We Are The Champions...Well Almost

Team DMG has officially made rodeo history (according to rodeo staff)! Teammates Shauna Morris and Tova Ramos are the first all-female team to place in the Businessmen's Steer Decorating finals and Tova herself is the first female holder, ever!

The finals were a chaotic melee of steers, ropes and macho men. Because there were double the amount of teams (16) from every other night, there were two steer per cute as opposed to one, which was the seed of all the problems in the first place! Our steer in particular got twisted with our neighbor's and caused Tova, the holder, to let go of the rope. Now usually this means you can kiss your chances of finishing goodbye as your steer happily trots away around the arena, but fortunately our steer didn't try to make a break for it, instead he stopped and hung out until we caught him again and then proceeded to drag Tova across the arena by to lead rope and me by his own tail. Fortunately we got our act together and I tied that dang ribbon as fast as I could and booked it back across the arena to the final judge.

At this point, I knew we didn't get first but when I looked around I was getting either a lot of sentiments of peace or we had just taken second place, either way I was happy. The awards ceremony was completely disorganized and I overheard the fellow who was in charge of passing out the prizes say, "I have no idea what I'm doing! Why do I have three prizes when there's only two winners?" Needless to say we didn't get our prize in a big ceremony and then became confused on where we placed when we kept getting conflicting reports from just about everyone. Were we second or were we third?

All-in-all we came in third, but we were very impressed with ourselves, especially after having lost the steer and getting dragged across the dirt. Our prize was a sterling silver money clip with the Reno Rodeo logo in jeweler's bronze and on the back it was engraved with "2008 BSD Third Place." They're beautiful and highly functional, which makes it even better. I was given the third money clip to "give to my sponsor" so David too has a handsome money clip to call his own.

I'm already geared up to participate next year and take home the second place pocket knife and then come back for a third year and take the mother-of-them-all, the Reno Rodeo belt buckle! Keep your eyes peeled for the DMG knockout team and come out and give us your rowdiest support!