History Lesson 
Rodeo Madness
There's a new generation in this ragged sport, from champion Larry Mahan's challengers to city-folk whose new cult hero is the cowboy
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"I think most of the guys are out here because they love to be around animals, love to compete, love the life," Mahan says. "They don't want to be stuck in some town all their lives at some dull job. The adrenalin flows pretty fast out here. Plenty of guys get hurt, but you worry about a good ride more than about your safety. I figure, if I ride three more years, I'll be up on 1500 head of bucking stock. Now it's not reasonable to think you can ride 1500 head of bucking stock without going to the hospital, so you just put that idea out of your mind and think about riding and winning and loving the life."
"Most of the boys out here don't make enough money to get by," Neal Gay admits." Almost all of them have side jobs. I'm not complaining: that's the way it is in our sport. It's not a sport that too many kids learn, not like football or baseball. We don't get the glory in the press. How many reporters are here covering the Finals? Damn few. There's a nothing football game on TV today (Minnesota vs. Green Bay). I'll bet there's 30 or 40 reporters covering it."
When Neal's sons, Pete, 22, and Donny, 20, joined the rodeo, he told them: "Boys, if you can stay healthy it's better than working for wages. But don't expect any drastic changes. You gotta love what you got right now." Gay also told his boys, "If you get out there and go broke, don't write home for money. You set down your gear and go to work."
Such drastic measures have not proved necessary. In 1972, his first year out of Mesquite High School, Donny earned nearly $15,000 in prize money. Both of the brothers finished among the top 15 bull riders, which qualified them for the National Finals. A year later Pete and Donny and two other young bull riders, Bobby Steiner and Marvin Shoulders (son of the former world champion), were seriously challenging Mahan for the bull riding buckle.
There was a sameness about the young challengers, almost as though they had been machine made. They wore size 141/2 shirts and size 32-30 jeans, they were smooth and self-sufficient and cocky as middleweight boxers, all in their early twenties, all sons and sometimes grandsons of well-known rodeo performers who long ago turned in their rigging bags for the permanent, affluent life of ranching and rodeo promotion. Unlike the man they chased—unlike Larry Mahan—they were born into their profession.
"There might of been a time when Pete would of gone another direction," says Neal Gay. "But Donny never had any other idea except to be a rodeo cowboy. From the time he was six Donny knew the only reason he wasn't world champion was his daddy wouldn't let him quit school. I'll say this, neither one of my boys ever asked for or got one cent from me: what they did, they did on their own."
Neal Gay gave up saddle tramping when his first wife died. Pete and Donny were babies at the time. Neal met his second wife, the only mother Pete and Donny remember, in church. She had never seen a rodeo. Now she's a barrel racer. For the past 16 years Neal has raised stock and operated the weekly Mesquite Rodeo, just outside of Dallas. "You might say rodeoing is a way of life in our family," Neal Gay says.
The Steiner family owns several ranches around Austin. Old Buck Steiner, the arch-grouch patriarch of the family, owns more than 90 pieces of property in choice locations around Austin's booming Highland Lake region. Bobby's dad, Tommy, is one of the nation's leading rodeo promoters.
"My granddad is 73 and still works all day, every day," says Bobby Steiner. "He works his stock in the morning and his shop in the afternoon. He works harder than anyone I ever saw. When he speaks, we all listen. He's the old master as far as I'm concerned." You can't see it with the naked eye but there is a lot of old Buck in his grandson. Bobby has that bull rider currency that time will erode: thin, cool, cynical, impatient, frequently bored, a droopy mustache on a frail, almost poetic face, small by street standards but obviously tough and capable, more businesslike than intense but intensely businesslike and afraid of nothing that walks on four legs. When he quit school and ran away from home at 16, Bobby was already a seasoned rider.
He recalls that Mahan told him one night (as they were carrying Mahan to a hospital in Fort Worth): "You're better than most of these guys already. Why don't you get your [RCA] card and join the circuit?" Not long after that, in the dead of night, Bobby packed his gear and wrote his family this plaintive note of farewell: "If you need me, get in touch. If I need you, I'll do the same." Bobby never returned. Six years later, at 22, he would be the bun riding champion of the world.
Marvin Shoulders really had a tough act to follow-being the son of, you might say, the Babe Ruth of Rodeo. Jim Shoulders, who still looks as though he has no age at all, like a highly polished rock, claims that he did not influence Marvin's decision. "Heck," Jim tells interviewers, "I told him he ought to be a reporter so he don't have to work hard." Nevertheless, at 22, Marvin Shoulders is earning better than $20,000 a year. "His bank account is usually bigger than mine," Jim laughs proudly.
Pete and Donny Gay, Bobby Steiner and Marvin Shoulders have something else in common—they all grew up wanting to be better than Larry Mahan. Mahan was the bridge. He was the best man when they were boys, and he still is: Mahan had already cinched his sixth all-around (breaking Jim Shoulders' record) before the start of the National Finals, and having won the war was still in the thick of the skirmish for the relatively minor title of best bun rider. "For as long as I can remember," says Bobby Steiner, "I've known that someday I would be competing against Mahan, or whoever was on top."
"It makes you realize how long you've been around," Larry Mahan is saying as he helps another cowboy adjust his cinch strap. "I think I probably put both Donny Gay and Bobby Steiner on their first buns. Now here they are, competing in the toughtest event there is." Mahan won his first bun riding championship in 1965, when he was 22. It was his break with obscurity. A year later he won his first world championship.
Mahan watches without comment as Donny Gay rides his bull to the buzzer. When Gay slips neatly to the ground while a clown distracts the beast, Mahan nods approval at the escape.
"They've handled the pressure better than I did," Mahan says. "In '65 I got an early lead, then suddenly I was falling off of everything. I pressured up. Remember, I grew up on two acres in Western Oregon. I had a horse when I was a kid, and that's all. These boys grew up with the rodeo. They were old hands when they were teenagers."
Clem McSpadden and his sidekicks, the clowns, are having a hard time keeping the audience amused. Their hippie jokes are dying a quick, natural death. (Sample: the definition of a hippie is someone who talks like Jack, 1ooks 1ike Jill and smells like john). Instinctively, they switch to Nixon jokes.
McSPADDEN (to clowns): You say you've found a job for Nixon? What is it?
CLOWN NO. 1: We're gonna put him on TV.
(McSpadden repeats the clown's line so that everyone in the coliseum can hear.)
McSPADDEN: What sort of TV shows?
CLOWN NO.2: I've Got a Secret...(McSpadden repeats it, to scattered titters from the audience)...The Price Is Right. ..(more, sharper laughter)...To Catch a Thief...(etc.)
A veteran politician, McSpadden realizes that two years ago or even a year ago telling bum jokes about the president would get him drawn and quartered at any rodeo in Oklahoma, but tonight he feels his audience, and when the self-conscious laughter slides again into boredom, McSpadden reminds them that this is still the best country of all. "It's been years since we've had anything like this (ie: like Watergate)," he says over the PA. "There's not many places on earth that can make that claim!"
Now there is general applause as rodeo fans honor themselves.
If the creator invented a meaner, ranker beast than the Brahma bull he forgot to tell the cowboy. A bull wants nothing more than to kill the man on his back, which is the reason cowboys ride bulls-the only reason. The sport has no correlation to the vanishing world of the true working cowboy. A roper, a dogger, a saddlebronc rider, these are men whose traditional daring and skill date back to and partially explain the beginning of the American West, but riding a bull is like climbing a mountain; it is its own excuse. Jim Shoulders used to say that it was simple—all a cowboy had to do was keep one leg on each side of the bull and his mind in the middle.
There is nothing capricious in the fact that the bull riding competition is always the final event of the rodeo. That is what the fans come to see.
Rodeo fans, especially those rugged individuals who travel hundreds and even thousands of miles to attend the National Finals, are elitists, like tennis fans only more fervid. They see themselves as nothing less than the True Descendants of the Heroic American Experience. There were no blacks and no freaks at the Finals, but there was an oblique collection of adventurers, including ex-Dallas Cowboy Lance Rentzel, Jerry Jeff Walker, and actor James Caan, whose hobby is calf roping.
There is a phenomenon loose on the land. The same force that sends children of bank presidents back to the cornfields and makes song writers like Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver, and Jerry Jeff Walker almost as popular in New York City as they are in Texas has come to roost at the rodeo. The cowboy has replaced the Indian and the spaceman as the symbol of defiance and the safety-valve of individual expression. God help us, the cowboy has become a cause.
Austin radio station KOKE (the acronym is unintentional though appropriate) plays what is now called "progressive country music," bills itself as the rodeo station, and sells Super Roper t-shirts that make you strong.
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