March 1974
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
Tentatively fingering the purple bump on his forehead and positioning the fruit cake on the coffee shop counter in such a way that he was certain to put his elbow in it, Jerry Jeff Walker ordered his first hot meal in five days, a bowl of Love Field soup. The author of "Mr. Bojangles" had flown from a performance in Atlanta to see the last day of the National Finals rodeo in Oklahoma City.
It had been necessary to get out of Oklahoma City fast. Jerry Jeff and his traveling companion, composer-musician Gary P. Nunn, had escaped with their lives, two guitars, and one Irish fruit cake molded in the shape of the state of Texas. Except for a slice in the cellophane packaging where a bull rider had pinned it to the wall with his frog sticker, the fruit cake was undamaged. It was about the only thing that was. There had been two sets of parties the night before, a Cowboy Hall of Fame banquet honoring (among others) a rank Brahma bull named Tornado who in 200 times out of the chute had never been ridden, and of course the assorted victory parties in the hotel. When Jerry Jeff staggered out of his hotel room that morning clutching his guitar and his fruit cake, he tipped the maid five dollars and advised her to abandon her broom and mop and find a plow. The room gave every indication that Tornado and several of his younger brothers who had also never been ridden had dropped by for cocktails; Jerry Jeff himself was a pitifully-wasted, semi-demented figure in a soiled beaver hat, sheeplined coat, Charlie Dunn boots, and whiskers too short to qualify as a beard and too long to be what you would call unkempt. In cowboy talk, he looked like he had been rode hard and put up wet.
The fruit cake had caused considerable uneasiness on the part of the bomb patrol at the Oklahoma City airport, and Jerry Jeff hadn't facilitated matters by pulling a yellow plastic watergun from his pocket and shooting himself in the mouth with tequila. Now, in the Dallas airport coffee shop, waiting to change planes for the final leg home to Austin, the fruit cake caused more comment.
"If that thing had legs I'd shoot it," said Dixie, the counter waitress.
"That happens to be the Larry Mahan Memorial Fruitcake presented annually to the craziest cowboy at the National Finals," Jerry Jeff told Dixie as she served his soup.
"That's a real prize, honey," Dixie said. "What are you gonna do with it?"
"I'm gonna have it made into a belt buckle," he said.
He wasn't lying: The fruitcake truly was a gift from Larry Mahan, the world's best all-around cowboy. For the worst part of an hour the night before Jerry Jeff also had in his possession another trophy, Larry Mahan's bull riding rope which he intended to place in his private museum along with Bobby Orr's hockey stick. But it had been necessary to use the rope in effecting his incredible escape, and now his only memento of those lost desperate hours was the fruit cake—and of course the purple knot on his forehead, and a bruised back and some unexplained sharp pains in the area of his rib cage.
He couldn't remember how it started, or even how it ended except the part about waiting at the hotel elevator which took forever to arrive. All the while, he was being pummeled by bull riders who, fortunately, are almost uniformly five-foot-eight, and besides, that being the night after the final go-round of the National Finals, were uniformly drunk as Tooter's goat.
"I can't say I was impressed," Jerry Jeff told Dixie. "I got beat up worse than that by a motorcycle gang in New Orleans last New Year's Eve."
"And you can't remember how it happened?" asked Gary Nunn. "The last I saw of you before you came back and wrecked the room was when you and Mahan went upstairs to get the rope."
"The rope," Jerry Jeff said.
"His bull riding rope. You wanted it for your museum."
"Yes, the rope, I remember now, we went to Mahan's room for the rope. Then I stopped by Bobby Steiner's room wearing the rope around my neck, which was probably a mistake and explains these rope burns on my neck and wrists. That's right, the beds were made and there were these bull riders and their wives sitting around. Yes, it's coming back now: Bobby Steiner either wanted me to sing 'Charlie Dunn' or didn't want me to sing 'Charlie Dunn,' and I either sang it or didn't sing it, I don't remember which, but whichever, it was wrong."
"Who's Charlie Dunn?" Dixie asked.
"He works for Buck Steiner...Bobby Steiner's grandpa. At the Capitol Saddle Shop in Austin," Gary Nunn told her. "Jerry Jeff wrote a song about him."
"Now it's coming back," Jerry Jeff said. "I was struggling to make the elevator, cowboys all around me, pushing, shoving, elbowing, calling me things I can't repeat. And how long the elevator took. And then...I'm not sure... I think I threw the rope at them like maybe it was Wonder Woman's lasso."
"Honey," Dixie said, "singing 'em a little song, that's no reason to punch you up like that. Is there something you haven't told us?"
Jerry Jeff closed one eye and attempted to focus the other one on the fruit cake under his elbow. A voice of long ago washed in his ear. A lonely and sad-eyed picker passed among the pecans and blue-eyed candy; red faces got redder. "I think I sang them our new song called 'Black Hole' about the universe and all this density that sucks the juice out of light and..."
"Did you sing the line about pubic hair?" Gary Nunn asked.
"I'll bet I did."
"That was your mistake, honey," Dixie said. "Cowboys may cuss a lot but there's one thing a cowboy won't stand for, that's somebody cussing in front of his wife."
Jerry Jeff rubbed ice on his forehead. It proved one thing: rodeo cowboys weren't ready for a song about pubic hair.
The 1973 National Finals, the world series of rodeos began the same way as any other rodeo. Announcer Clem McSpadden, a silver-suited, string-tied Democratic Congressman from Oklahoma, warmed up the crowd with his stock speech about how you won't find any hippies at the rodeo because cowboys believe in hard work and being able to tell their men from their women. This was followed by an abbreviated grand entry—a parade of flags representing the United States, Canada, Oklahoma, the Rodeo Cowboys Association (RCA), and Winston cigarettes. The crowd came to its feet when Larry Mahan galloped in with the Winston flag. Winston enriches the RCA prize money by $105,000 annually.
Mahan was wearing his beaver hat and his single-minded stage smile, but the smile vanished as soon as he rode out of the arena. These are aspects of the sport that do not appeal to Mahan—the pandering to middle American bigotry and to tobacco empire patriotism. At 30, approaching the twilight of a brilliant career that has rewarded him with a record six best all-around titles, Mahan is definitely a maverick. He wears loud shirts and psychedelic chaps and hair longer than necessary. He pilots his own twin-engine Cessna, chauffeurs his own black Cadillac limousine at unbelievable speeds, skis with Billy Kidd, hangs out with Craig Morton and makes compulsive credit-card calls anytime he is near a telephone, which is constantly.
"I used to be just about the straightest guy on the tour," Mahan told Bud Shrake of Sports Illustrated. "I don't know when it started or what caused it, but I've loosened up. Some of my values have changed. Things are funny and enjoyable to me now that I might have taken a different way a few years ago." For example, last Halloween night in San Francisco Mahan and some friends were sitting in a North Beach bar when this incredible creature in furs, feathers, eye shadow and lipstick strutted in, limp-wristed, one hand on his hip, crying: "I'm Larry Mahan! I'm not afraid of anyone in this whole wretched place!" A few years ago this performance would have been the signal for blood-letting, but now Mahan only smiled.
Whatever Mahan's contemporaries may think of his lifestyle, nobody denies that he is the best thing that has happened to the sport in 20 years. "I've been rodeoing since 1946," says Neal Gay of Mesquite, "and in all that time we've had only two superstars—Mahan and Jim Shoulders." Though Mahan compiled $64,000 in prize money last year (and at least that much again for such odd jobs as caddying the Winston flag), rodeo performers are still the poor relations of the sports world. Jack Nicklaus, who could be Mahan's equivalent on the golf circuit, earned $278,124.
Larry Mahan is not necessarily the best bull rider, or the best bareback rider, or the best saddle bronc rider, but he is the best cowboy. Some of the younger cowboys, those who can afford it, prefer to specialize in one or two events, but Mahan rides anything that bucks. He came out of the chute 30 times in the National Finals, a record that none of his challengers came close to approaching. Clem McSpadden doesn't like to think about it, but rodeo cowboys work less than probably any other profession. If you don't count thousands of miles of travel, or the time a rider spends preparing himself and his equipment, or the trips to and from the hospital, if you figure only the time he is actually performing it works out to about an hour a year. Mahan has had his jaw smashed, three vertebrae cracked and his foot broken: when he broke his foot in 1967, Mahan put on a plaster cast and, in the best tradition of the rodeo, continued to ride.
