develop a fluid one-ness with the rope.

[ropergillt-blog]

What Rope Is That? - The Mighty Samson

Photo:Samson Spot Cord #12 for trick roping, 18 feet with a thimble in the honda

For the curious, and I really hope there are a few out there, I will give details of the ropes I use, and how to configure for yourself a good spinning rope. These aren't the only kinds of ropes that are good for trick roping but some of the most popular. Ropers usually have multiple ropes because you need some variation to fine tune specific tricks, mostly by altering the length of the rope but you might also add some weight to it depending on your need. Someday I may branch out to try other ropes like nylon, maguey or other types of twisted rope but for now I use cotton braided rope, it is a true standard among trick ropers.

Samson Spot Sash Cord #12 - This is from what I can tell the most widely used rope for trick roping and it's been around for more than 100 years. You can spot it by its red spots, it's a white rope with a bit of red braided in, a cotton braid which is about 3/8 inch thick if you use #12, I've heard of some people using #10 which is a little smaller and lighter. You can get it in 1000 foot reels, 100 foot hanks, by the foot, or pre-fashioned as ready to spin trick ropes. The biggest and maybe only change in the rope over the years is in the core, it is most commonly found now with a nylon core covered in cotton braid but it was originally produced with cotton both as the core and outer braid. I haven't seen it in stores lately but you can easily order the standard nylon core rope from hardware retailers and you can also get the cotton core rope (which many ropers swear by) from Western Stage Props or Dubé Juggling Equipment. The cotton core will run you about twice the price of the nylon core, but it's still very cheap to get into roping compared to most other hobbies that aren't nearly as wholesome. Western Stage Props gives a little summary of Samson's heritage with trick roping, read it here for extra credit.

To start out I recommend a rope no less than 12 feet in length and more like 15 feet if you don't want to feel crowded in the wedding ring, that being said, I have a 12.5 foot rope that is one of my favorites. Children may be alright with a 10 foot rope. Ropes 18 feet and greater can start to get too big to manage for the flat loop and that's where most people start. There is a technique of gathering any extra length in your non-spinning hand, but it's best at first to not fuss with that, less to worry about.

A new rope will be stiff, which I don't much prefer, so I break in a rope by putting it through a wash cycle, let it dry and giving it a good stretch and twist a time or two. I've heard of different techniques for this, but I'll leave it to you to figure out what you want to do. If you give it a good wash it will help a lot, then just by spinning it you'll loosen it up over time. A broken in rope will fatten up a bit from the original 3/8 inch size because the braid will loosen and then it will have a nice limp feel.

Before you spin, you need to fix one end into a small eye, called a honda. This is done by just bending the last 3-4 inches of the rope back on itself and fixing it by sewing it together with strong thread or wire, or alternately just taping it down. Leave a big enough hole in the eye to run the other end of the rope through it and typically you want extra space so the rope can slide freely, however, a training wheels version can be made by taping the eye very tight around the other end so there isn't any extra room. This pinches it down so that it's not slipping around the whole time, all that slipping around can be hard for a beginner. I started this way, by taping the honda into a tight pinched eye. Some people tie it or sew it so the honda is fixed to where the spoke meets the loop but I don't think this is necessary, I've found just taping it so you have a tight eye in the honda is fine, you can still pull the rope through by hand to adjust the length and then you can easily remove the tape later when you graduate.

Photo: A tight honda fastened with tape at the end of a 15 foot rope

A rope that is fixed or tight at the honda is virtually useless for doing any real cowboy work because when you try to make a catch, the loop won't close up easily. I know we are talking about trick roping here, but I like to remember our origins, also you will find a fixed honda restrictive later as some routines are based around being able to change the size of your loop as you spin, and for that you need a loose honda. It doesn't hurt to try both ways, a piece of tape is easily applied or removed so please experiment.

Now you are ready to spin that rope! Just run the loose end of your rope through the eye of the honda and you've got your 3 necessary parts: a loop, a honda, and a spoke. While these are the only 3 necessary attributes that your rope must have, there is an optional element which you will probably come across eventually: the burner. A burner is an add on to the honda and they come in many varieties and materials; leather, plastic, metal. The burner is just material that covers the part of the honda that comes in contact with the rope as it runs through that eye. Burners have different purposes, sometimes it is to protect the rope from excessive wear at that friction point, sometimes it is to add extra friction and slow the rope down, and sometimes it is to decrease the friction and speed the rope up. People usually use speed burners for catch ropes and not for trick roping. Many trick ropers do use burners to slow the rope, that is to slow the slipping action that changes the length of spoke and loop.

Below is my 12.5 foot rope with a leather burner that I sewed on, I sewed it tightly and the wear has made it very smooth so it doesn't actually slow the rope noticeably. Some leather burners do slow ropes down by providing more friction but you can get a similar effect by taping it into a tighter eye. This rope also has 2 pennies taped into the honda, pennies are 2.5 grams each and nickels are 5 grams. Adding coins to your rope not only makes it more valuable but tames down a rope, or in other words keeps the loop from opening up so easily. If your loop rides up your spoke too much then some more weight on the honda should help, either that or calm down your spinning. A few pennies has a small effect on performance (and value), I'm still in the experimentation phase on this. How much weight you need will vary depending on the weight of the rope itself, how hard and fast you want to spin and how large a loop you want to target for. If you want to spin a large, stationary vertical loop (not alternating like the butterfly) you will need to add a good amount of weight.

Photo: honda with leather burner and weighted with 2 pennies

It is standard practice to add weight to the honda for large loop ropes and ropes for Texas Skip. Texas Skip usually requires 22-25 feet of rope and you won't be able to get 20+ feet of rope to hold a good vertical loop to skip through without adding an ounce or more to the honda, that's a lot more than a few pennies. The most common way to do this is to get a metal thimble which is very similar to a burner in that it is an insert into the honda, this time not for speeding up or slowing down a rope but to balance it. Based on the length and weight of your rope you need to get the right honda weight to find a good equilibrium point. You can get rope thimbles from hardware stores, marine supply stores, or specialized brass hondas at Western Stage Props.

I am just starting to experiment with these heavier hondas so I don't have any strong tips or conclusions yet, but I picked up a $2 thimble from Lowe's hardware store a few days ago and put it on an 18 foot rope as a sort of mid-weight rope shown below. It works, has a pretty different feel from light ropes but I'm getting the hang of it. I will probably add some more weight to it by wrapping some wire around it.

Photo: honda with metal thimble to add weight

I currently have 3 ropes: 1. 12.5 foot, 3/8 inch cotton braided, nylon core rope. This is my oldest rope, and it's not spot cord, it is of unknown manufacture purchased at a feed store around 1988. It is my most used rope for flat loop, wedding ring, and butterfly tricks. It may be a little on the small side for wedding ring but I find that it works for me and forces me to be accurate with my loop placement around my body. 2. 15 foot, #12 cotton core spot cord. A great all around rope that gives me a little more room than my first rope. 3. almost 18 foot, #12 cotton core spot cord for when I want something bigger. Heavier honda.

I have ordered 100 more feet of rope to make one for Texas Skip and also 2 small matched ropes to spin flat loops with right and left hand simultaneously. Stay tuned and I'll share my progress. Happy roping!

[ropergillt-blog]

Hobie Spins The Rope - On The Silver Screen

I stumbled on a nice display of trick roping in popular media recently. I didn't so much stumble on it but more like did a web search for something like "trick roping" and it was served to me. I first found an interview with actor Alden Ehrenreich who was promoting a movie called Hail Caesar! A Cohen brothers film from 2016. He was discussing training with horses, ropes, and guns for a role as an old time western movie star named Hobie. I searched out the clip of the roping scene and it packed everything from flat loop to Texas skip in less than a minute. It was impressive, and nice to see trick roping take a spotlight for a moment.

The second half of the sequence really started running away though and I had to watch it six times (probably more) trying to make sense of it. All the tricks were legitimate standards, impressive stuff that I wouldn't expect one could pick up in two months while doing all the other preparation an actor must be doing before a movie. The real kicker though was the transitions between tricks, they weren't quite like anything I had seen and I couldn't quite wrap my head around them. He goes into bouncing the loop over his head a few times, but it looked a little strange as he goes for that first lift. The more peculiar part was coming out of it he's spinning the loop counter clockwise which is standard, but somehow pulls off a merry go round clockwise around his body and hoists it up vertical into Texas skip with a nice big loop. I don't even think you can use the same rope for small horizontal loop tricks and large vertical loop skip and pull it off so nonchalantly.

Now, I'm not going to say all that is impossible,  just because I don't understand how a thing could be done doesn't mean it's impossible but  I knew for sure this guy was either a roping wizard or Hollywood has done what we all love it to do and fabricated a fancy little roping scene here. I set out to find out for sure which of my hypotheses were correct, knowing that it was probably the latter. I read through a good many interviews and articles which gave background to what was going on.

I found good evidence that Ehrenreich trained for six weeks with Cliff McLaughlin, son of famed stuntman Gene McLaughlin who was a big name in classic Hollywood westerns. In fact he says in an article on Front Row Features   "The rope twirling was real. I worked with a guy named Cliff McLaughlin"

So is that our answer then? Hmm, let's get a second opinion, it sounds like a vague answer that needs some clarification, pressing onward.

This piece where Robert Seigel of NPR  interviews Josh Brolin who was also in the movie is quite interesting, openly alluding to the possibility that the scene was doctored. I should mention there is apparently another roping scene in the movie which involves noodles instead of rope but I haven't seen that part yet.

SIEGEL: Alden Ehrenreich...

BROLIN: Yes.

SIEGEL: ...Learned to do rope tricks for this last.

BROLIN: Yeah, and with spaghetti.

SIEGEL: (Laughter) That's right.

BROLIN: So the great thing about now is we'll never know whether he really learned that, whether it was a stunt rope, whether it was a digital rope. You'll never know.

SIEGEL: Never know.

BROLIN: And you don't need to know. Why break the mystery?

I will concede that it is true we don't need to know if it was real or not, we as the general movie-going public who just want to be entertained and swept up into fantasy as a reprieve from the drugery of our lives. We as trick ropers on the other hand do have a professional responsibility to know if there really is a prodigy rope wizard out there among us. The fact that Brolin brought up digital alteration without any prompting from the interviewer is a little telling but we can't really read much into it either because he may not know where the line of special effects was drawn.

On Mashable Ehrenreich himself directly refers to "movie magic"

Interviewer: "The rope tricks. Too cool to be totally true, right?" Ehrenreich: [Laughs again] "I had to learn a lot of it! I had a trick-roping guy. But there’s a lot of movie magic there."

Uh huh, the truth comes out. Just one more reference from FXGuide that goes so far as to describe the extent and the method of how the effect was done. Digging into the article about three fourths of the way through it describes that Ehrenreich did indeed learn the ropes literally, he started out with a few tricks without any effects and then transitions into a sequence where he was only holding a short piece of rope going through the motions of the tricks but the full rope was added digitally. He was trained on the basics and how to move to make it believable. They did a good job, it's a nice moment but I admit I'm glad to find out it wasn't real, I wouldn't want someone picking these tricks up effortlessly and thereby shaming all the rest of us who have worked so hard to earn these the long way. It may be my pride talking but there could be a little harm here, as the effect was done very well and to most people it looks real. So there are probably a lot of people out there that think this actor did pull off all these tricks and if he - not a roping professional - could do it then the next time they see an actual roper doing it they will think it's not as big a deal as it really is. But I want to focus on the positive, and I remember that public perception it not the main motivating factor driving me to be a trick roper, so I shouldn't lose any sleep over it.

But good job Cohens for putting some almost real trick roping in the movie, and Alden for giving it an effort. They did hire a real roper for consultation and training but It might have been easier to just have actual trick roping in the movie as there are people who can perform these tricks and you might save some time and money on the special effects budget but I understand where you are coming from. Many people seem to love this scene, so it probably met the desired outcome. Maybe, strange as it seems, having a little fake trick roping in a movie will open the door for more work opportunities for real trick ropers, this is the warm thought that I will leave you with. Rope On!

[ropergillt-blog]

Choir Boy Beginnings

Setting: 1987 Tucson Arizona.

I go into the Tucson Boys Chorus with a love of music and soon find another love, roping. Along with a repertoire of western songs it turns out the choir cultivates a tradition of trick roping to go with it, devoting a portion of rehearsal time every week to roping practice in the dusty parking lot. I was an eager singer and an equally eager roper, taking my rope out frequently in my backyard to learn "the routine" so I could someday be on the roping team, a select few who would showcase trick roping in performances.

A nearby feed store stocked the popular 3/8 in. braided cotton rope which all the choristers used and the craft was primarily passed down from boy to boy, without a formal roping instructor. Dr. Julian Ackerly was our musical director and he knew enough to get you started with a rope, but some of the senior boys who were better ropers really mentored the younger boys, or at least provided an example enough so that if you had some self motivation you could work how to replicate what you saw the more experienced boys doing. You Tube didn't exist in those days and none of us had internet access anyway so these face to face encounters were crucial for passing along the skills.

Photo: Me in the wedding ring while fellow chorister Curtis Miller and our host family stand by. Colorado Springs during a Western States Tour 1991

It didn't take long and I was sold, I idolized the boys in the top group who were the best singers and best ropers. When I was younger I didn't get to see the Touring Chorus too frequently but a few times a year we would rehearse and perform at the Music Hall for our Holiday Show and Mother's Day Concert and I loved watching the roping team at those times. Along with learning to read music, I learned to rope so that when I got to the Touring Chorus myself, I eventually qualified for the roping team and was one of a few boys who would perform in the concerts.

Photo: Gill T. the early rascal days

Here is how the roping performance played out: Dr. Ackerly as announcer would call us through trick by trick. A hand-full of boys standing in a line across the front of the stage all proceeding through the routine in unison, first throwing out a Flat Spin in front of them and then stepping in the Wedding Ring a few seconds after. The Teardrop was accomplished by slowing the rope down and the loop droops into a teardrop shape around you as it spins. On a standard rope with a loose honda you can't slow the rope down too much because it closes up but the chorus had a tradition of taping their hondas tight so the spoke length remains nearly constant no matter what speed you spin the rope and it's a bit easier to go extremely slow without losing your loop altogether. Next the rope was sped back up and dropped into Handshakes followed by Single-Leg Handshakes, then the Switch where you would switch which leg was down. We would go back to Wedding Ring before doing a Lift-Off, that is, a single Handshake used to get momentum to pop the rope off over the head back to a Flat Spin. Then came Taps, and Double Taps (Spoke Hop variations). Lift-On took the rope back over our heads to the Wedding Ring position where we finished off with Skyrockets. Skyrockets was like the Lift-Off in that it used a single Handshake before popping the loop up overhead, instead of going off front into a flat loop it came straight back down to another Handshake and was repeated 5 or 6 times up and down. 

Each roper then showcased a solo trick, I don't remember what we called all of them but they were mostly variations of flat loop and wedding ring tricks. Stargazing was a memorable one where the roper would adjust the spoke to be rather short, it held place because the hondas were so tight, and while spinning a Wedding Ring around him he would lay down on his back, arm up, spinning that loop right above him. The short spoke let the loop spin just above the roper's horizontal body without touching down and killing the spin. If the top roper could do a vertical loop and Jump Through it then that was always saved for last and the whole chorus standing behind would count the number of times he could jump through, ending on the nice round number of 10 if he could get that far. This wasn't a Texas Skip mind you, nobody had a large enough rope or a weighted honda, so it was more like the makings of a large loop Butterfly taking the rope from the right side of the body, around front to the left side and then jumping through as the loop was pulled back to the right side starting position.

In my four years in the chorus, the Jump Through was the only vertical loop trick I ever saw anyone do. Nobody that I saw even did a regular Butterfly, I didn't know what that was till later and even the Jump Through was only done by a few boys, it was harder than all the horizontal loop tricks in the routine, even with the training wheels of having a virtually fixed honda it took a bit of practice. My day came my last year in the chorus, there were a couple other good ropers and probably a little better than I at the time but I out-roped all the other boys that day and was slated to do the Jump Through as a solo trick at the show. I had a first attempt where the rope hung up on my boot on the third jump. I wasn't sure if I could pull off ten jumps, having hardly ever done that in practice, so I was a bit nervous that Dr. Ackerly would push me at more attempts only to repeatedly fail there on stage and run off embarrassed that I was an unfit captain of the team. He called out "Let's give it one more try now!" and to my surprise I pulled out jump after jump until I heard all the boys behind me shout out "Ten!" and I was home free. That was surely one of my best moments.

To create a grand finale we would always do a Pyramid, grabbing the smallest boy who could do a steady Wedding Ring and put him on the shoulders of a mid-sized boy who then was pushed up on the shoulders of the largest boy in the group. I remember little Gary always up there on top that three man Pyramid spinning a wide loop. I would watch from the chorus or from a position as a spotter, and the size of that spectacle always went over well.

The dusty chorus hall parking lot has since been paved but the Tucson Boys Chorus still does a great service to keep alive the semi-obscure practice of trick roping (along with music of course, which has also added greatly to my life). I let my rope get packed away through my teenage years and through much of my adulthood but thankfully the fire was re-kindled in me a number of years ago partly because I found a copy of Will Rogers' "The Ropin' Fool" at the library to remind me of how much I love roping, and my eyes were opened to all the more you could do with a rope that I hadn't even imagined when I was a kid. I started roping a bit more, but still distracted by my adult responsibilities it didn't take off as much as I wished until now as I am making time for it just about daily, I'm hooked more than ever and keeping myself fit in the process. A big thanks to the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus!