It's A Wild, Crazy Ride

Eight seconds doesn’t seem like a long time.

But, trust me, to a cowboy on a bucking bull, trying to complete a ride and hopefully draw a paycheck, it’s an eternity.

You can get a sense of that next weekend, when the Pro Bull Riders’ Enterprise Tour visits Freedom Hall Civic Center in Johnson City, Tenn.

The Enterprise Tour is akin to a minor league of professional bull riding – not the top “Ford Built Tough” series broadcast on cable television – but that hardly matters to anyone who can appreciate the courage and skill it takes to ride one of these animals.

The cowboys are no less athletic, tough and confident; the bulls are no less big, agile and ornery.

Once the gate on a bucking chute swings open, there’s a mighty fine line between triumph and disaster, and every cowboy knows his ride is a nasty wreck waiting to happen.

As Montana’s Dan Mortensen, maybe the best rough-stock cowboy that state has ever produced, once told me: If you ride bulls for a living, it’s not a question of “if” you’ll get hurt, it’s a matter of “when.”

So, if the dangers are real and so few competitors make a lot of money, why keep coming back for more?

I asked that question a lot after I moved to Montana three years ago. I’d ask a cowboy who was so banged up he could barely stand straight, and he’d usually just shrug his shoulders. It was, he’d say, in his blood.

Cowboys are some of the most gracious and patient folks around, and I learned a lot listening to and watching them. But it’s not the same as doing.

I’d never done what they’d done. Cowboys would get thrown, pick themselves out of the dirt, grab their hat and tip it to the crowd, then come back ready for more. And I couldn’t understand why.

But I set out to find out.

I got to thinking about that again the other night, when a disc jockey on a local country-western station asked listeners to share the craziest thing they’d ever done. I wish I’d called.

I would have told him about competing two summers ago in a first-timer’s bull ride in Bozeman, Mont. It’s probably the closest I’ve ever come, as one co-worker suggested, to losing my mind.

I’d gotten to know a bunch of rodeo cowboys by that time, so, after I wrangled one of the rodeo’s 12 rides, I sought some pointers. After each cowboy finished laughing at me, he’d offer me some advice.

Mortensen, a six-time world saddle bronc champion, gave me some technical pointers. Shaun Halko, the Montana high school bull-riding champion, told me not to think about all the bad things that could happen but to go in with the attitude that I was going to ride.

Steven Lambert, the two-time Montana Circuit champion bull rider, gave me the best advice of all. He didn’t talk about technique or attitude, because he knew I’d forget all of it as soon as I climbed aboard.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “It’s going to be something you’ve never experienced before, so go out and enjoy it for everything it’s worth. I promise you, the first time never lasts too long. But it’s a ride you’ll remember your whole life.”

He was right on every count.

My ride lasted a little more than two seconds, which was three seconds less than I needed to win the championship buckle. Still, two seconds seemed like an awfully long time. As I picked myself out of the dirt, I kept wondering how I could have lasted four times that long.

It was every bit the adrenaline rush the cowboys assured me it would be. I was ready, right then, to do it again.

And I understood in that moment why cowboys keep climbing on.

Every time I watch bull riding, I recall a conversation I had with Mortensen. He’d started out riding bulls in high school and college, but stopped after he got good riding bucking horses.

He picked the event up again for one season – in 1997 – when he won his only world all-around championship. But that season, he paid attention to the event as he never had when he was competing regularly, and he realized just how many disasters bull riders narrowly avoided.

And, he said, he came to a conclusion: “Those guys are crazy.”

He might not get an argument from any of the cowboys who’ll compete in the PBR next weekend at Freedom Hall. Each of them has probably questioned his sanity more than once.

But, to paraphrase veteran radio commentator Paul Harvey, there’s another side to the story.

It’s one that I now know a lot about.

JIM CNOCKAERT is the Herald Courier sports editor. He can be reached at jcnockaert@bristolnews.com and at (276) 645-2572.