Born to Be a Cowboy, but Not in Dallas

The thing about Dee Pickett, the Idaho kid, is that he always knew he wanted to be a cowboy.

The trouble was, he didn’t know whether he wanted to be a Dallas Cowboy or an all-around cowboy. He didn’t know whether he wanted to throw passes or lassoes.

With a little luck, he could have been the next Roger Staubach. He had the arm for it, the speed and the know-how--he was a junior college All-American. What he didn’t know was whether he had the heart for it.

Not the courage. He had plenty of that. It takes more heart to jump off a moving horse and turn over a kicking calf and tie his legs together than to stand up to an NFL pass rush.

But Dee Pickett loved the rush of rodeo cowboying more than Tom Landry’s kind. The wide receivers he wanted to hit were four-legged and sure-footed. To be sure, their routes were more erratic than any Joe Montana might expect. And Dee didn’t have the length of the field to hit them. He only had 30 feet of rope.

But the only playoffs he ever wanted to be in are the ones he’s in this week at the Thomas & Mack Center here, the National Finals Rodeo, where men are men, bulls are real, seldom is heard a discouraging word and we’re really headed for the last roundup, the last stand of the Old West in our society.

Dee Harris Pickett is the reigning all-around cowboy world champion.

But about a dozen years ago, it looked as if Dee Pickett, instead of following in the footsteps of Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill and the other dime-novel heroes who made their livings in boots and saddles, would join another cast of athletic legends--BYU quarterbacks.

Dee was a deadeye quarterback for his high school team in Caldwell, Ida., and every school in the Big Sky Conference and a few in the Big Eight were hot after him. Brigham Young of the Western Athletic Conference got him.

Lavell Edwards, the BYU coach who elevated the forward pass to its highest form in the college game and had already had Virgil Carter and Gary Scheide in his backfield and was soon to have Gifford Nielsen, Marc Wilson, Steve Young, Jim McMahon and Robbie Bosco, wanted Pickett to join this cast.

A lot of people thought Dee Pickett was as great as any of them. He could throw long. He could hit a needle in the eye at 40 paces with the front end of a football, he was rawhide tough, and you knew he wasn’t afraid of contact because he used to spend his weekends falling on steers’ horns or flipping kicking calves over on their backs and trussing them up.

Pickett signed a letter of intent with BYU and went to fall practice there. The job was surely his, if not that year, at least the next three, but that’s when he came down with homesickness.

It’s not exactly the kind of homesickness you feel when you want your own bed or your mom’s cooking. What Pickett was homesick for was the pungent aroma of manure, dust, sweat, tanbark. The smells and sounds of that most American of all sports, the rodeo.

Pickett wanted something you could play in boots and spurs, not cleats.

People told him he was crazy. One of them was his own father who was not very supportive of his son’s career choice. But Dee was in the grip of a desperate love affair with a horse and a rope.

“I knew whichever sport I chose, I’d wonder all my life if I made the right choice,” he said. But it was his heart that dictated the choice.

He went first to Walla Walla Junior College when he left BYU, then Boise State. Even though he had an injured knee during much of his senior year at Boise State, NFL scouting combines came after him.

The Dallas Cowboys and Seattle Seahawks were dangling contracts. But Dee wanted a home on the range, not a locker room.

Pickett was a born athlete but he was a roper by inclination. Ever since he was a toddler in Caldwell, he seldom went anywhere without a loop over his belt. He would lasso anything--the bed post, the mail box, the family Volkswagen, the milk cows, fire hydrants, the neighbors’ dog. He got so he could get a rope around a blowing feather.

His principal specialties in rodeo were calf roping, steer roping and team roping, although he also did bulldogging (steer wrestling).

Calf roping is a holdover from the days of the bunkhouse west when the wranglers had to separate and brand the youngsters of the herd on the open range.

It calls for a calf to be released from a pen a few seconds before a cowhand on a horse sets after him with a twirling lasso. The rider drops the loop over the head of the running animal, jerks him backward and then leaps off his horse running, flips the calf and knots its feet, then remounts and gives the calf six seconds to free himself.

If the calf doesn’t, he posts his score. If the calf does, he posts zero.

A running calf has more moves than Lynn Swann on a curl pattern. He runs a route no quarterback could follow. Among other tactics, he may stop altogether. He could not only fake out a defensive back, he fakes out the quarterback.

Team roping is more of the same, except that one cowboy ropes the calf’s head and a second the hind feet, by dropping a 6-foot loop on the ground in front of the running hoofs and tightening the noose when the calf steps into it.

It’s harder than it sounds. You have to catch both feet. Catch only one and you forfeit 10 seconds. Catch none and you have a shutout going.

Would Pickett have been better off trying to reach Tony Hill or Steve Largent with his flings?

“I made the right decision,” he said. “I’m doing what I love.”

Pickett has earned $629,506 in his career on horseback. That’s exclusive of commercial tie-ins--boots, hats, belt buckles. That’s only what he’s earned with a rope in his teeth.

He is not having his greatest NFR, where he is defending all-around champion, this week. His loop Wednesday night wound illegally around the horns for a no-score in the team roping, and his 11.5 in the calf-roping, while not all bad, is not All-American either, and not all-around.

But, shucks, Roger Staubach threw an incompletion now and then. At least, in his sport, Dee Pickett doesn’t have to worry about throwing interceptions, and the calves can’t score on him.