INTRO PART GLORY · Roger Fidler, Rekha Sharma. Close Print Back 7 DIGITAL NEWSBOOK 8 Contents...

7 8Close Print ViewSearchContentsBack DI G I TAL NE WS B O O K

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YD I G I TA L N E W S B O O K

SERIES WRITTEN BY

KEVIN SIMPSONPHOTOS BY

CYRUS McCRIMMON

PAINGLORYThe most dangerous of rodeo events, bull riding, is enjoying

unprecedented popularity as

America’s “original extreme sport.” But for rodeo cowboys,

the ride often comes with a heavy price.

&


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YTHE DENVER POST ©2004 PAIN&GLORY INTRODUCTION 2

About the series

The modern American rodeo blends traditional showmanship and legendary machismo with the adrenaline-driven athleticism of extreme sport. The Denver Post’s three-part series (originally

published Dec. 7-9, 2003) explores the world of the cowboy, where mere seconds can mean the difference between death and life, pain and glory.

INTRODUCTION 18 [GRAPHIC] Bull-riding injuries

8 [GRAPHIC] Eight seconds of spins and bucks

PART ONE 58 A world of hurt

8 Crashing to earth head-first

8 ‘Don’t cry on my shoulder’

8 Lethal force vs. stubbornness

8 The rough trail to the top

8 Launching a new life

PART TWO 188 Spurred by a dream

8 Giving up football for bulls

8 Two years’ winnings: $40,000

8 Broken bones, unbroken pride

8 ‘I can’t sissy out now’

8 All the dirt they can eat

8 Assistance Funds

PART THREE 318 Riding into the big time

8 NASCAR shows the way

8 Cashing in on both circuits

8 [GRAPHIC] On the road

8 A small bull bodes trouble

8 No place for prima donnas

8 Safety helmet as mind game

8 ‘He can’t feel anything’

8 Praying and waiting

8 ‘I won’t give up ’til it’s over’

SURVEY 448 Please let us know what you

think about this series and the Digital Newsbook concept.

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE COVERJason Legler of Eaton rides Red

Alert in last-day action at the PBR World Finals. An alternate at the

finals, he did not expect to have an opportunity to ride.

THE POST TEAMReporter:

Kevin Simpson [email protected]

Photographer: Cyrus McCrimmon

[email protected]

PAIN&GLORYCopyright©2004 The Denver Post, 1560 Broadway, Denver, CO 80202

All rights reserved. No part of this Digital Newsbook may be used or

reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the

case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews.

ON THE WEBYou can find related stories and

other special projects at:

www.denverpost.com

DIGITAL NEWSBOOKSThis Digital Newsbook was

designed and produced for The Post at the Kent State University Institute for CyberInformation.

More information about this project can be found at:

www.ici.kent.eduDesigners:

Roger Fidler, Rekha Sharma

http://www.denverpost.com

http://www.ici.kent.edu


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Source: Justin Sportsmedicine Team The Denver Post / Jonathon Moreno, AP Photo / Victoria Arocho

THE DENVER POST ©2004 PAIN&GLORY INTRODUCTION 3

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Bull-riding injuriesRoughstock riders are more likely to get hurt than participants in any other rodeo event — and about twice as likely to suffer injury as football players. Despite its growing popularity, the sport has been slow to develop and adopt protective equipment that can withstand its dangers, which pose particular risk of head injuries.

Percentage of injuries per eventAlthough roughstock events — bareback, saddle bronc and bull riding — account for nearly 90 percent of rodeo injuries, bull riding alone produces nearly half of them.

Overall injuriesThe vast majority of rodeo injuries involve trauma to the head. Still, the use of helmets remains controversial for both practical and cultural reasons.

Protective gearA. The cowboy hat offers only slight protection for the skull. The helmet gives better protection for the head, face and jaw, but remains optional and controversial.

B. Protective vest shields the torso and has become standard equipment.

C. Chaps offer a layer of protection against the bull’s horns and hooves.

D. The glove protects the hand and fingers.

E. Boots have a special heel to keep spurs in place. The spurs help the cowboy stay in position on the bull.

Concussions are rated by how severely they affect a person’s senses, memory and thinking abilities.Grade one: Momentary confusion, no loss of consciousness, symptoms subside and mental status returns to normal in less than 15 minutes.

Grade two: Momentary confusion, no loss of consciousness, mental status and symptoms remain abnormal for more than 15 minutes.

Grade three: Any loss of consciousness, from a few seconds to several minutes.

Top five injuries

1. Head2. Shoulder3. Face4. Knee5. Elbow

A

B

C

D

E

What causes a concussionA blow to the head can cause the brain to jerk, twist or bump the skull. There is about one-quarter inch of space between the brain and the skull.

1. A blow is delivered to a rider’s head.

2. The brain accelerates in the cranial vault.

3. Damage occurs when the brain strikes the skull and rotates.

Team roping0.96%

Bull riding48.77%

Calf roping3.06% Steer

wrestling8.37%

Saddle bronc riding15.58%

Bareback riding15.58%

Concussion

Shoulder injury

Chest/rib/lung injury

Ankle fracture

Knee ligaments

48.99%

9.23%

6.52%

5.73%

3.82%


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Source: Professional Bull Riders The Denver Post / Jonathon Moreno, Photos by John Epperson

THE DENVER POST ©2004 PAIN&GLORY INTRODUCTION 4

Eight seconds of spins and bucksIn a two-day PBR competition, the top 45 bull riders ride once the first night and once the second night. The 15 riders with the highest total score on two bulls qualify for a third round of competition that takes place after intermission on the second night. The overall event winner is the bull rider with the highest three-ride total.

PointsThe total possible score for a bull ride is 100 points. Half of that total is based on the performance of the bull and how difficult he is to ride. The other half is determined by the rider’s ability to match the moves of the bull beneath him.

The bullJudges look for bulls with speed, power, drop in the front end, direction changes and body rolls. The more of these characteristics a bull displays during a ride, the higher the mark.

DisqualificationA bull rider can be disqualified and receive no score even if he stays aboard his designated bull for eight seconds. A bull rider is disqualified if he touches the bull or himself with his free hand during the ride or if his riding hand comes free from the bull rope at any point.

Barrelmen and bull fightersThe barrelman’s duty is to entertain the crowd during the “down time” when bulls are being loaded into the chutes and the riders are getting ready. Bull fighters, formerly known as “rodeo clowns” because of their makeup and comic costumes, have in many events dropped the traditional trappings. Their job is to distract the bull and protect a rider who has been bucked off or has dismounted after a successful ride.

Rules of the rideA. The clock starts when the bull’s shoulder or hip crosses the plane of the bucking chute.

B. The bull rider must maintain constant control and good body position.

C. Spurring the bull is not required, but extra “style points” are awarded for doing so.

D. The bull rider must hold on with only one hand.

E. The clock stops when the bull rider’s hand comes out of the rope or he touches the ground. The bull rider must stay aboard the bull for eight seconds or he earns no score.

AB

C

D

E


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PAIN&GLORYA DENVER POST SPECIAL REPORT: PART ONE

In dusty arenas across the country, bull riders test muscle and mettle, wagering their futures on an eight-second ride.

But the odds favor the bull.

A world of hurt

Jerome Davis’ wife, Tiffany, then his fiancée, was in the stands when he was paralyzed in a fall in 1998. Friends since childhood, they’d planned that year to fit a wedding and a one-day honeymoon between rodeo events. Though Jerome “tried to run her off,” he says, they married about seven months after his injury, and have not spent a night apart since.


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YTHE DENVER POST ©2004 PAIN&GLORY PART ONE 6

The lights went out for Jerome Davis when the bull beneath him sud-denly spun back, jerked

him down hard and hammered his jaw with a head-butt. Davis’ gloved hand unraveled from the rope. The bull bucked again, shucking the cowboy, who drifted to an awkward landing on the dirt f loor of the Fort Worth arena.

He awoke on a stretcher behind the chutes and immediately sensed something strange. He looked up at his buddy Tater Porter, another pro bull rider, who stood leaning over him.

“Take my glove off,” Davis said.“I already did,” Porter replied.Eight seconds from glory and a

heartbeat from disaster.Bull riding has always been the

big draw at rodeos, the grand finale in which a confluence of courage, danger and violent struggle thrilled rural American grandstands.

Now it rides a gathering wave of popularity born of the collision between the cowboy culture and contemporary influences. Mod-ern marketing has melded icons of the American West with the hip — and profitable — demographic of extreme sport.

Television, rock ’n’ roll and big money have energized a Western tradition, rebranded it and breath-lessly promoted it as “the most dan-gerous eight seconds in sports.”

The claim rings as authentic as the cowboys who ride.

The percentage of “exposures” resulting in injury for roughstock events — bull riding, bareback and saddle bronc — is five times

greater than football, more than six times greater than wrestling and nearly 12 times greater than ice hockey. And bull riding consis-tently ranks as the riskiest of the roughstock events.

But despite the well-documented hazards of the sport, its organizers have been slow to develop protec-tive gear such as helmets and man-date their use.

Research has lagged on the forces at work in the arena — no one has calculated exactly how hard a bull can stomp on a cowboy’s head, for instance — and so no one has developed a sport-specific, tried-and-true headgear. But there’s an even more imposing obstacle to protection: the culture.

Consider the first law of bull riding, often repeated by aficiona-dos with obvious pride: It’s not a question of whether you’ll get hurt — just when and how bad.

“It’s unfortunate that the sport is so dangerous, but that’s what’s sell-ing it,” says Randy Bernard, CEO of Professional Bull Riders, the top-flight tour whose purses and pro-motional genius have helped drive the sport into the mainstream.

The separate tours run by PBR and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association have trans-formed the sport into a potentially lucrative career that already has minted a handful of dusty million-aires. Cowboys chase the dream from all over.

“I love bull riding. Even though it broke my neck, and my wheelchair can be

aggravating as hell, I love it.”— Jerome Davis, former professional bull rider


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A 10-year-old Colorado boy plasters his bedroom wall with posters of his heroes and clings to bulls with every ounce of his 57 pounds. A high school prodigy on the cusp of his 18th birthday promises his girlfriend that, one day, he’ll ride them to riches.

Tough guys in the self-pro-claimed “cowboy capital” of Ste-phenville, Texas, knock them-selves out — literally — following the footsteps of the bull-riding legends that live in their midst. A former Colorado high school champion, now turned pro, criss-crosses the country in a desperate attempt to reach the PBR’s World Finals.

Along the way, all of them pay a price.

Crashing to earth head-first

Behind the wheel of his four-wheel-drive utility cart, Jerome Davis peers out from beneath his black cowboy hat and points to an undersized black bull milling among several others on his hun-dred-acre spread.

A smile creeps across his face.“He’s pushing 17 years old now,”

Davis drawls, “but I ain’t ever gonna sell him. I used to get on him about every day after school. He was pretty bucky.”

For a moment, nostalgia hangs in the North Carolina air with Davis’ recollection of himself as a boy in love with that eight-sec-ond rodeo thrill ride, a sensation so wonderfully addictive that he

Two thousand pounds of angry bull dump Dan Henricks of Logan, Okla., during the Professional Bull Riders World Finals in Las Vegas last month. The PBR circuit popularized bull riding as “the original extreme sport,” drawing a new generation into its thrills, its mystique — and its risks.


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never imagined himself doing anything else.

There is different work now. Davis fires up his cart, rattles down a hill and onto the two-lane blacktop road that leads to a cen-tury-old white ranch house with a green tin roof. He pulls into the driveway and cruises past the bull-riding practice barrel sus-pended by ropes near the garage and comes to a stop just a few feet from his back door.

He slides out of the cart and into his wheelchair.

At 31, Davis has become one of the leading stock contractors pro-

viding bucking bulls for pro com-petition, but it’s a second career that arrived far sooner than he hoped.

At 25, he ranked among the best bull riders in the world — some say among the best in decades — before his 1998 wreck at Fort Worth. He crashed to earth head-first, with mixed results. The impact did no damage to his head beyond a slight concussion. But it fractured and dislocated two ver-tebrae at the base of his neck, leav-ing him paralyzed from the chest down and with limited use of his hands.

Now, on the property south of

Greensboro that once belonged to his grandparents, he raises buck-ing bulls for the next generation of riders. It’s his lifeline to a sport that has always lured adrenaline junkies with its intrinsic rewards and now also offers millions in prize money.

“I’m infected with it,” Davis says. “I love bull riding. Even though it broke my neck, and my wheelchair can be aggravating as hell, I love it.”

He arrived on the pro bull-rid-ing scene at a seminal moment in the early 1990s, just as the sport recognized its stand-alone stay-

Looking out the front door beyond an American flag sticker, Davis was loading from his wheel chair into his 4-wheeler that he uses to navigate around his ranch.


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ing power and began its break from traditional rodeo, which also includes roping, riding and steer-wrestling events.

But some things haven’t changed. The redefined cowboy remains immersed in core tradi-tional traits of his sport — perse-verance, independence, self-reli-ance, faith and, perhaps most of all, danger.

A 2,000-pound bull. A rider usually well under 6 feet and rarely heavier than 175. Force and impact of hoof on human f lesh so far has been measured mostly by the tally of concussions, broken bones and worse.

Twenty-two years ago, some sports medicine pioneers backed by the Justin Boots company be-gan to treat rodeo injuries the way trainers long had been treat-ing athletes in more mainstream sports. They also began to count.

The resulting database, virtu-ally the only extensive statistical analysis in American professional rodeo, sketches a 20-year pattern of the dangers.

J. Pat Evans, an orthopedic sur-geon and former Dallas Cowboys team doctor who helped launch the effort in 1981, remembers the early resistance from cowboys who had no use for doctors — especially those who counseled them to give up their passion.

But the Justin group gradually earned trust by convincing its clientele that the goal was to help them return to action as quickly — and safely — as possible.

“It took about two years,” Evans recalls. “Then, I’d get home from

the hospital, the phone would ring, and it would be one of the guys saying, ‘I had two six- packs, and it still hurts. What do I do?”’

Bull riding has always account-ed for the highest percentage of rodeo injuries, but that figure jumped from 41 percent in the first five years of the study to 51 percent in the five-year stretch ending in 2000. One explanation for the shift: These days, they breed the bulls better than they breed the cowboys.

Genetic advances over that period have taken the breeding of bucking stock out of the trial-and-error stage and moved it toward a more precise process for pro-ducing bulls that are increasingly “rank” — the cowboy term for difficult to ride.

The Justin database isn’t per-fect, as its collectors admit.

Early coverage among more than 600 PRCA rodeos nationwide was spotty, although coverage gradually increased to 32 percent of rodeo performances in 2000.

Generally speaking, the study covers the better performers at the better competitions. There’s no way to gauge injuries among less skilled cowboys at the thousands of minor rodeos and informal “jackpot” events that spring up at bars and arenas across the coun-try. Also, Evans says, the reporting didn’t isolate instances of paraly-sis or even list all deaths.

“We were interested in things that were positive, that we could do something about,” he says. “We were looking for trends to help prevent injuries and reduce the numbers.”

Don Andrews, executive direc-tor of the Justin team, says that 14 cowboys died over the first 20 years of the study at the selected PRCA events. Cervical spine frac-tures accounted for less than 3 percent of major injuries over the 20 years.

“It’s amazing to me we don’t have a higher number of major injuries and fatalities considering the risk and exposure,” Andrews says.

Although severe spinal injury and paralysis may result in a rela-tively small percentage of cases based on today’s available data-bases, the potential for such cata-strophic accidents was illustrated in a 1996 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC examined bull-riding-

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Bull-riding injuriesRoughstock riders are more likely to get hurt than participants in any other rodeo event — and about twice as likely to suffer injury as football players.

Click here for an information graphic about bull-riding injuries.


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related brain and spinal cord inju-ries in Louisiana during 1994-95 and found five cases of central ner-vous system trauma. Three of the bull riders were age 17 or younger, and two others were in their 20s.

But the Justin numbers have remained the basis for many studies on rodeo injuries, largely because few researchers can find funding to do extensive original research.

One who did is Michael Mey-ers, director of the Human Per-formance Research Center at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas. In 1990, he studied 156 col-lege rodeo athletes — many of whom already had obtained pro-fessional standing. Overall, Mey-ers and his colleagues found rodeo athletes faced an 89 percent prob-ability of injury over the course of a 10-event season.

“Actually,” says Meyers, “that may be a little conservative. These athletes have ephemeral response to pain, so you’ve got to take into account that some injuries are not even reported.”

By comparison, college football reported a 47 percent probability of injury.

When Meyers’ findings are compared with other NCAA injury statistics, an even sharper con-trast emerges. The percentage of athletic “exposures” resulting in injury is far greater for rough-stock events — bull riding, bare-back riding and saddle bronc rid-ing — than mainstream contact sports like football, wrestling and ice hockey.

Although organizations like the PBR advance the notion that

today’s bull riders use modern training techniques for condition-ing, Meyers’ results — and some telling anecdotal evidence at this year’s PBR World Finals — suggest that cowboys are slow to adopt the ways of the finely tuned athlete.

“A large percentage do abso-lutely nothing to precondition for rodeo,” Meyers says, capsulizing his recent findings. “They believe in playing themselves into shape like old baseball players coming to spring training.”

Some top riders underscore that point. After winning the PBR event in Las Vegas, rookie rider Jody Newberry fields a question about the new breed of bull rider who employs modern condition-ing methods.

“True confession, right here,” Newberry says with a sheepish smile. “I don’t exercise.”

Justin McBride, one of the PBR’s top riders this season, has

just come off broken ribs and a punctured lung to compete in Las Vegas. But he, too, laughs off the idea that conditioning played a role in his largely successful return.

“You see a lot of young guys who are more athlete than cowboy,” McBride says. “I’m a cowboy.”

‘Don’t cry on my shoulder’

Born in Colorado Springs, while his parents were stationed at Fort Carson, but reared in NASCAR country among his family’s deep North Carolina roots, Jerome Davis nonetheless grew up all cowboy.

On the rodeo circuit, he skirted perceived anti-Eastern prejudice from judges by claiming his home as Odessa, Texas — where he attended college on a rodeo schol-arship — until he’d established his reputation and a place in the

Jason Legler of Eaton, shown at the PBR event in Springfield, Mo., is among a few pro cowboys who wear helmets — on occasion.


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PRCA’s prestigious National Finals Rodeo.

Only then did he list his home-town as Archdale, N.C., where his family raised cattle and quarter horses and still lives clustered in the tiny hamlet south of Greens-boro. In 1995, he became the first bull rider from east of the Missis-sippi to become a world champion when he won the PRCA title.

“I paid my dues like any kid,” Davis says. “If you go and ride the rank ones, before long they’ve got to pay you.”

Bull riding paid Davis well as he became a dominant force on the PRCA circuit and then helped launch the PBR, which has since become the sport’s most lucrative tour.

But in March 1998, bull riding took something back when he was thrown off the aptly named bull Knock ’Em Out John.

The resulting paralysis robbed him of a blossoming career, stripped him of the ability to do what he loved most and, perhaps worst of all, com-promised the rugged independence that had carried him so far.

He never blamed the bull, never second-guessed the way he rode him, never complained.

“The way I approached him, it just worked out that the way that bull bucked and my riding style clashed,” he says. “I never ana-lyzed it.”

Like most cowboys, he admits to a low tolerance for whining. There’s

even a gentle twang when he reminds his wife not to complain. “Don’t cry on my shoulder,” he tells her. “You’ll rust my spurs.”

The qualities routinely attrib-uted to the American cowboy have all surfaced in Davis’ life, a micro-cosm of a Western ethos some-times written off as myth.

“He’s always been so inde-pendent,” says his father, Carson Davis, who lives just across the road from his son. “He’s probably more Western than anybody in the West. He’s everything you seen in those cowboy movies.”

From the time he was 5 and told his kindergarten teacher his intent to become a bull rider, Davis never wavered — much to the chagrin of his mother, Pam Simmons.

She put him off, promised he could try bull riding when he turned 12 and secretly hoped the infatuation would subside.

He called her bluff. Climbed aboard his first bull a few months early. Got thrown off. Loved it.

“I don’t think any mother wants her child to be a bull rider,” Pam says. “I thought it would pass, and it didn’t. Should I have just put my foot down and said, ‘I’m your mother, you’re not riding?’ It was Jerome’s love, and when he turned 18 he was going to do it. He had a passion for it. At least he was successful at what he did, and doesn’t have to ques-tion, ‘Could I have made it?”’

On bucking animals, he proved

a phenom. At 16, he won a com-petition in Cincinnati that earned him $1,100 — which he promptly invested in the materials to build his own practice pen. He cut cedar posts from raw timber on the property and ran woven wire between them. He purchased his practice bull.

Davis progressed quickly through local and regional com-petition and earned his scholar-ship to Odessa — the same school where rodeo legends Ty Murray and Jim Sharp had gone. He pros-pered there, too.

After winning the 1992 colle-giate bull-riding championship, he moved on to a competition in Reno, Nev.

Carson Davis remembers get-ting the phone call that night. A bull named Orange Pop had stepped on Jerome, breaking six ribs and puncturing his lung. Blood seeped in and made breath-ing even harder.

“How bad?” Carson asked.The voice on the line told him

it didn’t look good, that Jerome might not last the night.

Carson hung up the phone — and threw up. Distraught as he was, he still had to call Pam. The two had been divorced for 15 years by then, but remained close friends. He struggled to compose himself so he could deliver the news as calmly as possible.

“Jerome had this thing,” he

“I don’t think any mother wants her child to be a bull rider.”— Pam Simmons, mother of Jerome Davis


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says, “that no matter how bad he got hurt, you better not be hol-lerin’ or actin’ stupid. So I called Pam and told her I had it all under control. You can’t tell her that her young’un is gettin’ ready to die.”

Carson told her they needed to f ly to Reno immediately. But Pam knew she’d be beside herself until she spoke with a doctor directly.

She recalls telling someone at the hospital to let Jerome know she was on her way, then fishing for reassurance that he’d be OK.

“No, ma’am,” said the voice on the line. “I can’t tell you that. All I can tell you is to get here as quickly as possible.”

Lethal force vs. stubbornness

Horns and hooves have dogged bull riders forever.

Their blunt force has bruised, battered and shattered bone. It has punctured lungs and damaged internal organs. Applied to the head, it has caused concussions and death.

Despite the obvious danger, the concept of protective equipment has gained traction only in the last 10 years in a sport that revels in the toughness of its athletes. The attitude comes rooted in Western tradition that brooks no whining among cowboys and rationalizes bull riding as lethally dangerous only to those who fail to focus on their task — or run into the same sort of hard luck as falling off a bicycle.

“In all honesty, I didn’t realize

it was that dangerous,” says Rich-ard “Tuff ” Hedeman, the now-retired rider who hosts the Fort Worth invitational that bears his name. “In hindsight, you’ve got to bull - - - - yourself that it’s not that bad. Well, it is that bad. What surprises me is that more people don’t die.”

Bull riders may be stubborn, but they’ll listen to reason.

A protective vest came on the scene in 1993, when respected cowboy Cody Lambert introduced pro riders to the idea. He pro-ceeded from the notion that a vest could eliminate many debilitating injuries, enable riders to ride with less pain and, ultimately, make more money.

He wound up reconfiguring a protective vest worn by jockeys until it looked and fit like a West-ern-style vest. During the PRCA

National Finals in 1993, he took a horn to the chest that broke the fin-ish on the leather, but nothing else.

That night, he took his first four orders from Cody Custer, Ty Mur-ray, Ted Nuce and Hedeman — a hall-of-fame lineup of bull riders. At the next year’s finals, 14 of 15 riders wore them.

The vests proved an easy sell because they looked Western. The same couldn’t be said for helmets, which made a cowboy look … well, not like a cowboy.

There was at least some science to back up the bull riders’ reti-cence. What protection the hel-mets provided against concussion could literally be outweighed by the additional strain to the neck.

But newer versions of the hel-met, still basically variations on a hockey theme, now are much lighter, reducing that risk.

Chance Tate, 17, of Cortez, straps on a protective vest before a ride in Craig.


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Many experts, including some pro riders who rode helmetless their entire careers, recommend headgear for young cowboys. But sanctioning groups generally stop short of a mandate, reason-ing that not enough research has been done to determine whether helmets really help and that no definitive bull-riding helmet has been developed beyond converted hockey gear.

Tandy Freeman, an orthopedic

surgeon who has worked with the Justin Sportsmedicine Team and the HealthSouth team that serves the PBR, estimates that concus-sions account for 12 percent of the injuries he sees in bull riders.

He doesn’t need to see more research.

“Helmets make a difference,” he says f latly. “Maybe you need to prove that to the cowboys, but not to me. If a bull steps on your head, a helmet will not withstand

being stomped on. But helmets help with all the other head things — knocking into the bull’s head, or a gatepost. What we can do is reduce the severity of concussions for 90 percent of the contact.”

Wiley Petersen, one of the top riderson the PBR circuit, wore a helmet for the first time as a pro in December 2002. He came to the conclusion that there was no good reason not to wear one.

“You can hang on to tradition

Davis leaves the PBR World Finals in Las Vegas, preceded by barrelman Flint Rasmussen, who entertains the crowd during “down time.” Davis was an initial investor in the PBR, the organization largely responsible for bull riding’s rise.


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and lose your teeth, or lose some tradition and keep your teeth,” he figures. “This isn’t traditional Western rodeo. This is extreme sport, and it’s moving away from the cowboy feel to it.”

And the slowly growing num-bers of top-flight pros who wear helmets regularly could literally change the face of the sport. But at its core, the elemental dangers of bull riding remain, even beneath a veneer of safety.

“No matter how many spon-sors you have, no matter who your agent is, how many endorsements you have or how articulate you are talking to the media,” says Lam-bert, “when the gate opens, you’re on your own.

“And the bulls do not care.”

The rough trail to the top

For Jerome Davis’ family, Reno changed their lives, and in a sense laid an emotional foundation for the ordeal that lay ahead.

For about a week after Orange Pop stomped his ribs, Davis couldn’t speak because of the tube snaking down his throat. But his mother looked at his face and recognized distress — not over his own condition, but over worrying her.

In the waiting room, Pam thought hard about what to say.

She could continue to obsess about the dangers of bull riding or stand firmly behind him. When Jerome had improved enough to listen to her, Pam made her choice and returned to his room.

“It’ll take more than any ol’ Orange Pop to keep you down,” she told him. He smiled.

Once the tube had been removed and he could talk, he said some-thing his mother would never for-get. He told her he realized that bull riding wasn’t everyone’s dream, but it was his dream. Whatever might happen to him in the arena, he’d be doing something he loved.

“It was simple,” Pam recalls now, “but it gave me a peace.”

It would be six years and a heady string of successes before the les-son of Reno would hit home.

After traveling with legend-ary rider Cody Custer in 1992, the year Custer won the National Finals, Davis felt he’d been shown a map that could lead him to the top. Three years later, he captured the PRCA title. He would qualify as one of the top 15 bull riders for five straight years.

Meanwhile, a group of veteran riders invited him to invest in the f ledgling Professional Bull Riders organization that sought to bring order, and bigger payoffs, to their

sport as it ventured away from tra-ditional rodeo.

Buy-in was $1,000. Jerome told them he had $500 and a chance to earn the rest on a good bull the next weekend.

He covered his investment. Then, as the PBR rose to promi-nence, he began to make his mark in the newer circuit where he could make more money in far fewer events than traditional rodeo.

In the early months of 1998, he tore through the competition.

“It was really the first year I focused on the PBR title,” Davis recalls. “I’d been on 33 bulls and only got throwed off three. I was having a heck of a good year, but as it turned out, that all came to an end.”

At the Tuff Hedeman Champi-onship Challenge in Fort Worth, he got on the last bull he would ever ride.

Davis knew he needed to stay over Knock ‘Em Out John, close to the head, so the bull couldn’t slingshot him to the dirt.

He was riding him well when the bull turned back and yanked Davis down into a violent head-to-head collision.

His fiancée, Tiffany, sat in the stands and watched Jerome get smacked in the jaw and fall to the ground. Then, as always, she wor-ried about one thing — the bull

“This isn’t traditional Western rodeo. This is extreme sport, and it’s moving away from the cowboy feel to it.”

— Wiley Petersen, one of the top riders on the PBR circuit


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stomping him before he could scramble to safety.

When Jerome’s bull danced clear of him, Tiffany thought everything would be all right. She waited for him to rise and dust himself off.

She waited a little longer.“And I kept waiting, ‘cause you

don’t run down there when they get hurt, unless you’re trying to get attention for yourself,” she says. “You kind of just wait.”

Once emergency personnel had loaded Jerome onto a stretcher and carried him out of the arena, she headed down to an alleyway behind the chutes. Her thoughts raced ahead to . . . tomorrow. She imagined how ticked off Jerome would be if he couldn’t ride the next day.

As he lay on a stretcher, Jerome came to and realized right away that something about him had changed, but he didn’t know exactly what until he asked Tater Porter to take off the riding glove that already had been removed.

The look in Jerome’s eyes told Tiffany something was seriously wrong. Then he said he couldn’t move his legs.

Back in North Carolina, his par-ents reacted to the accident with obvious concern, but with fear tempered by the Reno experience.

Carson Davis had been an-nouncing an amateur bull riding event in a nearby town when he

got a phone call telling him that Jerome had been hurt badly.

“How bad this time?” Carson asked.

“He’s paralyzed,” Tiffany an-swered, “but they didn’t say noth-in’ about dyin’.”

Carson sighed with relief.When he arrived at the hospi-

tal the next day, he was joined by his ex-wife Pam, Jerome’s mother. He noticed two people among the many from the cowboy community who had joined their vigil — Clyde and Elsie Frost, whose son Lane had been killed riding bulls almost a decade earlier. The poignancy of their presence didn’t immediately register with Carson until after he’d engaged Clyde in small talk about farming and cattle.

Then it struck him hard.“Here I am all worried,” says

Carson, “and this man would give everything in the world to be in my shoes, to have his son paralyzed instead of dead. You see him and realize what he went through, and our situation was a piece of cake.”

Pam Simmons remembers praying on her way to the Greens-boro airport to catch her f light to Texas: “Let him have his mind and his life, and we’ll take whatever else comes.”

When she saw him, Jerome appeared to broach the idea of returning to competition.

“When I get well …” he began.“You may ride,” his mother

interrupted. “But they don’t score you very well with your mama hanging on your back.”

When the doctor came into his room, Jerome tried to pin him down on the chances, tried to put a number to the likelihood that he would walk again. Fifty percent? Twenty-five? Ten?

The doctor paused for a mo-ment. “One percent,” he said. “Be-cause I never say never.”

“That’s all I need,” Jerome replied.

Launching a new life

Tiffany comes breezing into the kitchen from the adjacent room that serves as the office for the family business. She carries sev-eral photographs of Jerome in full form astride a bull named Straw-berry Wine and sets them before him.

He closes his hand around a felt-tipped marker and removes the cap with his teeth. His grip appears awkward, but his cursive script f lows easily across the pic-ture. God Bless, Jerome Davis.

He signs each picture personally and includes one with every mer-chandise order — vests, chaps, license plate holders, bandanas — that comes in via his website, www.JeromeDavis.com . But this amounts to a small fraction of the

“He’s paralyzed, but they didn’t say nothin’ about dyin’.”— Tiffany Davis describing Jerome’s injuries to his father

http://www.JeromeDavis.com


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business that consumes his life these days.

There’s the PBR event that he hosts every year at the Davis Rodeo Arena, the 5,000-seat venue he has constructed just a short ride from his house, and a variety of other events from high school rodeos to a Halloween maze he set up with the livestock fencing for a local church.

When he’s not on the phone or on the road with his stock or cruising the rolling hills of his property in his cart, he might be behind the hand controls of heavy equipment preparing the arena for competition. Or he could be

behind the microphone, where his down-home drawl and unabashed enthusiasm find an outlet as a rodeo announcer.

Wherever he is, Tiffany won’t be far away.

They were supposed to get mar-ried in May 1998 somewhere in Tennessee on a Wednesday, to fit the wedding and a one-day honey-moon between a jackpot event one weekend and more bull riding in Louisville the next.

Jerome and Tiffany grew up together around Archdale, have been friends so long that neither can remember when they first met. He knew for a long time that

she was the one. She knew from way back that he was “the perfect guy” and envisioned one day mar-rying someone just like him.

With benefit of hindsight, she now calls him her soul mate.

When Jerome was paralyzed at Fort Worth, it changed everything — and it changed nothing. He was alive. He was still Jerome. And while he says he “tried to run her off” in the aftermath of his crash, Tiffany wasn’t going anywhere.

Five months after their origi-nal date, the couple slipped away from Archdale with a small reti-nue of friends and tied the knot in Gatlinburg, Tenn.

At his ranch near Greensboro, N.C., former pro bull rider Jerome Davis maintains a connection to the sport despite the horrific accident in 1998 that paralyzed him. Davis contracts to provide bulls to rodeos, and hosts one of the stops on the Professional Bull Riders Challenger Tour at his arena. Grazing on his hundred-acre spread is a 17-year-old bull Davis rode as a schoolkid. “I ain’t ever gonna sell him,” he says.


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When the sixth anniversary of Jerome’s crash arrives in March, it will mark another milestone: six years that the two of them have never been apart for a single night.

At the hospital, they taught her everything. How to help him do the stretches for physical therapy. How to change his position in bed to prevent pressure sores. For a month, she would wake up every 30 minutes to turn him.

Surgery restored some of the feeling and movement to his hands, but certain fine motor tasks, such as buttoning a shirt, still require assistance.

“That bothers me more than anything, having to ask people for help,” Jerome says. “That’s some-thing I didn’t have to do before very much at all. I was pretty independent, I could make things happen on my own. Hopefully, one day I can get back on my feet and pay everybody back.”

Ultimately, a succession of ben-efit events covered the medical bills and let the couple preserve their savings to help launch a new life as stock contractors.

“I knew as soon as he got hurt, he’s going to have to change some-thing,” Tiffany says. “We’d already gotten into stock contracting a little bit, not big. I thought, we’ll just focus on that. I never really thought it would be this good.”

At one benefit auction, Jerome met businessman Tom Teague, a North Carolina trucking magnate whose contacts and expertise in the world of television and finance eventually landed Teague on the PBR’s board of directors.

Later, when Davis had a line on a good bull and was looking for an investor, he called Teague, and a partnership was born.

For Davis, the alliance provides the financial wherewithal to be a player in a roughstock business that more and more resembles the thoroughbred horse business.

Although the bull-riding uni-verse now features stars like Chris Shivers, Justin McBride, Luke Sny-der and Adriano Moraes, Jerome still answers his door to find kids eager to learn about bull riding, and he helps them any way he can.

One, a boy in his early teens, was so moved by the down-to-earth kindness from a man of such stature that, unknown to Davis, he successfully petitioned to have a portion of two-lane road near the Davis ranch christened the “Jerome C. Davis Highway.”

In a line that is more jest than truth, some folks claim that mile-and-a-half stretch is bumpy enough to make motorists feel like they’re riding a bull.

Behind Davis’ relentless opti-mism — “He wakes up in the

morning singing,” Tiffany insists — lies an equally persistent desire to rise out of his wheelchair.

He has tried both conventional and experimental therapies, but has learned that some offer false hope. Given the domestic poli-tics of cutting-edge possibilities like stem cell research, Davis fig-ures he’ll probably wind up seek-ing treatment outside the United States.

“I always think that I’ll walk again,” he says. “I went through stages where I prayed about it, and found peace of mind through my relationship with God. I don’t mope, bitch and complain to peo-ple. They don’t want to hear it. I try to stay positive about every-thing I do.”

He has maintained his connec-tion to the indescribable high of bull riding and, as one of the orig-inal PBR stockholders, continues to have a stake in the sport’s devel-opment. He understands well the danger and sacrifice involved, and how those double-edged elements also form the basis of bull riding’s growing appeal as an extreme sport.

“It’s part of the sport you have to accept,” he says. “If it wasn’t for that, there wouldn’t be guys win-ning a million bucks.

“It’s just the way it works, I guess.”

“It’s part of the sport you have to accept. If it wasn’t for that, there wouldn’t be guys winning a million bucks.”

— Jerome Davis talking about the danger and sacrifice involved in bull riding


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PAIN&GLORYA DENVER POST SPECIAL REPORT: PART TWO

As early as age 10, bull riders embrace a leather-tough world where injured athletes ‘cowboy up’ and climb back on,

chasing thrills, fame and prize money.

Spurred by a dream

Bull rider Garrett Norby — everybody calls him “G-man,” including his parents — tapes up as older riders doff their hats before the national anthem at an informal “jackpot” rodeo in Pueblo, one of many such events. Garrett, 10, is nurturing his bull-riding dream in rural southern Colorado.


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YTHE DENVER POST ©2004 PAIN&GLORY PART TWO 19

The dream begins in the back bedroom of a ranch-style house that seems to have dropped from

the sky into the starkly beautiful grasslands and meandering draws of southern Colorado.

Garrett Norby awakens in a twin bed tucked into a corner of the room, wrapped in rumpled sheets imprinted with cowboy images. On one side of a framed baptismal certificate, five weathered cowboy hats have been retired to pegs. On the other, autographed posters show men in full, glorious form riding angry, muscular beasts.

Garrett, age 10, lives surrounded by evidence of his passion for bull riding. On a table beside the bed lie more than a dozen shiny belt buckles, arranged in rows before a

handful of trophies that testify to his emerging talent.

Outside his window, the land-scape undulates to the horizon in all directions without human interruption. Ken and Mary Norby traded their small parcel in the foothills near Denver for this 720-acre, century-old family home-stead near Walsenburg. Here, they raise assorted horses, goats, sheep, pigs, dogs, cats, a long-haired, overweight bovine named Red Bull and three kids — 16-year-old Steven, 13-year-old Stephanie and a slight, brown-eyed cowboy with a smile like sunup.

They call him — as everyone does — “G-man.”

His dream: to climb on the backs of the rankest bulls in cre-ation, cinch a rope tight around a

single, gloved hand, and ride the wave of bucks, spins and adrena-line for eight indescribable sec-onds. To roam cross-country the cowboy way, independent and self-reliant, get dirt on his boots, take his lumps without complaint then acknowledge his glory with aw-shucks humility.

And get paid for it.Along the way, he’ll have to

navigate a world where injury comes more easily than success. Where peer pressure and devotion to Western toughness often stand between young competitors and safety equipment.

Already, Garrett is learning the most basic tenet of bull riding: You will get hurt. The relatively minor injuries G-man has endured so far are just a down payment on the future.

“I know people say, ‘It’s a dan-gerous sport. How can you let your kids do that?”’ Mary Norby says. “But I know my kids know what they’re doing. It’s really not that dangerous if they’ve been taught what to do.”

For G-man, the cowboy life came with the territory when the family moved here six years ago, renewing a rural lifestyle Mary Norby had left 15 years earlier. Stephanie took up barrel racing. Steven gravitated to the danger and exhilaration of bull riding — long the marquee rodeo event but now a competition that, with increased TV coverage and savvy marketing, has carved out a sport-ing niche of its own.

G-man followed his brother’s lead, although at age 4 he began by

To reach the elite level of professional bull riding, 10-year-old Garrett Norby can expect to spend years in youth, high school and informal “jackpot” rodeos. He runs the risk of being injured far more frequently than his football-playing peers.


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clinging to sheep in “mutton bus-tin”’ competitions. Then he moved on to calves, steers and, incongru-ous as it seems for a 57-pound fifth-grader, young bulls nearly 20 times his weight.

He competes regularly at Pueb-lo’s Saddle Saloon, site of just one of the innumerable, informal “jackpot” events that take place in Colorado and across the country. At the Saddle, G-man often walks away with a small cash prize that, because of the few competitors in

his age group, usually just defrays his $40 entry fee.

Stock contractor Vickie Lynn, who hosts this series of youth events, also serves as G-man’s bull-riding guru, sometimes ana-lyzing video of his rides and fine-tuning his technique.

But other times, like today, the tape comes out at home.

On a slow-motion replay, G-man watches his legs splay apart as he falls to the dirt, just as a bull’s rear hoof drives into his right leg. It

hurt bad, he recalls, just about as bad as when a bull threw him onto his tailbone in June and he had to miss three weeks of riding.

Thinking the leg could be bro-ken, Mary Norby took her son to the hospital, where X-rays came back negative. So G-man went home, elevated and iced the leg, which also had a nasty gash along the shin, and then gamely limped to school the next day, even though the doctor said he could stay home to rest.

Astride a spring-loaded gizmo called “Mighty Bucky” that he bought with his rodeo winnings, Garrett “G-man” Norby practices his moves as Jesse Jackson, right, replicates an angry bull’s twists and bucks and Justin Noga looks on at the Norby family’s ranch. Garrett started in youth rodeo competitions at age 4, where he clung to the backs of sheep.


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Both G-man and Steven took in-struction at the nationally known bull-riding school in Denver run by Larry Lancaster, whose Western wear and equipment business spon-sors cowboys on the pro circuits. At home, they have a full training reg-imen right outside their back door.

The boys have propped a 50-gallon drum at an angle on two-by-fours and covered it with a scrap of old carpet so they can climb aboard and run through their moves. A spring-loaded contraption called Mighty Bucky, which G-man bought with part of the $1,600 he won during a sum-mer of competition, stands nearby to simulate actual rides.

Farther from the house, a large fence loops around two bulls and a heifer and connects to two buck-ing chutes. Here, G-man, Steven and their bull-riding buddies get some practice on the real thing — even in cold weather when the ground freezes hard and the only warmth comes from the fire kept alive in a nearby barrel.

Virtually every week, Mary Norby loads her sons in the car and takes the show on the road. Her husband, Ken — a Wisconsin native who favors hockey — backs the boys’ bull-riding endeavors, but often works odd hours at the Pueblo Chemical Depot and can’t see them compete. Mary, whose

grandparents settled the home-stead where they now live, soon found that her agricultural roots struck a chord with her sons.

“If there’s a bull bucking some-where,” she says, “we’re there.”

Giving up football for bulls

As evening falls, young men fil-ter through the Saddle Saloon, pay their entry fee and sign an injury waiver. Then they head out the back door, through the arena and gather behind the chutes.

In this open-air dressing room, the guys strip down to their boxers, pull on their riding jeans and trade short-sleeve shirts for the long-sleeve Western attire that’s manda-tory in virtually all rodeo events.

Both G-man and his brother wear helmets — ice hockey gear converted, mostly with decorative stickers, for use as bull-riding gear. Steven shrugs when asked if the helmets are a parental mandate.

“Kind of,” he says. “I just don’t want to get my head smashed.”

G-man’s 10-year-old buddy, Dustin Baker, has a similar hel-met. His stepfather, Steve Atencio, points to a spot on the wire cage where a bull’s horn gouged the metal instead of taking a chunk out of Dustin’s face.

Atencio wasn’t wild about Dustin getting on bulls, but the boy joins a growing segment of bull riders attracted to the sport without background in family tra-dition or the ranching life. Dustin, who grew up in the city of Pueblo, has been drawn to bull riding by an even more powerful force.

“He watches too much TV,” says Atencio.

Televised bull riding has enjoyed widespread success, some-times drawing a viewing audience greater than more mainstream sports like baseball or hockey. And though Dustin also played football, he gave up the sport to pursue the cowboy life. Already, he has been stepped on — twice.

“He’s a tough kid,” Atencio says. “I tried to talk him into being a roper like I was. But he said ropin’ is for sissies.”

Until he climbs aboard his bull, G-man wears a black cowboy hat with a red “PBR” on the side — the logo of the Professional Bull Riders, the bulls-only circuit that spun off from the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association and, in only 10 years, has become the gold standard in the sport.

Behind the chutes, G-man be-gins the ritual preparation. He wraps his rope around the metal crossbar of a holding pen and pulls it taut. He rubs it down

“He’s a tough kid. I tried to talk him into being a roper like I was. But he said ropin’ is for sissies.”

— Steve Atencio, talking about his stepson Dustin Baker


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with granular rosin, then snaps the rope to get rid of the excess. He slides his gloved hand repeat-edly along the portion he’ll grip aboard the bull to warm the rosin and make it even tackier.

Shortly before the start of the competition, one of the older rid-ers calls the boys together, and they remove their hats and take a knee.

“Lord, just come out here and let us be safe, let us show every-body our talents,” he says. “Please let us bear down. Amen.”

G-man climbs aboard a bull named Black Magic, amid a cho-rus of chatter from the other boys.

“Find your point ...”“Don’t be poppin’ your chin ...”“Stick your chest out and have

fun and ride ...”“One-ten, G-man!” yells another

rider, urging him to give more than just 100 percent.

The encouragement and advice come rapid-fire, and G-man doesn’t

disappoint. He stays on for the full six seconds required of kids in his division — he “covers,” in bull-riding parlance — and racks up a score of 75. It’s three points better than his buddy Dustin.

At the end of the evening, G-man will leave with $28 cash. But the boys, pitted head-to-head in this laid-back competition, make no mention of victory or defeat. The bull measures a rider’s perfor-mance. A cowboy simply does the best he can. No excuses.

“Me and G are best friends,” says Dustin.

“Yeah, I don’t care if he takes first or second,” adds G-man.

“Well, we might be mad at each other for a few seconds.”

“I don’t get mad at you.”“Remember last year?”“Well, now I know you better.”Two weeks later, after a final

season-ending event at the Saddle, G-man wins a jacket and a gift cer-

tificate. Dustin, who continued to compete while G-man was laid up with injuries during the summer, takes home his first oversized belt buckle, for the overall title, and a saddle.

In their triumph, they taste the sweetness of their rewards. In the dust, they taste the future.

Two years’ winnings: $40,000

The woman behind the counter at the Moffat County Fairgrounds in Craig takes Kody Lostroh’s reg-istration for the last high school rodeo event of the fall.

“Morning,” she smiles, recog-nizing the two-time state bull-rid-ing champion. “How’s the foot?”

“Sore.”Lostroh still hobbles from last

week’s rodeo in Gunnison, where his bull careened against a fence and turned his lower left leg and foot into a purplish mass of bruises that nearly knocked him out of the competition. But he’s back this crisp September weekend, and hands the woman a check for $76 to cover his entry in both Satur-day’s and Sunday’s events.

He scans a list posted on the wall to see which bull he’s drawn, then finds the animal in one of the holding pens. It’s white, with horns that curl back from its head toward the rider.

“That white bull have any direc-tion?” Lostroh asks anyone within earshot.

Floyd Arena in Stephenville, Texas, draws top bull riders and greenhorns. Drew Jenkins, 19, of Merkel, Texas, had his fill of injuries; he now works as a barrelman.


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“Yeah, left,” one kid replies, indi-cating the bull likes to spin that way when he breaks out of the chute.

“I like left,” Lostroh says, crack-ing a confident smile.

The whole bull-riding world seems to be spinning and bucking in perfect harmony with the best high school rider in Colorado. He has arrived from Longmont just in time for his 18th birthday and checked into the local Holiday Inn.

Normally, he bunks in a camper, but this time he wanted to throw himself a little Saturday night birthday bash.

The date marks the beginning of a new phase in his bull-riding career. At 18, he becomes eligible for his PBR and PRCA permits — the first step in pursuing the big money on the pro circuit.

Lostroh, whose personal style runs more toward ball caps and sneakers than cowboy hats and boots, counts himself among a growing number of young riders who wear helmets. Bull riders have worn protective vests for several years now, and they clench rubber mouthpieces with regularity. But helmets remain optional, and only about half the high school riders in Craig wear them to compete.

In fact, three weeks earlier, Los-troh thought about ditching his helmet. But then a bull f lung his massive head backward, crashing

hard into the wire cage on Los-troh’s adapted hockey headgear.

“I’d be an ugly sucker now,” he laughs. “There’s a point where you have to be smart.”

In between high school sea-sons, he has been traveling with a few buddies, sleeping in tents or in the car to cut expenses, and riding at jackpot events around the West-ern United States. Recently, he added up his winnings from the last two years and realized he’d made $40,000.

He’s not sure where it all went, except that the red Ford Mustang he drove to Craig from his home in Longmont is his third car, and he likes to spoil his girlfriend.

On the high school circuit, he’s been building an imposing lead over his nearest rivals. And while some kids describe him as cocky, no one disputes the talent that seems destined to carry him far.

The mingling aromas of coffee and hot dogs seep from the conces-sion area beneath the grandstand as teens on horseback canter into the arena with a succession of flags.

The opening ceremony, a rodeo fanfare to Americana, culminates with a prayer and the national anthem.

Small knots of spectators — mostly family — settle into bleacher seats and mill about the grounds while calf roping, steer

wrestling and bareback riding open the competition. But as the morning wears on, someone be-hind the chutes gives notice to the bull riders.

“Time to get nervous!”One of the early riders, 16-year-

old Jared Collins of Elizabeth, lasts only a few seconds on his ride before tumbling to the dirt.

Collins rises to one knee. But before he can scramble away, the bull’s hooves slam him in the back. His protective vest shields his torso, but his right leg buckles horribly.

“My knee,” he groans as he’s helped off.

Two paramedics arrive where Collins sits on a wooden platform behind the chutes. One probes his right leg.

“Doesn’t seem like any broken bones.”

Still, the paramedic tells the boy he needs to get to the hospital. An ambulance is waiting. Collins shakes his head.

No way he’s leaving in what he calls a “meat wagon.” Instead, his father helps him to their truck and drives him to Craig Memorial Hospital.

Meanwhile, Lostroh finds some free space along the fence behind the chutes and begins his prepara-tion in earnest. He loops his rope around the fence and applies his rosin.

“I’d be an ugly sucker now. There’s a point where you have to be smart.”

— Kody Lostroh, telling how his headgear saved him from serious injury


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His jeans come off and com-pression shorts go on, followed by a 6-inch bandage that he care-fully wraps around his right thigh — concession to a badly pulled groin muscle suffered weeks ear-lier. He lifts his shirt to extend the wrap around his waist, exposing a washboard stomach hardened by thousands of sit-ups.

For all the weight lifting to pump the upper body, the sit-ups to chisel the abdominals and the leg work to strengthen groin muscles that help the rider cling to the back of the beast, for all the practice on barrels and bulls, any cowboy will tell you it’s a mental game.

Control your fear, control your actions.

“You just don’t see many kids like Kody, who don’t get bucked off,” high school rider Clay Cul-breath says with admiration. “I’ll bet you fifty bucks right now that he’ll cover.”

Lostroh stretches, removes his hat, takes a knee and whispers a prayer.

He climbs the chute, trades his straw cowboy hat for his helmet. He cinches his rope around the white bull named John Wayne, and pulls it snug into his left hand. He winds it once around his glove and then tucks it between his ring finger and his pinky in what rid-ers call a “suicide wrap” — a tac-tic that affords all the advantages, and dangers, of a hard-to-release grip.

Lostroh nods, and the chute boss f lings open the gate. True to form, the bull immediately spins to the left and bucks hard. Two

Chance Tate, 17, of Cortez hangs on to his animal, wearing the cowboy hat that about half of high school bull riders prefer to a protective helmet. Seconds later, this bull dumped Tate in the dirt and stomped his neck and head, rendering him unconscious.


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more spins to the left and dirt f lies as it strains to throw its rider.

But by the time the whistle sig-nals eight seconds, John Wayne has been thoroughly defeated. He stops — stands stock still — in a posture of total acquiescence.

Because the bull utterly quit, and half a rider’s points derive from the animal’s performance, judges give Lostroh the option of a re-ride to possibly improve his score. Even with a bad bull, Lostroh has scored 73. It seems unlikely any of the few remaining riders will match that.

Plus, he’s hurting, as one of the metal bells on his bull rope f lung up and smacked him.

“Since I’m winning it, and I can’t hardly stand the pain in my foot, I’ll let it stand,” he says.

Meanwhile, the last contestant of the day, Chance Tate, also draws a bull whose performance moves the judges to offer him a re-ride.

Tate accepts.The tall, fair-haired kid from

Cortez climbs aboard his second bull wearing his traditional cow-boy hat — no helmet. He nods to the chute boss and begins his ride.

It doesn’t last long. He’s thrown quickly to the dirt, where the bull goes after him, stomps on his neck, tears away his protective vest and pulls it up and over his head. The bull stomps again, slamming the boy’s head, before the bull fight-ers — formerly known as rodeo clowns — can coax it away.

Moments later, the public address announcer sends out an urgent call. “We need the para-medics over here, ASAP!”

As they examine Tate at the ambulance, his stepmother, Dee Ann Dennison, holds one hand, stroking it, patting it as the 17-year-old Tate sits unresponsive, upright on the gurney with his neck in a brace. His face mottled with arena dirt, his eyelids nearly closed, his lips slightly parted, his right arm shaking, he looks to be in serious trouble.

The words of the paramedics and others around the boy strain with urgency.

“Breathe, Chance, breathe!”“Chance, can you feel your legs,

buddy? You know where you’re at now, Chance?”

His lips barely move. Blood hangs from one nostril like a red icicle. The paramedics stabilizing his neck call out for anyone in the small crowd who might be able to assist them with cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Slowly, they move him into posi-tion on the gurney to be loaded into the ambulance, then strap him down for the ride to the hospital.

“This is gonna be tight, Chance. You still with us?”

Broken bones, unbroken pride

Later that afternoon at the Holi-day Inn, Jared Collins stands pool-side, propped up by crutches.

After being kicked in the back by a bull and grotesquely twist-ing his leg during that afternoon’s competition, he now knows two things. His right knee is a mess, the ligaments seriously damaged. And his football season at Eliza-beth High School, where he plays middle linebacker and offensive line when he’s not off bull riding, is finished.

Paramedics stabilize high school bull rider Chance Tate. The teen suffered a concussion but went to a dance later that night — and rode a bull the next day.


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Collins already has broken three ribs on one side, two ribs on another, his wrist, his back, his leg. And now, the knee has turned to mush — all in only three years of bull riding. With obvious pride, he slides out of his shirt to reveal the raspberry on his left shoul-der blade where the bull’s hoof stomped him to the ground just hours earlier.

Still, his vision of heaven on earth would be to wake up every morning, run bulls into a chute and ride, ride, ride.

Officials at the National High School Rodeo Association esti-mate that only about 2 percent of young riders will wind up mak-ing a living in the sport, and even those who do won’t be making that living very long.

Protective gear in bull riding has gained acceptance slowly, having to overcome the hurdles of Western tradition. High-tech vests have become standard equipment largely because they don’t limit movement and — in the larger scheme of rodeo culture — they look Western.

But both youth and professional riders have been much slower to embrace helmets, despite over-whelming evidence that concus-sion is the most likely injury a bull rider will face.

A 20-year study of rodeo injuries by a sports medicine group found that rodeo participants were five times more likely to suffer concus-sions than the next most common injury, shoulder fractures and dis-locations.

Still, national high school rodeo

officials say that while helmets are encouraged, the fact that they’re mostly converted hockey or foot-ball gear, and not specifically designed for riding, has kept the national body from making them mandatory.

They point out that more kids would wear helmets if more of the pro riders wore them. But some experts say that the trend toward mandatory helmets must begin with young riders, much as hel-mets eventually became standard among National Hockey League players years after they were required in the youth ranks.

Collins didn’t wear a helmet when he started riding bulls three years ago, and he doesn’t like the idea of wearing one now. His rationale: Riding without one, he’s

more aware, conscious of his vul-nerability and consequently able to react quicker to the danger.

Collins was on his way out of the emergency room at Craig Memorial when paramedics wheeled in the gurney bearing Chance Tate, who also competes without a helmet.

“He was all strapped up,” Collins says somberly. “He looked bad.”

But as the sun dips behind the silhouetted hills and the heat of late summer gives way to an autumn chill, Collins warms him-self with a comforting thought as he gathers his crutches and limps back to his room.

“I’m thinking of hanging around at the dance tonight,” he says with a sly grin, “and getting sympathy from the girls.”

‘I can’t sissy out now’

Pickup trucks cluster around the meeting hall at the Moffat County Fairgrounds, and teenag-ers stand in knots outside double doors f lung open to the night.

It’s a shade past 9 p.m., and some of the rodeo contestants already have paid their $5 admission to line the walls of the dance hall while a DJ spins everything from country-and-western to hip-hop.

Beneath the brim of a white cowboy hat, a tall, lean, light-haired kid peers out at a sudden surge of teens high-stepping in a line dance to “Cotton-Eyed Joe.”

Chance Tate, who just a few hours earlier had been loaded barely con-scious into an ambulance after a

Eight seconds of spins and bucksClick here for an information graphic about bull-riding competitions and the rules of the ride.


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bull kicked him in the neck and head, now makes the party scene.

“The doctor told me to stay awake as long as I can,” he says.

Tate also says he was told he suffered a concussion when the bull kicked him. He remembers almost nothing between the time he lay in the dirt and the moment he regained his bearings in the ambulance.

“If I get that same bull tomor-row,” Tate vows, “I’m gonna spur his guts out.”

Ride tomorrow? He says the doctor told him he shouldn’t ride on Sunday. The American Acad-emy of Neurology recommends that anyone who suffers even a momentary loss of consciousness wait a week before returning to competitive sports.

But Tate, raised in a true cow-boy family that spends its winters rounding up wild cattle in New Mexico, knows what he has to do. Right now he’s just tired and sore. It’s no time to go soft.

“I rode with a broke pelvis before,” Tate figures. “A concussion ain’t gonna hurt much. I plan on making pro. I can’t sissy out now.”

Sure enough, on Sunday morn-ing Tate climbs aboard his bull and pulls his rope tight.

“This cowboy had some tough luck yesterday,” says the P.A. announcer. “He got stepped on, and

we were all concerned about him. But talk about a tough cowboy — here he is, back today. He deserves to win a check today for all the hard luck he had yesterday.”

One man, whose son also com-petes in bull riding, shakes his head and says there’s no way he’d let his boy compete after a concus-sion. But it happens. All the time.

It’s the cowboy way.Tate’s bull comes tearing out of

the chute spinning and bucking, but it can’t throw him. The whistle blows at eight seconds, and Tate smoothly flings himself off the bull and lands squarely on his feet.

The judges give him a 66 — which for the moment leaves him tied for first place.

At the far end of the arena, Den-nison, Tate’s stepmother, applauds his ride. A day earlier she had feared the worst. “I was just praying, to be honest,” says Dennison, recalling the ordeal. “He didn’t look good at all. I was scared to death.”

But once Tate started coming around on the ride to the hospital, once he remembered what town he was in, she exhaled. Hospital X-rays came up negative, and Denni-son knew that Chance would want to get right back on a bull as soon as possible — despite the doctor’s recommendation.

“It’s what they’re going to do,” she says. “Chance said before,

he’d rather die on a bull than any-where else. We kept close watch over him all night. There’s no rules that say you can’t ride when it gets too tough.

“You go to the end. You stick with something and see it through.”

However admirable Tate’s cour-age, and however well-intentioned the life lessons behind his parents’ decision to allow him to ride, the question remains: Why would high school rodeo authorities per-mit an athlete to ride so soon after such an injury?

The mostly volunteer Colorado State High School Rodeo Associa-tion says it doesn’t have the author-ity — or the will — to tangle with parents who don’t think anyone should tell them what’s best for their kids.

“As soon as we start telling peo-ple they can’t compete, it usually becomes a big ol’ deal with the par-ents,” says Bill Kennedy, president of the sanctioning body. And so the organization leaves such calls — except in the case of clearly vis-ible injuries, such as those involv-ing casts — to the parents.

What Chance Tate does in Craig is “cowboy up,” shake off adversity, do what he came to do and reinforce the image of toughness surround-ing the rodeo athlete. That he fights through the danger and covers his bull provides a happy ending to a

“I rode with a broke pelvis before. A concussion ain’t gonna hurt much. I plan on making pro.”

— Chance Tate, after a bull stepped on his neck and head


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dicey decision and only adds to the lore of the cowboy way.

“Answered prayers is all it is,” says his stepmother. “A few guardian angels on the fencepost for him.”

Meanwhile, Kody Lostroh gets ready to ride.

Candace Gerke has been going with Lostroh for six months, has seen him in and out of the arena, and can point to a single quality that sets him apart from other guys — on or off a bull.

“He’s not scared of anything,” she says. “He’s weird like that. I’ve never seen him negative. I’ve seen him fall off a bull maybe three times, but he just doesn’t let things get to him. I’ve never seen anybody ride like he does.”

Lostroh has plans to go to col-lege — probably at a good rodeo school in Wyoming — but it’s clear he sees his future on the pro bull-riding circuit.

“He says we’re going to be rich,” Gerke says. “He talks about it all the time. He’s not arrogant — he just knows he can do it.”

Lostroh draws the same bull he rode on Saturday. With a smile visible through the wire cage of his helmet, Lostroh showboats, waving to his buddies behind the chutes — three times, between bucks.

“Crazy nut!”“God-dang!”

Lostroh wins the event by a wide margin and takes home about $250 for winning both days — enough to cover his hotel bill and then some.

“You can’t be scared of bulls,” he says. “If you’re scared, they’re gonna hurt you.”

All the dirt they can eat

In a pool of light amid the cool darkness, a cowboy named Michael Dillon comes bursting out of the chute on the back of some-thing more wild and furious than he has ever encountered. Less than three seconds later, his bull has yanked him down hard, clocked him in the head and sent him fly-ing, already unconscious in mid-air, to a nasty landing in the dirt.

“Knocked out his running lights,” says one rider matter-of-factly, watching from behind the arena fence. “Dashboarded,” observes another.

Dillon quickly comes to, but for several moments doesn’t quite know where he is.

In a bull-riding sense, he’s somewhere between dreamy high school aspiration and harsh real-ity, trying on the cowboy way at a tiny, two-bleacher arena where bull riders perch atop the fences,

launching streams of tobacco juice or draining cans of Tecate.

Geographically, he’s at the cen-ter of the cowboy universe.

Stephenville, Texas.If you live here, about 90 min-

utes southwest of Fort Worth, you are serious about rodeo. You wear an ornate, oversized belt buckle and likely have brushed shoulders with the likes of Ty Murray, Tuff Hedeman or Jim Sharp among a who’s-who of rodeo tradition that has settled within a lasso’s radius.

And on an autumn Tuesday night that has erased the rolling Texas landscape except for this brilliant cowboy oasis, it means you are likely to find yourself prac-ticing the bull-riding craft among riders gifted and god-awful, but game beyond all reason.

The earthen parking lot is crowded with pickup trucks, girl-friends watch from the bleachers, and the high-pitched hum of cicadas provides the soundtrack to the bull-riding bonanza one rider describes as “two dollars, all you can eat.”

Stock contractors bring high-quality bucking bulls out here for exercise, and cowboys bring their machismo for a workout. Some hone their abilities. Some search for them.

Dillon, 24, is still searching. He played football in high school because his parents made him

“You can’t be scared of bulls. If you’re scared, they’re gonna hurt you.”

— Kody Lostroh, after successfully riding the same bull that threw him earlier


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choose, and back then his foot-ball career seemed a now-or-never proposition. Then he got a job with a construction finance company for a few years before he resur-rected his passion for bull riding.

“I’m out here to see if I got what it takes,” says Dillon, once his senses have finally returned. “My boss, everybody I work with, they got the belt buckle. You ain’t got the belt buckle, you ain’t in it at all. The passions down here are football and rodeo.

“Everybody understands it.”Dave Samsel understands.Now one of the top 20 riders in

the PBR, he arrived here from Kan-

sas in January 1996. Although he’d broken horses since his early teens, he didn’t ride a bull until he was 24 — an uncommonly late start.

When he realized he was good at it — really good at it — there seemed only one logical place to go.

“I always wanted to see why everybody was from here,” says Samsel, now 32 and more than half a million dollars richer from rid-ing the PBR circuit. “In Kansas, if you tell somebody you rodeo, they say, ‘What are you gonna do when you grow up?’ Here, they don’t ask what you really do. It’s more an accepted way of life. Up there in Kansas, it was a phase.”

He has come out to the all-you-can-eat bull-riding session just to watch. There’s no use risking injury by practicing when the PBR World Finals, and the possibility of a major payday, loom less than two weeks away.

Still, Samsel’s very presence reminds the aspiring riders why they’re here. But another cowboy perched on the chutes illustrates the sport’s darker f lip side.

Kent Cox watches rider after rider get dumped by their bulls in a jack-pot event that nobody wins. He’s a former PBR performer who, at only 32, has retired after five surgeries to implant 13 metal plates in his face.

A bull carrying Deric Parks lunges into the October night at Floyd Arena in Stephenville, Texas, where it costs $2 to watch and a signature on a waiver to ride as many bulls as you dare.


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But that’s not the reason he quit riding 18 months ago.

“The reason I quit,” he says softly, “is that I didn’t crave them bad bulls anymore, those yankin’, jerk-you-down bulls. I didn’t have the eye of the tiger. I remember I used to wake up in the morning and crave bulls. But the last year I got on, it was just because I didn’t know what else to do.”

Like so many others, Cox migrated to Stephenville. He came from the Panhandle, north of Ama-rillo, to run with the rodeo crowd. His pro career ran from 1992 until he gave it up in 2001, a span inter-rupted by a year-and-a-half break to recover from his facial injuries. His best year, money-wise, was about $70,000.

“The big reason I rode bulls was that I was gifted enough to make a living doing it,” says Cox. “And it beat working for somebody else. Some days, there’s nothing to it. And some days it’s so frustrating that you don’t make any money for a while.”

The physical toll: broken legs and arms, reconstructive surgery on both knees, a bone graft on his wrist, torn elbow tendons he never did get fixed. When a bull smashed his face, requiring the extensive surgeries, his share of the doctor bills ran close to $40,000.

To pay what wasn’t covered by

the small PBR accident policy, he says he was lucky he had medical insurance he got by claiming his occupation as ranching.

And then there was one other policy that bailed him out: a $12,500 dismemberment plan that kicked in because his injury half-blinded him.

“In a weird way, it was a bless-ing in disguise that I lost the sight in my right eye,” Cox says, reveal-ing a quirk of cowboy accounting. “That probably kept me from being in debt for the rest of my life.”

Now he does day work mend-ing fences and doing odd ranch-ing jobs. Nights he comes here to watch the bull riders and wonder where the craving went.

“Every now and then, I’m not totally convinced I won’t get on one again,” he says. “Since I quit, money damn sure got tight.”

The growing popularity of bull riding has put new stars in the eyes of aspiring cowboys — here and across the country. Tuff Hede-man, considered one of the best bull riders in history, lives on a picturesque property just north of town, near a wide spot in the road called Morgan Mill.

He and 19 other riders launched the PBR tour 10 years ago, and for the first time this season they offered the circuit’s top rider a $1 million bonus, in addition to purses

at individual events that not so long ago would have been a good year’s earnings all by themselves.

It’s not that the hard-core riders rising through the ranks in rural America wouldn’t be doing the same thing for a silver buckle and 50 bucks. But now there’s something more to shoot for — big money, international fame, television expo-sure and sponsorships in the hun-dreds of thousands of dollars.

Now it’s more than the cowboy way. It’s the American way.

“Tuff ’s home is like a monu-ment to us,” says novice rider Dil-lon, recovered from his knockout experience. “You come driving past it down the highway, and you think, ‘One of these days, that could be mine.”’

“In a weird way, it was a blessing in disguise that I lost the sight in my right eye.”

— Kent Cox, a former PBR bull rider

TO HELP | Assistance funds

The Justin Cowboy Crisis Fund, 101 Pro Rodeo Drive, Colorado Springs, CO 80919, can be reached at 888-662-5223. More information on the fund, associated with the Pro-fessional Rodeo Cowboys Associa-tion, is at www.prorodeo.org/jccf

The Resistol Relief Fund can be reached at Resistol Relief Resources Inc., 6 S. Tejon St., Suite 700, Colo-rado Springs, CO 80903, or call 719-471-3008, ext. 3128. More informa-tion about the fund, associated with the Professional Bull Riders, is at www.pbrnow.com/RRF

http://www.prorodeo.org/jccf


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PAIN&GLORYA DENVER POST SPECIAL REPORT: PART THREE

Pro bull riders scratch out a living, hoping for a break. The miles, bruises and expenses pile up. But at the PBR World

Finals in Las Vegas, even a last chance can pay off.

Riding into the big time

Glitz, pyrotechnics and a million-dollar first prize accompany announcement of the top four bull riders at the 2003 PBR World Finals in Las Vegas. But the long road leading to that high-profile contest is paved in grit, pain and dust.


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YTHE DENVER POST ©2004 PAIN&GLORY PART THREE 32

From the easy chair in his living room, Richard “Tuff” Hedeman tinkers with his VCR, searching

for the moment. He slows the tape to the point

where he has just exited the chute on the back of a Brahman-Cha-rolais mix named Bodacious in the 1995 Professional Bull Riders World Finals in Las Vegas.

The animal thrusts its back legs impossibly high into the air, yank-ing Hedeman down hard and then, powering upward, shattering his face against its own boulder-size head. The first blow makes the cowboy’s body go limp.

The second sends him hurtling to the dirt.

Hedeman, now 40 and a retired champion, watches the young man on the screen somehow pick him-self up and stagger out of the arena. He sees a face bloodied beyond rec-ognition. He chuckles and offers a one-word commentary. “Ugly.”

But now, viewing the tape in the stone house he built on his 75 acres just off a two-lane highway in Morgan Mill, Texas, he also rec-ognizes a beautiful irony.

Flashed live before a national TV audience, the horrific wreck sent the fledgling PBR crashing into the public consciousness. It provided a defining moment in the way only breathtaking violence can.

“I’ll see people you wouldn’t expect to have a clue what bull rid-ing is,” Hedeman says, “and they’ll tell me they seen me ride Bodacious. But that’s human nature — they like to see a little blood and guts. They don’t want to see anybody

killed or maimed, but if it happens, they don’t want to miss it.”

Both the decade-old PBR and the rival Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, with its new Xtreme Bulls tour carried on cable tele-vision, have staked their futures on eight seconds of life-or-death tension. Each of those moments attracts TV audiences, followed by advertisers and sponsors.

For Hedeman, a founding inves-tor in PBR, the “wreck” on Boda-cious made a mark far beyond his financial portfolio. It took two surgeries to reconstruct his face into something he says never quite duplicated the original. He lost 25 pounds. The crash also jarred his senses. Chocolate never tasted the same. Neither did hamburger.

His then-3-year-old son, Lane, named in memory of bull rider Lane Frost, who died in 1989 after

being gored in the back at Chey-enne Frontier Days, saw what this bull had done to his father’s face and minced no words: “Dad, if you get Bodacious again, you got to chicken out.”

Hedeman reluctantly agreed. To try again would be “beyond the line of stupidity,” he admitted, and so he hoped he and Bodacious never crossed paths again.

Naturally, they did.But this time, Hedeman “turned

him out” — the bull-riding equiv-alent of a forfeit. Although the decision ran counter to every cow-boy instinct and nearly made him physically ill, it was basically a no-brainer. He had nothing to prove. Riding Bodacious in his weakened post-surgical condition easily could have been suicidal.

Bodacious’ owner, stock con-tractor Sammy Andrews, realized

“[Fans] like to see a little blood and guts. They don’t want to see anybody killed or maimed, but if it happens, they don’t want to miss it.”

— Richard “Tuff” Hedeman, retired champion bull rider


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that if one of the toughest riders in history turned out his best bull, others would surely follow suit.

So he retired Bodacious from competition — but not from the public eye. If anything, the bull’s stock rose in his retirement. Under the guidance of rodeo announcer Bob Tallman, who became the animal’s business manager, Boda-cious’ seed was sold far and wide, as were T-shirts and videos. His likeness appeared with Hedeman’s on Bud Light advertisements, and he made countless public appear-ances to open car dealerships and Western-wear stores.

A perfume bore his name. In an unauthorized venture the bull’s handlers unsuccessfully tried to squelch, so did a line of condoms.

“People ask me, ‘How many guys did he kill?’ ” says owner Andrews, whose favorite bull died three years ago and was buried on his ranch near the Texas-Okla-homa border. “I tell them none, and they’re disappointed.”

NASCAR shows the wayRandy Bernard accepted the

job as CEO of the Professional Bull Riders just weeks before Bodacious cold-cocked Hedeman on live TV. That broadcast — which came

right on the heels of a NASCAR race on the TNN cable network — drew a 2.4 rating, which means the spectacle of the wreck beamed into more than 2 million homes. A business model was born.

The PBR had come bucking into the world just three years earlier, when 20 cowboys each kicked in $1,000 to create an organization they hoped would bring some sense of order to a sport recently spun off from traditional rodeo competition.

Bernard made it rock ’n’ roll.Then only 28, Bernard led the

charge toward an audience demo-graphic that veers away from Western roots and buys into bull riding under a hipper, more hap-pening description: the original extreme sport.

Elaborate introductions, lasers, pyrotechnics and an emphasis on the dangers faced by its tough-ened competitors — all this was melded with appealing strains of Americana and patriotic fervor.

In a marketing sense, the PBR has followed squarely in NAS-CAR’s footsteps. It aims for a remarkably similar demographic, tries to piggyback its broadcasts on the televised auto races and understands the axiom that many fans — of either sport — show up in the hope of witnessing a spec-tacular crash.

According to the PBR’s market research, 70 percent of its fans also love NASCAR. Only 12 percent identify with traditional rodeo.

Market research and focus groups also have guided the PBR’s concoction of original music to wrap around its live shows — a country-rock mix that leans toward the latter — and influ-enced its decision to more aggres-sively market its bulls as athletes.

That idea, which pays homage to the post-retirement success of Bodacious, has produced a line of plush, stuffed bulls straight from the tour, as well as a series of min-iature “CollectiBulls.”

Women, Bernard says, listed the beasts above the cowboys among their favorite things about bull riding. And PBR research shows its market is 37 percent female.

“We never want to get away from our roots — chaps and cowboys hats,” says Bernard, 36. “But we can capitalize both in the city and the country and make fans by imple-menting rock ’n’ roll, pyrotechnics, lasers and make it a great show. We can make these guys heroes.”

Like NASCAR in its early days, the PBR has nurtured a television following through cable — cur-rently, the Outdoor Life Network — and gradually bulled its way onto network TV with NBC, which broadcast seven events in 2003.

“People ask me, ‘How many guys did he kill?’ I tell them none, and they’re disappointed.”

— Sammy Andrews, talking about Bodacious, one of his prize bulls


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As television interest has grown, so has the prize money — about $10 million this season. Cowboys from as far away as Brazil and Aus-tralia now pursue the rising finan-cial incentive, chasing down a living and feeding their hunger for bulls.

Cashing in on both circuits

On a Friday afternoon in Sep-tember, Jason Legler points his white Chevy Lumina along the highway from Omaha southeast to Kansas City, then south to Joplin and east again to Springfield, Mo.

These 400 miles — among the

more than 60,000 that have spun his odometer this year — roll by to the tunes of classic country, rock ‘n’ roll and, when fatigue sets in, a quick station change to a comedy channel on the satellite radio his wife gave him for his birthday.

But the crucial calculation here isn’t mileage; it’s dollars. After walking away from a PRCA event in Omaha with nothing to show for it, Legler sees the PBR stop in Springfield as an opportunity too good to pass up.

Even more important than the prize money, it could move Legler closer to qualifying for the PBR World Finals — the Las Vegas season finale where a rider could

reap a financial bonanza of more than a quarter-million dollars.

For Legler, Springfield is a quick stop. After riding there, he’ll hop back in his car and drive late into the night to Tulsa, where he’ll catch a 5:30 a.m. f light to Califor-nia for another PRCA rodeo. Like many of the cowboys, he works both tours, dips into both pots to tough out a living.

“You got to rodeo a little harder,” says the 25-year-old Eaton, Colo., resident. “But it’s worth it in the end.”

In a sport in which everyone seems to be coming off some sort of injury, Legler has been coming to grips with a fractured eye socket

Jubilant fans of rookie bull rider Jody Newberry of Ada, Okla., thrill to his score of 94.5 at the PBR World Finals in Las Vegas. Newberry’s fans had waited long, tense minutes for judges to make certain Newberry rode for a full eight seconds.


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suffered in a head-butt with a bull last March.

He’d broken bones before, but this was different. The pain made him sick to his stomach, and when he blew his nose, the skin around his eye puffed up like some f leshy balloon, hinting at damage to his nasal cavity.

His doctor determined Legler didn’t need surgery, but advised against riding for a while. That’s when Legler picked up his first hel-met — a modified hockey helmet custom-fit with a titanium cage.

Against his doctor’s recommen-dation, Legler rode three times in three cities over the next 72 hours. He’d never worn a helmet much before, but right off the bat he took second place at an event in Austin, Texas, and just stayed with it.

Although the physical effects of his injury have passed, Legler faces mental obstacles as well. It’s the ability to focus totally on the bull — to block out fear and self-doubt and just perform — that often means the difference between recovery and the easy slip-slide to anonymity.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that bull riding has drawn many riders closer to God, or at the very least caused them to consider mor-tality at a point in their lives when they are most full of themselves.

“I probably wasn’t near as spiri-tual before bull riding,” Legler says, “but then I didn’t have near the danger. Guys on the road bring the Lord’s word to you. It’s like a guardian angel. Everyone hopes to have one. It’s too rough of a sport not to have one.”

A group prayer usually unfolds somewhere behind the chutes. In hotel rooms on the road, Bible studies spur discussion that spills into the early-morning hours. And in an extension of the time-hon-ored tradition of “cowboy church,” some pro riders and fans gather in arenas for informal worship.

Behind the chutes in Springfield, a young cowboy named Nick Mor-rison gathers contestants who’d like to pray — and almost everyone at least removes his hat and keeps a respectful silence — and quickly gets to the heart of the matter.

“If you were to die tonight and don’t know where you’d go,” the fresh-faced, 21-year-old Morri-son says on bended knee, launch-ing into more of a sermon than a prayer, “well, don’t leave here with-out knowing. I don’t want to get to heaven and see none of you guys there. That would break my heart.”

A small bull bodes trouble“Here are 45 of the bravest men

in sports today …”When the house lights go down

at the Hammons Center on the campus of Southwest Missouri State University, the coupling of traditional Western Americana and 21st-century hype begins.

A fog machine adds to the introduction of the top cowboys, while rock music blares in the background. Then comes the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem. Four projec-tion screens suspended above the arena replay every bull ride, while announcers deliver a running commentary.

Jason Legler wears a black shirt embroidered with the logo for Sad-dle Barn, a Roswell, N.M., retailer

On the roadFrom Aug. 31 to Nov. 17, Jason Legler traveled 37,902 miles to participate in 23 rodeo events in 17 states. He successfully rode 29 bulls for the eight seconds and was bucked off 11 times. He was on the road for 53 days and at home 25. He suffered 2 injuries that sidelined him (back and groin) for short periods. For the whole year, he earned $57,000 from Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association events, $24,000 from Professional Bull Riders rodeos and $8,000 in endorsements. His expenses were $43,000. When the dust settled, he had cleared $46,000.

Days when Jason Legler was on the road or bull riding

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that furnishes his equipment and pays some modest performance bonuses.

The cost of the equipment isn’t chump change: Chaps run $300 to $500, the protective vest $200, a good rope another $200.

Legler has drawn Locust Creek Flash, a relatively small bull but one that bodes trouble. At 5-foot-10, Legler stands taller than most riders, and smaller bulls — with less girth on which to balance — can prove more difficult to keep beneath him.

Sure enough, just a few sec-onds out of the chute, the bull turns back, sends Legler f lying and then punctuates the ride with a head-butt to the rider’s chest. Legler’s not hurt, but, with dirt caked on his shirt, he walks off with nothing to show for the long miles and long hours that brought him here.

The show over, he signs an auto-graph for a young boy in a white straw hat and ambles toward the exit. On the arena concourse, he drops his dusty equipment bag outside the public men’s room, removes a plastic bag containing some clean clothes and goes inside to change. He emerges a few min-utes later, slings his bag over one shoulder and heads for the park-ing lot.

“Me, I just move on,” Legler says. “What happens, happens. No point thinking about it. A lot of guys look back at the year and regret how much time they spent, and how many miles they drove.

“I think you should never look back.”

No place for prima donnasThere’s little in the way of a

financial safety net for the cow-boys. No guaranteed contracts, no appearance money, no pay if you don’t play.

That makes it tough to grind out a living, but it also enhances the riders’ appeal among sports fans jaded by prima donna millionaires. Like bull riding’s inherent danger, the rodeo work ethic fits well into

modern marketing efforts to mint a new breed of hero.

But even heroes get hurt.The PBR reached a sponsor-

ship agreement with HealthSouth, which offers riders some help with rehabilitation and other medical care at the company’s facilities. But that’s not always a realistic option for far-f lung cowboys.

And the $500 deductible and $20,000 cap on accident insur-ance provided by the PBR — set to increase to a cap of $50,000 in 2004 — barely begins to cover medical expenses for a serious injury.

Bernard, the PBR’s chief execu-tive, says the organization may eventually self-insure once it’s financially secure enough to absorb a $2 million to $3 million hit in a given year. But for now, riders find it next to impossible to get their own health insurance.

Some find a friend willing to hire them for a more traditional off-season job, like framing houses, so they can claim that as their occupation on an insurance application. Filling in “bull rider” or “rodeo performer” brings noth-ing but rejection.

Other riders on both the PRCA and PBR tours place their faith in the stopgap relief funds sponsored by Justin boots and Resistol hats, created to help injured competitors pay expenses while they recover.

Some cowboys, recognizing the high risk and short career span, have hired agents to maximize their earning potential.

Mark Nestlen of Yukon, Okla.-based Cowboy Sports Agents Inc.,

Jason Legler of Eaton, shown at the PBR event in Springfield, Mo., is among a few pro cowboys who wear helmets — on occasion.


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has about two dozen rodeo per-formers in his stable.

“It’s such a short career, such a small window of opportunity to make a living and establish some-thing for their families, they’ve got to get the most out of it,” Nestlen says. “They weren’t necessarily getting that before.”

In the five years that he’s been representing cowboys, mostly bull riders, Nestlen has seen endorse-ment deals mushroom. One top client, he says, made close to $60,000 in ancillary income five years ago. Today, he makes closer to $400,000.

It’s all about television. Nestlen says network ratings drive the dollars his riders can command in sponsorship deals. Top 10 rid-ers can hit $100,000 or more. Those ranked between 10 and 20 in the PBR can pull in up to half that from makers of boots, booze, jeans, riding apparel and from assorted other companies.

Prize money alone has increased dramatically in the past decade. The 29 top-flight PBR events each offer total purses of about $120,000, with $24,000 up for grabs in the “Challenger” sat-ellite tour stops. The winner of the World Finals weekend can make more than $250,000, and the top rider in a season-long points sys-tem earns a $1 million bonus.

Although the PBR offers more enticing money, PRCA rodeos offer many bull riders more opportuni-ties to turn their passion into a viable career. Rodeos coast to coast pay the persistent cowboy enough to feed both the adrenaline crav-ing and the family.

But there’s another twist to the bottom line: With more dollars at stake, riders become willing to take even greater risks.

“You’ve got cowboys out there who are going to ride, and they don’t care … how many doc-tors tell them you can’t,” Nestlen says. “You shake your head some-times.”

Safety helmet as mind game

In the middle of Ohio, Jason Legler rolls the dice.

The road to the PBR World Finals passes through Colum-bus, the last stop on the top-flight tour. And for Legler, a rider on the bubble, it’s a last-ditch effort to make the big show, to put together enough quality rides to finish among the top 45 competitors.

So he has scrapped the helmet.He considers this a “back to

basics” move, a decision grounded more in superstition than safety, a what-the-heck attempt to reverse

his recent hard luck. He quit rid-ing with the headgear right after getting dumped by his bull in Springfield, then took first place at a PRCA rodeo in Kissimmee, Fla.

It’s a dangerous head game, a change of strategy that exposes him to greater risk, but so far it has worked out. Still, it was a tough sell to his wife, Kari, who responded not with pleading or argument, but only a terse reminder: “You know what I think.”

“I guess she don’t want me getting any uglier,” Legler says. “Sometimes, you got to do things to get your mind back on track. Next time, I might change the color of my chaps. You never know. I might have (the helmet) back on tomorrow. Stupid mind games guys play.”

Behind the chutes at Columbus’ Nationwide Arena, Tandy Freeman — the orthopedic surgeon whose word is gospel to rodeo athletes — presides over a small training room. Freeman wears blue jeans and a cowboy hat and an easy, unflappable Texas demeanor that has contributed to his reputation.

He and his assistants, trainers Rich Blyn and Peter Wang, have unpacked three trunks full of sup-plies that follow them throughout the tour. Crutches, gauze, ban-dages, moleskin, back supports and a small pharmacy spill into

“You’ve got cowboys out there who are going to ride, and they don’t care ... how many doctors tell them you can’t.”

— Mark Nestlen, a sports agent representing rodeo performers


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the room, where cowboys have come to take pre-competition treatment. Some pedal a stationary bike in their boots, strip off shirts and drop jeans to have arms, ribs and legs taped and wrapped for their rides.

It’s a uniquely challenging area of sports medicine, a service that took years to gain the trust of cowboys weary of hearing doc-tors respond to their injuries with a simple admonition: stop riding.

It began two decades ago, when a group of sports medicine experts began tending to cowboys at PRCA rodeos across the country and compiling a database of the inju-ries they encountered.

Freeman and the rest of his team take a nonjudgmental approach that respects the cowboy mental-ity, the inherent risks of the sport and the reality that riders often choose to withstand the pain of injuries that would sideline ath-

letes in sports that demand more mobility.

“Some trainers ask, ‘Why is that guy competing with a torn ACL?”’ says Blyn. “Well, because you can. You have to endure the pain for eight seconds, but it’s something you can get away with. They know they’re going to be in pain, so they don’t say anything until an injury bugs them enough. They know when they’re hurt and when they’re not.”

In a training room at Las Vegas’ Thomas and Mack Center, Rich Blyn tapes the leg of bull rider Gilbert Carrillo while Cody Hart rides an inflatable medicine ball, awaiting an X-ray of his lungs. Most rodeo athletes once shunned doctors’ help, but when sports-medicine pros began treating bull riders as athletes with a need to perform, resistance began to fade.


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Television monitors in the training room flash the broad-cast feed of the event on cable’s Outdoor Life Network. One pro-motional feature urges viewers to “vote for your favorite rides and wrecks,” and proceeds to show clips of remarkable ability — and savage accidents.

One of the crashes, barely a week old, shows rider Justin McBride getting stomped by his bull — an injury that punctured his lung, sent him to the hospital and has kept him out of the Columbus competition.

“Shoot, he’s just out of the hos-pital and they’re putting him on the vote,” Freeman says, shaking his head.

On this first night of competition in Columbus, the training room does a steady business tending to aches, bruises and rung bells.

All in all, it’s a typical evening of hard luck and hard knocks.

Legler gets bucked off his bull at 7.9 seconds — a hair from a “marked ride,” but scored a fat zero nonetheless — and his hopes of riding in Las Vegas dim. The headline news, though, is that tour leader Chris Shivers scores an 89 that extends his lead over the injured McBride in the race for the million-dollar points title.

Shivers ends the evening tend-ing to an injury of his own. He

lies on a training table, bags of ice stuffed inside his purple shorts to soothe a chronically aching right hip.

“You want a bag of ice for the hotel?” Freeman offers. “Yessir.”

‘He can’t feel anything’

Tony Mendes, a curly haired, bespectacled and contagiously enthusiastic rider from Utah, stands at the end of a training table and changes the diaper of his 1-year-old son, Klay.

“What’s a horse say?” Mendes prompts, and Klay delivers a pass-able whinny on cue.

Nearby, another cowboy holds his nose. “Whew! That’s ranker than the bulls,” he says, watching Mendes complete the change.

There is laughter on this second night of the Columbus competi-tion, and the training room has been uncommonly quiet.

But the mood changes quickly.In the arena, rider Ednei

Caminhas lands face-first in the dirt, and his bull compounds the rough landing by stomping on his back. The crowd falls silent as the trainers load Caminhas onto a stretcher, carry him to the train-ing room and lay him on the table where, moments earlier, a tod-

dler had been getting his diaper changed.

Caminhas winces from the pain while Blyn and another rider remove his boots and help peel off his blue jeans, revealing heav-ily taped and bandaged legs. His protective vest deflected the blow, but the bull was among the heavi-est of the night and still caught Caminhas f lush enough to do some damage.

Caminhas lies on his stomach, ice on his back, grimacing at the TV monitor, where the competi-tion rolls on. And where, for the second night in a row, Legler has been bucked off his bull, all but ending his hope of riding in the World Finals.

The next contestant, a 29-year-old Arizona cowboy named Beau Lindley, also gets bucked off, and lands awkwardly on his head. The fallen rider doesn’t stir.

Suddenly, Blyn bursts into the training room.

“Can I move you?” he says to Caminhas, and the urgency in his voice prompts the injured rider to slide to a table farther from the door.

A stretcher bearing Lindley enters. Freeman clears the room, closes the door. A few minutes later, it swings open again and paramedics hustle Lindley toward the loading dock.

“They know they’re going to be in pain, so they don’t say anything until an injury bugs them enough.”

— Rich Blyn, a trainer commenting on the cowboy mentally


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“He can’t feel anything from here down,” Freeman says sol-emnly, holding his hand to his chest.

The competition goes on, but the air has gone out of the arena as word of the early symptoms circu-lates among the riders. They greet the news with grim expressions or weak assurances that he’ll come out of it, he’ll be OK.

Meanwhile, an ambulance rushes Lindley toward an uncer-tain future.

Praying and waiting

Past midnight, cowboys are strewn along the seventh-floor hallway of Columbus’ Grant Hospi-tal, backs to the wall, blue-jeaned legs angling across the f loor, hats in their laps. Waiting for news.

Cody Custer, the former cham-pion winding down a legendary career, has plugged his cellphone into a wall outlet to handle the stream of calls. At 38, he knows too well the danger and heartbreak of his sport.

Back in 1998, Custer had been next to ride when young sensation Jerome Davis fell off and broke his neck in Fort Worth. He hadn’t immediately realized the extent of Davis’ injury, which left him para-

lyzed below the chest.Custer also had been there three

years ago, when Glen Keeley got stomped by his bull in Albuquer-que and suffered severe internal injuries. He talked to Keeley soon after but didn’t know at the time how badly that would turn out, either.

“I prayed with him; we were shooting the breeze,” Custer recalls. “And then I didn’t see him again.”

Keeley later died from his inju-ries.

But this latest crash cuts partic-ularly deep. Custer taught Lindley at his Arizona bull-riding school years ago and knows the fam-ily well. He ranks Lindley as his most talented student, a teenager who, by the third day of lessons, was getting on the rankest bulls he had.

Lindley, he explains, also understood the price of his pas-sion more keenly than most. His younger brother died in a bull-rid-ing accident as a teen.

Custer made the first call to Lindley’s wife, Jaime, to give her the news before it swung around on the cowboy grapevine. Now, he urges all the others who ring his cellphone to keep the faith.

“I think he’ll be good,” he tells the latest caller. “We just got to keep praying for him.”

Across the hall, Todd Pierce, the former bareback rider who has turned his attention full-time to Christian ministry, also speaks softly to a bull rider who has called his cellphone.

“He’s doing a lot better. … The spinal cord’s intact …”

Lindley has been wheeled to an-other part of the hospital for tests, but finally, a nurse approaches the cowboys and plants the seeds of hope.

“He’s got some feeling in his feet,” she reports.

“Praise God,” says Pierce.Just minutes after Lindley went

down in the arena and the cow-boys learned the frightful early diagnosis, an envelope circulated. Now, it has $1,500 inside for what-ever Lindley’s family needs — a typical, heartfelt show of fraternal generosity.

Suddenly, a gurney wheels around the corner en route to the ICU. It’s Lindley, lying with his neck in a brace. When the cow-boys leap to their feet and follow, the attendants stop so Custer and Pierce can say a quick hello to their friend.

They tell him that Jaime is f ly-ing out in the morning, and not to worry about money. The PBR will pick up her travel and hotel costs, leaving the $1,500 in the envelope for miscellaneous expenses.

“I prayed with him; we were shooting the breeze. And then I didn’t see him again.”

— Cody Custer, remembering when fellow bull rider Glen Keeley died from severe internal injuries


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Even at a dark hour, Pierce injects some cowboy levity.

“You land on your head,” he jokes, “and you still get a check.”

By 3 a.m., the nurses have settled Lindley into a bed next to the window in an ICU room. They lead Custer and Pierce back to see him. The cowboys stand on either side of the bed, close to his head so Lindley — still in the neck brace that limits his field of vision — can see them.

They talk about … bull riding. Lindley has choice words for the animal that f lung him awkwardly to the dirt. He asks who won and what bull he rode.

Moments later, a doctor comes by on his rounds. He begins with Lindley’s feet and tests him for sensation, gradually moving up his leg and then to his arm and hand. Lindley answers “yes” to every touch. He has some lim-ited movement in his arms and hands.

But he does not move his legs.“So he could just walk out of

here with a neck brace in a couple days?” Pierce asks hopefully.

“Possible,” says the doctor, who tempers any optimism with a disclaimer. The extent of Lind-ley’s further recovery remains unknown. He adds, in a resigned tone that suggests he knows some-thing about cowboys, that perhaps Lindley should quit riding bulls.

“We’ll see,” Lindley says.Custer pulls out his cellphone

and dials Jaime. He holds the phone to Lindley’s ear, so that back in Arizona his wife can hear his voice.

At a PBR event at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, bull rider Jason Legler joins other cowboys in a prayer behind the chutes. “I probably wasn’t near as spiritual before bull riding,” he says, “but then I didn’t have near the danger.”


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“Don’t be upset,” Lindley says, the words sticking on dry lips. “I’m OK … don’t worry … I’ll be OK.”

Before they leave, Custer and Pierce lay their hands on Lindley and pray.

‘I won’t give up ’til it’s over’

Two weeks later, Jason Legler stands in line at a designer coffee shop at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, wondering what in the world “mocha” is and inquiring about the definition of “latté.”

“Do you have regular coffee?” he asks.

After getting bucked off both his bulls in Columbus, Legler knew his chance of qualifying for the PBR finale had been stomped into the arena dust. Only the top 45 riders make the cut. But the inevitability of injuries — such as the one that struck Lindley, who easily would have qualified for the finals — means that a handful of alternates must be available.

Seven are invited based on sea-son rankings. Legler is seventh on the list.

A long shot.He cashed in some of his fre-

quent-f lier miles and booked a f light to Vegas and a hotel room at the less-ritzy Gold Coast farther

down the Strip — where, he says, “they let me whoop and holler while I’m playing blackjack.”

For four days, he will relax and play the tables, have cocktails and watch the bull riding. He sat in the stands to watch the open-ing round, but the rest he plans to view on the hotel’s big-screen television.

“I probably won’t be in it at all — a spectator for once,” he says. “Last night, I got a ticket and didn’t know where to go.”

After a tough season, he could use the rest: just a few blessed weeks to try to heal a nagging lower-back injury that has had him popping ibuprofen regularly — three in the morning, like vita-mins, and three more after com-petition. Still …

“I knew (a ride in the Finals) was pretty much impossible,” he says, “but I won’t give up ‘til it’s over.

At the last possible moment, Legler’s phone rings.

He has been sitting in a res-taurant at the Gold Coast, sipping coffee after ordering bacon and eggs for breakfast. The news stuns him: Veteran Jim Sharp can’t ride because of a bruised rotator cuff from the previous night.

Legler doesn’t wait for breakfast to arrive. He tosses a $20 bill on the table and hustles to his room,

grabs his bag of gear and heads for the door. On the way out, he runs into a couple of buddies who drive him to the arena.

He punches his wife’s number into his cellphone, tells Kari the news, and asks her to call his par-ents and let them know he’s riding on national television.

In the darkened Thomas and Mack Center, Legler bounds down a long ramp beneath the glare of a spotlight and raises his hat to the cheers that greet his name. Pyro-technics f lash across the arena. The faint smell of sulfur mingles with the musty aroma of the bulls.

About 90 minutes into the show, Legler straddles Black Jack, who stumbles right out of the gate and gives an awkward perfor-mance, though Legler rides him capably.

The drama comes after the eight-second buzzer, when Legler tumbles off the bull and careens head-first into the metal chutes.

The impact stuns him, but it’s the next couple of seconds that send a gasp through the crowd. Black Jack dodges the bull fight-ers’ distractions and charges the downed cowboy.

The bull’s head and horns crash into the chute with a heavy, dull thud, just inches from Legler’s unprotected head. The dazed rider

“When you get that one shot, you don’t want to fall off.”

— Jason Legler, commenting on the lure and risk of bull riding


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remains blissfully unaware. The bull fighters help him to safety.

His score is relatively low, 81.5 points, owing not to Legler’s effort but the bull’s poor performance. The judges grant him the option of a re-ride.

At first, he’s too woozy to respond. Blood fills his nostrils, though he feels no pain in his nose. Slowly, the world swims back into focus.

Re-ride? You bet.This time Legler draws a bull

named Red Alert. It bucks and spins but can’t loosen the cowboy’s grip. It’s a fine ride, scored a very respectable 88.5, and Legler pulls off his hat and sends it spinning, saucerlike, into the air.

In a difficult season fraught with injuries, he salvages more than a measure of pride. Although Legler figures his finish — eighth best among the day’s rides — will leave him out of the money, he’s dead wrong.

When the competition’s final tally comes out, Legler has a num-ber beside his name: $2,250.

It’s a minor windfall, certainly more than he expected. He does not even learn of the prize money until later, well after Chris Shiv-ers has been handed an oversized check for $1 million and the week-end champion, rookie Jody New-berry, accepts a check for more than $250,000.

That kind of money is the pot of gold at the end of a cowboy’s rainbow. But for Legler, the long season ends with about $80,000 in total winnings between the PBR and PRCA. The cowboy life cost

him roughly half that in travel expenses.

Bull riding’s revolving door of injuries, including the wreck that eliminated Beau Lindley from competition, contributed to Legler’s chance for a turn in the national spotlight. It’s a fact of life riders understand and accept.

For Lindley, now recuperating in a Phoenix rehabilitation center, surgery has improved the sensa-tion in his legs and feet. That has fueled optimism about his recov-ery, though the prognosis remains uncertain.

Risk has never kept cowboys out of the dusty, f lood-lit arenas in the Texas hinterlands, the honky tonks of rural America, the small-

stakes jackpots where roughstock meets rough-hewn courage. And it won’t keep them from seeking their sport’s grandest stages.

“When you get that one shot,” Legler says, clutching a long-neck bottle of celebratory beer, “you don’t want to fall off.”

He retreats to the Gold Coast, antes up at the blackjack table and plays the cards he’s dealt. Ace and jack. A winner.

“Whoa, Nellie!” he shouts.

ON THE WEBYou can find related stories and

other special projects at:

www.denverpost.com

In Las Vegas, Legler and stock contractor Nick Kallsen of Fort Morgan blow off steam at the Gold Coast Hotel’s blackjack tables.

http://www.denverpost.com


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