Bull riding doubles as rodeo’s most celebrated and dangerous event. This is the story of the bull that nearly killed me in South Dakota.
There wasn’t a cloud in that South Dakota sky. Peering over my black boots and silver spurs, I studied the blue canvas as I flew through the air, cartwheeling toward what I was certain would be a horrific landing.
It was a summer Sunday afternoon, and my friend Luke and I had made the drive up to a bull riding practice pen just beyond Nebraska’s northern border. To be bluntly honest, both of us were rank amateurs when it came to rodeo’s most famous and notoriously dangerous event. I had ridden some in Kansas several months prior and more recently logged a few rides at another practice pen near Omaha. Luke was even more inexperienced.
Most all of my previous rides gave the strong hint that maybe this wasn’t the sport for me. I had been one-bounced (bucked off right out of the chute) more times than I cared to count, and the closest I had gotten to an eight-second ride was halfway. In the process, I had been stomped, dragged, and chased out of arenas by furious, flailing beasts – some of which weighed every bit of one ton – hell-bent on making sure I never sank another set of spurs in their flanks again.
Yet after all of that, there I was on a splendid Midwest weekend, that damn Dakota blue rotating out of my field of vision as I sailed like an oblong mortar toward the dirt below.
Like the saying goes: If you’re going to be stupid, you better be tough.
While they certainly weren’t stupid, I had met a lot of tough cowboys and cowgirls during my visits to practice pens. Folks like them are the real McCoys, young men and women who make their hard-earned living working ranches in some of our nation’s loneliest corners. To these true Westerners, rodeo events like riding rough stock, cutting cattle, and roping runaways are more than just sport; they’re an extension of their beloved way of life, one that’s fading into a memory.
Looking back on my short stint as a bull rider, I realize it was the people, the living lineage of America’s frontier days, that kept me coming back for more despite all my better judgment.
I remember watching a cowboy drive in bulls from pasture before one practice session in Nebraska. Using nothing more than a whip he cracked on the ground, he neatly filed the ornery herd into formation and marched them into the holding pen. The cowpoke then swung over the fence, hopped into the front of the rider line, and picked out the rankest bull in the whole lot.
What happened next was a bull riding master class. He danced with that overgrown bovine for what must have been 15 seconds. Deciding he had enough, the cowboy smoothly stepped off, vaulted over the nearest corral panel, and cracked open a Budweiser tallboy from a nearby cooler. You couldn’t have scripted the whole thing better for one of those Ram Trucks rodeo commercials if you tried.
Everything he was as a bull rider, I most certainly wasn’t.
The South Dakota bull that had me hurtling toward an uncertain fate was supposed to break left out of the gate. That’s what the contractor told me at least. As I slowly dropped into the bucking chute, gingerly resting my boots on the rails and moving into position on the bull’s back, I visualized myself following along with his initial leftward lurch. Once my right hand was in place and the rope was tightened to my satisfaction, I clamped my teeth down on my mouthpiece, leaned forward and nodded my head.
The gate opened. The bull, for whatever godforsaken reason, decided to buck directly toward the opposite side of the arena.
Immediately thrown off balance and without the skill or experience to recover, I felt my center of gravity shift to the rear with the bull’s second forward leap. I lost my grip on the rope. Now untethered and falling backward, the animal had me right where he wanted me. Lifting his hind legs, he hit me squarely on the small of my back with his tail head, launching me into an arc that Luke later claimed topped out at 10 feet.
As I completed my half-cartwheel, I heard the contractor let out a panicked yell. I landed on the crown of my helmet, immediately tasting a mouthful of dirt mixed with the peculiarly sweet, internally emanating flavor that has always accompanied particularly hard shots to my head.
Having heard a crunch, I momentarily laid motionless in a hazy cloud of dust, analyzing my body. My head was in flames, and my back felt like it had been thrown into a trash compactor. Other than that, my senses seemed intact, and I could feel all my extremities. I slowly got to my feet and hobbled stiffly to the rail.
It took me a few months to fully recover from that ride, and the accounts I got from those who watched it told me I was really lucky. The contractor’s face was ghostly pale when he came over to check on me. Luke summed up his thoughts on the painful drive back south: “I thought you were dead.”
If you are going to play cards with the devil, you best know when to fold or walk away winners. My spurs are still in my gear bag, right where I left them that Sunday in South Dakota.
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