02/06/2024
Last night’s Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo finals was the great watching and rodeo highlights reel we’d expect from such a major stop on the Texas Swing. But when they broke the action right after the bronc riding to retire reigning PRCA Pickup Man of the Year Josh Edwards, well, I wasn’t ready for that one.
As you all know by now, I’m a big fan of going out on top of the game before backsliding. I always hate to see a great just fade away. But we’re talking about a guy who just voted to work his second NFR in December, who also was just voted the best in the business in his line of work. I had to ask.
Why now, when you’re on top of the world?
“For me, it feels like the right time, and for a few reasons,” said Edwards, who’s 45 and from Forney, Texas, which is less than an hour’s drive from Fort Worth. “My boys are 16 and 13 now, and they’ve spent their whole life chasing me around in the summers. It’s time for us to do what they want to do.
“A lot of people, especially on the contract personnel side, don’t get to control how and when they leave. Every contract personnel person works their whole career to try and get on the big stages. I’ve been so blessed. I got to work on this sport’s biggest stages. There’s always that eternal wish of getting to do it all again, but I’ve seen that merry-go-round so many years, and I didn’t want to get on it and not be able to get off. I didn’t want to stick around so long that I left disgruntled and sour. I’ve seen that happen to way too many good people.”
Josh and Kristi’s boys, Blevin and Brinnon, have big dreams and goals of their own now, and two all-in parents. Blevin is working on his pilot’s license, and wants to take to the skies with his pilot dad on his journey to one day becoming a commercial pilot. Brinnon is riding saddle bronc steers, so was no doubt busy going jump-for-jump with the likes of Damian Brennan, Zeke Thurston and the Wright boys last night.
“A couple summers ago, a guy told me, ‘You only have 18 summers with your kids,’” Josh remembers well; he worked his first Finals in 2014, by the way. “It’s time for it to be about them now, and with how it all happened for me in the same year in 2023, it’s just time.
“I try to be aware of things, and when you’re younger, you blow by the signs. I read something Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson wrote the other day, and it hit home. He said, ‘Sometimes you have to give up the things you love to become the person you’re supposed to be.’ The first time my kids went to the beach, they went with my brother, because I was at a rodeo. I’m very goal-oriented, and I’ve accomplished what I wanted to. It’s their turn.”
Now we know his “why” on the when. Josh was a fan of how Peyton Manning won the Super Bowl, then walked away from football, and followed suit. I next wanted to know why a guy with contracts to work blockbusters the likes of The Daddy Cheyenne Frontier Days™, Dodge City Roundup and San Angelo Stock Show and Rodeo chose Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo to be his last PRCA rodeo.
“I always knew I wanted to go out at Fort Worth when I felt like I got to the top of the mountain, and that I wanted to go out loving the sport and loving my job,” Josh said. “I don’t know that you could ask for a more storybook ending than being voted to work the NFR and Pickup Man of the Year, then coming to what I consider my hometown rodeo for the 25th year.
“I started working for Rafter G Rodeo in 1999. I was in college, and dating the girl who was my high school sweetheart, and she was Neal Gay’s secretary and timed at the rodeos. I entered the calf roping at Mesquite every week just to go see that girl who’s now my wife. I joined Rafter G’s labor crew at Fort Worth in 1999 (young Josh’s jobs included untying the calves), and started picking up at Fort Worth in 2000. This was the perfect place to ride away as a PRCA pickup man.”
He will fulfill one last pickup-man obligation when he works The American Rodeo on March 9 at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. Why? Because he said he would, and Josh Edwards is a man of his word.
But make no mistake, the end of this chapter is drawing near. And there are so many things he’ll miss about being a world-class pickup man.
“What I have loved the most about being a pickup man is that it encompasses everything I wanted to be as a cowboy—horses, horsemanship, roping, working with livestock and just being in the whole rodeo environment the whole rodeo,” he said. “Once the rodeo starts, you can feel that energy in that arena with every bucking horse and every cowboy. There’s no way I can recreate that experience in my life. It’s a feeling I’ll treasure forever.”
Edwards might be riding away from being a pickup man, but this guy’s a cowboy for life. And there’s a wild next adventure coming down the pike. Ever heard of the Mongolian adventure race called the Mongol Derby? Yeah, I hadn’t either. Edwards is entered this August.
“It’s a 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) horse race across Mongolia,” he explained. “The herders and nomads have wild horses there that are about 13 hands and 900 pounds, and they gather them up for this horse race. You get there and get on a wild horse with 15 pounds of gear, and you have 10 days to complete the course.”
Say what?! Oh heck, why should this surprise me from a skydiving, bungee-jumping, ironman triathlon-racing, plane-flying pickup man? Josh actually put in for the Mongol Derby four years ago, in 2020. Being selected to compete in it this summer—as the first cowboy ever—was just another round of, “There’s your sign.”
So this is where the cowboy rides away. But not really, and only from this one chapter, as he swings the door wide open on all the challenges and adventures to come—which will always include rodeo.
“God allowed this to work out the way I’d always dreamed it could and would,” Josh said. “I’m just happy that I was able to recognize it in the moment instead of missing the signs.”
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