“My wife and I used to go to these horse shows for a long time. For so many years we never won anything, and she said, ‘I don’t think we ever will,’ and I said, ‘you keep going long enough and it’ll be your day,’” Ronnie Austin said.

Friday was Ronnie’s day. Again. Just like at the 2005 Bayer Select World Championship Show, Ronnie won the tie-down roping world championship with CNN Smart Gunner and the reserve world championship with RR Sonoita Norbert.

“It’s a great honor to know that when you show up, you’ve got some tools to work with,” Ronnie said. “There’s a lot of other guys that do, too. I’m very blessed to have these horses.”

Ronnie said if he’d had horses of this caliber in his younger days, life could have taken a different direction. 

“It’s kind of like my wife, I told her once, ‘If I’d had horses like this, I’d probably have had a shot at making the National Finals, and I’d probably never met you.”

Ronnie was a cattle buyer and met his wife, Jessica, in a sale barn restaurant in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

“She asked me if I wanted to eat a hamburger 30 years ago, and I’m still eating her hamburgers,” he said.

Ronnie, who takes chemotherapy to treat leukemia, which is in remission, said he wasn’t feeling the best Friday night when he roped his way to scores of 215 and 208.

“But I feel good cause I’m here,” he said. “I feel very blessed, I thank God every day that I’m here. You can sit around and complain and feel sorry for yourself, but that’s not in my vocabulary.

“Being here today, with a lot of the things I’ve been through in life, I feel it’s such a blessing to be here and be in this organization.  It’s something I’ll be looking forward to next year.”