Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, & Bull Riders

by Josh Peter

  Sling Blade, Baby Cakes, Night Life, and Blueberry Wine made quick work of the next four riders, and back into the chutes climbed Lee. This time he settled onto Bullet Proof, a bull ridden six times in 10 attempts and the same bull Lee had ridden at the 2003 finals for 89 points. He nodded for the gate, and Bullet Proof blew into the open space. The bull took two jumps, turned to the right, and Lee was done.

  Unable to hang on to the rope with his injured arm, he tumbled to the dirt. The crowd applauded his effort, then braced for the final ride. One man stood between Newberry and the victory—well, for precisely 4.7 seconds he did. That’s how long it took Silver Select to buck off Brian Wooley and secure a winner’s check of $32,490 for Newberry. The riders finishing between second and 10th won a combined $47,000, while the rest of the 35 went home empty-handed—save a one-night appearance fee of $200, barely enough to cover hotel, travel, and food expenses, even when piling in four to a truck and four to a room and eating fast food.

  Life in the PBR was a far cry from life in the Professional Golfers Association Tour, where the top 125 pros got free rental cars and free accommodations, and the top 50 money winners during the 2003 season earned no less than $1.3 million each. During the 2003 PBR season, Shivers earned $1.2 million—with his million-dollar bonus to be paid out $100,000 a year for 10 years. Every other rider in the top 10 made no less than $112,000. But no rider 30th or lower on the money list made more than $54,000; and Steven Shelley, 50th on the list, earned just $20,847.19.

  Top rookies in the National Football League and the National Basketball Association got millions of dollars before they even suited up. And those were guaranteed salaries. In bull riding, there are no guarantees—other than pain.

  After being presented an oversize winner’s check in Jacksonville, Newberry looked like he’d just made a hole in one. “I tell you what. I surely wasn’t planning on winning this one,” Newberry said with a loopy smile during a TV interview. “I didn’t even get my hair cut or nothing before I got out here. I’m not presentable right now. But I’m going to go home and get my hair cut and come back ready to win another one.”

  Facing a $500 fine from the PBR if they skipped the postevent autograph session, Newberry and the other able-bodied riders returned to the arena. A PBR employee waited with a boxful of Sharpies and checked the riders’ names off a list as they took their pens and headed into the arena, where 1,000 fans waited for a chance to get up close and personal with their favorites. Hedeman and the other PBR executives understood the value of giving fans a chance to connect with the riders—something that would’ve been impossible in the NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball.

  The riders circled the arena, signing cowboy hats, programs, ticket stubs, and anything fans asked them to autograph. They also posed for pictures and waited for the regular propositions.

  “Where are you going after this?” a comely groupie once asked rider Cody Whitney.

  “To my hotel room,” Whitney said.

  “Can I come?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to call my wife and see.”

  But it was mostly a wholesome sight—until later, when at darkened bars or hotel rooms, buckle bunnies asked riders to sign their breasts. On the rodeo circuit, it was a tradition that allowed riders to get into the groupies’ shirts before the groupies got into the riders’ pants.

  As the autograph session came to an end that night, the riders headed back to the locker room to gather their equipment. Several grabbed bottles of Bud Light from tubs that were loaded with beer before every event, while others grabbed bottled water. It was clear the riders were heading in separate directions, some back to the hotel for the night and others to the designated after-event party bar—something the PBR typically held at a country-and-western bar and advertised to fans as a chance to get autographs and mingle with the riders.

  Back at the hotel, riders Cory Melton, Ross Coleman, and J.W.Hart drank beer in the lobby while waiting for Hedeman, who, as usual, had the use of a limousine. Beer in hand, Hedeman returned, and the riders fell in line behind him and piled into the black stretch limo. Talk turned to beer drinking and bar fights and women—like some of the women who scurried into the bathroom at the 8 Seconds bar to fix their lipstick and hike up their halter tops as midnight and the black stretch limo approached.

  Inside the bar a small crowd formed around a mechanical bull. Cowboy hat pulled low, the rider bobbed, rocked, and whirled in rhythm with the machine. Suddenly someone blurted out, “It’s a girl.”

  Indeed it was. A girl named Candace Middleton. Twenty-one, trim, and cowboy-tough pretty.

  One jerk too many, and off the mechanical bull she went, her cowboy hat falling off and her long red hair tumbling out. She walked away looking proud. She drove dump trucks 6 days a week for a living but dreamed about riding bulls. No woman had ever competed at a PBR event, and most of the world’s top riders found the notion of a woman riding bulls against men laughable. Women did ride bulls in organized competitions for small prize money, but they were required to stay on for only 6 seconds and had the option of holding their bull ropes with both hands.

  Riding one-handed, Candace said, she became the first woman to ride a bull at the 8 Seconds bar. In another part of the bar, patrons who signed a waiver could try to ride real bulls. But tonight, healing from a calf injury, Candace rode only the mechanical bull. Earlier, she’d gone to the BFTS event at Veterans Memorial Arena to watch the world’s best riders and hoped to get some advice during the postevent autograph session.

  “Don’t do it,” one rider told her. “It’s too dangerous. . . . Quit.”

  “That’s one thing I won’t do,” responded Candace.

  Later, in the dim lights of the loud bar, other women showed similar determination as Candace—not to ride a bull but to climb atop the riders. Riders guzzled free beer, leaned against the bar, and waited for the buckle bunnies to approach. Approach they did, as if pulled by magnetic force. The riders surveyed the pickings and searched for one they could take to the hotel for the night.

  About 90 minutes later, Ross Coleman and Cory Melton—tall, strapping riders and two of the buckle bunnies’ favorites—stood behind two young, shapely blondes. The pawing began. Earlier that night, a stranger had asked one of the women if her breasts were real. She looked offended and determined to prove they were. So there, in plain view of dozens of bar patrons, she lowered her top and pulled out her right breast, and the man gave a squeeze.

  “They’re real, all right,” he said, grinning.

  When 8 Seconds closed down for the night and Hedeman led the way back to the limo, he did so with three fewer riders. Coleman and Melton had left with the two blondes determined to join them.

  The good news for the bull riders going home alone was that they’d survived the night unscathed. Shortly before closing time, outside the bar, tempers had flared. Someone had pulled a butterfly knife. Bouncers tackled the man. Someone had punched the man’s wife. All hell had broken loose before the cops arrived. The limo driver recounted the details, and the riders looked disappointed they’d missed the action.

  Pulling up at the hotel at two-thirty in the morning, they staggered out of the limo. Two riders went in search of more beer. The others went in search of their rooms.

  Three hours later, still pitch dark outside, it was quiet enough inside the hotel lobby to hear a cow pie drop. The ding of the elevator broke the silence.

  Out staggered the first bull rider.

  Another ding. Another rider.

  Another ding. Another rider.

  Another ding. Another rider.

  Hungover bull riders filtered into the hotel lobby with most of the sober riders still in bed.

  Out of the elevator came J. W. Hart. His initials stood for John Wesley, but some of the announcers fibbed, telling the crowd they stood for John Wayne. That morning in Jacksonville, J. W. Hart looked like John Wayne after a weeklong stagecoach ride. Red circles rimmed his glassy eyes. But when someon
e mentioned they were surprised to see him up so early, Hart grinned.

  “We’re cowboys,” said Hart, known as the Iron Man because he’d ridden in 197 events before a torn groin muscle in 2003 ended his streak. “That’s the way we do it. Just takes some conditioning. Like running a marathon.”

  A marathon. Perfect. Each of the 27 regular-season events would serve as roughly 1 mile on the marathon-like race to the finals starting October 22 in Las Vegas. The opening leg of the race would be grueling, with Jacksonville the first of 19 consecutive weekends of Built Ford Tough Series events.

  Hart dumped the last of his bags into the trunk of a taxi and climbed into the backseat with two other riders. Not far behind were the others. The morning was young, and so was the season. But the riders had planes to catch and dreams to chase, and so off they went in rental cars, shuttles, and taxis, one weekend event down and 26 more to go before the finals, with the $1 million bonus and gold buckle waiting to be claimed.

  The marathon had begun.

  STANDINGS

  1 Jody Newberry 520.5 points

  2 Dan Henricks 453.5 points

  3 Dave Samsel 419.5 points

  4 Brian Wooley 314 points

  5 Jason Bennett 314 points

  6 Craig Sasse 252 points

  7 Cody Hart 252 points

  8 Gilbert Carrillo 201.5 points

  9 Mike Lee 166 points

  10 Cody Whitney 135.5 points

  THREE

  HEADS & TAILS

  Bossier City, Louisiana

  Friday & Saturday, January 9 & 10, 2004

  Corey Navarre fished a quarter out of his pocket. He looked at Lee Akin.

  “Heads the bed, tails the couch,”Navarre said.

  It was past midnight, about 2 hours after the first night of competition ended at the PBR’s third stop, a 2-day event in northwest Louisiana. An hour-long Bible study group had just broken up, and Navarre and Akin were ready for bed. Best friends, travel partners, and former rodeo teammates at Southwestern Oklahoma State, they stood out on the bull riding circuit. Navarre is white and Akin is black, one of the few black riders who’d reached the Built Ford Tough Series.

  In keeping with rodeo tradition, they were sharing a room with two other riders. But for Navarre, Akin, and others treading below the top-10 money winners, sharing a hotel room was more than tradition. It was a way to make ends meet. Riders often slept two to a bed, but the hotel room at the Horseshoe Casino, where the PBR riders were staying, featured an unexpected luxury: beds and couches. The coin flip would determine who slept where.

  Navarre flipped the quarter into the air, caught it in his right palm, and slapped it on his left wrist.

  Heads.

  “You’re on the couch,” Navarre said.

  “What?” howled Akin. “You said ‘heads the bed’—not that you’d get the bed.”

  Navarre rolled his eyes.

  “Heads, I’m in the bed. Tails, I’m on the couch.”

  Navarre reflipped the coin, caught it in his palm, and slapped it on his wrist. Heads again.

  Akin eyed the quarter as if it might be a two-headed trick coin. Navarre turned it over, revealing tails on the other side. “Satisfied?” he asked.

  Akin frowned. Forget the quarter. He was still trying to make heads or tails out of what had happened to his career. Six months earlier he’d been on the cover of the PBR’s monthly magazine, Pro BullRider, with his photo next to a headline that trumpeted “A Rising Star.” At 29 years old, with his high cheekbones, caramel-colored skin, and fashion model looks, he seemed destined for magazine covers.

  He graduated from Southwestern Oklahoma State in 2002 with a degree in biology but never seriously considered a career outside of bull riding. After spending several years competing in the PRCA, he turned his attention to the PBR. With a thunderclap, he arrived on the BFTS in 2002, with top-10 finishes in six of his first seven events and $50,000 in winnings.

  But an elbow injury sidelined him for 7 weeks, and a knee injury kept him out an additional 8 weeks. His body healed, but his confidence crumbled. Akin proceeded to fall off 18 of his next 20 bulls; and in July, hoping to regain his form at small-time bull riding events, he climbed aboard about 30 more bulls and could count on one hand the number he’d successfully ridden.

  Tuff Hedeman added insult to injury. During a PBR telecast, he noted that Akin had a degree in biology and suggested Akin put away his riding gear, put on a white lab coat, and get back to dissecting frogs. Akin felt the world was dissecting him.

  He developed his love for rodeo while he was growing up in Hemet, California, at the knee of his mother, DeBoraha. She rode horses and competed in barrel racing and in 1990 became the first black woman to compete in the 20-year history of the International Professional Rodeo Association Finals. In yet another family breakthrough, in 2002 Akin became the only black rider on the PBR’s top circuit. Featured in Savoy magazine, he was touted by some as the next great black rodeo star. But he wouldn’t be the first.

  That honor belonged to Bill Pickett, the oldest of 13 children and the son of a former slave. It was at the turn of the 20th century when Pickett invented a rodeo event called bulldogging, better known as steer wrestling. Frustration was the mother of his invention.

  The story, according to writer Paul Harwitz, goes like this: In 1903, on a ranch in Rockdale, Texas, a longhorn steer refused to enter a corral. The animal kept scattering the herd, and Pickett lost his patience. Aboard his horse, Pickett rode alongside the steer, jumped off, and wrestled the steer to the ground. The animal kept resisting, so Pickett bit the steer on the lower lip and slammed it to the dirt.

  Other black stars followed. Myrtis Dightman, considered the Jackie Robinson of rodeo, broke the color line but never could break through for a world championship. He once asked his white friend and fellow rider Freckles Brown what it would take to win the world championship. “Keep riding like you’ve been riding—and turn white,” Brown replied. With white judges awarding the scores, Dightman had no chance. But he played an important role in breaking the barrier in the 1970s when he met a short and skinny kid from Watts, site of the 1965 riots in Los Angeles County.

  Charlie Sampson was his name. Introduced to horses at a young age, Sampson wanted to be a champion bull rider, and he knew Dightman could help. Dightman, by then retired, agreed to tutor Sampson; and in 1982 the kid from Watts became the first black cowboy to win a world bull riding championship. Lee Akin dreamed about becoming the second.

  Though prejudice no longer seemed a serious obstacle, Akin occasionally confronted it. Like the incident in Mississippi in 2000. After a rodeo, Akin remembered, he returned to his hotel room before heading to a bar where he was supposed to meet fellow riders.

  “When I walked in, it was like a movie: The whole place just stopped and looked at me,” Akin told a reporter from the Florida Times-Union. “I asked what the cover charge was or if there was a cover charge to a lady near the front door, and the lady just looked at me. Some guy takes me outside and asks me if I saw the sign. There were a bunch of signs, so I asked which one. He pointed to a sign that said, ‘This is a private club. We have the right to refuse service,’ and goes, ‘I think you know what that means.’ I asked him if there was a place I could shoot pool, and he said, ‘Not around here there ain’t,’ and just walked away.”

  At the start of the 2004 season, however, Akin knew the bulls and his self-confidence, not prejudice, were the chief obstacles to his winning the championship. Even his good nights were bittersweet. At the PBR’s second stop, Akin made the championship round. Then he drew Little Yellow Jacket, who launched Akin over his horns and kicked him in the head. Akin, frustrated by a string of bad luck and bad rides, grumbled, “I feel like if I didn’t wear my seat belt, I’d fall out of my truck.”

  The soft strumming of a guitar and a stack of Bibles greeted people filtering into CenturyTel Center. Open to the public, the so-called Cowboy Church service attracted about 300 PBR fans, who clus
tered in one section of the arena. The men removed their cowboy hats when Todd Pierce, a bareback-rider-turned-pastor, stood before them. These were no ordinary fans.

  Wearing their PBR T-shirts and PBR jackets, many of them had gathered at a Holiday Inn the day before as if they were attending a family reunion. There was the self-proclaimed Texas Rowdy Bunch, a six-pack of Texans who put a large “Rowdy Bunch” sticker on the side of their van. There was Larry Seamans, who escaped the pressures of work by attending bull ridings and liked to say, “If the PBR don’t get your fire going, your wood is wet.” Then there were Bill and Peggy Duvall, who wore matching blue and yellow PBR jackets.No fans were more devout than the Duvalls.

  The retired couple from West Virginia had known nothing about bull riding when they were flipping through the TV channels in 1995 and came across a PBR event, punctuated by the rapid-fire Texas twang of Donnie Gay, then the PBR’s lead commentator. Gay cracked up the Duvalls with his signature lines—“A shot in the shorts,” he quipped after a bull hooked his horns into a rider’s backside, and “His bell’s ringing and nobody’s home,” he boomed after a rider got dumped on his head and wobbled to his feet. The Duvalls decided they just had to see this in person.

  Hooked after attending their first live event, they started going to about half of the PBR’s regular-season bull ridings and attended each year’s finals in Las Vegas. Bill Duvall, a lanky, white-haired man who looked younger than his age of 73, made his fortune in the automotive and truck service industry. Now he and his auburn-haired wife of 71 spent a small fortune on their annual PBR travels. They bought the PBR’s most expensive tickets at $100 apiece, stayed at the PBR headquarter hotels, and occasionally treated the bull riders to steak dinners.

  The Duvalls knew all the riders, some well enough that Bill Duvall drank beer with a few—up until 2 hours before the bull riding began. Of course, that was a few years earlier, before the PBR, growing protective of its image, cracked down on such behavior.