My Short, Unhappy Life as a Rodeo Clown

I learned four important things when I enrolled in Leon Coffee's program for aspiring cowboys: protect the bull rider, protect your partner, protect yourself, and go to law school.

by John Spong

January 2002

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Leon's laugh was high-pitched and hoarse. "Oh, man, you're going to find out what that means quick enough. Believe me, you will find out. And every time it happens I want you to spit a marble into the dirt where you landed. And I want you to look at where that marble lands. I want you to study it. Then you're going to get up and go again. Once you've done enough rodeos and gotten hooked enough times that you've lost all your marbles, if you still want to be a bullfighter, you give me a call."

He could not have intended for that pat response to be taken seriously, and if he doubted my resolve, he should have come out and said so. I took up jogging, watched a bunch of rodeo on television, and six months later, when I found Leon's name and number in an ad for the school at the back of the ProRodeo Sports News, made that call. When he cashed my $375 tuition check, our rapport was cemented, and I had my mentor. Kind of like Yoda.

I turned myself over to him completely when we got to Wichita Falls. I hung on his every word as we watched those tapes in the hotel. I studied his moves to juke the bulls. There was the T-Step, the tight circle he ran inside the bull's shoulder. There was the Step-Through Maneuver, an exaggerated fake to one side then a spin back around that ended with the clown waving bye-bye to the passing bull's haunches. I memorized the order of a clown's priorities: protect the bull rider, protect your partner, protect yourself.

That was Leon's mantra, one of the first things he tried to impress upon me and one drummed into my head between every ride. A clown never leads the bull back to the rider. When the bull rider or your partner is in trouble—when he has been hooked and is down or when he's backed up to the wall—your job is to "capture" the bull, or get him to fix on you, and lead him the hell away. Leon emphasized an absolute duty, always and everywhere in that rodeo arena, to protect the other cowboys, to dart between him and the bull, to come in so close to the bull that you could slap him on the head to make sure you had his attention.

What you absolutely do not do, he added for clarity's sake, is lead the charging bull back to where the cowboy is stranded. Least of all if he's near the wall. Get the bull out in the middle of the arena, where he can stomp his two thousand pounds of rampage and menace into dirt rather than bones. Let him wave those horns like baseball bats in the air, not into somebody's kidney. Remember the mantra: the bull rider, your partner, yourself.

It was writ large on Leon's astonished face when I ran, pie-eyed, right up his back at the arena wall with Ghostbuster close behind. The bull had just chased Leon to the left of the chutes where Leon had hoisted himself up onto the wall, teetering on his hips atop the five-foot-tall barrier, exposing the back of his legs for nice, clean wishbone breaks. But Ghostbuster, noting the ease with which Leon had sidestepped a couple of his rushes and then scampered to the perimeter, rightly surmised that one of the clowns out there knew what he was doing. The bull turned 90 degrees to his right, where I was standing more flat-footed spectator than bullfighter, and full bore he barreled ahead. I, of course, took off immediately for the wall, and just as Leon hopped down to the ground, I arrived, about two feet away from him. In unison we jumped from the bull to balance on the wall.

The problem was, that section of the arena wall wasn't wall at all. It was quarter-inch steel cable strung like a tall barbed-wire fence, with three-quarter-inch sheets of plywood hanging from the second highest strand. Picture two birds on a wire, side by side, but they weigh about 180 pounds apiece, and one of them is no more nimble than an overfed basset hound. I had enough work just hanging on, but I also had to bounce my legs off the plywood to dodge the bull each time he crashed forward. When a lunge by Ghostbuster drove my right foot clean through the plywood, instinctively I looked to Leon for a little sympathy.

That was bad move number twenty, and by this point, Leon was ready to make something happen. He rolled over the fence and out of the ring with me right behind him, and we ran fifteen yards to the corner of the arena. "We're going to fight this cat here. He's a bad little dude," Leon said. He climbed the back of the wall, but Ghostbuster had followed us down the fence line and was waiting right there. Leon hollered at the cowboys by the chutes to get the bull's attention. They whistled, waved their arms, and yelled, "Hey, bull!" but Ghostbuster kept eyeballing Leon, who backed down and ran along the ring to where we'd hopped over. Ghostbuster stayed in the corner.

That's when Leon shifted gears. He leaped into the arena, caught the bull's eye, and ran straight at its right ear. As the bull dove forward, Leon cut hard to his own right, turning a tight loop near enough to the bull to yank coarse, greasy hairs off that nasty black hump, the bull spinning wildly around him until Leon slid to a dead stop and froze the beast; he changed direction on his bad knee and laughed at Ghostbuster as he skipped off on the good one. "What's wrong with you, big'un?" Leon said. "You better go get your daddy 'cause you ain't bad! No, sir!"

In barely four seconds, half the time of a completed bull ride, Leon had proved up his legend. As precise as a point guard and as cocky as a surgeon, he had moved like he had a crowd of 10,000 people watching. The only distinctions between this and real rodeo were that his theme song—Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel"—wasn't playing and he wasn't in costume—no makeup to hide his grit, no floppy green hat to hang on the defeated bull's horns.

Now, my turn. I was a little slower into the arena. Carefully, deliberately, almost reluctantly, I sashayed to ten feet in front of the bull, a tentative step one, step two, step three, and then Ghostbuster made his move. He charged at my right knee, and I pivoted quickly to get around him, but he'd stopped and was waiting for me when I completed my turn. We were face to face. There was a pause, and he looked over at Leon, allowing me to backpedal two soft steps while I considered the right move. It was the T-Step. I took off for his left ear. "Go around him," yelled Leon repeatedly. "And take your feet with you!"

I made my way past the bull barely a half-step from his horns, taking a rough nudge in my side and slipping momentarily to one knee as he whirled with me, but keeping my head and pushing on until, at the turn of a full revolution, he laced one big heavy horn down around my left hip and cocked his head back into his shoulders, sharp and short. Suddenly I'm a goalie on a foosball table, spinning through the air, legs spread wide for a cartwheel but no hands on the ground to manage my descent. I crashed hard on my left hip. Lucky for me, Ghostbuster let me hobble off without further incident, because Leon was laughing way too hard to provide any help. "Welcome to my world!" he hollered.

I chose not to ask about his vaunted priorities as he laughed through our lunch. I knew he would have gotten to me if he thought Ghostbuster had anything in mind once I wrecked. I nursed my wounds over a truck-stop hamburger and replayed the showdown in my head. With each viewing the rout grew more one-sided and my hipbone more painful, until I started to have, for the first time in my life, concrete thoughts about the future. Maybe the summer after graduation would be better spent studying for the LSAT instead of rodeoing. If I could get into a good law school, I'd still be able to talk about "my rodeo clown days" during job interviews at law firms and on the dates I'd finally land with sorority girls.

But Leon was back on my side. He told me I was coming along. He pointed out that Tulsa Tom hadn't been able to stick it out. He invoked the baddest cat in the valley. I had to give it one more shot.

"One last shot" would have been more apt. My encounter with a brown-and-white Simmental bull named Pretty Boy, the biggest bull in the arena, was a greater debacle than my battle with Ghostbuster. A poorly executed Step-Through Maneuver resulted in a head-on collision. With Pretty Boy approaching at about thirty miles an hour, I was intent on waiting until the absolute last moment to make my fake, but unfortunately that last moment was spent contemplating which direction to juke, rather than actually juking. In an instant I was stationary, then flying, then landing some thirty feet away and rolling onto that same blue-black hipbone.

It was still tender twenty months later, on my first day of law school.

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