Ben Crockett got the best birthday present a man could ask for two weeks ago with the birth of his first child, Katie Jo. He’s earned a lot of cool titles in his now 23 years of life - how does ‘record-setting high school football player who became a WRCA World Championship qualifying Ranch Bronc rider’ sound for a resume? But they pale in comparison to becoming a father.

The running joke in Ben’s hometown of McLean is that Baby Crockett will be an Olympian. Ben’s wife, high school sweetheart Rylee, was a track star at West Texas A&M. Ben Crockett was the best football player McLean has ever and potentially will ever see. 

Not that he sees it that way. Six years ago, he led the McLean Tigers six-man football team to its only state championship in school history, with a UIL state title game record of nine rushing touchdowns (he also passed for three). It was the triumphant cap to a historic season where he rushed for 2,760 yards and 59 touchdowns on offense and racked up 131 tackles, 11 sacks, six forced fumbles and five interceptions on defense. But his lasting memory is how well-rounded that 2018 team was, the signature humbleness a glimpse into why ‘There was never any animosity towards Ben for getting the ball 40 times a game,’ according to his high school coach, Clint Linman.

“I think we could’ve put one or two of them (my teammates) where I was at, and they could’ve done the exact same thing,” Crockett said. “I think we all could’ve switched roles.”

But his role then was the star athlete, and his role now is taking care of a small ranch nestled between Shamrock and Wheeler, which is high up in the Texas panhandle. Whereas he used to perform in front of the McLean faithful at AT&T Stadium or avid rodeo goers in Amarillo, his days are mostly quiet - except for a fussy baby. In the winter time, he feeds the cattle four days a week, riding in a pickup truck spraying feed. If he’s not breaking up ice clumps for the cows to move freely, or fixing barbed wire fences so they don’t roam too freely, he’s on horseback in a Cowboy hat, riding around the Great Plains.

“Ben would just as soon ride off into the sunset and nobody ever talk about him again,” his old foreman, McLean cowman Destry Magee, said. “The people around here, we kid him about it. ‘Oh, there’s the legend.’ We called him ‘MVP’ forever.”

But out here, just 20 miles east of where he first earned those nicknames, Ben Crockett is an anonymous cowboy. This is the life he chose when he turned down a football scholarship to West Texas A&M. And it’s all he ever wanted. 

“Ben’s been a cowboy first his whole life,” Magee said. “He was a cowboy before he was a football player.”

His grandfathers were Panhandle cowboys, his maternal one working on the famous Four Sixes Ranch. His longtime cowboy father set his family up on a small ranch 12 miles southeast of McLean. Ben, the youngest of the three Crockett sons, grew up watching all his role models take on the cowboy lifestyle. He’d listen to them spin stories about the older generation and how it’s always been done. He never pondered what he wanted to be when he grew up because the answer was in front of him every day.

But if the Crocketts were cowboys, they were also McLean football players, dating back three generations. And they all wore No. 20. 

Six-man football holds a special place in the Panhandle’s heart, the only sport that’s tough enough to mimic the toughness required to live on a ranch in an area ravaged by fires in one season and blizzards in the next. Most of that McLean title team were ranch kids, including Ben’s three best friends, Chism Henderson, Kater Tate, and Bradley Hannon. Instead of spring practice, they spent the spring branding calves. It was a true team sport - one guy ropes the hind legs, drags the animal to the two flankers who hold it down while the fourth gives it the shots and an ear tag.   

Once fall rolled around, however, their sole focus was winning the first state championship in McLean history, a goal the group shared from junior high on. 

“I don’t know if you’d ever meet a more competitive group,” Henderson said.

Linman, the head coach, recalls having to tone down practices and rig one-on-one matchups so certain players didn’t compete against each other because they only knew one speed: full-tilt. Their playstyle embodied ‘Panhandle Tough.’ Whereas plenty of six-man football teams spread the formation around to get their athletes in space, McLean based out of a tight formation and punched you in the mouth. 

“They knew we were going to run it and we knew we were going to run it, it was just going to be about if they could stop it,” Crockett said.

As the games wore on, opponents tired of stepping in the 6 '1, 215-pound Crockett’s path. He was like a hammer pounding nails, and usually, those nails were flush in the wood by the third quarter. 

“He was as tough as they come,” Hannon said. “It didn’t bother him to get hit, but he didn’t get hit a whole bunch. He was the one doing the hitting.” 

And he did so for 14 straight weeks, powering a trip to AT&T Stadium that energized McLean and numerous tiny towns speckled across the Panhandle. The team’s state championship bus drove through these communities, past cars honking their horns and people lined up on the side of the road or on the highway overpass with signs. The team had expected the support from their own town but was shocked by the support from towns they’d beaten along the path.

“A town of 5-600, all it is is a big family,” Magee said.

A lot of those family members wanted to see their star, Crockett, play college football at West Texas A&M, which offered him a spot at boundary linebacker. The townsfolk wanted him to prove what they believed - that Crockett could make the jump from six-man to 11-man football. 

“WT (West Texas A&M) wanted him, they recruited the heck out of him,” Magee said. “When he went to WT, they had his picture on the big scoreboard and had all his stats. It was a big deal. And anybody else would’ve done it. But Ben was like, ‘Ah, I’m done.’”

The truth was that Crockett liked football because of the camaraderie he shared with his friends and coaches in McLean. He didn’t like it enough to do it without them. Because the funny thing about winning state and breaking records is that he remembers the bus rides or the time he and Henderson knocked each other silly in a tackling drill more fondly. 

“I don’t think it would’ve ever been the same (in college), and I don’t think I would’ve liked it any more than I did (in high school),” Crockett said.

Crockett gave normal college student life at West Texas A&M a try for a semester, then left because he knew he didn’t need a degree to do what he wanted to do. Soon thereafter, bronc riding replaced the outlet for his competitive edge that football served. He’d started riding broncs on his family ranch the summer going into his junior year. In fact, his record-setting season came after he cracked his tailbone taking a spill from the horse that July. 

He accomplished his dream of winning the state championship and then started a new one to qualify for the WRCA World Championship Ranch Rodeo, a rodeo consisting of working ranchmen rather than professional contestants. To the surprise of no one who knew him, he did that too, representing Wilson Cattle LLC from Canyon, Texas in the ranch bronc riding portion of the event.

Then, having reached the pinnacle of his goal, he stepped away once again. He’s married with a child now, which has led him to curb his training sessions taming broncs. Turns out that these two women are the only people who can slow Ben Crockett down.

Except family hasn’t slowed him down, only changed the mission once again. Because once upon a time it was a state championship trophy and the WRCA Finals he sought, and now he's working to build a ranch of his own that his future family will be proud of. So zoom in on that idyllic portrait of an anonymous cowboy riding off into the Texas panhandle sunset, and you’ll find Cowboy Crockett with a fire in his eye as he chases another dream.

“It’s just like sports, you want to work at what you do,” Crockett said. “You don’t want to just half-butt everything. You want to be as good as you can.”