Prime Time Winter 2020

REFLECT IONS AND RECOLLECT IONS

Paul Marchant | Rancher/Columnist | idahomarchant@gmail.com Irons in the Fire S everal years ago, I helped coach the local high school basketball team for a few Hoosiers and Pea Eye

Final Four. For South Dakota State, it may be an eight-point loss to Baylor in the first round. There is no better than your best. There are about 100 kids who show steers at our county fair. It has turned into a very competitive show. Gone are the days when my kids had a fairly reasonable shot at winning the purple banner with one of our homegrown steers. That’s not to say we don’t have some decent calves, but they can’t really compare with some of the high- powered show steers in the show ring. That doesn’t mean my kids shouldn’t show because they can’t be the best, because they should always do their best. If a steer doesn’t make weight and misses the sale because he didn’t get fed right or he’s too rank to handle in the show ring because nobody took time to gentle him down at home, that is a different story. It seems like we get too hung up on the biggest, the prettiest or the highest priced. That’s often true in many aspects of the cattle business. Does it really matter to me if my neighbor topped the sale last fall with his January-born calves that came off the cows and irrigated pasture at 650 pounds when my March and April calves came off the desert at 500 pounds? Do you really need a new pickup with surround sound and a built-in Boy Friday? Or will the ’02 Dodge with 190,000 miles but the decent running Cummins work just fine for another year? Folks who have been able to remain in the cow business and make a decent living for themselves and their families year in and year out are gen- erally the least-cost and efficient producers who don’t tend to jump at every new trend and fad like a pup after a jack rabbit. The next big thing is always around the corner. Your next big thing, however, may not be mine. And that’s OK. PT

seasons. As anyone in rural America knows, hitching one’s hopes and reason for living to the

success of a small-town high school athletic program can sometimes be like a spring spent doctoring scouring calves. Your ef- forts and heart may be fully invested, but you’re most likely going to lose some. One particular season served up a good share of life lessons, as high school sports are supposedly intended to do. The team consisted mainly of a bunch of under-sized, under-talented over achievers. Our two best post players were barely six feet noth- ing if we lied about their height; our best shooter could hit a three pointer, but tend- ed to shut down if he missed one or two; our best athlete sometimes forgot about defense; and our best defender didn’t want to score. I’d like to tell you that we had a Hollywood season, but we were more Rudy than Hoosiers and more Newt and Pea Eye than we were Butch and Sundance. We lost more than we won, and we knew what it felt like to lose by 25. We didn’t end the season by shocking the world and taking state, but we did shock the county by com- ing through the loser’s bracket and mak- ing it to the state tournament, where we barely missed making it to the third day of the tournament. Translation: we lost our first two games and were knocked out of the tournament without a trophy. However, rarely did I ever feel like that team didn’t do its best. The point of this story is not that we should accept mediocrity. The point is that, no matter what we do, we should do the best we can. For Kentucky, that may be the

Akaushi Prime Time • Fall 2019

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