A bull ride lasts eight seconds. But a cowboy is a cowboy forever.
:02 Stay off your back pockets
:04 get between the bull’s shoulders
:08 Don’t let go till your head hits the ground
01 Nod when you’re ready
Ash Potter has already smoked a dozen hand-rolled cigarettes when he climbs over the rail. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer begins, “in chute number two….” Between smokes, Potter prepared the fingers on his left hand by bending them back almost to his wrist. He stretched his legs, his back, and his neck. He put on a knee brace, chaps, and a Kevlar vest. Like many rough stock rodeo riders—bull riders, saddle bronc riders, and bareback riders—Potter took off his belt and buckle. Skinny cowboys tie their front belt loops together with string. Potter’s are not tied; he’s built like Popeye. Earlier, in an empty pen, Potter whirled in a manic preparatory dance as if he were inside a tornado.
“…all the way from Australia by way of Stephenville, Texas….” Potter races his glove up and down the rope to make the rope sticky, then wraps it around his hand. A dozen people are crowded around him: chute bosses, contestants, rodeo clowns, the man who owns the bull. At the last second Potter smashes down his hat and gets into riding position.
Potter has drawn bull number 740 at the Top O’ Texas Rodeo in Pampa, near Amarillo; he knew it days ago. He called around to inquire about its tendencies. “He’s not rank, but he’s a good little bull for me,” Potter told me in the car on the way up. In bull riding, a rank bull offers the possibility of a winning score or a broken neck. Potter is fresh off a win in Arkansas where he rode a rank bull to a $5,000 payday.”C’mon, let’s hear it for Ash Potter!” With a nod Potter signals the gate open and the detonation begins. For the first four seconds he rides tall and square, shadowing the bull’s every move. Then the bull lunges left, into Potter’s rope hand. Potter tries to recover, to pull himself back square, but the bull goes left again, sucking Potter down into the well—a deadly vortex of hooves and horns. The clowns close in, preparing to pull him to safety and to distract the bull. Then Potter is sailing clear. He is limping toward his hat when the buzzer sounds. “Folks,” the announcer says, “there’s another cowboy going home with nothing. Give him a hand.”
02 Stay off your back pockets
Potter, 28, is not a sulker, which helps make him a favorite on the pro rodeo circuit. “What happened?” I ask as he takes off his glove and chaps. “I don’t think he knew which way he wanted to go,” he answers, still jittery from the adrenaline rush. “He’s young.” Potter stuffs his rope and bell into a bag where he keeps a Bible with a cowboy on the cover. He claims not to read it, and the Bible’s condition backs him up, but he is not inclined to remove it. When he finishes packing, Potter rolls and lights another cigarette and we walk to a tent that serves free flank steak and baked potatoes to contestants. At the other end of the tent, a woman is giving free haircuts. At 10 p.m., her chair is empty. She sizes us up and looks disappointed when I tell her that Potter and I need to eat and run; we have a six-hour drive back to Stephenville, the Rodeo Cowboy Capital of the World and Ash Potter’s adopted hometown.
Most of the 15,000 people in Stephenville, located an hour southwest of Fort Worth, can’t tell you why or when the town started attracting rodeo cowboys. “Damned if I know,” is a common reply. In the same breath, however, almost any resident can rattle off the names of 10 world-class bull riders, saddle bronc riders, bareback riders, steer wrestlers, calf ropers, team ropers, and barrel racers who live there, any two of whom they saw at Wal-Mart or Circle-T Farm and Ranch that very morning. On my first day in Stephenville, before I met Potter and followed him on a two-day swing through Texas, a woman overheard me asking for the names of rodeo cowboys at a local pizza place. She slipped me a note. “You need to talk to him,” she said, pointing to the name at the top. “Just don’t tell him I said so. He’s my ex-husband.”
About the town’s rodeo cowboy history, this much has been recorded: in the 1940s, Everett Colburn based his stock contracting business—supplying the animals for rodeos—in Dublin, 11 miles southwest of Stephenville. Colburn’s partner was Gene Autry. Together they put on some of the biggest rodeos in the nation, including annual events at the old Madison Square Garden in New York and the Boston Garden. When the season was over, cowboys followed the stock back to Erath County. The cowboys bought houses and ranches near Stephenville and rodeoed through the winter.
Today, the stock contracting business is scattered all over the country, but cowboys keep moving to Stephenville because their heroes are all there; because the nation’s leading collegiate rodeo program is there; because land is relatively cheap; because the town is in the heart of rodeo-rich Texas; and because it’s close to DFW Airport if they need to fly to the Calgary Stampede. Then there’s the comfort of knowing that the best rodeo cowboy doctor in the nation, Dr. Tandy Freeman, is in Dallas.
In Stephenville, a cowboy or cowgirl can talk about his or her dream of “winning the world” at the local dance hall and not have to explain that they mean a championship in one of seven rodeo events. The language is known, the clothes are familiar, and the culture is deep and ingrained. In Stephenville, it’s the animal-rights activists and vegetarians who attract stares and whispers.
The town is an oasis for the Western way of life.
03 Stay Loose
The roster of rodeo cowboys and cowgirls who live in Stephenville is long and multi-generational. Whit Keeney lives in Stephenville. Keeney is the Marlboro Man without the emphysema. He’s tall and handsome and is rumored to have an eye for the ladies. Keeney has just recovered from a broken shoulder; he got bucked off a horse. Neither the injury nor the manner in which he incurred it makes him unusual in Stephenville, except for the additional fact that Whit Keeney is 84 years old. Keeney set the steer wrestling world record with a time of 2.4 seconds and roped with Will Rogers. Even when he was past his prime, Keeney kept roping and riding. He won the national old-timers rodeo all-around championship eight years in a row.
Harry Tompkins, a world champion from the ’40s and ’50s, lives south of town. Tom Reeves officially lists his home in Eagle Butte, S.D., but he lives here. Reeves has qualified for the national finals rodeo in each of the last 16 years and, as of July, was the top-ranked saddle bronc rider in the world.
Tuff Hedeman lives just north of Stephenville. His name will be forever linked in cowboy mythology to the late Lane Frost, his best friend and subject of the movie 8 Seconds, who was killed at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo after a bull rammed him in the back. Hedeman is also famous for successfully riding the rankest bull ever, Bodacious, in 1993. Two years later, when Hedeman tried for a second time, the 1,800-pound bull whipped his head back and hit Hedeman in the face in one of rodeo’s most disturbing wrecks. The impact necessitated the complete rebuilding of Hedeman’s face.
In 1994, Hedeman, fellow bull riders, and Stephenville businessman Ron Pack started the Professional Bull Riders Association. The PBR, in effect, extricated the most dangerous, most glamorous event in rodeo—bull riding—and created its own league with separate events and large cash purses. The PBR tour now has 29 stops and its own national finals and attracts the very best riders and bulls.
Stephenville is simply full of professional cowboys. Jim Sharp lives there. Sharp is a two-time world-champion bull rider and is widely considered to be the best natural bull rider alive. He was the first cowboy to ride all 10 bulls during the national finals—one every night—the rodeo equivalent of hitting 10 home runs in a row during the World Series. “Don’t bother asking him how he does it,” one cowboy cautioned me. “He doesn’t know himself.”
Ty Murray lives in Stephenville. Murray won the all-around cowboy world championship six years in a row, from 1989 to 1994. The bull-riding Carrillo brothers, Adam and Gilbert, are there, as is champion roper Martin Lucero. Cody Ohl, two-time, calf-roping world champion and wild man, lives there. Ohl, as of July, was the third-ranked calf roper and fifth-ranked all-around cowboy in the world. Troy Dunn used to live in Stephenville until he moved back to Australia. Dunn won the world bull-riding championship in 1998.
J.J. Hampton lives in Stephenville, too. She’s the two-time, all-around women’s rodeo champion.
04 Get between the bull’s shoulders
Tarleton State University has had as much to do with Stephenville’s reputation as the Rodeo Cowboy Capital of the World as any other local institution. Tarleton opened in 1899 as a prep school and college. In 1917, after encountering financial problems, Tarleton was placed by the state legislature in the system that eventually became Texas A&M. Today, Tarleton has 7,400 undergraduate and graduate students on campus and satellite campuses in Killeen, Fort Worth, and Granbury. Twelve hundred of those students are enrolled in various agriculture programs. The school runs a 2,000-acre farm on the edge of town and raises everything from chickens to pigs to dairy cows.
Rumors circulate occasionally of a name change linking Tarleton more directly to A&M, but local opposition is deep, reflecting Stephenville’s fierce independence. “I don’t want to be a little Aggie,” one local businessman told me. “I could have gone to A&M if I’d wanted to be an Aggie. But I didn’t.”
The Student Development Center, located at the corner of Lillian and Vanderbilt, houses the campus store, a cafeteria, student mailboxes, and various administrative offices. On the ground floor, directly beside the information booth, is a glass entry to a suite of offices. The lettering on the glass reads: “Dean of Students/Rodeo Coach.” When I push through the double doors, coach Bob Doty is talking to his wife, who is a career counselor at Tarleton. In a sense, Doty is, too. Chad Biesemeyer was one of his steer wrestlers last year. Biesemeyer won so much money on the pro circuit that he quit school to rodeo. Another student, Jennifer Smith Driver, recently turned pro. Driver is a barrel racer who won the college all-around for Tarleton last year.
Every year a fresh batch of cowboys and cowgirls show up at Tarleton with a horse trailer or a knack for riding rough stock. On the day I meet Doty, he’s on his way to meet a prospect at the university’s 19-acre rodeo facility. She wants to board her horse for the fall semester. In Stephenville, even the apartment complexes have stables. At one, on the west side of town, a student can rent a two bedroom unit for $505 a month and get a 25-horse stable thrown in for $520, plus expenses. “Wrangler jeans and ball caps are just what people wear around here,” Doty tells me. Doty is stocky and, like most cowboys, sunburned from the cheeks down. “It’s not a preppy school,” he says. “Most of our students come from towns with less than 15,000 people. Rodeo people are comfortable here. They don’t stick out.”
Seventy-five students rodeoed for Tarleton last year, 25 on some sort of scholarship. The team is the largest of the 199 colleges and universities nationwide that compete in rodeo. The men won the national championship in 1967; the women won in 1969, 1970, and 1971. The women came in second last year. Despite the fact that the school has had one of the top 10 rodeo programs in the nation for the last three years, Doty sometimes claims that football holds a bigger place in the heart of Stephenville than rodeo. He’s got a point: the high school team won the state 4-A championship in 1993, 1994, 1998, and 1999. The ’93 team never lost a game.
“Bob,” I say, “maybe that’s so. But yours is the only college I’ve ever been to where the rodeo coach is given the same prominence as the dean.”
“I guess that’s right,” he says.
05 Dig in with your feet
On the road, where cowboys spend much of their professional lives, they reveal their histories and hard-won wisdom. In the arena they reveal something primal. “You want to know the cure for a hangover?” Ash Potter asks me an hour out of Pampa on our drive back to Stephenville. His hat is off; his legs are out straight. “Golf,” he says. “I played the other day. The first three holes were awful. By the seventh, I was running between holes.”
If Potter runs at golf, perhaps it has less to do with whiskey than the fact that he carries only a 3-iron, a 7-iron, and a putter. He is equally unburdened off the course. Everything he owns fits in three duffle bags, one of which is his bull-riding bag. “It’s better that way,” he explains. “When you stay with people, they don’t like it when you have a lot of stuff.” For the moment, Potter is staying with a woman in a trailer near town. Stephenville rodeo cowboys measure their various tenancies in terms of days or weeks instead of months or years. No one seems to mind.
“When I was in the 9th grade back in Queensland,” Potter continues, “the principal called my dad and told him that the only class I was passing was P.E. He said I might ought to try something else.” Potter quit school and started working cattle. He and his older brother Greg rode bulls on the side. Both of them ended up in Stephenville after bull-riding stints in Canada. “You can’t make a living riding bulls anywhere but the States,” he says.
In between conversation and stops for coffee, Potter uses his ex-girlfriend’s cell phone—they’re still friendly—to call his brother. The connection is full of static and weak and then not a connection at all. Potter’s brother is driving all night from Utah to Kansas—from one rodeo to the next. Each time Potter leaves a message he signs off, “Be safe, mate.” Greg Potter was the third-ranked bull rider in the PRCA in 1999 and was eighth in 2000. Presently, he competes in the PBR.
When we roll into Stephenville at 4 in the morning, the streets are deserted. I drop Potter at Chick Elms’ Rodeo Shop and Boot Repair on South Loop where he has left his car. Elms’ shop is the Admirals Club for Stephenville rodeo cowboys. Some afternoons, every other customer is an NFR cowboy on his way to a rodeo. Most wear t-shirts and baseball caps and wouldn’t be mistaken for bull riders and bronc riders except by their talk, which consists invariably of three questions: “Where’ve you been?” “How’d you do?” “Where are you headed?”
If the coffee’s not fresh—and there have been complaints lately in this regard—the cowboys make their own. If they need their boots re-heeled or want to talk bronc riding, they talk to Elms. He was a national finals qualifier from 1975 to 1980 and very nearly won the world in 1976; it came down to the final ride. Elms got bucked off and Chris LeDoux, today a popular country singer, won the gold buckle.
“I’ll see you back here at 1:30 p.m.,” Potter says as he lifts his bag from my back seat. “That’ll give us time to eat lunch and get to the Jacksonville rodeo.”
06 Squeeze with your legs
Rodeo cowboys talk about the week before and after July 4th the way retailers talk of Christmas. With the exception of the best bull riders, hitting it big is a relative term. One calf roper told me that getting to the finals meant clearing $20,000 to $40,000 for the year after expenses. It didn’t faze him that clearing $20,000 to $40,000 required hauling a horse to more than a 100 rodeos a year—for a total of about 60,000 miles. But then again, the average rodeo cowboy has only a vague and theoretical understanding of money. A former world-champion bull rider lives outside Stephenville in a mobile home with a hole in the floor. When friends offered to bunk him in better quarters he looked at them as if they had been thrown one too many times and said, “What, and leave The Palace?” About the same cowboy I was told, “If he had a hundred bucks, he’d give you half of it.”
When rodeo cowboys get back home, flush with cash or dead broke, they go see Pop. His other name is V.W. Stephens. He runs one of the more important rodeo cowboy establishments in Stephenville: a bar and dance hall called The City Limits. It’s one of few places to drink alcohol and listen to live music in an otherwise dry and tuneless part of the state, and as such it operates under close supervision of various law enforcement agencies and Baptists. A few years ago, Stephens felt the need to organize a nickel beer/voter registration campaign in anticipation of a local sheriff’s race. Tarleton students especially appreciated the civics and suds connection. The incumbent was run out of office. “Students need to know that they’ve got rights, too,” Stephens says about the matter.
On a solid Thursday night, 1,500 cowboys and cowgirls force their way inside the gray metal building, which sits on the Granbury side of town. Sometimes cowboys bring Stephens autographed pictures or a pair of old chaps to hang on the wall. Fights are rare, and for some their loss constitutes additional evidence of the withering of the Old West. “A bar fight used to cost you only twenty-fifty,” one old-timer tells me in the restaurant attached to the bar. He meant $20.50; that was the cost of the municipal fine. A kindly deputy would pay it for you if you were headed out of town to rodeo. You paid him back when you returned. “Today,” he says, “they’ll fine you anything, $500 even.”
Stephens claims that he suspends the fighters for up to a year, but often as not he takes them upstairs—to the liquor storage room—and tries to talk sense to them. He tells them to save money, to plan for the end of rodeoing. “I tell calf ropers, ’You throw a bad loop and it catches your arm—you’ve got a running cow at one end and a stopped horse at the other—and it’ll cut your arm off.’”
He doesn’t take it personally if they don’t listen. “They’re big-hearted kids,” Stephens says.
A world champion bull rider was in the bar recently. His language got rough. “Son,” Stephens said to him from behind the bar, “you’re not gonna talk that way in here,” whereupon the cowboy took umbrage, said a few more choice words, then had to be led outside by an impromptu posse and told to go home. Long after midnight, Stephens got a phone call. “Mr. Stephens, it’s me,” the cowboy said. “I’m sorry I used those words. I guess I drank too much. It’s just…” The cowboy, who everyone agrees is the Michael Jordan of rodeo, paused. “…it’s just that nobody calls me ’son’ but my daddy,” he said.
Stephens told the cowboy that he was sorry, that he didn’t mean anything by it. “That’s okay,” the cowboy said. “Mr. Stephens,” he continued, “can I come back?”
07 Keep hold of the rope
Stephenville is not simply the gathering spot for bull riders, bronc riders, and barrel racers. It is magnetic north for calf ropers, team ropers, and breakaway ropers. Team roping is the hot rodeo sport. It requires two ropers and a steer that will play along. The ropers back their horses into open-ended stalls and, when the steer is released from a chute situated between them, chase after it with ropes spinning. The first roper, the header, loops the steer’s head and leads the steer to the left whereupon the second roper, the healer, ropes the back two feet. When both ropes are stretched tight, the time is recorded. The sport requires exquisite teamwork and years of practice. When team ropers split up, they are said to have gotten divorced.
The U.S. Team Roping Championships recently relocated its offices from Albuquerque to Stephenville. It is now housed in a newly constructed frontier village on Highway 377. The USTRC is an important piece of a vertically integrated roping empire based in Granbury. The parent company owns rope manufacturers, equine products makers, various roping events, and a magazine titled Super Looper, which is dedicated to the sport.
The USTRC developed a handicapping system much like the handicapping system used in golf. In only 10 years, the association has grown to 35,000 members. It keeps tabs on more than 100,000 active ropers nationwide. The system is intended to allow all classified ropers an opportunity to compete for prize money. The USTRC sanctions more than 85 roping events annually and holds its own national finals in Oklahoma City. Last year, a total of $18 million was awarded in cash and prizes, $3.2 million at the finals.
Super Looper, when it finally moves to the new offices in Stephenville, won’t be the first roping magazine in town. The Roping Pen is already there. The owner moved from Florida because he said he had a credibility problem by not being in Texas. Not long ago he wrote a column declaring that all cowboys should live in Stephenville and sure enough, a few months later, ran into a cowboy in a local cafe who basically had his hat on backwards. “My wife died,” the greenhorn said, “and I wanted to be a cowboy. I read in a magazine that they’re all here.”
In Stephenville, there are dozens of private roping arenas, and the lights burn every night. Jerry Jetton runs the equivalent of a roping salon at his place east of town. Jetton is a calf roper and team roper. He was pro rodeo Rookie of the Year in 1979 and a 14-time national finals qualifier. In 1982, Jetton was the king of Interstate 25. He won rodeos in El Paso, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Denver, Cheyenne, and Casper. On the night I visited the training ground, Jetton and a handful of younger cowboys made run after run at Jetton’s steers. In the dust and haze of early evening, only the sound of the pneumatic chute gate—operated by a garage door opener tied to a saddle horn—suggested that we were somewhere other than in the 19th century.
08 Don’t let go till your head hits the ground
Potter is up in the next go-round. A few minutes ago, a saddle bronc rider got kicked in the head—twice—during an otherwise ordinary buck-off. When they led him out of the arena, the cowboy’s face was blank and there were drops standing on his hat as though the sky had rained blood.
I followed the procession to the portable building that serves as the rodeo field hospital. When I pushed open the door, a medic was bent over the cowboy’s head. There was a gash where the cowboy’s hair parted and nasty cuts above and below his right eye. “You’re gonna have to get some stitches,” the medic said to him. “And they’re gonna give you some powerful antibiotics. You take ’em. Not just two or three days’ worth. There’s no telling what that horse had on his hooves.” The cowboy’s eyes were closed, his shirt was off, and there was blood everywhere, even on his belt buckle. It was hard to know how much of the lecture was sinking in. “And listen,” the medic continued, “when you get to the hospital, be sure to tell them about those plates in your head. They may want to give you an X-ray.” No one in the room flinched at the mention of the cowboy’s particular hardware: plates, screws, and metal rods are duct tape in the world of rodeo.
Meanwhile, Potter is pacing. He’s about to ride bull number 50, Painted Desert. The better bulls have a number and a name. The best have a number and a name that includes advertising for smokeless tobacco. In other words, if Painted Desert keeps bucking off cowboys, his name will become Skoal Painted Desert. “He’s a good little bull,” Potter told me before we left Stephenville. “Maybe I can score an 80 or 81 and win some money.”
Potter’s routine from the previous night in Pampa—the stretching, the rolling and smoking of cigarettes—goes unchanged, except that just before climbing into the chute he turns to me. “Here,” he says, sticking out a gloved hand, “pull it tight.” I wedge his elbow into my chest and pull. “Harder,” he says. He makes three wraps around his wrist with surgical tape and I let go.
The ride goes like last night’s: four seconds of getting-to-know-you bouncing and then ka-boom—a violent jerk to the left, into Potter’s rope hand. He is thrust forward, his chest out over Painted Desert’s horns, which are long, the ends sawed off to the circumference of silver dollars. In Denver last year, a bull caught Potter in the nose. The scar makes it look like his nose had two architects. On this ride, Potter somehow pulls himself back on top. The crowd starts to yell, whipped into action by the announcer. “Look at him go, folks. C’mon, help him out!”
After what seems like an eternity, the buzzer sounds and Potter sails into the dirt. Even though he rode the bull, he doesn’t score enough points to place in the prize money. Jacksonville pays only the top six point getters. However, cowboys who ride the full eight seconds don’t go home empty-handed. They win day money—the entry fees of the cowboys who fell off. At Jacksonville, the day money is $300.
Potter packs his bag, and we shake hands. His ride is idling. He’s going home with yet another Stephenville bull rider in a minivan filled with kids who will be fast asleep when Potter gets out at Chick Elms’ Rodeo Shop in the middle of the night. He doesn’t say goodbye. Cowboys never do. They say, “Down the road.”
Photo: David Bowser
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