Rodeo bulls, like the boys who dream of riding them, are unpredictable creatures. They can start out shy and skittish, then suddenly turn ornery. They’ll lie down in the chute one day and try to gore you the next. The most dangerous bull ever ridden, by some accounts, began as a scrawny yellow calf in 1988. Half Charolais and half Brahman, he was still long and bony at age three, but liable to turn fat and ungainly if his breeding held true. His owner, Phil Sumner, named him J31—he wasn’t sure the bull would live long enough to earn a real name. Sumner took him to a few scrubgrass rodeos in northern Oklahoma, but didn’t see much fight in him. “I was thinking, Dude, you’re going to have to step up your game plan or you’re going to be going to McDonald’s,” Sumner told me.
Then one Sunday afternoon at a small arena outside of Okeene, Oklahoma, something in the bull snapped. The kid who was riding him got his hand caught in his rope. He was flopping around on J31’s back, trying to dismount, when the bull suddenly went crazy beneath him. He leaped up and spun around, bucked forward and kicked back, his legs so high behind him that he almost flipped end over end. By the time the boy pulled free, the bull had nearly gone over the fence. “It just freaked him out,” Sumner said.
Animals, as a rule, don’t like to have other animals on their backs. They find it strange and distressing—an attack or a violation, an act of dominance. This hasn’t kept us from trying to ride them, of course. Horse, mule, donkey, camel, llama, yak, and elephant—the bigger the animal, the more likely we are to climb on top of it. People have sat on ostriches, orcas, alligators, and water buffalo, straddled giant tortoises, and set toddlers on St. Bernards. Their mounts may try to shake them off at first, but the contest is an unequal one, and they tend to knuckle under eventually. Some even learn to like it.
Not rodeo bulls. Their brains aren’t wired for submission. They not only refuse to be ridden; they find ever more inventive ways to cast people off. Watching old videos of J31, you can see him learn as he goes. At first, he just charges around the ring and jumps up and down. But the older he gets the crueller and less predictable he becomes. He spins one way, then the other, charges forward, and jerks to the side. His front and back ends start to uncouple, jackhammering the ground independently. His spine twists and rolls, leaving the rider with no balancing point, no center of gravity. By the age of five, he weighs nearly two thousand pounds and is built like a clenched fist: all hoof and horn and fast-twitch muscle. Sumner eventually sold him to another rancher, Sammy Andrews, figuring that he was too much bull for the local rodeo circuit. It was Andrews who gave him a name to match his reputation: Bodacious.
“He was like a monster once he matured,” Tuff Hedeman, a four-time world champion, told me. “Even the good guys were super scared of him. You’d see world champions ride him for a jump or two and then get off.” In 1993, at a rodeo in Long Beach, California, Hedeman drew Bodacious for what some consider the greatest ride in history—a near-perfect exhibition of balance and anticipation. Two years later, the bull got his revenge. At the world championships in Las Vegas that August, Hedeman was leading the standings by what proved to be an insurmountable three hundred points when he drew Bodacious again. This time, a split second after leaving the chute, the bull bucked forward with all his might. Hedeman did what riders are supposed to do: he leaned high over the bull’s shoulders and flung his arm back as a counterbalance. But just as he came forward, Bodacious threw his head back—smashing it square into Hedeman’s face. Hedeman stayed on somehow, his hand twisted in the rope, only to get head-butted again, thrown into the air, and bounced off the bull’s back like a rag doll.
The ride broke every bone in Hedeman’s face below the eyes. It took thirteen and a half hours of reconstructive surgery and five titanium plates to repair the damage, and Hedeman’s sense of smell and taste never returned. “I told my buddy afterward, I must have broke my jaw, because when I bite down my teeth don’t come together,” he recalled. “People were looking at me and then turning their eyes away or putting their hands over their faces. I thought, I must look like Frankenstein or something.”
Seven weeks later, when a rider named Scott Breding drew Bodacious at the National Finals Rodeo, he elected to wear a hockey mask for protection. It didn’t help. In less than four seconds, the bull had knocked Breding off with the same move, fracturing his left eye socket. The next day, Sammy Andrews retired Bodacious from competition. “I didn’t want to be the guy who let him kill someone,” he told me.
The boys at the Camp of Champions couldn’t wait to get on a bull like that. How else would they be world champions one day? Bull riding is a collaborative sport—a pairs competition in which one partner tries to kill the other, like an ice dance with an axe murderer. If a rider manages to hang on for eight seconds, he’ll earn up to fifty points for his own form and fifty for the bull’s. The meaner the animal the better the score. “Ooh, I really want to ride 44!” Wacey Schalla told his friends Trigger Hargrove and Jet Erickson one morning. He jumped up and down on the catwalk along the arena, and pointed at a bony brown calf in the chute below. “I hear that sucker’s rank!”
Wacey, Trigger, and Jet were eight years old. The tops of their heads barely cleared my waist, yet they already had the rangy look of seasoned riders. They wore saddleman jeans and paisley Western shirts, tooled leather boots and straw cowboy hats, oversized to fend off the broiling June sun. Wacey was the smallest of the three and the most intensely focussed. His eyes would turn to slits above his freckled cheeks as he visualized his next ride. Trigger was taller and leaner, with a natural swagger—he was an excellent roper as well as rider. Jet was the shyest and the most delicately built. While Trigger kept up a running monologue—“That 36 nearly yanked my arm off! But then the next one didn’t hardly buck at all”—Jet slumped against the rails, adrift in his own thoughts. “He’s kind of a floater,” his father, Everett, told me. “But when he scoots up on that calf and it takes off, his body takes over and he just rides.” He laughed. “It kind of reminds you of the legends of the past, watching them kids.”
In the past two decades, selective breeding has made rodeo bulls more dangerous and valuable than ever before.The best ones cost half a million dollars and their semen can fetch thousands.
Almost every weekend, the three boys would ride against one another at some small-town rodeo in Oklahoma. The previous Saturday, it had been Elk City, with Wacey coming in first, Trigger second, and Jet third. But the order could easily have been shuffled. “It’s just back and forth with those three,” Trigger’s grandfather, Eddie, told me. “They’re the fiercest competitors and the best of friends.” All three were the sons of professional rodeo riders. They’d gone from bouncing around on sheep at the age of three or four—“mutton busting,” it was called—to riding calves at six and now the occasional steer. In two or three years, they’d get on their first bulls. Their winnings came mostly in the form of engraved belt buckles and prize saddles—“I’ve got a bunch more in my closet somewhere,” Wacey told me, when he showed me a few buckles at his house—as well as small cash purses. But they’d grow more substantial soon enough. Caden Bunch, one of the eleven-year-olds at the camp, had made more than a hundred thousand dollars.
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The Camp of Champions was a final tuneup for the biggest rodeo of their lives: the Youth Bull Riders World Finals. The event would draw the top fifty riders from six age groups to Abilene, Texas, in July. It would feature rougher stock than most of them were used to riding, so they wanted all the help they could get. The camp, founded by a bull rider turned cowboy preacher named Andy Taylor, was a combination rodeo school and revival meeting. The first half of the week had been devoted to girls’ events—barrel racing, goat tying, and breakaway roping—and the second half to boys’ events: calf roping, bull riding, and bronco busting. The camp was held on the grounds of the Trinity Fellowship, a budding megachurch in Sayre, Oklahoma, on the short-grass prairie just east of the Texas Panhandle. There were livestock pens and dusty red arenas to one side and a striped tent to the other, where the campers met for church services every morning and evening. “You know what’s cool, boys?” Ted Nuce, one of the trainers and a former world-champion bull rider, told them. “Riding bulls is a Jesus trap. You guys are going to pray because you want to. You need some protection out there.”
Earlier that day, the boys had been to the first of the morning services. These had a comforting sameness to them. The house band, led by a local bulldozer operator and his sons, would play some Southern-flavored Christian rock. Andy Taylor would drawl a few lines of Scripture, then some retired bull riders would come up to testify. These were small, wiry, tightly wound men—“the bantam roosters of the rodeo world,” one calf roper called them—accustomed to keeping their pain to themselves. They’d talk, haltingly, about the injuries that had laid them low at the height of their careers, and how little they knew about earning a living in the real world. How they’d succumbed to drink and drugs, disloyalty and meanness before the Lord pulled them through. “Some of my family members just abandoned me,” a young, bespectacled bull rider named Matt Austin confessed. “I was broken. But I’m here to tell you that God will never leave you.”
I couldn’t tell how deeply this registered with the eight-year-olds. Riding calves is less life-threatening than riding bulls, and Wacey and his friends seemed to think they were immortal anyhow. They were by turns the best-behaved boys I’d ever met—they addressed adults as sir and Ma’am, took off their hats in church, and lowered their eyes and mumbled “Excuse me” when they bumped into you—and the rowdiest, the least domesticated. “They make me proud,” their counsellor, Keith Hutton, told me on my first night at camp. He was about to say more when a chorus of screams and shouts erupted from the bunkhouse below, in the church basement. “He’s bleeding!” a high voice was squealing. “There’s blood everywhere!” Hutton sighed and blew out his cheeks. He waited a moment for the noise to subside, then lurched up from the couch and trudged downstairs.
Reports on the incident would remain muddled and contradictory. As far as Hutton could tell, Wacey was jumped by another boy after beating him in a game of h-o-r-s-e. Trigger waded in to defend him, and in the ensuing fracas the assailant fell and smacked his head, opening up a gash. “It was kind of a freaky deal,” Hutton told me the next morning. “It looked like his head had fallen off, there was so much blood.” By then, in any case, the boys were all friends again, monkeying around in the breakfast line while Trigger practiced his roping tricks. A little blood, they knew, came with the territory. Trigger’s uncle had torn off a thumb roping steers, and Jet’s father had snapped the C1 vertebra in his neck when a bull named Stoney tossed him on his head. He spent the next six months immobilized in a halo, not sure if he could ever get on a bull again. “We know it’s dangerous,” he told me. “But there’s more glory in it than injuries, I’ll promise you that. And the pain always goes away. Sometimes you just have to wait longer than others.”
When breakfast was over, Hutton corralled the boys into a little trailer hitched to a golf cart and hauled them over to the arena. (He was legally blind, so he couldn’t drive a van.) “The Calf-Rider Express is pullin’ out!” he shouted, then turned and fixed them with a baleful glare. “Hey! I don’t need to hear a bunch of yellin’! We had enough of that foolishness last night. And don’t go jumpin’ off the trailer! That freaks me out.” Bald and gap-toothed, with bright, bewildered eyes, Hutton grew up an Army brat in England. He got deported for selling black-market cigarettes, and spent the next few decades smoking weed and paying rent, as he put it, until he found Jesus. “This hot blonde was on me to come to church,” he said. “I thought she might give me a little, but I ended up crying out thirty years of being pissed. I’ve been clean ever since.” When he wasn’t volunteering at the church, Hutton worked as a roofer, a substitute teacher, and a drug counsellor. It sometimes seemed like he’d treated someone in almost every family in his town.
Western Oklahoma is a tough place to live in the best of times. The soil is poor and full of gypsum and clay. The winds can rise to catastrophe out of a clear blue sky. In the right light, there’s a kind of grandeur to its vast, featureless sweep, where every truck stop and water tower can take on totemic power. But any sense of self-importance has long since been wrung from the local population. People age quickly here. The young men with hips cocked and thumbs hooked through belt loops turn into swaybacked old ranchers soon enough, beer guts tucked into embroidered shirts. The girls in ponytails and rhinestones weather into creased, careworn women. They know that the eyes of the world are focussed elsewhere—on Texas, perhaps—and do their best to get on with it.
Early that morning, a towering thunderhead had rumbled in from the east, stripping branches from the cottonwoods and flooding the streets of Oklahoma City. But the sky blew clear within minutes, leaving only muddy ruts behind. “They’re saying that this is going to be the next Mojave Desert if we don’t have a weather change,” Hutton said. “It’s been going on for ten or twelve years now.” The fracking industry had brought new jobs to the area—Elk City was growing fast—but without water the boom might not last long. And what with the low minimum wage and the high teen-pregnancy rate, methamphetamines and prescription-drug addiction, life was lived ever closer to the bone. Around here, the notion of childhood as a safe, protected place—a benign bubble—seemed like poor training for life. Religion and rodeo made more sense.
Rodeo camp features calf roping and bronco busting for boys; for girls, there’s barrel racing, goat tying, and breakaway roping.
When the eight-year-olds had arrived at the arena and put on their helmets and protective vests, one of the trainers gathered them around him in a circle. “We don’t do this for the money,” he told them. “We do this because the very first time we got on a bull—the first time we got bucked off and hit the ground and got up—right there we knew that this is what we were meant to be doing.” He cast his eyes around the circle, peering hard at each one of them. “God has a plan for you being here,” he said. “What you learn in bull riding you’re going to be able to apply to everyday life. When life gives you a storm, you can sit back and let it toss you wherever it wants to toss you, or you can have the confidence to know that God created you to be a winner, and to have honor and glory.”
The boys didn’t need convincing. A bucking calf seemed like the ultimate amusement-park ride to them—a bumper car and extreme coaster rolled into one. When they weren’t in line for another ride, they were practicing their moves on the Mighty Bucky: a padded barrel perched on a steel pivot and springs. I never saw a serious injury among the eight-year-olds, but plenty of boys were bawling by the time they picked themselves up off the ground. Yet they couldn’t wait for the next round. The teen-agers, if anything, were even more eager. Nearly every ride left one of them hobbling to the gate, clutching an arm or leg. I saw one boy’s cheek split open by a bull’s horn and another boy dragged across the ground like tin cans behind a bumper, then stomped on for good measure. Both were back on another bull the same day.
I thought about a playground near my house in Brooklyn, in Park Slope. A couple of years ago, it was beautifully renovated by the city, with a rock-lined stream meandering through it and an old-fashioned pump that children could crank to set the water flowing. The stream was the delight of the neighborhood for a while, thronged with kids splashing through the shallows and floating sticks down the current. Yet some parents were appalled. The rocks were a menace, they declared. The edges were too sharp, the surfaces too slippery. A child could fall and crack her skull. “I actually kept tapping them to check if they were really rocks,” one commenter wrote on the Park Slope Parents Web site. “It seemed odd to me to have big rocks in a playground.” Within two weeks, a stonemason had been brought in to grind the edges down. The protests continued. One mother called a personal-injury lawyer about forcing the city to remove the rocks. Another suggested that something be done to “soften” them. “I am actually dreading the summer because of those rocks,” still another complained.
The parents at the camp flipped this attitude on its head. They valued courage over caution, grit over sensitivity. They revelled in the raw physicality of boys. The mothers sat in the bleachers taking videos and hollering advice—“Wyatt, just ride the way Daddy taught you!” The fathers straddled the chute, leaning over their sons to cinch the rope and shove the calf into position: “Are you ready?” “Yes, sir!” “You’ve got to take the fight to him.” “Yes, sir!” “You’ve got to want it.” When the gate blew open, they leaped up on the rail and watched their sons with clenched fists and narrowed eyes. They weren’t stage parents, for the most part. They just took following your bliss to its logical extreme. “I’d let my kid do whatever he has a passion for,” one mother told me, “even if he wanted to be a piano player.”
How dangerous is bull riding? The best numbers come from a sports epidemiologist named Dale Butterwick. In 2006, when he was at the University of Calgary, Butterwick set up a registry of rodeo injuries and spent three years filling it with data from rodeo medics and riders’ self-reports. Between 1989 and 2009, he found, twenty-one contestants had died in the United States and Canada. Sixteen were bull riders, including one twelve-year-old boy. Another twenty-eight sustained “life-changing” injuries.
Butterwick’s study didn’t track the riders’ less grievous accidents—the breaks, tears, gashes, dislocations, concussions, and contusions that can occur on almost any ride. But, according to a twenty-five-year study that used data from the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, injuries tend to cluster in four areas: the head and face (sixteen per cent), the neck and back (fifteen per cent), the knees (twelve per cent), and the shoulders (twelve per cent). “It’s not if you’re gonna get hurt; it’s when,” some of the parents at the camp acknowledged. Others downplayed the risk, saying they’d rather have one bull try to kill them than eleven football players. Yet bull riders are ten times more likely than football players to be seriously injured. Theirs is the most dangerous organized sport in the world.
Butterwick’s data ended with an alarming spike: in the last two years of the study, the rate of catastrophic injury was more than double that of the twenty-year average. This came as no surprise to Cody Custer, the senior trainer at the camp. “The quality of the stock just keeps getting better,” he told me. “When we were riding, you might go to ten rodeos and maybe get one bull that bucked really hard. Now, out of a herd of thirty, twenty-two will be buckers. It’s an epidemic, really.”
Custer’s son Brett was a sixteen-year-old bull rider at the camp. He was a little stud, Custer said. “But all it takes is one time to break an egg in there—or kill a kid or paralyze him.” The Camp of Champions played it safe by rodeo standards. The boys had to wear helmets and vests, the trainers stressed caution, the livestock were somewhat less than homicidal. But at the Youth World Finals all bets would be off: the previous year, among the oldest contestants, three out of four had been bucked off.
When Custer was born, in 1965, rodeo still seemed an extension of ordinary cowboying. He joined his first roundup at the age of four, on his family’s ranch south of the Grand Canyon, and spent much of his youth riding bareback. He learned to loosen his hips and shift his weight, to roll with every pitch and yaw. He learned to ride with his feet, clamping them tight to an animal’s sides and reacting to the slightest twitch. He learned to use every inch and ounce of his lariat-thin frame, sitting tall to increase his leverage and send pressure down his legs. By the age of fourteen, he’d ridden some twenty-five hundred steer. These were castrated animals, not nearly as strong and wild as an uncut bull, which was just what he needed. “Most of them just went straight up and down,” he told me. “But my confidence got sky high and so did my skills.”
In his twenty years on the circuit, Custer had his share of injuries: a collapsed lung, several broken ribs, and a broken jaw that had to be wired shut for five weeks. He had major surgeries on both shoulders and one of his knees and suffered a string of severe concussions, the worst of which knocked him out for more than half an hour. Yet he counts himself lucky. Custer won a world championship in 1992, was elected to the Professional Bull Riders Ring of Honor in 2003, and was still walking when he retired, that same year. “I got away pretty good, all things considered,” he told me. “You probably won’t be hearing about twenty-year bull-riding careers anymore.”
Bodacious changed the way rodeo animals are bred. Before him, most bulls were a dubious commodity—worth more for beef than for bucking cowboys. A rancher might get a hundred dollars every time his bull was ridden, twice that much at big events. The riders made the real money—they were the ones that people came to see. Bodacious changed that equation. People who’d never heard of Tuff Hedeman knew the name of the bull who’d “rearranged his face,” as Hedeman’s wife later put it. After Bodacious was retired, he toured the country like a war hero, appearing in GQ and Penthouse, making personal appearances at restaurants, casinos, and car dealerships. “It was unreal,” Sammy Andrews told me. “I thought we’d sell two or three T-shirts. But we had tour buses coming around to see him.” There were Bodacious coffee mugs, belt buckles, jewelry lines, and condoms. “If a Brahman bull ever were a superstar, then Bodacious just might be,” the band Primus sang. “He’s a cream-colored, beefy-brawn, full-fledged, four-footed bovine celebrity.”
Wacey Schalla (left) and Jet Erickson practice on an oil-barrel bull. With fewer and fewer ordinary animals to practice on, the learning curve gets steeper every year.
It wasn’t long before breeders found that they didn’t really need riders to make money. As Bodacious’s brand of notoriety spread to other bulls—Wolfman, Dillinger, Asteroid, Bushwacker—ranchers began to earn more from selling sperm, swag, and licensing agreements than they did from rodeos. At events called futurities, the bulls could now compete directly against one another, carrying dummy cowboys on their backs while judges rated their bucking ability. The top bull could earn a quarter of a million dollars at a single event, and as the purses grew so did the sport’s attention to genetics. Ranchers once content to breed any bull that leaped around now turned to outcrossing and in-vitro fertilization to select specific behaviors: the dropkick, the side spin, the twisting belly roll. The result was a succession of ever more powerful, more athletic, more murderous bulls. The only question was who could ride them.
When Custer won his world championship, in 1992, he rode more than three-quarters of the bulls he drew. Last year’s world champion rode just half. The change has been especially hard on young riders. Their learning curve gets steeper every year, and there are fewer and fewer ordinary animals for them to practice on. “These kids that are eleven, twelve, thirteen years old—they’re getting on bulls that we never saw until we were pros,” Custer told me. “It’s like a phenomenal little football player being put in with a bunch of college kids who want to knock his head off.”
Custer is a hard man to rile up. The dashing young cowboy from the old videos now wears tinted glasses and button-down shirts and ends every conversation with “God bless.” But when he talks about rodeo politics you can see the old bull rider in him. Four years ago, when his son was still in junior high, Custer sent a letter to the National High School Rodeo Association asking for steers to be used rather than bulls for the smaller contestants. A number of retired rodeo stars co-signed the proposal, but the request was ignored. “The guys who are raising the bulls, most of them have dollar signs in their eyes,” Custer told me. “Their interest is not in that little boy. Their interest is in the bull.”
A couple of weeks before the Youth World Finals, I went to visit Dillon Page, the co-owner of D&H Cattle Company, in south-central Oklahoma. Page’s family has been raising livestock in the bottomland along the Washita River for three generations. When he bought his first set of bucking bulls, thirty years ago, there were a few dozen rodeo stock contractors in the country. Now there are close to a thousand. For the past few years, Page has managed the ranch with his son Hoyt Dillon, at one point winning the Professional Bull Riders Stock Contractor of the Year award for six years running. H.D., as his son is known, runs the breeding operation and shuttles the bulls to rodeos, while Dillon directs the day-to-day workings of the ranch. On the morning I visited, he’d been up since seven, haying the fields.
“We’ve got some bulls acting like queers back there,” he told me as we walked toward his truck to begin the morning feeding. “Seems to happen every time you get a weather change. A couple of bulls start ridin’ each other, then they go to fightin’, and it just turns into a blasted mess. That’s how you end up with a lot of your cripples.” Page, who is sixty-three, has the crouched, sinewy build and the flinty manner of an old deputy sheriff in a Western. He holds the small of his back as he walks and rubs his neck, which is deeply creased and baked red by the sun. As he muttered instructions to the cowboys on his property, a gold tooth flashed from time to time in his upper jaw.
Some five hundred bulls were scattered across the ranch’s fifteen hundred acres. Tawny, black, mottled, white—rodeo bulls are almost always mutts—they grazed under spreading pecans, in thirteen pastures separated by tall steel fences. The best of them could go for half a million dollars in their prime, but the ranch made even more by selling half-interests in calves. An investor might pay twenty-five thousand for a yearling, cover all its expenses and entry fees, then split the winnings with Page and his son. If all went well, the bull would get sent to thirty-five or forty rodeos a year, earning five to ten thousand in fees and up to a hundred thousand in futurities and other winnings. After eight or nine years, he’d be retired, then used to sire calves for another decade or more. A single straw of champion semen could go for upward of five thousand dollars.
When we reached the first pasture, Page jumped out of the truck to open the gate and drove over to a row of galvanized troughs. He put the truck in neutral to set it rolling slowly beside them and flipped a toggle beneath the steering wheel. This triggered an auger in back to release the feed—a mixture of cracked corn, cottonseed, soybean hulls, and dried distiller’s grain. As it poured down the length of the troughs, Page jumped out of the cab again and ran back to pull some hay from the truck bed. He scattered it around the troughs, ran back to the cab, climbed in, and drove to the next gate, then started the process all over. At one point, a big white bull came shouldering toward him, testicles hanging nearly to the ground. Page shouted and waved his arms. When that didn’t work, he bent down and picked up a dirt clod and pelted him with it. The bull stood his ground and gave a deep grunt, then shook his horns and clattered off. “You just hope they don’t decide to run over you,” Page said when he got back in.
Before he bred bulls, Page tried his hand at riding them for a few years. He was never good enough to make a career of it, he told me, but he got off easy where injuries were concerned—just a few broken bones and a ruptured spleen. Although there was that one ride, when he was seventeen or eighteen—the one that left him with three ribs broken off into his lower belly. “I was pissin’ and shittin’ blood for four days,” he said. “I don’t know if it was my bladder or my kidneys, but something wasn’t right in there.” The pain got so bad that he had a friend haul him to the emergency room in Ardmore. But the doctors kept him waiting for four or five hours, so he went back home. Two weeks later, the bleeding finally stopped. “I guess it wasn’t life-threatening,” he said.
I asked him how he would have fared on bulls like the ones he breeds now, and he laughed. “Oh, not very well, I guess. I rode some pretty good ones in my day—one of ’em, J’s Pet, hadn’t been rode in five years. I thought I’d done a pretty good deal. But he couldn’t even hold a light to some of these things that we buck today.”
Bucking bulls are like human athletes: every generation has a few that are unaccountably great. The Peyton Mannings and LeBron Jameses can’t really be reproduced or used to gauge the average level of play. It’s when you look down the bench that you start to see a pattern. “Take Stone Sober over there,” Page said. He pointed to a red bull pacing inside a trailer next to the pasture, soon to be taken to a rodeo. He was built like a middleweight wrestler, with bunched shoulders and thick veins ridging his muscles. “We’d rather have him a little bigger,” he said. “He’s probably thirteen hundred, fourteen hundred pounds—his mama was little bitty. But he can jump as high as this fence with somebody on it. He can turn back and spin and go the other way, and he has a lot of kick and a great big belly roll. Shucks, there ain’t no telling what he’s gonna do. I don’t think he knows hisself.” In the past three years, Stone Sober had bucked off twenty-two out of twenty-three riders, most of them in under four seconds.
Jadeyn Lara (left) and Shayne Spain after completing the third round of mutton busting. Spain finished third over all; Lara finished eighth. They have become friends through competing together.
An animal like that is a freak of nature, Page said. It’s a petri dish full of exotic mutations—of tics and phobias, spastic nerves and explosive rages, carefully culled and combined. The sperm from a champion sire is usually collected off-site, mixed with eggs from a proven dam, and transplanted into a rancher’s cows. It doesn’t always work. Genetic recombination is a crapshoot, and the outcome depends as much on psychology as on physiology. “Confidence plays a big part in it,” H. D. Page told me later, on the phone. “If a bull gets rode every time he pokes his head out the gate, he’ll either quit buckin’ or change his buckin’ pattern to win. Some of them just figure it’s not worth the effort, and some of them learn to enjoy their jobs. They get addicted to the adrenaline.”
The result can be as unhealthy for the bull as for the rider. When a two-thousand-pound animal leaps six feet in the air and hammers down on his back legs, things can go wrong: joints pop, tendons snap, backs get thrown out of kilter. One of the pastures on the Pages’ ranch was full of hobbled old gladiators, kept around for semen or sentiment. “This one here broke his leg at the finals,” Page said, pulling up next to a white-headed bull with a black eye patch. “Hard Twisted. Won a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars as a two-year-old, but you can’t set a broke leg. See how crooked it is?” He let the truck idle a little farther, then pointed to a big brown bull stepping gingerly beside the fence. “His leg? He broke it so bad that it drawed up. It don’t even touch the ground.” He shook his head. “I shoulda done killed him. They make the best hamburger meat there is—well muscled and lean. Ain’t nobody that’ll have better hamburger meat. But sometimes you get to thinkin’ too much and you keep ’em around when you shouldn’t.”
I asked Page if he ever wonders if things have gone too far. His son tried to ride Bodacious three times, yet here they are trying to make bulls even meaner. Is there a limit to how dangerous a bull can or should be? “I hope not,” he said. “Because I intend on making one that’s a whole lot ranker than we’ve had before.” He smirked. “You know the bad thing? We can’t breed cowboys. If you could figure out how to get a set of women and three or four sires that had all that heart and the other ingredients that it takes, then you could match the sires and the dams up like we do the bulls. Then maybe we’d have a great bull rider.”
In the meantime, there’s only one alternative: start them young.
The Taylor County Expo Center, in Abilene, must have looked like the Taj Mahal to Wacey and his friends. They’d been to a lot of rodeos by then—dusty little arenas at the edge of town, with a rickety concession stand on one side and some bleachers on the other—but never one like this. The parking lot was as big as an airport, with what looked like a giant spaceship in the middle. It had a hallway inside that went clear around it, filled with folks selling cowboy hats and rifle cases, saddle soap, tooth guards, rope rosin, and T-shirts that said things like “Mama Tried” and “The Hurrier I Go, the Behinder I Get.” When you walked down the tunnel and out into the arena, the seats went up and up on every side. The roof looked like it was five stories high. The floor was covered in a maze of pens and chutes full of livestock, with cowboys hanging off all the rails. There was even air-conditioning—at a rodeo! Imagine that.
The World Finals are really six separate competitions, each for a different age group and animal. The four-to-six-year-olds ride sheep, the seven- and eight-year-olds are on calves, the nine-to-eleven-year-olds on steers, and the rest on increasingly fearsome bulls. Each contestant rides once a day for three days, earning up to a hundred points per ride from the four judges stationed around the arena. On the fourth day, the top fifteen scorers out of the fifty in each group compete for their division championship. There are cash prizes for the highest scores every day and a big pot at the end for each champion—more than sixty thousand dollars altogether.
“A lot of this event is about the luck of the draw,” Curtis Spain, one of the event’s organizers, told me. The best buckers earn the best scores for their riders, but they’re also the most likely to toss a rider off. “We call that thinning the herd.” Back home in Forney, Texas, Spain had his own rodeo arena as well as a mechanical bull. His son Mason was one of the top eleven-year-olds in the finals, and his daughter Shayne, age seven, was an excellent mutton buster—one of only two girls in the finals. Girls could qualify for the older age groups as well, but most dropped out before that—often at their parents’ urging. “The world’s most dangerous sport is not something you really want to let your little girl do,” her father told me. “This is Shayne’s farewell tour.”
The first round was rough on Spain’s kids, as it was on the boys from Oklahoma. All of them rode well but drew sluggish animals, earning mediocre scores. Trigger was the exception. He drew one of the feistiest calves in the pen—a big black Holstein—but got bucked off right before the buzzer. “He came out and took two big blows and then started lopin’,” Trigger told me the next morning. “The second blow put me over on the side, and it’s really hard to stay on when he’s lopin’ and bouncin’ like that.” I told him that I was sure he’d do better this time, but he didn’t look convinced. “Hopefully,” he said, picking at his chaps.
“The Star-Spangled Banner” was blaring over the loudspeakers by then—a taped version by LeAnn Rimes, sounding like a country girl who’d just walked out on her worthless lover. Over by the chutes, the mutton busters were getting ready to start the second round. Shayne Spain leaned against a rail and glanced up at Jadeyn Lara, the only other girl in the finals. Shayne was a year older and half a head taller, with a gap in her front teeth. Her stringy blond hair fell loose across her shirt—her brother’s, which she’d worn for good luck. Jadeyn had on a pink vest that said “Ridin’ Dirty” and pink chaps stitched with dollar signs—her nickname was J. Money. She’d positioned herself at the highest point in the arena, on a platform above the center chute, and was kneeling there with her head lifted high, like the figurehead on a ship’s prow. She and Shayne had both dominated their local rodeo circuits—Shayne in north-central Texas and Jadeyn in the southeast—and both wanted badly to be the first girl to win the finals. “The boys hate it,” Curtis Spain told me. “They hate losing to a girl. But little girls develop faster than little boys, and Shayne is fearless, man. She likes rubbing their noses in it.”
Sheep aren’t all that into bucking. Truth be told, they don’t like to run that much, either. It takes a sharp spur and a clanging cowbell to get most of them moving, and even then they’re a pretty smooth, well-cushioned ride. Still, the mutton busters found ways to fall off. Some lost their grip on the wool and keeled over sideways. Others held on tight and pulled their mounts down on top of them. One or two hit the arena wall and got peeled off, or flipped head over heels when their sheep came to a dead stop. Shayne and Jadeyn both managed to hang on, but Shayne got the better draw. Her sheep had been sheared recently, so it was harder to hold but also faster and jumpier. She scored a sixty-four, for fifth place over all. Jadeyn started off well, or at least upright, then slowly began to tip over. By the time the buzzer sounded, she was hanging off her sheep at three o’clock, yet she never fell: fifty-four points—enough for eighteenth place.
A junior bull rider loaded in the bucking chute in the final moments before a ride. Contestants at the Youth Bull Riders World Finals range in age from four to nineteen.
By the time the calf riders’ turn came, the crowd was getting giddy. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” was playing on the P.A., with a ragged chorus of bleats and bellows behind it. As the contestants lined up, the m.c. introduced each one with a verbal drumroll: age, home town, championships, and sponsors. Tiger Mart, B&B Towing, Pop’s Honey Fried Chicken. A lot of the boys already had stage names: Dusty Rhodes, Colt Christie, Fate Snyder, Tater Tot Wilcox. Their parents knew that rodeo is one part extreme sport, one part show business. Some of the riders looked as gaudy as rodeo clowns in their embroidered shirts and lizard-skin boots, crested Roman helmets, and vests that read “Cowkids for Christ.” But it was up to the calves to make them look good.
Wacey drew a big white Holstein with mean-looking eye patches. The calf looked promising at first, but proved to be a halfhearted bucker. It was all Wacey could do to score sixty points, leaving him in thirteenth place—just enough to make the championship round, if he rode well the next day. Jet drew one of the rankest calves in Abilene: a twisting, half-spinning specimen who’d bucked off his rider the day before. For a second or two, Jet looked loose and in control. Then he leaned a touch too far forward, the calf changed directions and kicked up its back legs, and just like that the boy was tumbling through the air. A few minutes later, Trigger met the same fate. He came out looking stiff and off center, got thrown to one side, and bounced off just before the buzzer. Both boys got up crying but dried their tears by the time they reached the gate. They would not qualify for the final round.
“He hit the ground trying,” Jet’s father told me afterward. “That calf would dang sure have been hard for any kid to ride.” Trigger’s dad was less philosophical. “He’s in a slump,” he said. “First time I’ve seen it in his life. It’s just really frustrating—he’s got so much natural talent. When he’s locked in, he can’t be beat, but he’s been riding like an average kid. Those first two calves, he could ride those with his eyes closed.”
The next morning, before the national anthem, one of the event directors made his way to the microphone. A tall, barrel-chested Texan named Danny Malone, he worked as a lineman northwest of Fort Worth and had a sixteen-year-old boy in the Open Bull competition. It had been brought to his attention, he announced, that some parents had been acting inappropriately—using foul language and “whuppin’ on” boys who’d been bucked off. “Well, I’m here to tell you that that will not be tolerated,” he said. “It’s the reason we have U.S. Marshals and Texas Rangers here. If you are caught, you will be asked to leave this property and you will not be allowed back.” He paused, then added, almost beseechingly, “Guys, come on! They’re young and they’re trying their best. If they’re not—hey, we don’t know what’s going on in their heads. Maybe they’re just having an off day. Now, I know I’m not their parent. I can’t tell you what to do with your kids in private. But if I see you whuppin’ on them I will not tolerate it. And, yes, I know who you are.”
Most parents at the World Finals weren’t used to seeing their kids bucked off, much less three out of four times. At one point, I watched one of the fourteen-year-olds leave the arena after getting thrown off his second bull. He sat down, took off his helmet, and smashed it into his forehead. Then he did it again, methodically, five times in a row. “That’s gotta hurt,” someone next to me said. It was the first time I’d heard that at a rodeo. When I asked Malone for a rundown of the week’s injuries, he mentioned “the usual bumps and bruises”—rodeo-speak for everything from deep lacerations to hobbling hematomas. Then he went on to list a dislocated hip, a fractured eye socket, and a stock contractor whose incisors had been knocked in by a swinging gate. “We had to put his teeth in saline and send him to the trauma center,” Malone said.
Malone’s son Austen was one of the best riders in Abilene, as well as one of the most injury-prone. A lanky, sweet-faced kid with long curly blond hair, he’d had several concussions, broken arms, and a dislocated neck. He’d shattered his right leg so badly that the tibia and the fibula were snapped off completely, the foot turned around backward. The previous year, Austen had spent a week in the hospital after a bull jumped on his chest. Yet he’d come back to win the World Finals. “I worry about it. I do,” his father told me. “We discuss it all the time. If something serious happens in the arena and God calls his number—if a fatality happens to my son bull riding—it’ll be a struggle. I’m not going to lie to you. But I’ll know that my son will be at peace. That he died happy and enjoying what he was doing.”
A few minutes later, the mutton busters came out to kick off the third round. Shayne was just seven points out of the lead, but her father didn’t have much faith in the sheep she’d drawn: its last rider had scored only fifty-four points. Shayne’s only hope was to spur it out of its torpor, working its sides with both heels, though she’d have a harder time keeping her balance. “I told her to let fly the leg,” Curtis said. “Just let fly. Get all the points you can.” The tactic worked. The sheep pelted across the arena with sudden vigor, the girl kept her seat, and the ride earned sixty-two points. “You know what they say,” the m.c. shouted. “Sometimes the best cowboy for the job is a cowgirl!” Shayne was now in third place for the championship round. Even better, she’d outscored her rival, Jadeyn, who hadn’t been as lucky in her draw and was stuck back in eighth. “We’re making our way up!” Curtis told me. “We’re like a shark, circling, circling, looking for a chance.”
Wacey was in a tougher spot, twenty-one points out of first. He needed both a great ride and some help from the leaders to win. When I found him on the catwalk, waiting for his third ride, his brow was furrowed and his eyes fierce with concentration. “Just thinking about the business of what I’ve got to do,” he said. At his parents’ ranch, in Eakly, Oklahoma, he’d spent hours watching bull-riding videos to perfect his form. He’d been working on keeping his free hand high to help control his upper body, and his other hand pulled tight against the rope. When the calf kicked up, he needed to lean forward off its haunches, and when it broke to the side, he had to keep his butt down, centered and correct. “Riding bulls is such a mind game,” his father, Luke, told me. “You can buck yourself off just as easily as anything. But he’s a little young for that. The truth is he’s on top of his game.”
Earlier that morning, the third-round draw had been posted on the wall of the tunnel to the arena. Luke peered at it for a second, then nodded with a tight grin. For once, Wacey had a bucker. Calf No. 99992 had tossed his rider on the first day and hadn’t been ridden the second, so he’d be fresh. “That’s good,” Luke said. “He can score some points on that one after those sorry calves he’s had.” His wife, Nikki, wasn’t so sure. She’d seen what happened to Jet and Trigger. “I was kind of hoping for something a little more average,” she said, her face pale and drawn behind her shades. Wacey, though, had no doubts: he wanted that calf.
A former champion who is angry about the breeding of fiercer and fiercer bulls says, “You probably won’t be hearing about twenty-year bull-riding careers anymore.” Riders know that injury is a matter of when, not if.
When his turn finally came, he punched his helmet and climbed into the chute. He clamped his legs around the calf’s bony, squirming back, rubbed some rosin into his rope, and wrapped it tight around his fist. “Ride him like a champ, Wace!” Jet yelled, from the catwalk above him. Trigger was there, too, grinning down at him. Then the gate flew open and the calf charged out, leaping and flexing across the arena like a steel spring shot from an old tractor. He twisted one way and the other, jackknifed in the air and rolled his belly, but could not get the rider off. Wacey matched him rhythm for rhythm, free arm waving and heels flying, spurring him on even harder. When the buzzer sounded and he’d tumbled to his feet, he gave one of the bullfighters a high five and ran off. A little later, the m.c. announced the judges’ tally: 74.5—the highest score for a calf rider all week.
Wacey would go on to win the round and finish the rodeo in style, riding his last calf cleanly for a sixty-two. It wasn’t quite enough to win the championship: his calf was game but underpowered, and he finished third. But his record from the previous round would stand. Shayne ended on an even better note, winning the last round. She finished third in her group as well. She and Wacey each earned a little more than a thousand dollars for their efforts—enough to cover their families’ costs and perhaps a dinner at Applebee’s on the way home. By the time the judges had cut their checks and passed them out in the hall, the Expo Center was nearly empty, its booths packed up and the parking lot deserted. The other parents had headed home hours ago. Their boys had a long road ahead of them, and it would soon be past their bedtime.
Watching the medics put away their ice packs and syringes, painkillers and rolls of bandages, I thought about the last time Tuff Hedeman drew Bodacious. It was December of 1995, just seven weeks after the bull had nearly killed him. Hedeman had lost twenty-five pounds and his body was still healing, but he’d managed to qualify for the National Finals Rodeo anyway. Like Cody Custer and Lane Frost—the hero of the movie “8 Seconds,” who was killed by a bull named Takin’ Care of Business in 1989—Hedeman belonged to a generation of riders who prided themselves on never backing down. “They just had something the guys don’t have today,” Dillon Page told me. “They were raised up in the country and they got on bulls to win.” Yet when Hedeman drew Bodacious again, in the sixth round of the finals, he knew what he had to do.
“I thought at first that I might have done something wrong the last time,” he told me. “But when I watched a video of the ride, the fact is that I was in perfect position for a bull of that calibre with that bucking pattern. There was nothing I could do. If I’d tried to lean back to avoid his head, I would have been stretched out vertically, and when his back legs hit the ground the force of the downdraft would have jerked me off. That’s why most people really feared him. He was a great bull, but he got to the point where you could ride him correctly and still nearly get killed.” And so, when Hedeman’s turn came to ride that night at the National Finals Rodeo, he climbed into the chute and onto Bodacious’s back. But when the gate swung open, Hedeman let the bull charge through without him. Then he tipped his hat to him and left the arena. Three rounds later, Scott Breding put on his hockey mask and gave Bodacious his final ride.
Hedeman wouldn’t trade his bull-riding experiences for anything. The closest he’s come to that feeling has been flying in an F-16 fighter jet. “It’s just this explosion of adrenaline,” he told me. “It’s indescribable.” Still, when one of his sons started to get interested in the sport a few years ago, Hedeman took him into his trophy room and showed him some pictures of the guys he used to ride with. “I told him, ‘Just look at them. Those are the best guys that rode every year.’ Then I pointed at a few and said, ‘I watched this guy die, this guy die, and this guy die. This guy’s in a wheelchair and this guy’s in a wheelchair.’ For me, ninety per cent of it was good. I never had a life-threatening injury. But the last thing I would ever want my son to do is ride bulls. It’s insane.”
His son never did take up bull riding, but for other boys Hedeman’s story was just the sort of cautionary tale that hooked them on the sport for life. At the Camp of Champions, I’d watched a succession of stiff-backed and patched-together men walk up to the microphone and, as the Oklahoma sun flamed and guttered on the horizon, do their best to warn the boys about what lay ahead—what a brutal, debilitating world this could be. Yet the result was only to earn more converts. “Blessed be the Lord, oh, my soul,” as the cowboy preachers sang. “For I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
On the last afternoon, a cattle trough was hauled under the tent and twenty or thirty boys lined up to be baptized in it. Andy Taylor had asked the campers if any of them were ready to be born again, and Trigger, Jet, and Wacey all raised their hands. When the time came, though, only Trigger and Wacey went down easily. Jet, stripped to his swim trunks, climbed in willingly enough but then seemed to change his mind. He pushed his feet up against the end of the trough and gripped the rim tight with his hands. For just a moment, he hung there like a spider perched above a water glass. Then one of the church elders cradled his head and slowly, quiveringly, Jet let himself go under. ♦
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