Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, & Bull Riders Page 9

  Walt Garrison, then a fullback with the Dallas Cowboys, started putting on rodeos; and J. Pat Evans, team doctor for the Cowboys, came along to treat injured contestants. Evans was a beefy man with short-cropped hair, and what the riders liked about him most was that he never suggested they quit. The goal, Evans told the rodeo cowboys, was to get them healed and back competing as quickly as possible. A rider with a broken foot gave Evans a chance to prove his point. He built a cast with a spur lodged in the back.

  Wearing a cowboy boot on his good foot and the cast with a spur on his broken foot, the rider returned to action.

  Eventually Evans started directing a full-time orthopedic staff for rodeo events, and the PBR wanted its own. Freeman joined the tour as its on-site doctor in 1995, and wherever the PBR tour went, he and his staff followed. More astonishing than the number of injuries bull riders suffered was the number of times a rider walked away from a wreck relatively unscathed. But that March night in Fort Worth, Johnson’s wreck marked the first time that season a rider had to be carried out of the arena on a stretcher. Instead of sending Johnson to the hospital, Freeman kept him at the arena for observation. For one, he thought Johnson would get more attention in the PBR sports medicine room than he would in the local emergency room. Two, Freeman worried about the expense.

  To treat someone with a concussion, emergency room doctors routinely ordered a CAT scan and MRI; and by the time the riders were discharged, the cost approached $5,000. At PBR events, the rider carried $20,000 in insurance. But with a $500 deductible and the rider responsible for 20 percent of medical expenses, a $5,000 bill would leave the rider responsible for $1,500—a huge burden for riders scratching out a living.

  But 30 minutes after the wreck, Johnson’s condition worsened. He no longer knew where he was. His brain had begun to swell. On Freeman’s orders, Johnson was moved back onto the stretcher and taken to the hospital.

  Back inside the arena during first-round action Saturday night, Jody Newberry had taken the lead with a 90-point ride on Jack Daniels Happy Hour. But when the first round of competition ended Saturday night, most people’s thoughts were with Johnson—just as they were when the bull riding resumed Sunday afternoon. The final round of competition began with no sign of the fallen rider.

  Midway through second-round action, a cowboy entered the arena and wrapped Rob Smets in a bear hug. “I love you, man,” he whispered into Smets’s ear. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  It was Ross Johnson. Smets hugged him back.

  Then Johnson joined the riders behind the chutes, and one by one they filed by to shake his hand and welcome him back. “How you feeling?” asked Owen Washburn.

  “Hurting from the top of my head to the bottom of my toes,” he said with a grin.

  Hedeman walked up and gave Johnson a hug.“Man, I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again,” Hedeman said. “Glad to see you standing here.”

  Johnson had emerged from the wreck with nothing more than a concussion, six staples on the side of his head, and a very sore tongue. Riding without a mouthpiece, he had clamped down on his tongue, which had left a blackish purple bruise across the pink flesh. As Johnson mingled with the riders, the PA announcer called the crowd’s attention to the back of the chutes, and Johnson raised his right hand to acknowledge the cheering crowd.

  Later, during second-round action, Mike Lee climbed aboard Mesquite Heat, unridden in nine attempts. Out of the chute, the bull reared back, twisting its body like a spastic worm, and then did it again. Then he reared back even farther, the bull’s body rising straight up and down. Legs slipping off the side of the bull, Lee looked like he was trying to hold on to a rocket. Somehow he managed to hold on for the full 8 seconds before falling off the bull.

  “Mike Lee,” Justin McKee exclaimed during the OLN telecast, “how he did that I have no idea!”

  The judges posted their scores: 92.5 points! Though the score fell short of the highest in PBR history—96.5, achieved by only Bubba Dunn and Chris Shivers, Shivers having done it twice—the 92.5 was the highest score yet that season. The ride showed why PBR insiders considered Lee, still 2 months away from his 21st birthday, the best young rider on tour and contender for the 2004 championship. But the day in Fort Worth belonged to the bulls.

  They dominated the second round and the short-go that followed, bucking off all 15 riders in the championship round. And with Little Yellow Jacket tossing Reuben Geleynse and Hotel California throwing Tony Mendes, the two bulls validated their chances at Bull of the Year honors. Mike Collins, a 25-year-old rider from Adair, Oklahoma, and one of only two riders to ride two bulls during the 2-day event, got bucked off Blueberry Wine on the last ride of the day. But with the cumulative point lead, he won the event by default. Lee finished third, Moraes finished 19th, and Justin McBride finished 22nd; and the hobbling riders headed back to the sports medicine room.

  As the room eventually thinned out, melting ice bags, unraveled ace bandages, and wrapped, bloody surgical scissors remained the testament to the mini massacre. In addition to Johnson, the official injured list included a dislocated leg tendon to Gilbert Carrillo; a concussion and sprained neck to Brendon Clark; an aggravated shoulder injury to Dave Samsel; and a concussion and dislocated right shoulder to Craig Sasse. “All in all, not bad,” Freeman said. “Only had to send one rider to the hospital.”

  That rider perched himself on top of a padded examination table for final inspection. Freeman looked at the 4-inch bruise stretching from Johnson’s Adam’s apple to under his left ear. He checked the gash on the right side of Johnson’s head. Then he looked directly into Johnson’s eyes.

  “You need to be wearing a helmet,” Freeman said. Getting treatment at the adjacent table, rider Brendon Clark caught Johnson’s attention and arched his eyebrows. The look said it all: Wear a helmet? Don’t even think about it, Ross.

  “There’s another one that needs to be wearing a helmet,” Freeman said, nodding at Clark.“Don’t listen to him, Ross. The helmet will protect you against injuries. And that means you’ll be riding longer.”

  Freeman cited the success of protective vests as proof. Cody Lambert had invented the vests after Frost’s fatal injury. And when vests became mandatory equipment in the mid-1990s, the incidence of serious chest and abdominal injuries dropped tenfold, according to Freeman, who anticipated the same reduction in head injuries if helmets were mandatory. But of the top 45 ranked riders entering the 2004 season, only nine wore a protective mask or helmet, and Freeman had grown resigned to the other riders’ reluctance. Furthermore, the PBR had expressed no plan to make helmets mandatory.

  Freeman handed Johnson a pouch of six Vicodins. “Take them as needed,” he said.

  Back in the locker room, Clark considered the advice Freeman gave to countless riders about wearing a helmet.“Maybe we should wear helmets,” he said.“But we’re cowboys, and I think we ought to be wearing cowboy hats.”

  A week later Ross Johnson showed up for competition with nothing more than a cowboy hat to protect his head.

  STANDINGS

  1 Adriano Moraes 4,951 points

  2 Justin McBride 3,557 points

  3 Mike Lee 3,520.5 points

  4 Ross Coleman 2,748 points

  5 Jody Newberry 2,627 points

  6 Mike White 2,319.5 points

  7 Greg Potter 2,319 points

  8 Dave Samsel 2,248.5 points

  9 Reuben Geleynse 2,210.5 points

  10 Dan Henricks 2,079 points

  NINE

  WANNABES, WASHUPS & DREAMERS

  Thibodaux, Louisiana

  Saturday & Sunday, March 27 & 28, 2004

  The license plates told it all. Georgia. Florida. North Carolina. Texas. Wisconsin. The cars and trucks pulling into the parking lot outside the Thibodaux Civic Center carried bull riders from across the South and beyond to this Humps N’ Horns event, the bottom rung of the PBR’s two-tiered minor-league system.

  While the tour’s top 45 riders compe
ted before sellout crowds in cities like Atlanta, Nashville, and Philadelphia, the road to the Built Ford Tough Series wound through towns like Jasper, Texas; Las Cruces, New Mexico; Afton, Wyoming; and this week, Thibodaux, Louisiana, a Cajun-spiced outpost about 70 miles west of New Orleans. The locals served up jambalaya, boudin, and boiled crawfish in a place where Bayou Lafourche, murky waters infested with alligators, cut through the heart of town. Not that the dangerous reptiles kept those living in Thibodaux from paddling down the bayou during annual races in their pirogues, canoes made from hollowed-out tree trunks. Some in this town of 14,431 still speak Cajun French.

  In all, 78 riders—among the 656 card-carrying members of the PBR in 2004—showed up to compete for about $13,000 in prize money at the Bud Light Humps N’ Horns. There were no stars in the mix of riders, who included aging veterans, frustrated wannabes, and peach-fuzzed newcomers like Eathan Graves. Emerging from a camper with Texas plates, Graves wore a cowboy hat about two sizes too big for his tiny head and appeared at least a year away from needing a razor. He looked like he’d crumple in the face of a stiff breeze, much less in the face of a raging bull. According to his California driver’s license, he was 18, but he looked barely old enough to drive. At 5 feet 8 and 115 pounds, he was among the frailest riders in Thibodaux, if not all of professional rodeo.

  For months he’d eagerly waited for the day he’d turn 18, the minimum age to be eligible for PBR competition. It didn’t matter if you had never been on a bull before, as long as you had $345 for the permit. Similar to baseball’s minor-league system, the PBR-sanctioned Humps N’Horns and US Smokeless Tobacco Company Challenger Tour events serve as a feeder system, giving riders a chance to break into the top-45 money earners and qualify for the BFTS. To start, Graves and other new riders had to buy a permit, which made them eligible for non-BFTS events, with most spots available on the Humps N’ Horns tour—the lowest tier of the PBR’s minor leagues. The next step was to earn $2,500 in PBR winnings, which qualified a rider to upgrade his status from permit holder to cardholder and increased his chances of securing spots at Challenger Tour events, where the bulls were ranker, the purses larger, and the chances of amassing enough money to crack the top 45 infinitely better.

  The road to the majors could be long and expensive. Graves’s journey had begun in January 2004. When he and three buddies piled into a truck, he hit the road and the minor-league circuit. The truck was not only their transportation but also their home. At night the four young men squeezed into the truck camper and slept on makeshift beds made of foam and futons.

  As they drove from event to event, Graves kept in his daily planner a neat record of his performances at each event. The handwritten entries showed stops in Macon, Georgia; Tallahassee, Florida; Tucson; Knoxville, Tennessee; Columbia, South Carolina; North Charleston, South Carolina; Beaumont, Texas; Abilene, Texas; Hidalgo, Texas; and Laredo, Texas. The entries also showed a total winnings of $1,500 and that Graves had successfully ridden 48 percent of his bulls. And inside that daily planner, he also kept a fake million-dollar bill—a reminder of his ultimate goal: to win the coveted PBR championship and end-of-the-year bonus.

  Graves never considered college rodeo as an option, even though 134 schools—mostly small 4-year colleges and junior colleges—offered scholarships. As the PBR’s popularity and prize money had grown, so had the number of riders bypassing college and heading straight for the pros. To hear the riders’ broken grammar and habitual use of “ain’t,” one might have assumed there was little going on beneath those cowboy hats. But they knew how to negotiate life on the road—finding cheap hotels, cheap food, and, in some cases, cheap women—and when interlopers entered their world, they detected bullshit with the unerring accuracy of a bomb-sniffing dog. A deep understanding of Chaucer and Tolstoy, a grasp of quantum physics, or a command of Middle Eastern politics was irrelevant on the PBR tour.Winning the national college bull riding championship was no guarantee of PBR success, either. Of the nine riders who’d won the past 10 college bull riding championships, only one, Corey Navarre, had made a steady living on the PBR. Not even Will Farrell, who won the college bull riding championship in ’99 and ’02, had made it in the PBR.

  Chris Shivers, who had won the PBR title in 2000 and 2003, had never set foot on a college campus. Nor had Cody Hart, who won it in 1999, or Adriano Moraes, who won in 1994 and 2001. Of the PBR’s first 10 champions, only Tuff Hedeman,Michael Gaffney, and Owen Washburn—all older than 30—had competed in college rodeo.

  By midafternoon Saturday in Thibodaux, the riders began inching forward in a line that snaked outside a small office inside the Thibodaux Civic Center to pay their $155 entry fee. There were no entry fees at the BFTS, where the purses were almost seven times as big as they were at Humps N’ Horns events—not counting BFTS bonuses, which sometimes reached $100,000 a ride.

  Matt Merritt was a chipper 22-year-old barrelman from North Carolina. Accompanied by his new fiancée, he took his floppy shoes, face paint, and bagful of gags on the road 45 to 50 weekends a year, typically making $1,000 for a 2-day event. He’d seen the PBR’s star barrelman, Flint Rasmussen, leave sellout crowds doubled over in laughter. So he figured his only shot at becoming the PBR’s star clown was if Rasmussen retired or got freight-trained by a bull.

  While Merritt lugged his gear into the Civic Center, Troy Kibodeaux, an aspiring stock contractor who hauled his prize bull Chocolate Chip 4½ hours from his home in Sulphur, Louisiana, drove into the parking lot. This was the first bull riding event for Chocolate Chip and Kibodeaux, who only recently had started breeding bulls and explained, “One bull got good, and so I called the Big Man.”

  The “Big Man” was Jerry Nelson, who stood 6 feet 6 inches and weighed over 300 pounds. He wore his shock of white hair pulled back, and his unruly white beard was almost long enough for him to pass as an aging member of ZZ Top. He looked as big and imposing as some of the bulls, and these were some serious bulls. Nelson had made his fortune in oil equipment sales before deciding to sink a few million dollars into the bull-breeding business. In just 10 years, he’d built one of the largest cattle holdings in the United States and one of the rankest strings of bulls in rodeo, including a promising 4-year-old named Just a Dream.

  “Little Yellow Jacket can’t pack the son of a bitch’s water,” Nelson said. “When we bucked the son of a bitch in Houston, you could have driven a Peterbilt underneath him.”

  While Nelson occasionally sent his top bulls to the PBR, he used his second- and third-string buckers while copromoting and producing the Bud Light Humps N’ Horns. It was here that Nelson was in his element, away from the bright lights and the politics of the PBR, and trying to make a buck in shit-kicking towns like Thibodaux. But Nelson didn’t produce on the cheap. To provide commentary at the Thibodaux event, he hired Donnie Gay, the eight-time bull riding champion who also did commentary for PRCA events televised on ESPN and had once served as the lead commentator for PBR telecasts. Gay was short, stocky, and opinionated. Though he remained a celebrity in the world of rodeo, he looked at home inside the dimly lit Thibodaux Civic Center (capacity 3,858), with the scoreboard that belonged in a high school gym circa 1970.

  About an hour before the competition began, Gay inspected the audio system. He was looking for the microphone he was supposed to use. “Which mic?” he asked.

  “The one with the broken handle,” someone replied.

  A microphone with a broken handle in an aging building. Figured. But Gay smiled and said, “I’ll go anywhere for the right money.”

  Another reason Gay had come to Thibodaux was to watch Kendall Galmiche, a promising 18-year-old rider from Carriere, Mississippi, who had turned down an offer to play baseball for Mississippi State to pursue a career in bull riding. Gay liked what he’d seen while coaching Galmiche. But not all the riders here were as bright eyed or promising as Galmiche. Bloodshot and bleary eyes were a testament to the late nights and long drives on a quest that for some began to look like a crue
l mirage. The BFTS felt a million miles away, or at least as far as Thibodaux was from that weekend’s BFTS event in Fresno, California, at the 15,000-seat Save Mart Center. But like a narcotic, bull riding kept luring back riders like Jacob “Spook”Wiggins, a 29-year-old Texan with close-cropped black hair and a mischievous grin. If not one of the sport’s best riders, Wiggins was one of its best storytellers.

  He kept up a running chatter and talked about drunken orgies, nights in jail, punching out his best friend, driving 24 hours to the next rodeo, the time a bull gored him in the nuts and doctors needed 54 stitches to sew them back together, and on and on. “I’m jinxed with injuries,” he said. “Every year I start to make the finals, I get killed off.”

  Then there was Robby Shriver, a blond-haired, upbeat 27-year-old from Screven, Georgia, who spoke with a mixture of conviction and desperation. He’d upgraded to cardholder status 2 years ago, but after a slump was competing mostly in Humps N’Horns events.“Everything I have right now, I’m putting into this sport,” he said, “and, God willing, I will make the PBR finals this year. . . . I need to win tonight.”

  It was a 2-night competition, with half of the 78 riders competing Saturday and the other half competing Sunday. Each rider got one bull, and the eight riders with the top scores advanced to the championship round. The eight riders with the highest cumulative scores earned checks from the purse of $13,000. Graves and his buddies helped set up the event Saturday but wouldn’t compete until Sunday.

  Saturday night, Gay got a look at his promising pupil, and he liked what he saw in the first round when Galmiche rode a bull named Snoopy for 84 points. Waving him over, Gay offered some advice and encouragement as Galmiche prepared for the championship round.

  But his short-go ride lasted only a few seconds, with Galmiche getting bucked off and landing awkwardly. He limped out of the arena and soon was strapped to a stretcher and headed to the hospital. Glancing at Galmiche being carried to an ambulance, Gay never missed a beat, keeping up a steady banter as, one by one, the bulls carrying riders came bucking out of the chutes. It was a reminder of the cold-natured business: rider down, show goes on.