Often, the world champion tie-down roper comes with a signature horse: Fred Whitfield and Moon, Cody Ohl and Luke, Stran Smith and Destiny, Trevor Brazile and Jag and even Tuf Cooper and Roanie.

For Shane Hanchey, the horse he would win his world title on should always have been Reata. That horse is the reason Hanchey is even competing in ProRodeo. Hanchey’s brother Jason trained the horse owned and bred by Buck Daniel and put his little brother on him.

But if they were to win a world title together it sure didn’t look like 2013 would be the year. At the end of 2012, Reata colicked and had to undergo emergency surgery. During the recovery, he injured his right hind leg, putting his return further behind.

“I picked him up in June,” Hanchey said. “We headed out for the summer run and did pretty good and got back to where I needed to be and then he got a little stinger in Salinas and I was paranoid so I sent him back. I don’t ever want anything bad to happen to that horse.”

He stayed out of commission until the week before the NFR. In the meantime, Hanchey borrowed Clint Cooper’s Sweetness, Cody Ohl’s Pearl and Trevor Brazile’s Rio—and scuffled his way to an NFR qualification.

“I run one calf on Reata before the NFR,” he said. “Reata was at my vet’s in Decatur so when he was ready just before Thanksgiving I picked him up and took him to Trevor’s to try him out. I ran one tie-down calf on him and I looked at Trevor and he told me, ‘He’s ready for Thursday.’ I took his word for it. It’s hard for me to say I was confident, but I looked back at how much I had won him and knew what I had.”

And it showed. Hanchey won the first and eighth rounds at the NFR and placed in five others. He topped Fred Whitfield’s 1997 average record of record of 84.0 seconds with an 80.1 time on 10 head. In sum, he came away with $134,766 in Las Vegas—a new NFR earnings record in tie-down. His season earnings ended up at $207,671, beating Cody Ohl by a mere $4,000.

“To break a guys’ record like Fred—I can almost tell you every calf he ran in 1997 I watched it so many times—is unbelievable in itself,” he said. “Then they told me I broke Cody Ohl’s earnings record from 2006. To do all that on Reata is really special. To win a world title means everything in the world.”