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.
“GET YOUR ASS ON,” TY MURRAY SAYS, pointing to the mechanical bull in his large work shed.
“Absolutely no way,” I reply.
“Come on, city boy. You said you wanted to understand what I do.”
The finest rodeo cowboy in America—perhaps the greatest rider of bulls and bucking horses of all time—gives me a sly little grin, and the corners of his lips twitch upward. Although he is 29 years old, he could still pass for a teenager. He is only five foot eight and 160 pounds. His face is so baby-smooth that you’d think he never has to shave. When he pulls the brim of his hat over his forehead, he looks like James Dean in Giant. He talks like him too: in a clipped monotone, his voice as flat as a fence post.
“I want to see you bear down on that sumbitch,” he says, his grin getting wider. “I want to see you ride.”
It’s a spring afternoon in north-central Texas, a few miles south of the town of Stephenville, where Murray owns a breathtakingly beautiful 1,861-acre ranch. More than two hundred head of brindle cattle graze on perfect pastures that slope down toward the Bosque River. Except for the occasional visit from his girlfriend, Julie Adair, a former barrel racer who lives in California, Murray spends his days here alone, on the highest hill overlooking the spread, in a three-bedroom house filled with the memorabilia of one of the most astonishing yet least acknowledged careers in all of sports. Spread throughout his pine-paneled living room are dozens of belt buckles awarded to him for his rodeo victories. In a corner of the dining room are the hand-stitched saddles he received for winning a record seven all-around cowboy championships at the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association’s National Finals. In rodeo circles his seven titles are the equivalent of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak or Byron Nelson’s eleven consecutive PGA tour wins. He has lost the all-around title only three times since 1989, and those years he was injured. No less an authority than Larry Mahan—the renowned rodeo cowboy who held the previous record with six all-around titles—believes Murray’s record will not be broken. “And, barring injury, he could win many more,” Mahan says. “He’s just unbeatable.” This is why I’ve come to the ranch: to try to understand, in the words of one observer, Murray’s “mystical ability” to stay on crazed, whirling beasts.
“Go on. Get up there,” he says to me. “You need to know what this feels like.”
“But there are no pads to cushion my fall,” I point out.
He shrugs. In the time-honored tradition of rodeo, Murray has laid down a challenge, and he wants to see what I’m going to do. Or, to put it in the vernacular of his world, it’s time for me to “cowboy up,” to “show my sack” (“sack” being a rodeo term for, um, a certain component of male genitalia).
I climb onto the back of what looks like a converted metal oil drum, and Murray starts pushing and pulling on a lever behind me to get the thing bucking. Immediately I am being tossed into the air and thrown back down on the bull, over and over. Each jolt nearly shreds my spine. Three seconds later—a literal eternity on the machine—I jump off, wild-eyed. It feels like someone has hit me between the legs with a baseball bat.
“There’s nothing like it, is there?” Murray says, completely deadpan. He then climbs onto the mechanical bull while his ranch foreman, Heraclio, steps forward to grab the lever. Murray fixes his unblinking, light green eyes on the back of the bull. Like a conductor at the start of a symphony, he slowly lifts his left hand in the air: the classic rodeo pose.
Heraclio tugs on the lever, and the machine goes into spasms, but Murray . . . how do I explain this? He looks as if he’s taking a ride in a limousine. He is in such perfect synchronicity with the bucking of the bull, his frame rising and swooping with every explosive thrust, that his upper body hardly moves. His back remains ramrod straight, his chin stays tucked against his chest, and his left hand remains perfectly poised in the air. Eight seconds later, he lightly hops off and looks at me, still a little bent over, my hands grasping my inner thighs to ease the pain.
“And I bet you thought all you had to do was hang on,” he says.
HE MIGHT NOT EVEN BE RECOGNIZED BACK EAST, but in much of the American West he’s revered. He’s always introduced at rodeos as the King of the Cowboys. Kids surround him and plead for autographs. “Buckle bunnies” (the pretty young women who follow rodeo, also known as “shiny brights” because of the colorful Western shirts they wear) throw themselves at him. “Whenever he walks into a rodeo arena, the atmosphere changes, even for the other cowboys,” says Lane Barber, a well-regarded saddle bronc rider. “You’ll be taping up in the locker room, getting ready for the night’s performance, and suddenly there’s Ty. You’ll see the young riders suddenly get real nervous and start whispering, ‘My God, Ty’s here.’”
While almost all cowboys have just one specialty, Murray has mastered rodeo’s three glamour events: bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, and bull riding. He earns more than a million dollars a year at competitions and through endorsements, the most of any rodeo cowboy in history. Besides dominating the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association (PRCA) circuit, he’s a star on the Professional Bull Riders (PBR) tour, which brings together the world’s 45 best bull riders for a 29-event season. He’ll hit as many as three rodeos a week scattered thousands of miles apart. During last year’s “Cowboy Christmas”—the lucrative July 4 weekend in which more than thirty rodeos are held across North America—he flew in a private jet so that he could compete in Arizona, Texas, Utah, Oregon, Colorado, and Alberta, Canada. “It is hard to exaggerate the way rodeo consumes Ty,” says Pam Minick, a former Miss Rodeo America who has worked as a television commentator at rodeos for more than two decades. “He is at the very top of this world, and he is still as driven as a rookie to get out there and prove himself every night. It’s like he’s always looking for the perfect ride.”
In many ways, rodeo is the most anachronistic of sports. Although public address announcers always make a point of draping rodeo with the American flag, calling it a celebration of our glorious frontier traditions, the simple fact is that no one alive can remember what the frontier was, and thus be truly nostalgic for it. There are no more cattle drives or cow towns. There is no open range. Only a tiny fraction of Americans know what it’s like to live in an area where you cannot see a fence. What’s more, the skills shown off at rodeos are largely irrelevant to the operation of a modern-day ranch. Ranchers don’t have the time or the inclination to break wild horses in their pens when they can drive to an auction barn and buy perfectly tame ones, and many ranch hands are not proficient horsemen: They use everything from helicopters to six-wheel all-terrain vehicles to round up cattle—if they have roundups at all. Only occasionally do they need to rope a calf.
Yet rodeo continues to thrive. The PRCA sanctions more than seven hundred rodeos a year around the country, and they’re attended by an estimated 23 million fans. The PBR tour has become so popular that it is now selling out arenas from Florida to Massachusetts to California, and about 1.5 million households tune in each week to the PBR Bud Light Cup on The Nashville Network. While it’s rare to find a rodeo cowboy today who grew up on a ranch—“It’s sort of hard for that to happen anymore, since there are fewer ranches than ever for kids to grow up on,” says eight-time world bull-riding champion Don Gay—there is no shortage of young men wanting to get into the sport. The sons of oil-field workers, electricians, homebuilders, and even fighter pilots, they come mostly from small towns or the edges of cities west of the Mississippi, and they are really no different than other schoolboy athletes. They cut their teeth at the kind of youth rodeo clinics that are held at small, dusty out-of-the-way arenas. They then join their high school rodeo teams, attend colleges with rodeo programs, receive their PRCA cards, and start “goin’ down the road” (the rodeo phrase for competing professionally).
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