Senior cowboy Cody Wright of Hurricane High says he's not very good at this interview stuff.
You could hardly expect him to be.Wright, second-eldest of 12 children, who works as a concrete pourer for his father's Wright-Way Concrete business, does everything else. He has no time to practice those interviews that will inevitably come if he keeps this stuff up.
Wright, who repeated as boys' all-around cowboy champion at the conclusion Saturday night of the 1996 Utah High School Rodeo Association Championships at the Wasatch County Fairgrounds, is as all-around as cowboys come.
He competes during the season in six of the seven events available to high school rodeo cowboys: Team roping, calf roping, bulldogging, bareback and saddle bronc riding and bull riding. All he misses is cow cutting.
The girls' all-around state champion is Lottie Loveless of south Utah County.
Wright qualified for the state finals in the three roughstock events and took a first and two seconds in Saturday's Final Go.
He was the season leader going into saddle bronc and won the final go-round with a score of 72, six points better than second place, to win the yearly average and qualify for nationals in that event. Saddle bronc, he says, is his favorite event. "I'm just a little more natural in it," he says.
Wright was 12th at the 1995 national finals in saddle bronc.
In bareback, he took second for the night's ride and moved into fourth place - the top four qualify for nationals. Spiker Robert Hart won the season average and is the top qualifier for nationals but had the fourth-best score of Saturday's go.
In bull riding, Wright scored 72 to place second for the night and qualify second to nationals behind the Spikers' Blue Stone.
Wright says he only knows one other prep cowboy who does all the roughstock, much less six events.
But he's not completely unique.
His father, William Wright, was also a six-event participant in rodeo at Hurricane High School. And his five younger brothers (he has six sisters, one older) are all rodeo cowboys in their own right, though several are still quite young.
Wright, whose goal this year was to go in all three roughstock events to the National Finals Rodeo Aug. 14-17 at Pueblo, Colo., says he actually does go to school in between work and rodeo practice. But he practices each event for an hour or two, though he doesn't do all of the every day.
His experience at the National Finals last year (12th in saddle bronc) helped him this season. "There's a lot of pressure there," he says.
He thinks he's improved over last season because he's learned to spur better and deal with that pressure better. So well, in fact, that he's rarin' to get back. "Yeah, it was a blast," he says.
Wright says he'll accept a rodeo scholarship to Weber State and hopes to some day be a professional rodeo cowboy.