I Had 47 Days to Win $60,000 or Lose My Ranch. The Only Thing I Was Ever Good At Was Shearing Sheep, So I Flew to New Zealand to Beat the Best in the World

Rewi Tamatea picked me up at the airport in a truck older than me.

He was sixty now, white-haired, a body like a fence post, and he laughed for a full minute when he saw me.

“Look at you, Yank,” he said. “You got old.”

“You got older.”

“Yeah, but I was always beautiful.”

He drove me straight to a shearing shed in the Wairarapa, where a farmer friend of his had six hundred ewes waiting.

“You want to qualify, you shear all day,” he said. “Every day. Until your back screams and your hands bleed. Then you shear more.”

I sheared all day.

My back screamed. My hands bled. I sheared more.

In my first hour, I sheared nineteen sheep. The top shearers in New Zealand do sixty in an hour. Some do more.

Rewi watched me with his arms crossed.

“Your hands still know,” he said. “Your head forgot. You’re thinking. Stop thinking. Let the sheep tell you where to go.”

On the third day, I sheared thirty-eight in an hour.

On the fifth day, forty-four.

I qualified for the Golden Shears open on the last place in the draw. The announcer mispronounced my name. Somebody in the crowd yelled, “Go home, cowboy!”

Rewi yelled back something in Māori that made the whole section laugh.

The night before the semi-finals, I called my mother.

“How’s the back?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“Liar,” she said. Then: “Brock. The bank called. They moved the date. They want it by April 1st now. Something about the loan being reclassified.”

April 1st.

The final was March 7th. The prize money would take three weeks to clear.

If I won, I’d make it by days.

If I didn’t win, it didn’t matter anyway.

I hung up and lay on the floor of Rewi’s spare room, staring at the ceiling.

Rewi stuck his head in the door.

“You’re thinking again,” he said.

“I’ve got a lot to think about.”

“No,” he said. “You’ve got twenty sheep to think about. That’s all. Twenty sheep.”