The New Rodeo : A Different Breed of Cowboy Rides the Bull-and-Bronc Circuit Today

Wacey Cathey, the nation’s top-ranked bull rider, eases himself onto the back of the 2,000-pound Brahman with all the confidence of an Air Force pilot slipping into the cockpit of a jet fighter.

He calmly slides his gloved right hand under the rope that’s tied around the bull’s midsection. A cowhand in the chute helps pull the rope taut, while Cathey pounds it into his open palm to get an even better grip.

Then he nods his head. With a bang, the chute opens and Eighty-Five--a ton of angry, horned leather and hamburger--takes three ungainly leaps toward the center of the arena in Lancaster.

The bull abruptly rears up on his hind legs and twists his front half to the right, nearly throwing Cathey to the ground. The cowboy struggles to steady himself, but the bull quickly reverses direction and whips his shoulders to the left, going into a spin.

A Cowboy in the Air

Cathey now looks as helpless as a rag doll atop a cyclone, pitching left, then right, then left again. The bull makes one, two, three circles, finally launching the cowboy head first onto the soft sod of the arena’s floor a few moments before the buzzer goes off.

Like Wacey Cathey desperately trying to hang on to a bucking Brahman, so do rodeo and its estimated 20,000 or so active cowboys and cowgirls cling to a way of life that nearly disappeared with the Iron Horse, wild buffalo and the U.S. Cavalry.

“It’s the last page of the old American frontier,” bronc rider Dave Appleton, 28, said at a recent rodeo. “That’s basically what all rodeo is about.

“People who don’t know anything about rodeo can come in there, and they can almost sit there in the stands and see a part of history.”

More than 50 cowboys and cowgirls, clowns and rodeo queens will give one of those bronc-busting history lessons at 2 p.m. today at the Simi Valley Days Rodeo, corner of Los Angeles Avenue and Madera Road in Simi Valley. A second rodeo will be Sunday at 2 p.m.

While the rules of rodeo haven’t changed much since Buffalo Bill Cody helped popularize the sport with his traveling Wild West Shows around the turn of the century, today’s rodeo contestants are much different from their predecessors.

“First off, most of these guys aren’t real cowboys,” says Wilbur Plaugher, a 66-year-old rancher and weekend rodeo clown who wrestled steers and rode bulls with the likes of Slim Pickens and William Boyd in the 1940s and ‘50s.

“If I took these kids up to my ranch and told ‘em to flush the cattle out of the brush or do some other normal chore, most of ‘em wouldn’t know what to do.”

Indeed, most of today’s rodeo participants are merely “weekend cowboys,” who hold down jobs in retail, construction and other trades Monday through Friday. Even those who work on ranches during the week are more likely to ride the range in pickup trucks than on palominos.

Part of it stems from the dwindling number of farms and ranches. No longer are most rodeo participants cowhands who mosey into town for a few days of bronc-riding, drinking and womanizing. Many of today’s contestants are college graduates who picked up the sport while attending a university that fields a rodeo team.

“To an extent, the college circuit has replaced the ranches as sort of a ‘minor leagues’ for up-and-coming rodeo stars,” says Tim Bergsten, a spokesman for the 9,000-member Professional Rodeo Cowboys Assn. in Colorado Springs, Colo.

But plain old economics is the main reason why so many of today’s cowboys perform in weekend rodeos while working 9-to-5 jobs during the week. Rodeo riders don’t draw salaries.

“By the time you’ve paid your entry fees, bought gas and fed yourself, you’ve spent $200 or $300 for the weekend,” says Craig Root, a saddle-bronc rider who shoes horses during the week in Santa Paula. “If you don’t finish near the top of your event, you don’t get paid.”

It’s Not Lucrative

Rodeo isn’t a lucrative sport. Only a few superstars who compete full time--hitting between 150 and 200 rodeos annually--earn about $100,000 for a year’s work.

Most of the contestants are more like Root, who hopes to ride in 30 rodeos this year. “I’ll make $15,000 or $20,000, if I get hot,” he says.

Expenses typically eat up between 40% and 60% of a cowboy’s gross earnings. The obvious need to economize has helped at least one rodeo tradition survive: Like their predecessors, most modern-day cowboys travel together in order to cut costs, sharing rooms at cheap motels and eating at fast-food restaurants or greasy spoons.

“No doubt about it, gettin’ there is the worst part of rodeo,” says Jim-Bob Custer, a 19-year-old bronc rider from Wickenburg, Ariz. “This is my first year on the circuit, and I’m already kind of tired of the travelin’.”

Custer, his brother Cody and a few other cowboys had arrived at a Sunday afternoon rodeo in Ventura after driving 175 miles from a roundup in Yucca Valley the night before. The Ventura rodeo was their fourth in three days.

And when it was over, the fans had barely started for the parking lot before the men were taking off their chaps and piling into a van for another rodeo the next evening in Merced County, more than 200 miles away. Four days later they’d be 2,000 miles south, in Arkansas, to start a 72-hour spree that would take them to four tournaments in four states.

Most modern rodeo contestants are far more health-conscious than their forerunners. Many follow a rigid exercise schedule more befitting a linebacker than a cowboy, lifting weights and jogging several miles daily to stay in shape.

“The guys take a lot better care of themselves nowadays,” said Plaugher, the rodeo clown. “They don’t drink nearly as much as they used to, and they don’t do as much fightin’.

“I guess you’d call ‘em athletes, not cowboys. When we’d get hurt back in the ‘40s, we’d soak a bandage with horse liniment and wrap it around a leg so it’d get numb for a while and we could ride in the next event. Now, these guys are more likely to take codeine.”

Today’s rodeo stars are also more specialized, competing in only one or two events. Old-time cowboys commonly took part in four or five.

The emphasis on training and specialization even extends to rodeo clowns, a profession once reserved primarily for over-the-hill cowboys who were handier with a bottle of whiskey than they were with a horse.

“I’m a bullfighter, not a clown,” bristles Don Freouf. “Plaugher is a clown--his job is to entertain the crowd. My job is to protect the cowboys.

“Bullfighters dress like clowns, but their job is completely different.”

So different, Freouf says, that many aspiring clowns--er, bullfighters--now attend bullfighting schools where they hone their skill at drawing the beasts’ attention away from a fallen rider without putting their own lives in jeopardy.

Pay’s Regular

While Freouf’s job might not be as glamorous as riding or roping, it does have some important advantages, “not the least of which is that I get paid every time I come out,” Freouf says. “A good bullfighter can make $55,000 or $70,000 a year, although there’s a lot more bullfighters than there are jobs.”

Most cowboys would consider even $55,000 handsome pay for a year’s work, but not Wacey Cathey.

Last year Cathey earned $64,000 in prize money, putting him in seventh place on the list of top-earning bull riders. He won another $57,000 in the first eight months of this year, more than anybody else on the circuit.

Those top earnings allow Cathey to avoid many of the unpleasantries of rodeo life: He eats better than most other cowboys and can afford to stay in better hotels.

More important, Cathey now has the money to fly more than the typical cowboy. “Flying instead of driving gives me an edge because I can go to more rodeos, and I can travel to the ones with the biggest purses,” he says.

At 35, Cathey is a virtual senior citizen by rodeo standards. He credits part of his longevity to the relatively few injuries he has sustained: “I’ve busted a few bones, and had surgeries on my knees and shoulder and elbow--but nothing too serious.”

Others haven’t been as lucky. Last month, a cowboy in a Nevada rodeo died after he was thrown and then stomped by a bull in front of thousands of onlookers. The death has renewed an on-again, off-again debate over whether cowboys--bull riders, in particular--should be required to wear safety helmets and other protective gear before they’re allowed to compete.

Most rodeo cowboys don’t like that idea.

“Danger is the inherent nature of the sport,” eight-time world bull-riding champion Don Gay said recently. “A cowboy’s equipment is a long-sleeve shirt and a cowboy hat and a hell of a lot of nerve.

“When you . . . decide you’re going to make a living rodeoing professionally, you assume the fact that when it’s your turn, it’s your turn. You don’t wonder if you’re going to get hurt; you wonder when.”

Despite the obvious dangers of the sport and the toll it takes on a cowboy’s personal life, there’s a never-ending stream of fresh-faced cowboys willing to hit the rodeo circuit for a shot at big-time prize money and the platter-sized belt buckles that go to the winners.

Although most of those faces still are white, the number of minorities taking part in organized rodeo is growing. More than 100 contestants entered the Black World Championship Rodeo in New York a few months ago, a healthy number for an annual event that’s just 5 years old. Charles Sampson, born and raised in Watts, became the first black rider to win the world bull-riding championship in 1982.

Groups ranging from police officers to gays now sponsor their own annual rodeos, and a growing number of women--traditionally confined to barrel racing--have begun taking part in other events.

Women Ride Bulls

“Cowgirls’ lib” took a giant leap forward last July, when women were allowed to ride bulls in an exhibition at the famed Frontier Days rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyo. It was the first time females were allowed to climb into a Frontier Days bull chute in more than half a century.

Lynn (Johnnie) Jonckowski, one of the cowgirls who rode in Cheyenne, was asked why a woman--or anyone, for that matter--would want to earn a living by climbing on bulls, hoping to stay on long enough to collect a few hundred dollars.

“Boy, I don’t know,” she said. “I wish to heck I did, ‘cause if I could get it out of my system, I sure as heck would.”

Even Cathey says that he’s not in rodeo so much for the money as he is for the thrill--even if it occasionally means getting tossed in the dirt and stomped by a bull.

“One of the best things about rodeo,” said Cathey, packing up his gear and bound for another round-up 800 miles away in New Mexico, “is that there’s always another one down the road.”