BRAYTON, Iowa – Cord McCoy found a spot near the fireplace at Big T’s, about as far away from the big screen television as he could be.
The several other dozen folks inside the bar and grill in the small community between Des Moines, Iowa, and Omaha, Neb., kept looking back to get some sort of reaction from the redhead from Tupelo, Okla., who has long been one of the fan favorites in the sport of bull riding. Now he and his brother, Jet, are taking the reality-TV world by storm on “The Amazing Race,” which airs Sundays on CBS-TV.
McCoy was in Iowa visiting his fiancé, Sara Best of Brayton. Her family organized an “Amazing Party” on Sunday, Feb. 28, so a few dozen folks joined the reality-TV star as he watched himself on the broadcast.
What he got to watch was a show that seemed tailor made for the cowboys, who won the second leg of the race that aired the week before. With travel, roping and horseback riding – albeit on wooden stallions instead of workhorses – Jet and Cord McCoy easily made it to the third-leg finish in first position. While each won a sailboat for winning episode 2, their third-leg win earned them two tickets to Patagonia, a region containing the southernmost portion of South America.
So how did the cowboys get there?
“Jet’s strengths are between his ears,” Cord said on the show. “He’s smart.”
They left their locale in Chile via bus to a spot in Argentina, and along the way the flatlanders took in the picturesque horizon. “There are no mountains like this in Oklahoma,” Jet said.
Once they arrived at their first Argentinean stop, they played a game of poker against the Travelosity gnome, the lawn-ornament mascot of the travel Web site. It took the leading cowboys a little while to get a better hand than the non-living counterpart, and they were passed in the race by married couple Joe and Heidi and lesbian couple Carol and Brandy.
“That gnome is good,” Cord said jokingly, referring to the inanimate object’s steady look that neither revealed a good hand nor a bluff.
But then the McCoys reclaimed the lead when they got to be gouchos, or South American cowboys. Talk about type-casting for their roles.
“I don’t know what we’re doing, but I bet I like it,” Jet said upon seeing the lassos.
He liked it so well that Jet took a couple of throws at a hay bale with a steer-head dummy attached. “I can’t believe I missed the first one,” he said. “I bet I hear about that.”
The “roadblocks” the teams had to choose from included a game of polo on a wooden horse or finding a buried treasure. The McCoys chose to maneuver the polo ball from one end of the playing field to another in nine strokes, so each would rotate hitting the ball, then move the horse to the next spot.
When questioned by host Phil Koeghan about their championship belt buckles slowing down, the cowboys reminded him that the buckles hold their belts together, and the belts hold their britches up where they need to be. “We’d be slower with our pants around our ankles,” Jet said.
Behind the McCoys after three legs of the race are the father-daughter tandem of Steve and Allie, with the lesbian team of Carol and Brandy in third.
So the cowboys live on for another week, and they’ll start in first place … again.
