Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, & Bull Riders Read online

  “Americans coddle, but they don’t correct,” Moraes liked to say. It was easy to see where he had inherited his toughness and discipline. On the second day of their working the cattle, a spooked cow tried to jump out of the wooden chutes, and its left hoof caught Adriano Moraes’s father on the head. The hoof left a muddy footprint on Aparecido’s cowboy hat and dazed the 58-year-old man. He grabbed on to a wooden gate to keep from falling.

  Sitting nearby, Flavia shouted for someone to bring water. Aparecido Moraes waved them off, looking more irritated than hurt, and motioned for Adriano to resume sending the cattle through the chutes.

  Adriano chuckled. This was the same man who had ordered him as a little boy to wrestle calves—or else. The same man who for years had barely spoken a word to Adriano, the second-oldest of five children, other than to assign him daily chores. The same man who once—when Adriano had been sent home early from school—had scowled and slapped the boy in the face before Adriano could explain what had happened. But this also was the man who had softened over the years and found it easier to show affection to his grandchildren than to his own sons.

  Adriano and Aparecido. In some ways, they were so much alike: hardworking and hardheaded. Whereas the father had struggled to control his temper, the son had struggled to control his mouth. “You should quit smoking, because you stink,” Moraes remembered telling his father as a young boy.

  For years Adriano had despised the man. Aparecido had driven Adriano to his first rodeos, but the two barely spoke. In fact, Aparecido didn’t learn about his son’s bull riding success until someone showed him an article in the newspaper. All those victories. All those buckles. And Moraes never heard a word of praise from his father. But over the years, he had learned how to forgive his father and had come to love him. When Adriano hired his father to run the 1,000-acre ranch, the two grew closer, even if their conversations rarely strayed from talk about the chores and developments on the ranch. At his house in Keller, Texas, Adriano sometimes missed his father so much he cried. For all the tension that had divided them years before, Aparecido had shaped the boy who had grown up to be one of the world’s greatest bull riders.

  April 20, 1970. On that day, Elizabeth Moraes felt the sharp jabs of labor pain. Aparecido set out on horseback to find the local midwife, but it took longer than expected. When they returned 3 hours later, Elizabeth was on the cold wooden floor with a baby boy between her legs and the boy covered in Elizabeth’s star-patterned nightgown. For years Elizabeth Moraes joked that Adriano had become a star because as soon as he had entered the world, he was covered with them. But before the riches had come the rags.

  Soon after he was born, Moraes’s grandparents went broke and lost their land. The family set out on a journey that included one stop after another, with Aparecido finding jobs as a ranch manager to earn the bare necessities. Early on they lived in a house with dirt floors. At night, they could hear rats and snakes slithering through the corn kept in tubs against the house’s thin walls.

  In 1982, at age 12,Adriano Moraes saw his first amateur rodeo. With makeshift equipment, he began practicing at home on a bull named Rubber. He wanted to be cool, and to him the epitome of cool were those grizzled old rodeo cowboys riding bulls.

  Three years later, when he saw his first professional rodeo, Moraes discovered something almost unimaginable: The riders got paid, with the best making almost $100,000 a year. Suddenly the idea of riding bulls beat the idea of scratching out a living as a ranch manager. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade and set out to become a pro bull rider with less-than-standard gear. Instead of a bull riding glove, Moraes used a motorcycle glove. Instead of a bull riding rope, he used a flank strap. He had no protective vest, no mouthpiece, and only one of his mother’s thin nylon bags in which to carry his belongings.

  At his third pro event, Moraes made the championship round, finished second, and won 10 times more money than he could have made in a month working as a ranch hand.

  When Moraes’s parents moved to another region of Brazil in 1988 because his father had found a better job, Adriano, then 18, stayed behind and continued working for the rodeo company and pursuing his riding career. He married a young woman, and they had a son, Victor; but the marriage lasted only 3 months.A year later he met his future wife.

  It was a dusty bull ring in Matao, a town north of São Paulo. She was sitting in the stands. Moraes was standing in the arena. Moraes spotted the tall, slender young woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a pretty face, and he had to meet her. After the rodeo, Moraes hustled to his car, hit the gas, and pulled in front of the woman’s car. Blocking her path, he climbed out of his car and walked over.

  “Hi, I’m Adriano,” he boomed.

  She smiled bashfully. “I’m Flavia.”

  Less than a year later, they were married.

  “I was at peace,” he said. Then 21 and with Flavia at his side, Moraes emerged as one of the best bull riders in Brazil. Winning national championships in 1992 and 1993, he saw it was time to find a new mountain to climb. It required the couple to board a plane for the first time in their lives.

  They flew to the United States in late 1992 to get a firsthand look at the vaunted American bull riders. Charlie Sampson, who had met Moraes 4 years earlier when Sampson was putting on a riding clinic in Brazil, was awaiting their arrival in Arizona. Moraes grew up watching American cartoons, so for his first American breakfast, Adriano ordered pancakes, just like ones the chipmunks on the cartoon “Chip ’n Dale” ate. For his first American dinner, he ordered a T-bone steak, just like the one the cat on “Tom and Jerry” used to eat. The Moraeses stayed with Sampson for 40 days, then drove to Keller, Texas, and moved into a cramped trailer with Troy Dunn, the Australian champion. With bull riders trudging into and out of the trailer at all hours of the night, Adriano and Flavia slept on a mattress on the living room floor and dodged cockroaches.

  But it was worth it. For one, they’d seen the world’s best bull riders compete at the NFR in Las Vegas, and later Adriano competed in a few open rodeos. He also did his first TV interview and, in broken English, declared, “If they let me ride, I can ride with these guys.”

  Enticed by a $60,000-a-year endorsement deal with a beef company, Moraes returned to the United States in 1994 and took the North American rodeo world by storm. He won the inaugural PBR championship, became only the third rider to cover all 10 of his bulls at the NFR, and won the prestigious Calgary Stampede. Six years later, with his English vastly improved and his riding skills as good as ever, he won the 2001 PBR championship and became the tour’s first two-time champion. Now the third championship was within reach, but the season was taking a physical and emotional toll.

  He needed time at Canção Nova, the Catholic community. It was here that Moraes tapped into spiritual strength—the strength he thought he needed to hold off McBride, Lee, and any surprise contenders down the season’s homestretch.

  During an evening service at a small chapel, Moraes knelt on the ground in prayer. But a few minutes later, he sat in the wooden chair and removed his left cowboy boot. The hard floor had aggravated his swollen left knee. Cowboy boot removed, he again dropped to his knees and joined a small group praying in tongues.

  His rehabilitation program was at best unorthodox. Six days after the surgery, he rode his horse up a steep 700-foot hill and joined his friends, one of whom got stuck in a tangle of branches 10 feet up a tree. Without hesitation, Moraes wrapped his arms around the thick trunk, climbed up the tree, and freed his friend. Then he peered up at a cluster of branches, as if considering a higher climb.

  “Justin McBride says to go a little higher,” someone joked.

  Down climbed Moraes.

  Yet moments later, he and his friends were swinging on a vine. When they realized a tree impeded their swing path, Moraes brandished a small machete and whacked the offending arbor. Tim-berrrr! Down it came, but not before Moraes had swung on the vine and tried to dislodge the tree by crashin
g into it with his feet.

  “How’s the knee?” someone asked.

  “Which one?” replied Moraes, grinning.

  Leaving the junglelike brush unscathed, Moraes untied his horse and rode down the steep hill while declaring that only he could stop himself from capturing the PBR championship. Later in the week, driving a friend to the airport, the talk turned to bull riding.

  He spoke about his loneliness on the PBR tour and his disappointment that riders like Justin McBride and Ross Coleman—both of whom had spent time with Moraes during a trip to Brazil—had never invited him for special trips to their own homes. During PBR events, McBride, Coleman, and the others were friendly with Moraes, but after the nightly competition, he often found himself alone—unless he was with fellow Brazilians or nonriders. Moraes’s idea of socializing was to hang out in the hotel coffee shop, talking bull riding. McBride, Coleman, and many of the others usually headed for the bars.

  Occasionally he joined the dozen or so devout Christian riders, including Mike Lee, at the weekly Bible studies. These riders were nondrinkers and nonsmokers who avoided the buckle bunnies and the PBR’s after-event parties and seemed like the group to which Moraes would gravitate. Yet over time, Moraes grew isolated from them, too.

  “I tell them they should pray more,” said Moraes, who also urged the group to focus more on evangelization.

  In some respects, Moraes’s isolation mirrored the dynamics of bull riding. There were no teammates, no on-site coaches, no one to blame but oneself. Moraes understood this with only five regular-season events left until the PBR finals in Las Vegas.

  “It’s totally up to me,” he said. “Nobody’s as good as me right now. Nobody. That’s a fact. That’s why I can’t afford to lose. If I lose, it means I failed.”

  Because of his powerful left arm, the one he used to grip the bull rope, and his strong legs, Moraes was known as a “power rider.” He detested the label, because it suggested he relied more on brute force than balance. Perhaps to prove otherwise, Moraes walked across the top of the 6-foot-high panels of the back pen like a tightrope artist wearing cowboy boots and spurs.

  Though they never joined Moraes on the panels, two other riders in the PBR showed exceptional balance and athleticism. They were the two riders Moraes considered his strongest competition—McBride and Lee.

  “I love the way Justin rides,” Moraes said, noting how McBride pinned his knees against the bull instead of clamping down with his full legs. “He neutralizes the bulls a lot. Has a lot of balance. Graceful rider. One of the best riders we have there now. If he wins, I’ll be upset with myself. But I’ll be very proud of him. He’s going to represent (the PBR) very, very well.

  “But not Mike Lee. Mike Lee cannot represent now. He’s immature. He can’t even talk. Rides well. But he does not know why he rides and how he rides. . . . He doesn’t understand the fundamentals of riding. He just does it. That’s pure ability. . . . I ride with my mind. He rides with his born ability.”

  The words came across harshly, considering that some riders saw Lee as a future superstar who might one day surpass Moraes.

  “The next Adriano Moraes hasn’t been born yet,” Moraes said. “If he has been born, he’s not riding. And if he’s riding, he’s not riding with us.”

  THIRTEEN

  TUFF TIMES FOR PBR

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  Wednesday–Friday, July 7–9, 2004

  Back late from a business meeting, Randy Bernard strode into his eighth-floor office, dumped his travel bag on the ground, and settled into the leather chair behind his cherrywood desk. To his left was a spectacular view of Pikes Peak. But he scarcely glanced at the snowcapped mountains. With his tanned face, toothy smile, and full head of brown hair, even at age 37 he looked as much a frat house president as a chief executive officer, let alone the CEO of a company with a budget of $35 million in 2004. He usually wore jeans and cowboy boots but hardly cut the image of a stereotypical cowboy, with his PalmPilot, pocket-size digital camera, and iPod. He could be as affable as a cruise ship director and as smooth as a marble countertop, but at the moment he seemed distracted as he flipped open his laptop computer while his executive assistant, Andee Lamoreaux, rattled off Bernard’s phone messages. Bernard stared at his computer screen. Online, he clicked onto rodeo Web sites where he knew the message boards would be filled with chatter. He wanted to get the latest take on the news that a week earlier had rocked the PBR and sent his executive assistant scrambling.

  If anybody could find Bernard, it was Lamoreaux. She punched the numbers on her office phone.

  “Hello?”

  Got him.

  Bernard, who was on business in London, answered his cell phone. Lamoreaux’s urgent voice indicated there was no time for chitchat. Call Richard Perkins, she said, referring to the PBR’s chief financial officer.

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “We just got a letter—Tuff resigned.”

  Tuff resigned? It was enough to make a cowboy swallow his snuff.

  “Oh, damn,” Bernard said.

  Less than 7 days into what was supposed to be a leisurely 6-week break between BFTS stops, Hedeman had terminated a contract that called for him to sign autographs at all of the tour’s BFTS events and paid him more than $100,000 a year. His resignation letter, dated June 24 and sent by certified mail, contained a single sentence: “Gentlemen, I hereby tender my resignation as a member of the board of directors of the Professional Bull Riders, Inc., and as president of the Professional Bull Riders, Inc., to take effect immediately.”

  Bernard left three phone messages for Hedeman. None was returned.

  Adding to the confusion, a British filmmaker working on a documentary about the PBR called Bernard to say that just days earlier, her crew had taped an interview with Hedeman during which he had said the PBR was “his life.” Now he’d resigned? She didn’t get it. Neither did Bernard.

  All Bernard had to go on was an article in the Empire-Tribune, a newspaper in Stephenville, Texas. “The PBR is big business,” Hedeman was quoted as saying. “I just have some fundamental differences about that. I will always choose what I think is best for the bull riders. Producing in a sport that is profitable is important and it’s hard work. I enjoy doing that; but when it comes to what’s good for business and what’s good for the riders, I put the riders first every time. They are what the fans come to see.”

  The insinuation was clear: The riders had become a secondary concern to Bernard and the PBR’s board of directors. But less than 24 hours after the article was published, Ron Pack, Hedeman’s business partner and close friend, disavowed the quote that appeared in the Stephenville paper. Bernard wasn’t convinced, and not long after his conversation with Pack, he got a call from a rodeo newspaper reporter who wanted to know what Bernard thought of Hedeman’s resignation and the quote. The quote? Yes, the quote, replied the writer, reading to Bernard what the writer said Hedeman had sent him—the exact same quote that had run in the Empire-Tribune.

  Bernard was upset but had no intention of canceling the meeting he’d arranged with Pack and Hedeman for July 12 at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. There they would discuss Hedeman’s future with the PBR. Bernard would bring Cody Lambert, the PBR’s vice president and a grouchy but funny ex-rider who was as tough as Hedeman. He and Hedeman had once been friends. After all, they had grown up together, attended college together, and traveled together on the rodeo circuit. To this day, Lambert would say of Hedeman, “He’s the best rider that ever got on a bull.” But their friendship was over.

  Before Bernard had taken over as the PBR’s CEO in 1995, Pack said, Hedeman and Lambert had formed the political strength behind the tour. But as the years passed, they found themselves on opposite sides of issues, especially when, at Bernard’s urging, the PBR began copromoting its own events. Hedeman was looking out for the original promoters and sponsors, Lambert was looking out for the PBR, and both contended they were looking out for the ride
rs.

  At the 1995 finals, only hours before Hedeman’s infamous wreck with Bodacious, Lambert ripped off the arm of a chair and flung it across the room at Hedeman. It bounced off a metal locker. Just another PBR board meeting where the old friends turned nasty. “Tuff and Cody, without a doubt, run the board of directors,” Pack said. “Two captains sailing a ship and a difference of opinions. Somebody’s going to win and somebody’s going to lose.” Lambert had heard Pack’s assertion before and vehemently denied it, saying neither he nor Hedeman had any more influence than the other board members.

  Nonetheless, by 2004, it was clear Hedeman was headed for defeat.

  As the word of Hedeman’s resignation spread among the bull riding world, fans swamped the PBR’s message board before Bernard ordered it shut down. “There was so much malicious gossip, and the PBR is not going to be a place to start false rumors,” Bernard said. “We’re not going to put the message board back up until fans understand that.”

  What Bernard had to understand was this: To many fans, Tuff Hedeman was the PBR.

  In 1992, after the Justin Boots World Bull Riding Championship in Scottsdale, Arizona, Hedeman and about a dozen bull riders crammed into a motel room. It was the culmination of months of talks. Sam Applebaum, a California tax planner who’d befriended Hedeman and a handful of the other top bull riders, led the call to action: It was time to break away from the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) and create their own bull riding tour.

  A couple of years earlier, businessman Shaw Sullivan had done the same thing, creating a tour called Bull Riders Only (BRO). But Shaw wanted all the riders to sign contracts, essentially turning over control when it came to determining what sponsorship patches riders could wear, how the prize money would be distributed, and how the events would function.

  Recalled Hedeman: “We basically said, ‘Screw you.’ ”He and the other bull riders thought they, not the promoters, deserved control; and to make it happen, the riders in that motel room pitched in $1,000 apiece. The number of original investors eventually grew to 21, and the group set out to start its own bull riding tour.