Back in 1980, the world was a little different place. There were no cell phones, Internet or reality TV. Pac-Man was released, Mount St. Helen erupted, and Ronald Reagan was elected president.

And in the world of professional rodeo, South Dakota cowboy Paul Tierney ended the first year of the iconic ’80s decade by winning the prestigious all-around cowboy title, breaking the four-year winning streak of six-time champion Tom Ferguson.

It has been 32 years since Paul took his place in the rodeo history books and earned his second gold buckle. But while he has retired from his career as a full-time professional cowboy, he has not faded away. On the contrary.

While raising his family near the Black Hills of South Dakota, Paul instilled in his four children both a love of the sport and an appreciation for great horses. He and wife Robin began their own tradition of raising and training talented American Quarter Horses on their family ranch near Oral, South Dakota, and specifically raise their horses with the intention of making great rodeo and ranch horses.

With talented horses, dedicated trainers and a passion for the sport they all love, the Tierney family legacy is now one they are sharing with the world.

Gold Buckle Dreams

Growing up in the sandhills of Nebraska, Paul held a rope in his hand and rode a horse for most of his life. But at age 28, he reached a turning point in his rodeo career.

“I came to a point in my life where I decided I was going to either see what I could do or I was going to do something else,” Paul explains. “I’d saved up about $7,000, and I put it in a can to go to the winter rodeos. I wanted all my fees, all my travel expenses, everything paid at that time. When the can ran out, I was going home.”

The year was 1977, and Paul traveled to Denver for one of the first big rodeos of the season. He won a little money in the team roping, which was not one of his specialty events of tie-down roping and steer wrestling, but it was enough to send him to another rodeo.

Fort Worth, Texas, was the next stop, and there, Paul made a big deposit into his $7,000 savings account.

“I set a record for the most money ever won in one rodeo (at the time) – a little over $10,000,” Paul says with a smile. “At that particular time in my life, I’d never seen a check wrote out to me for $10,000. I’d sold some calves in my life, but there weren’t many, and calves weren’t (priced) all that high. So I mean, this looked like a very good way to go.”

From there, Paul continued on the rodeo trail. He headed to the other winter rodeos – Houston; El Paso, Texas; Jackson, Mississippi; and Phoenix, winning money at nearly every one. Before he knew it, Paul had won more than $16,000 on the PRCA rodeo circuit.

“I realized I could do this, so I switched who I was hanging around with, which was guys who maybe weren’t going to the NFR, and I started traveling with Dave Brock, who was going to the NFR,” says Paul, who has always believed in the importance of the mental game. “I started traveling with people who thought like I was thinking.”

After spending a couple of months at home in the spring, Paul hit the rodeo road again in June, and spent the rest of the year there. He qualified for the 1977 National Finals Rodeo, which at the time took place in Oklahoma City. That year was a sudden-death format for the world championships, and Paul narrowly missed out on capturing the all-around cowboy title.

“I missed my last calf to win the all-around. It was a deal where maybe I had opportunity, but I didn’t capitalize the way I should have. But it was still a great year.”

So Paul returned to the pro rodeo circuit in 1978, missing six weeks during a crucial part of the summer due to injury, but still making the NFR in tie-down roping. That year, he finished second in the tie-down world standings to traveling partner Dave.

The next year was pivotal for Paul. He won the tie-down roping championship, the first gold buckle of his career.

In 1980, PRCA went back to the former system of declaring world championships based on season-long earnings and not just the NFR. That year, Paul won the all-around title by a mere $100 over Tom Ferguson, who had been on a four-year winning streak. Paul also captured a gold buckle in tie-down roping, making for a great year and stellar start to the decade of the ’80s.

“I had a great winter, and came out of the winter leading the all-around standings,” Paul recalls. “I was in the lead that whole year, and they never caught me. I was steer wrestling, calf roping and team roping, and I’d occasionally rope a steer, too.”

In 1981, Paul was poised to win the all-around title again but was overtaken at the NFR. During the next several years, Paul qualified for several more NFRs and came close to clinching another gold buckle in 1984, coming in second in the all-around standings again. Then, in 1987, a back injury kept him from qualifying, and he decided it was time for surgery.

The surgery helped put an end to his career as a professional, full-time rodeo cowboy, but Paul was far from finished with the sport. Many factors led to his decision to stay home, one of them being his growing family.

“I kinda fell away from the rodeo deal and started riding a lot and training horses. Then we started getting a bigger family. A wife will never get in the way of rodeoing, but kids will, because they give you roots,” he explains. “If you don’t live where they’re rodeoing, it’s hard. It was too much to be gone, so I didn’t do it full-time anymore.”

Raising Children and Horses

Paul’s career raising and training horses started back in his early rodeo days, when a horse that he bought at the Rapid City Stock Show sale for $450 took him to two gold buckles.

“I took him home and started roping on him, and this horse turned out to be a really great horse. His name was Coffee Jeff (Ash Creek-Coffee Queen by Coffee Wagon),” Paul says. “I trained him from the ground up. Being on the road like that, when he quit working so good, then I had to buy horses. I bought three more horses in my career, and they were all ‘made’ horses. But none of them ever worked like he did.”

Paul realized that if he wanted the best rodeo horses, he’d have to train them himself.

And with four children – Jesse, Paul David, Amy and Jordan – also rodeoing, it became a family affair to raise and train rodeo horses. Paul and Robin, a barrel racer and former Miss Rodeo South Dakota, began selecting horses for their program based on a strong set of criteria. They look for horses that are well-suited to ranch work, arena competition, trail work and hauling.

On the ranch, the horses work about 300 mama cows. Paul and Robin’s names are both on the 20-year AQHA breeding certificate they have earned.

The ranch’s main stallions are PTS Frosted Cash, a 1993 gray stallion by Frosty Feature and out of De Blitz by Deregulate, and Frenchmans Sanwood, a 1998 palomino stallion by Frenchmans Guy and out of Driftwood San by Sak Em San. Paul and Robin bred Frenchmans Sanwood, and Ray Wardell of Moorcroft, Wyoming, bred PTS Frosted Cash.

The mares come from recognized rodeo bloodlines, such as Driftwood, Dash For Cash and Frenchmans Guy.

The Tierneys are involved with the breeding, training and finishing of their horses from the beginning to the end. Son All of the Tierney children are actively involved in training their own horses as well.

The couple’s oldest son, Jesse, who qualified for his first National Finals Steer Roping in 2011, has his own ranch and horse operation near Hermosa. Paul David lives near the Tierney Ranch in Oral, and assists with everyday work and training at the ranch.

Amy is in college at Northeastern Junior College at Sterling, Colorado, where she is a member of the rodeo team. Jordan is a junior in high school and is an active participant in the South Dakota High School Rodeo Association, Little Britches and 4-H rodeo, where she participates in nearly all of the girls’ events. Jordan’s work ethic is much like that of her parents, and it’s not unusual to see her in the practice pen at home well after dark.

“All of my horses were bred and raised at the ranch,” Jordan says. “I’ll be riding my own for the breakaway this spring, but the rest are my dad’s horses. My mom works on our barrel horses with us. My parents do a lot to help us, but we also do a lot and help season them, too.”

Jordan’s hard work doesn’t go unnoticed by her parents, either.

“It doesn’t make a difference what she’s working on, Jordan works hard at it,” Paul says of his youngest daughter. “Right now, she’s wrapped up in basketball. She runs all summer long, three to four miles at least four times a week. Her volleyball is the same way. And then she’ll come home at night and be out in the arena until 10 or 11 p.m.”

Trained to Win

That work ethic is something Paul has become known for. As he mentors many young competitors in addition to his own children, Paul not only shares his wealth of knowledge about training good horses, but also about training minds to win.

“We’re always working on the fundamentals,” Robin explains. “But sometimes the kids realize their dad has an ability to compete. We have to allow the fundamentals to work, but then live on the edge a little bit and take some risks. And that’s probably what we encourage them to do more often than not, but we work on the fundamentals all the time.”

Learning how to win is something that Paul learned at a young age from his mentor, Clark Brown of North Platte, Nebraska.

“Clark Brown really taught me to win under pressure,” Paul says. “When I went to work for him at 19, we had match ropings every day. And he would always say that it didn’t matter how much money we had up, but we always put some money up. Every day we put up a dime in the go-rounds and 50 cents in the average. And it was unreal how much money he made off me. … He just hardly ever missed. But if he did, he would say to me, you have to go rope four calves. That’s it. In a sense, he would kind of harass me, but he made me realize that I just needed to catch sometimes. Those are the things that I took with me. Sometimes that’s all I needed to do – catch – for big money. But a lot of times, I was catching for 50 cents.”

Today, the now-wiser Paul uses the same technique on his sons when he competes against them, as he did at the 2012 Timed Event Championship in early March at the Lazy E Arena in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

Learning how to step up under pressure is often what separates champions in the arena, and Paul and Robin work hard to help their children learn that quality, and as Robin explains, it often comes down to repetition of the basics and competing as much as possible.

“We have a college girl (Amy) who has placed at the top in every go in college, and then gotten to the finals and missed,” Robin says. “So we’ve talked about what we need to do to help her get over that, and the answer is to get her to more competitions. More pressure. More of it will help you get through it.”

Paul’s advice to young competitors is to remember the basics and stay in the present.

“You can’t stay in the prize. But you gotta stay on the price – what is the price we have paid to win? You can’t think about the win – you have to stay focused on the journey to win and the process. So any time the mind starts to wander and you start thinking about that $50,000 or that gold buckle, you’ve got to bring your mind back to the basics. You bring yourself back to the start, and then to your position – your score, position and catch.”

But most importantly, the Tierneys stress to their children and the other kids and people they train to appreciate every opportunity and accolade that comes their way.

“You have to be thankful of what’s being created and what’s become. If you’re not thankful, you can become arrogant, big-headed and prideful. So I’ve always told my kids that it can be taken away from you tomorrow. It’s easy come, easy go,” Paul says from experience. “You have to be appreciative of what’s going on in your life. So many people become a champion, and next thing you know, they think they are ‘it.’

“But you’re easily replaced – someone can come along tomorrow and take it away. So be thankful for the things that are at hand and what you’re involved in. Yeah, they talk about you when you’re winning, but they talk about someone else next.

“A lot of kids don’t see the work that goes into being the best anymore, and we’re showing them that no one gets to the top without putting in the work.”