Friends honor North Texas rodeo legend Roy Cooper, the ‘Super Looper’
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Roy Cooper took the sport of calf roping by storm in 1976 when the 20-year-old cowboy from New Mexico won Rookie of the Year and the first of eight World Champion titles. He was inducted into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame three years later.
“He was the equivalent of Michael Jordan in our world,” said filmmaker and former calf roper Tim Endsley. “He changed calf roping to what it is now.”
Cooper was found dead April 29 after his North Texas home near Decatur was destroyed by a fire. His friends say there will never be another “Super Looper,” but the 69-year-old left behind a lasting legacy both in rodeo and in the countless lives he touched.
The ‘Super Looper’
Endsley was still a kid when he met Cooper, who was already in the early days of his career. It was Cooper who gave him his first rope.
“Whatever was his was yours, and that’s just the way he treated you,” Endsley told the Star-Telegram. “So eight-time world champion, and you could be, you know, just a kid at the rodeo, and he was gonna take time for you.”
Endsley has lots of memories from more than 40 years of friendship with Cooper — traveling to rodeos, telling stories until midnight, watching country music legend George Strait walk into Cooper’s house unannounced for a visit.
One thing Endsley said he doesn’t remember is Cooper putting anybody down. He wanted everybody to win.
“Roy was always about building you up, he was never about tearing you down,” Endsley said. “I think that’s kind of how winners are, though, you know what I mean? They don’t have to tear people down to win.”
Cooper learned how to win at a young age. His father, Dale “Tuffy” Cooper, taught him and his two siblings proper roping techniques on their family ranch. Roy Cooper was 11 when he won the All-Around Championships in the Junior Rodeo Association, according to the New Mexico Sports Hall of Fame.
In 1975, Cooper won the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association calf roping championship while studying journalism at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant, Oklahoma.
1976, Cooper’s first year as a professional rodeo cowboy, got off to a bad start. In a 2023 documentary made by Endsley’s Wild Horse Motion Films, Cooper said he didn’t win anything in his first two rodeos at Kansas City and Chicago. His luck started to change, and in February he won his first big check of $4,300 in the Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show, now known as the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo.
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Barrel racer Connie Combs said she met Cooper at Southeastern shortly after his Fort Worth win. The university was trying to recruit her for their rodeo team. She had already competed in the National Finals Rodeo the previous year, and she asked Cooper if he was “going to go really hard.”
“Yeah,” he answered. “I’m going to try to make the NFR.”
Combs and Cooper both qualified for the 1976 NFR and won World Champion titles — Combs in barrel racing and Cooper in calf roping.
As a result of their wins, the two appeared in a promotion for Wrangler western shirts. Combs still remembers the photo shoot in Golden, Colorado. It was cold, she said, and they had to get up early. They were told they were playing the part of “tough customers” in the advertisement and couldn’t smile at all.
Combs said they had a hard time keeping a straight face for the photo. She still has a copy.
Cooper was always in competitive mode, even out of the arena, according to Combs.
“He was always looking for a way to get a little bit faster,” Combs said. “Even if he was winning, he was always trying to get better. So to him, he was never good enough. It’s like, ‘I gotta keep getting better and faster.’”
Cooper nicknamed Combs “CC Rider” in honor of her initials and the blues song. The two would often talk at rodeos over the years. He didn’t talk about himself much, according to Combs. He was always asking about everyone else.
“He had a good energy to him,” Combs said. “Like, when you got around him, he had this really great energy, and you could pick up off of it. It would even, like, carry into you to help you even do better.”
Rodeo’s Triple Crown
PRCA rodeo photographer Terri Abrahamsen started taking pictures of Cooper in the 1970s. At the time she had no idea she was capturing history, but she said she did notice Cooper’s drive.
“He was not someone who settled for ‘Oh, I hope I do good,’” Abrahamsen said. “He was one of the first real motivated competitors that I ran into.”
Abrahamsen said even when Cooper was winning the world championship, she didn’t think of him as a rodeo legend. He was just her buddy Roy.
Cooper was never arrogant, according to Abrahamsen, and she didn’t realize until later what a big deal it was that he’d earned all those titles.
In 1983, Cooper won rodeo’s coveted Triple Crown when he earned three World Championship titles in the same year. To date, he’s one of only 10 cowboys to accomplish this.
Cooper downplayed the honor in a February interview with Let’s Freakin’ Rodeo, saying he’d won the Triple Crown by accident.
“I was lucky,” he said. “And I had a great, great horse.”
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Cooper continued to compete in the National Finals Rodeo throughout the 1990s, winning his fourth NFR average Steer Roping title in 1996 at the age of 41. In 2000, he became the first cowboy to surpass $2 million in rodeo earnings.
Even after he stopped competing, he continued to pour his knowledge into this three sons — Clif, Clint and Tuf Cooper. In December 2010, all three qualified for the NFR calf-roping event.
“That’s a Triple Crown for me,” Roy Cooper told the San Antonio Express-News in 2011. “I’ve dreamed about it, and it happened.”
Tuf Cooper has gone on to win four World Champion titles and continues to compete professionally.
For more than 40 years, Roy Cooper sponsored a World Championship Junior Calf Roping event. Young people from all over the United States flocked to compete, and Cooper also used it as an opportunity to help them improve their skills.
Abrahamsen would show up to take photos some years, and she remembers seeing participants come up to him and ask “How did I do? How did I look?”
“I was like, he’s still got it,” Abrahamsen said. “He still wants everybody to succeed, like he succeeded.”
