Game Over 
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
At 29, Ty Murray is the king of the cowboys — a matinee idol of the mythic west. But he’d trade it all for the perfect ride.
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Despite their ranchless backgrounds and college educations, the new generation of rodeo cowboys act pretty much the same as the generations who rode before them. They appear in public in their standard outfit: Western shirt (usually Wrangler), jeans (always Wrangler), scuffed boots (new boots at a rodeo evoke snickers), and cowboy hat (brushed felt in the winter, straw after Easter). They rely on colorful nineteenth-century cowboy language to describe what they do. (After a good ride, they say, “I scraped ’im up good”; after a bad ride, they say, “I rode like a fat lady.”) Around the chutes, they act masculine and unrestrained, bullheaded and dauntless, performing without complaint despite cracked ribs, bruised organs, and torn knees. At most, their rides last eight seconds, as fast as a gunfight, which for them is the whole point. Their rides are an elemental confrontation with wildness: a dangerous dance between man and beast. And when it’s over, the cowboys retrieve their hats that have fallen to the ground, disappear behind the chutes, and head off to another rodeo.
No one exemplifies this persona better than Ty Murray. “This boy is all cowboy, right down to the little toes in his boots,” says Gay. He seems to be straight from central casting: a fearless, fiercely independent throwback to the Old West. In typical cowboy fashion he doesn’t make small talk with strangers, and he’s often laconic in interviews, revealing little about himself because, as he once put it, “I let my riding talk for me.” At a bull-riding event in Odessa one night, when I tried to elicit his opinions on the symbolic meaning of rodeo, Murray fished out a can of Copenhagen, dipped two fingers into its dark, moist contents, packed a rich wad behind his bottom lip, and said, “What in the shit are you talking about?”
In truth, his friends on the rodeo circuit say, Murray possesses a wicked sense of humor and has a cowboy’s love for practical jokes: He once spent an entire PBR rodeo banquet leaning over in his seat at the head table so that he could flick a cigarette lighter under the emcee’s rear end. Like Will Rogers, he takes great pleasure in razzing pretentious characters, especially big-city types. After I asked a series of naive questions about his riding skills, he started calling me Stuart Smalley, after the pathetic, emotionally needy character played by Al Franken on Saturday Night Live. When he worked as a consultant on the recent western film The Hi-Lo Country, he watched the film’s star, Woody Harrelson, scream in pain after ripping off part of his fingernail on a bucking chute. As several worried assistants gathered around the actor, Murray sauntered up and said in a mock-anxious voice, “Is your little fingernail going to be okay? Do you think you’re going to be okay? By the way, did you notice that three of my buddies over there got dragged around and stomped on by a bunch of bulls? Are you gonna be okay?” Harrelson quickly got the point and stopped complaining.
When other cowboys talk about Murray, they pay him the ultimate cowboy compliment by saying that he is full of “try,” a combination of skill, concentration, and courage. “He’s got so much try in him that he honestly believes he can ride anything with hair on it,” Gay says. In fact, in 1994 Murray was arrested in Colorado for “unlawfully harassing wildlife.” He had been seen chasing down an elk in a snowmobile, jumping on its back, and then riding it through a snowy pasture. He paid a small fine, he says, “but I got about $50,000 worth of fun out of the deal, so I guess I came out all right.”
“Ty is just one of those people who loves a challenge—any challenge,” says his close friend Charles Soileau, a saddle bronc rider who also lives in Stephenville. (Known as the Cowboy Capital of the World, Stephenville is home to at least a dozen top rodeo cowboys who like its pastoral setting and the fact that the Dallas–Fort Worth airport is only a two-hour drive away.) “He’s always wanting to flip a coin to see who will buy dinner. If you’re working out with him and you do fifty push-ups, he’ll keep going until he does ten more. And he’s so competitive with himself that whenever he gets bucked off, he’ll never say it was because the animal was too good. He’ll always tell you that he pussed out.”
TY MURRAY WAS BORN JUST OUTSIDE PHOENIX, and the day he came home from the hospital his parents put a tiny pair of cowboy boots on him. “If there was someone born to ride, I imagine it was me,” he says. Butch and Joy Murray had no qualms about their son learning the ropes, as it were, of rodeo. As teenagers, they had participated in rodeos themselves. Joy, a feisty redhead, had even won bull-riding trophies. “As a family, we didn’t ski or bowl or play golf,” says Butch, who broke colts and trained horses for a living. “We went to participate in rodeos on weekends.”
Butch taught Ty and his two older sisters to rope and ride. The Murray girls became competent barrel racers, but Butch quickly realized that Ty was a rodeo prodigy. Joy swears that the first words he ever said were “boo wider” (baby talk for “bull rider”) and that as soon as he could walk, he would try to ride anything he could get his legs over, including her sewing machine cover. When he was two, he was riding calves while his father ran beside him, holding on to his belt loops to keep him from falling. By three, he was telling his father he didn’t need any more help.
Butch, who now works the starting gate at the Downs racetrack in Albuquerque, still marvels over his son’s early drive to become a rodeo champion. To improve his balance, young Ty walked on the top of fences. He got a unicycle and rode it while holding weights in his hands. Using the money he earned doing chores, he bought a bucking machine and rode it so often that he had to put cardboard inside his chaps to keep his thighs from bleeding. At night he went to sleep lying on his back with his toes turned out and his heels pushed inward—the spurring position used in the bareback and saddle bronc events. Joy still has a paper Ty wrote in the third grade in response to the question, “If you could accomplish anything in the world, what would it be?” He said he wanted to beat Mahan’s record of six all-around titles. “How would a boy that age already have that kind of a goal established in his mind?” Butch asks. “Back then, no one thought Mahan’s record would ever be broken.”
By the age of nine, Murray was riding small bulls. The second bull he rode bucked him off, stepped on his jaw, and broke it. But his parents never tried to slow down his progress. “He knew that hard knocks were part of the sport,” Butch says. When I mention that nine seems an extraordinarily young age to be riding an 1,800-pound animal, he chuckles. Clearly, I am not of his world. “Listen,” he says, “if your nine-year-old son broke his leg skiing, would you tell him that he could never ski again?”
Murray was thirteen when Mahan saw him compete in the Little Britches National Finals in Colorado. “I thought, ‘My God, he’s riding bulls better than I did when I was a world champion,’” Mahan recalls. “He was already a master of his mind and body, almost Zen-like in his control.” Murray’s riding style, paradoxically, belied the image of the rough-and-tumble cowboy: He was cool, clean, and precise, his free arm sweeping up and down as smoothly as the second hand of a clock. Still, he always came up with innovative ways to hone his skills. He even joined his high school’s gymnastics team to improve his balance and coordination. “He really took physical fitness to a new level in rodeo,” Gay says. “You’d touch his arm and it would be so hard you’d think you were touching a hood ornament on a Studebaker.”
In 1987, entering the bareback, saddle bronc, and bull-riding competitions, Murray easily won the national high school rodeo all-around title. It was at that point that he came to Texas, where he enrolled at tiny Odessa College, a two-year school that had a top-notch rodeo program and was near a number of PRCA rodeos. In 1989 he surprised no one by winning the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association’s all-around title, but he also did well enough on the professional circuit (college rodeo rules allow students to compete in both amateur and pro competitions) to qualify for the all-around championship at the PRCA’s National Finals in Las Vegas. During those ten nights, Murray lasted the full eight seconds on some of rodeo’s most famous horses. He became only the second cowboy in history to stay on a crazed snorting bronc named Mr. T., and he became the only right-handed rider ever to beat a writhing, twisting horse called Wolfman. That year he won his first all-around title, which is given to the cowboy who performs best in at least two events. At twenty, he was the youngest all-around winner in history.
In some ways, that unfathomable victory was the equivalent of Tiger Woods’ acing the Masters in his rookie year—except that unlike Woods, Murray has lived up to the outsized expectations he created. In each of the next five years, he returned to the finals and won the all-around title. For the next three years he was injured, but he came back to win for the seventh time in 1998.
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