Bazinga – the horse that carried her to her first NFR last year – is built like a rope horse, and Jones actually runs him in a Petska roping bit with a chain port. After all, he’s by the late Dinero (PC Frenchmans Hayday). His registered name is Famous Hayday because he’s out of Jaxsons Olympic Fame. The extended Youree family’s mare was by a Dash Ta Fame stallion out of a Beduino/Easy Jet mare, and her bottom side was straight old-school racing from Easy Jet to Royal Charger to Go Man Go and Rocket Bar.
Jones, now 22, was a freshman in high school whose good horse was hurt when her family approached Janae Massey to see if she knew of anything available. Massey didn’t then have her 5-year-old Bazinga for sale, but was willing to let him go to the Jones family. She’d already placed him fifth in the 2015 BFA Superstakes Slot as a 3-year-old.
“He was very full of himself that day I tried him,” Jones said. “Little did I know that was only the beginning of it.”
The two fit together so well that Jones won the high-school state barrel racing championship on him and then in 2020, during Covid, won WPRA Resistol Rookie of the Year honors. Her other horse, High Cotton Lane, was one they’d bought at the Heritage Place sale as a yearling and Jones trained. She won the 2018 BFA World Championship on him as a 4-year-old. That’s why his name, too, is tattooed on her wrist.
“They’re the two horses that changed my life,” she said simply. “Bazinga stays really put-together in his runs. He’s amazing, but you never watch him and think, ‘Wow, that was unbelievable’. Cotton has moves on the backside that make me think, ‘Wow!’ He leaves me behind all the time and gives 200 percent every single run.”
Cotton’s body doesn’t always hold up, however. In addition to his penchant for overreaching, he tends to constantly have bruises, cuts or something in his eye that have kept him sidelined a lot. Jones finished 17th in the world in 2022, and last year Bazinga stepped up and took her to the NFR.
The bay’s forte is big, open arenas like Cody, Wyoming, Jones said, but she still thought he’d love the Thomas and Mack Center. After all, she’d ran him at Northside plenty and he always liked that. Plus, he gains confidence in a pen and usually gets stronger. Sure enough, Jones’ four fastest times at the ’23 NFR were clocked in the last four rounds.
“Sometimes we struggle in slack,” she said. “He’s kind of a show boater and likes when people are watching, so he definitely tries harder in a perf.”
He also buddies up on the road, and Jones has found it much easier hauling three horses this year instead of two (when one is left at the trailer alone).
“Bazinga is very, very quirky,” she said. “I get separation anxiety if I go out to eat, because I don’t know what he’s doing when I’m not there. For instance, he doesn’t like washracks, and hates water. I have to trick him to give him a bath. It takes two people to hold him, so he doesn’t get washed a lot.”
A couple of years ago, Jones picked up another Dinero horse from Massey. This one, a palomino mare, was called Penny. Jones didn’t catch the significance, because she’d never seen an episode of TV’s The Big Bang Theory.
“Of course, now I’m on Season 8 and loving it, and I even named my other new horse Sheldon,” Jones said.
The one she bought a couple of months ago is out of the NFR mare RC Back In Black by a running-bred stud. She’s still trying to get with him, she said. In the meantime, Jones had a decent Fourth in which she placed at Livingston and Mandan before making the finals at Calgary. Skimming the barrels on the road means she does do a little work to free Bazinga up on the backsides of barrels to keep him moving forward.
“Even at Calgary, I was working him by taking him multiple strides past the barrel,” she said. “I didn’t feel like working him, but I thought, I’m going to feel dumb if I don’t. Because he gets so turny once he knows an arena. He was amazing at the NFR and so consistent, but I had to do a lot of work to get him around the barrels. If I do hit one, it’s because he rolled over the top, and not because he was trying to be bad.”
Like last year, Jones again ranks in the Top 20 on the horse that’s so easy for her to ride she rarely even has to think, she said.
“He’s super solid,” Jones added. “He’s my right-hand man; we fit like a glove.”
Dodge City Roundup barrel racing results 2024
