Craigslist horse World Champion Team Roper

By Chelsea Shaffer - Courtesy Team Roping Journal

Levi Lord's low-maintenance, 23-year-old heel horse is shining under Globe Life Field's bright lights. Levi Lord is pretty sure of it: they don't make deals like the kind he got on Little Bay anymore. Ten years ago, Lord was a freshman in high school with a little money in his pocket.

The South Dakota kid had just been to a truck roping in Texas and won some cash, and he was on the hunt for a high school rodeo heel horse.So the whole family piled in a truck and headed back to

Texas with a list of horses Lord had pieced together, including the number of a man who'd posted a $2,700, 14-year-old gelding on Craigslist. They went to the East Texas home of Bruce Standefer who'd, at the time, owned the horse about a year. "There’s a couple little things he would do that irritated us," Standefer remembered. "He'd turn his head in the box to the left, and he just didn't fit my son or me." "He didn't look like much," Lord remembered of the first time he saw the horse registered as Poco Sparta King. "But even then, you could tell he tried his heart out. I went back and tried him the next morning and I roped good on him. My dad and my brother (Eli) told me that if I was really looking for a heel horse and I didn't buy that one, I wasn't really looking very hard. He worked so good every time, but he wasn’t the flashiest thing. Really the same way he is now."

Two weeks later, Lord won his first truck on LB, and Lord's dad, J.B., called to thank Standefer for the buy. "I get a phone call from Levi's dad, and I think, 'Oh no, they don't like the horse,' when I see my phone ringing," Standefer remembered. "But he called instead to just say thank you for selling him the horse, that Levi had just won his first truck on him." In the decade that followed, Lord and Little Bay won high school rodeos, then the Badlands Circuit title three times, along with Rodeo Houston; Spanish Fork, Utah; and Nampa, Idaho.