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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What has made his success even more incredible is that he competes in the three grueling “roughstock” events: bareback, saddle bronc, and bull riding. (His closest competitors for the all-around title have always been cowboys who enter the timed events—team roping, calf roping, and steer wrestling—which are much safer and have far less popularity and commercial appeal.) Although at first glance he looks like someone who couldn’t handle such rigor, he is quite a physical specimen. Like a gymnast, he has no measurable body fat. Muscles bulge in his arms, back, and shoulders, and his fingers are unusually thick, which is why he is able to put viselike grips on the braided rawhide ropes he holds while riding. “It’s not just his strength that is so surprising,” says Tandy Freeman, a Dallas sports doctor who specializes in treating rodeo cowboys. “He has this uncanny ability to control his body. He possesses a kind of equilibrium on an animal that you don’t often see.”
THIS SPRING I TRAILED AFTER MURRAY, trying to get insight into his fierce obsession with making the perfect ride. To the untrained eye, he appears to be doing the same thing every time he rides: He looks like he’s hanging on to a rope for dear life, his body a blur of motion. But it’s much more complicated than that. “It’s like he’s doing three different sports three times a night,” says Tuff Hedeman, another Texas rodeo great. “Each one requires a very specific set of skills. You don’t know how hard it is.”
In February, at the prestigious Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show and Rodeo in Fort Worth, I watched him do his three events in the space of two hours. First up was bareback, in which a rider can use only one thin leather rigging, with a small handle similar to that of a suitcase, to keep himself on the horse. During a ride, the horse will jerk forward so hard that a weak cowboy will feel as if his arm is being ripped out of its socket. With high back-leg kicks, the horse will then whip the cowboy back and forth so that his head and upper back slam viciously against its rump. J. Pat Evans, a former Dallas Cowboys team physician who founded the Justin Sports Medicine rodeo program, once told me that a bareback rider “can take as many hard hits in eight seconds as a professional football player does in an entire game.”
That day Murray had drawn Bold Eagle, a 1,300-pound horse who got irritated as he lowered himself on its back. Bold Eagle banged against the cage and snorted angrily, twisting its frame to get a look at him. Rodeo audiences never get a sense of an animal’s pent-up tension before a ride, but as Murray later told me, “the best horses know when it’s show time. They come out of that chute wanting to rear up and rip you off their back.”
“Watch ’em, Ty, watch ’em,” said a few of the cowboys standing around the chute. But Murray didn’t seem to be listening. He cinched his leather rigging tight around the horse, shoved his hand into the handhold, turned his toes out, and pushed his spurs into its skin just above the shoulders. If he wasn’t in that position when he came out of the chute, he’d be disqualified.
Murray fixed his eyes on the back of the horse. When he was ready, he simply nodded. The gate opened and the horse jumped out, bucking quickly to the right, as if it was trying to slam him against the railing. Above the music of the arena band and the excited play-by-play of the announcer (“Ride ’em, Ty, ride ’em! Show ’em your try, Ty!”), I could hear the back hooves of the horse as they slammed to the ground. Yet Murray was staying right in position, never leaning too far to the left or right, spurring Bold Eagle’s neck with each buck. It was as if he was thinking with his spinal cord, instantly reacting to every move the horse made. In cowboy lingo Murray had “tapped off.” He and the horse were in perfect rhythm, caught up in a flamboyant, furious ballet. When the buzzer hit, Murray leaped off, landing on his feet like a cat, and walked off to rousing cheers.
Forty-five minutes later, he was back at the chutes for his saddle bronc ride, a surprisingly difficult event that rewards timing and finesse. In saddle bronc a cowboy uses a modified Western saddle and stirrups and is allowed to hold a rein with only one hand. To avoid a spill, the cowboy must distribute his weight perfectly between his backside and his feet (which, according to the rules, must stay in the stirrups). If he grips the rein too tightly, the horse is liable to pull him right over its head. If the grip is too loose, he’ll likely be thrown off the horse’s back end. Meanwhile, he must maintain a complicated spurring motion in time with the horse’s bucking, moving his spurs from front to back (rather than up and down, as is required in bareback).
Murray had drawn a bronc called Black Jack, and to borrow a phrase from J. Frank Dobie, he had a belly full of bedsprings. But by the horse’s second jump, it was obvious that Murray was in complete control, holding the rein directly in front of his chest and showing so much “lick” (spurring motion) that he almost jabbed himself in the butt. Eight seconds later, the buzzer rang, and he again landed on his feet.
The last event of the night, of course, was bull riding (all rodeos schedule bull riding last to keep the audience around), and Ty had drawn bull number 74. Bareback might be the toughest event physically and saddle bronc the most demanding technically, but bull riding remains the most thrilling and terrifying confrontation between man and animal. Ten times a contestant’s weight, a bull can rise four feet in the air, drop almost straight down, and then—with shocking nimbleness—spin right and then left. The best riders are not the strongest cowboys but those who, like Murray, are quick enough to react. “If you make one small shift the wrong way on a good bull, you do not stay on,” Murray told me before his Fort Worth ride. “And it’s when you’re down that you become the most vulnerable, because that’s when a bull will try to trample you or hook you with his horns.”
Indeed, he has had friends killed or paralyzed by bulls; he has seen them get “hung up,” get their hand stuck in the rigging, and dragged around the arena until all the ligaments in their arm were torn. Most of his own injuries have come from run-ins with “rank” (difficult to ride) bulls, but so far, none has been particularly frightening or career threatening. When I asked him the inevitable question about fear, whether he sees his friends get hurt and thinks it could happen to him, he showed himself to be his father’s son. “Hey,” he said, “do you stop driving your own car when you hear about someone else having a car wreck?”
Murray took a quick drink of water—a sign above the fountain warned, “No Spitting”—and headed for the chutes. Everything was still, like the calm before a tornado, but when the gate opened number 74 bellowed, shot into the air, paused for a moment, and then crashed down again, a literal ton of muscle and bone hitting the earth hard enough to rupture his rider’s spleen. Once again, however, Murray had anticipated all the moves, thrusting his chest forward when the bull leaped forward, then flinging his left arm over his head to keep himself centered when the bull went into a tight spin.
For the third time that night, he rode to the eight-second buzzer and landed on his feet. His scores for the three rides were among the best of the night. Afterward, a couple of cowboys dropped by the locker room to congratulate him, but he barely said thank you. “The most important ride is always the next one,” he mumbled, and then he was gone into the night.
MOST COWBOYS IN THE ROUGHSTOCK events retire in their early thirties. Their body cannot withstand the beatings. But Murray is in such peak physical condition that he could keep riding into his late thirties or early forties, especially if he cuts back to one event. He admits he is tempted to give up his quest for another PRCA all-around title to concentrate on the more lucrative PBR tour, which has a $1.5 million purse at its national finals, but he has no plans to do so as of now. He could probably be far more famous if he wanted—as it is, he appears in ads for Wrangler, and a Ty Murray video game will soon be released—but he’s not interested in self-promotion. “To me, the joy is in the riding,” he says. “When I retire, I’ll return to my ranch at Stephenville, and I’ll need nothing more.”
Murray is indeed a throwback to the Old West, a final tether to a purer age. On the day that he gives me a tour of his ranch, we drive over a low spot in the Bosque River where the water gurgles over the stones, and then we head up a hill, where I see three grave markers. “Those are the graves of bucking horses who were famous in their day,” Murray tells me. “But they had no place to go after they were retired. I brought those horses here so that they would have a nice place to live before they died.”
I look at him, startled at his apparent sentimental streak. “Those horses gave me some great rides,” he says. “I’ll never forget what it felt like to be on them. It’s a feeling that’s impossible to describe.”
In a while he drops me off back at his house. He is busy: It’s calving season, and he needs to check on his cattle. But all the talk about rodeo and riding has stirred him. Just before I leave, he points to his metal shed, where the mechanical bull sits silently.
“Why don’t we give it another go?” Ty Murray asks, and his lips start twitching upward.
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