Why Your Lariat Kinks So Fast — The Old Cowboy Fix

Three weeks after you work in a new lariat, it stops laying flat. Kinks that won't shake out, memory loops that spring back every time you let go. You pull hard, hang weight off the end, run it through your hands. Nothing fixes it. Most ropers buy another one and six months later they're looking at a ruined coil again. The old hands who roped 300 days a year kept the same lariat for seasons without a single kink. They weren't using different rope. Every time you coil flat loops stacked on top of each other, you put a tiny rotational twist into the lay. A quarter turn per loop, maybe less. You don't feel it happening, but that twist is permanent and it compounds. Thirty coils means 30 rotations locked in. A month of normal use and you've got 200 or 300 twists stacked up inside the fiber. The rope remembers every one. By the time you feel it in your hand, the damage is already done. Summer of 1957, a kid named Ray hired on at the Waggoner Ranch in north Texas. By August he'd gone through three lariats, each one kinked so bad he couldn't throw a clean loop. One evening the foreman took the rope out of his hands and showed him something different. Ray worked another 40 years on that outfit and never ruined another rope. What the foreman showed him took 30 seconds. You coil without an anchor, letting each new loop rotate in your palm as it forms. The rope unwinding its own tension as you coil. You store it with a loose wrap, not cinched tight. You break in a new lariat slow, dragging it behind a horse for half a mile or sinking it overnight in a stock tank. And you release the loop flat when you throw, no wrist roll. A 35-foot lariat coils in under a minute this way, and when you shake it out later it falls without a single kink.