Brady Buck Obituary

Brady Buck was a storyteller. Every word of his that made it to the press was the final result of pondering, edits, rewrites, self-scrutiny, and iteration regardless of whether the words contributed to his book, a post-game recap, or a controversial take via tweet or in one of his myriads of group chats.

His absence makes the task of telling his story particularly more challenging as it aspires to meet his literary standards. The chronicle of Brady is a great one. It is one in which a kid becomes a young man through hard work on the family cattle ranch located in the plains of Colorado. One where a young man dares to dream, leaving his one-horse town to matriculate to Duke University. A story in which Brady finds that once in a lifetime love, returns home to the community that forged him, builds a family and life as the man he set out to become. In short, it is Unmatched.

Brady Patrick Buck was born on November 17, 1990, in Wray, Colorado. News of his timely Saturday night arrival quickly spread across the town, and Rex and Jody’s hospital recovery room soon became the place to be for libations and celebration. Within the next 5 years, Brady would be there to welcome the addition of his three siblings — Molly, Coby, and Baylor.

The foundation of Brady’s childhood was rooted in family life on a cattle ranch. During his early childhood, Brady flourished in the traditional ranch experiences while also appreciating the pop culture which surrounded a kid growing up in Colorado during the 1990s. He would join Rex on a dewy morning to check cattle grazing in the Sandhills before returning home at midday to meticulously reconstruct Mufasa’s Pride Rock on the muddy banks of the Republican River. Other days Brady explored as a knight of the Wray Ranch kingdom sporting the Colorado Avalanche’s coat of arms with his loyal sibling squires in tow before quickly throwing on his boots to help flood irrigate the alfalfa fields. In the winters, Brady would slide into the driver’s seat to steer the pickup in the open pasture while his father jumped on the back to flake hay to the cows.

A timely Colorado Avalanche Stanley Cup in conjunction with his discovery of The Mighty Ducks spurred Brady's lifetime passion for sports. Brady would ritualistically read Sports Illustrated cover to cover and then scotch-tape laminate the featured athlete of the edition before rereading the magazine until it was properly tarnished. In short order, his bedroom walls were lined with Michael Jordan, John Elway, and Ray Bourque.

Childhood adventures on the ranch also quickly evolved into legitimate work. Not unlike John Wayne’s march into the schoolhouse in The Cowboys, as soon as Brady was able, he stepped up to help with the family enterprise. In the summers, Brady would help move cattle, fix fence, and flank calves during the annual cattle brandings. In the winters, he would help break ice and feed hay. At the age of eight, Brady entered the arena of livestock showing, not just as a hobby, but as a family obsession that would be omnipresent in his life and the life of his siblings for the decades to come.

As Brady entered his teenage years, free time was non-existent. At 4:30am, Brady and his siblings would wake up to halter and barn their show steers before sunrise. When the clock hit 6:30am, weightlifting for sports ensued with conditioning or throwing practice to follow. By 9:00am, Brady and his siblings worked their show cattle again before reporting for ranch work and checking off any task on the agenda that Rex outlined the day before. If there weren’t afternoon sports, Brady would continue working on the ranch until the sun hung low. Once the stars filled the sky, Brady would permit the show steers to be turned out then the routine was repeated again the next day.

In the livestock show arena, Brady followed in his father’s footsteps by winning the Yuma County Fair Steer Show in 2005. Brady’s determination and resolve would ripple through his siblings and elevate the family’s competitive spirit to a higher trajectory which culminated in his younger brother winning the 2013 and 2014 Colorado State Fair Reserve Grand Champion Steers, 2015 National Western Grand Champion Prospect Steer, and many other victories on the national stage of livestock showing.

Growing up in eastern Colorado, Brady formed an inseparable bond with his cousins, the Johnsons, during pilgrimages down to the Collins Ranch or to the Flying Diamond Ranch near Kit Carson, Colorado, where the family business of cattle ranching initially began in 1907. The family matriarch, Grandma Polly Collins Johnson assembled the family for annual vacations, which ranged from Sebasco, Maine, to Sea Island, Georgia, to the continent of Europe. Whether on one of the ranches or during one of the many trips, Brady would closely follow his older cousins Jennifer, Will, and Myles as they defined ambition for the younger cousins with excellence in academics and sports. The competitive family bar coupled with Brady’s love of sports pushed him to pursue more. He positioned Duke University in his sights and set out on his personal vision quest.

Brady entered Wray High School with a notable tone of seriousness and urgency. He was uncompromising in his standards for academic excellence and demonstrated the utmost commitment to sports. Brady would play sports throughout all of the seasons, but football was the focus. Prior to his senior year, Brady played receiver and safety for the Wray Football Team, setting the single game reception record his junior year, a record which still stands today. His senior year, Brady ascended offensively to be the quarterback for the Wray Eagles as the team pursued a state championship. The 2008 team fell short in the 1A State Championship, losing to an undefeated Akron. Brady earned distinction for football by being named 1st Team All State, 1A Athlete of the Year, and a State Finalist for the Wendy’s Heisman Award. Academically, Brady was the Wray High School Valedictorian of the very competitive Class of 2009 and achieved his foremost childhood aspiration of being accepted to Duke University.

Despite not knowing a soul on campus and being 1,500 miles from the ranch, Brady quickly carved out a path for himself as a member of Duke University’s Class of 2013. As a freshman he pushed himself to acclimate to a heightened academic competitive climate. Up to this point in Brady’s life, nothing could persuade him to camp outside; that is until Duke basketball entered the picture. What started as standing in line all night for a run-of-the-mill ACC game quickly proliferated into Brady sleeping in a 12-ft x 12-ft tent for six weeks with half a dozen quasi-random freshmen peers to obtain tickets to the coveted Tobacco Road Showdown against North Carolina at Cameron Indoor Stadium. That winter proved to be the harshest Carolinian winter as K-Ville was carpeted with snow, but in the end, Duke trounced North Carolina 82-50, Brady and all the Dukies thawed by the “burning of the benches”, and the Blue Devils went on to win the National Championship that year.

Brady rushed and joined the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity where lifelong friendships would be forged with great young men from across the country. Over the summer break, Brady would host a faction of Duke fraternity brothers for a weekend at Wray Ranch providing them an authentic cowboy experience of riding horses, branding cattle, shooting guns, and wearing blue jeans. The Wray-Duke pipeline ran two ways; at Brady’s beckoning, hometown friends, neighbors, teachers, and coaches cherished being Cameron Crazies for a night followed by Brady hosting them on campus for the duration of the weekend. During the summer recess after his junior year, Brady, true to his eastern Colorado origins, interned in Washington D.C. for former Senator Cory Gardner of Yuma, Colorado while he was serving as a Colorado Representative in the House.

Brady was able to incorporate his love of sports with his knack for writing by earning a position as a sportswriter for the college newspaper, The Duke Chronicle. He began his authorship covering any and all sports, but quickly moved up the pages, with Brady Buck on the byline for the Duke men’s basketball games. He even traveled with Coach Krzyzewski’s Team USA to interview the greats of Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant. In total, Brady published 287 articles at The Chronicle, many covering Duke basketball during one of the program’s most prominent eras.

Brady graduated from Duke University in the Spring of 2013, majoring in Public Policy and an accompanying minor in Environmental Science. Upon graduation, Brady’s zeal for sports led him to accept a role with the Colorado State University football team under Jim McElwain as an assistant recruiting coach. As an initiate into the life of college football coaching Brady lived with Rob Ezell, a grad assistant coach from Alabama. Under the leadership of Coach McElwain, CSU achieved its first winning record in several years and ended the season as Champions of the New Mexico Bowl.

The return to his home state of Colorado reignited his love for agriculture, cattle, and family which, combined with the desire of one day starting a family, led him to leave the world of college sports. In 2014, Brady accepted an opportunity to work for two of his lifelong mentors, Steve Gabel and Case Gabel, as the Cattle Clerk at Magnum Feedyard. Under the guidance of the Gabel family, Brady sharpened his expertise of livestock and expanded his knowledge base into the cattle-finishing segment and commodities risk management, gaining his commodity brokerage credentials with La Vaca Trading, growing professional responsibilities and clientele. Although his nameplate profession had returned to the cattle sector, Brady never relinquished his penchant for writing and sports.

Brady Buck of Wray and Jordan Barnett of Eads were cut from the same eastern Colorado cloth. Brady from the north. Jordan from the south. Each earning accolades in the respective crafts of sports and academics. A thin veil must have hung over I-70 as their worlds closely orbited one another, but never collided, until the Summer of 2017. After Jordan earned a law degree, she officially became more educated than Brady, checking one of the last remaining eligibility requirements on his calculated list of characteristics for a gal, as she was already a lettered Division I athlete. Jordan pierced through Brady’s stoic personality on that first date, laying the foundation for a life of profound love and devotion.

On July 6, 2019, Brady and Jordan were married at the Cottonwood Chapel on Wray Ranch. The weekend, like so many other pages of his life, sewed together the various facets of Brady into one serene occasion celebrated on both ends of Yuma County. After their nuptials, the two Bucks lived together in Wiggins where Brady continued working at Magnum Feedyard and Jordan commuted into Denver for her law practice.

Spare time was wasted time from Brady’s point of view. After he returned home from the feedyard and kicked the dust off his boots, Brady would sit behind a keyboard resurrecting a Colorado sports epic archived from his childhood. After a multi-year odyssey, hundreds of hours of research, and dozens of interviews, in February of 2020 Brady published Unmatched: Prep Wrestling’s Epic Chronicle, a narrative nonfiction book recounting Tom Clum’s pursuit of perfection and Brett Roller’s courageous conquest on the high school wrestling mats. The individuals involved were initially reluctant to have the story told, but Brady persuaded and persevered. It was one Brady felt worthy of sharing with the world.

Brady and Jordan knew that their entrepreneurial dreams were leading them home to eastern Colorado. In June of 2020 they returned to Wray and started their respective businesses. Jordan dreamed of renovating a historic Main Street building into her law practice, and Brady needed an actual office. Together they purchased the most dilapidated building available and designed their dream office. The “Buck Law” shingle was hung on Main Street with Brady in the back of the office growing his commodity brokerage business and expanding livestock and pasture insurance with the EastCo Group. Brady and Jordan were inseparable both personally and professionally, as they worked just a quick jaunt down the hall from each other.

Upon his return to Wray, Brady promptly re-entered the arena of coaching as he became an assistant under Coach Levi Kramer for the Wray High School Football team. Since he first left his hometown, Brady held a deep desire to bring the community a football state championship, something that not only eluded him as a player but the program at large for more than 30 years. Brady’s coaching efforts focused on wide receivers and the defensive line. His contributions were amplified by his Moneyball aptitude in which he would catalog play calls and run data analytics for the Eagles to best prepare and adapt to opponents on their schedule.

With his hometown dreams taking shape, Brady and Jordan’s dream of starting a family became front and center. On June 1, 2021, Brady and Jordan welcomed their first son, Brooks Patrick Buck, into the world. Naive to parenting, Brady quickly found his footing as a father, especially in his familiar childhood backdrop of Wray. Brady adored Brooks, and you could always find Brooks in Brady’s arms. Their second son, Bash Rogers Buck, arrived on Friday, January 13, 2023, fulfilling Brady’s dream of raising brothers close in age. Bash held a special spot in Brady’s heart, and he always said that God sent him exactly on time, bringing unimaginable light into his life. The boys were told bedtime stories of the 2004, 2008, and 2010 high school football teams accompanied by the life lessons of hard work, brotherhood, and family. In the evenings or on the weekends, Brady would take them out to the ranch to check cattle and audit the family enterprise before returning home in time to catch the tipoff of their beloved Duke Blue Devils. Brady loved his family fiercely, and believed there wasn’t a better team to be on.

Three months after Bash’s birth, Brady was diagnosed with brain cancer. He never flinched in his steadfast resolve to undergo treatment and continued to work and take care of his family every day in the face of hardship. After taking a hiatus for the 2023 season, Brady’s perseverance propelled him to return to coaching Wray football for the 2024 football season which yielded a perfect 13-0 season, recapturing the previously elusive title of 1A Colorado State Football Champions.

Brady Buck passed away peacefully in the evening on February 21, 2026, surrounded by his family after valiantly fighting with brain cancer for nearly three years. Although he has left us, his impact on his family, friends, and community will never be forgotten.

Brady Buck is survived by his wife, Jordan; his sons, Brooks Patrick and Bash Rogers; his parents, Rex and Jody Buck of Wray, CO; his sister, Molly Lange, her husband, Justin, and their daughters, Kick and Poppy of Wray, CO; his brother, Coby, his wife, Darcey, and their son, Carrson of New York, NY; and his brother, Baylor, and his wife, Jenna of Wray, CO.

He is also survived by Jordan’s family: Marty and Betsy Barnett of Eads, CO; Kyle and Whitney Barnett and their children, Reese, Will, Luke, and Dylan of Eads, CO; Chad Barnett of Eads, CO; Dain and Sarah Barnett and their son, Wyatt of Colorado Springs, CO; and grandmother-in-law Lucy Barnett of Eads, CO.

He is further survived by Scott and Jean Johnson of Colorado Springs, CO; Don Johnson of Litiz, PA; Toby and Amy Johnson of Kit Carson, CO; Melvin Buck of Yuma, CO; Karen Buck of Greeley, CO; Brett and Cindy Legg of Cheyenne Wells, CO; Karl and Dana Sorton of Bothell, WA; Barry and Suzette Koch of Kit Carson, CO; and a herd of beloved cousins - Jennifer and Jay Livsey; Will and Lauren Johnson; Myles and Katie Johnson; Charlie and Kaitlin Johnson; Chisti and Drew Weaver; Taylor and Jordan Noel; Brad and Marilyn Johnson; Haley and Tess Johnson; along with a pack of the next generation of kid cousins.

Brady was welcomed in Heaven by his grandparents, Rogers and Polly Johnson of Kit Carson, CO; Jack and Barbara Buck of Yuma, CO; his grandfather-in-law William Barnett of Eads, CO, and his Uncle Keith Buck of Greeley, CO.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the Brady Buck Memorial Fund c/o First Pioneer National Bank, Wray, Colorado.

Click the link to watch to service https://evt.live/brady-patrick-buck