The Reining Stars : In Pro/Celebrity Rodeo Sunday in Burbank, Actors and Others of Note Live Out Their Fantasies by Taking Part in an Age-Old Western Ritual

It’s happened before, countless times, albeit under different circumstances.

A young man has been programmed to go to college--Duke University in this case--to pursue a profession, possibly to enter politics.

The young man has other ideas.

Screwing up his courage, he prepares to beard his father. It’s a busy day, a work day, and the father, with a trace of impatience, looks up from his desk: “Yes?”

The young man clears his throat. “Dad,” he says, “I don’t think I want to go to college.”

No? What then?

“I’d like to go Out West and be a cowboy.”

Years later, Steve Ford recalls the scene. “You know how you always paid attention to your father when he shook his finger at you? Well, this was the world’s biggest finger.

“My father’s office was the Oval Office. And when he stands up and the seal of the President of the United States is behind him, and the flags . . . somehow you take him a little more seriously.”

Awed as he was, young Ford stood his ground. “Instead of enrolling at Duke three weeks later, I packed up my Jeep and headed West. It was the best decision I ever made.”

On Sunday, Steve Ford--rancher, breeder, actor; never far from horses--will gallop full-tilt across the turf of the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in febrile pursuit of a spooked steer. So will actors Alex Cord and Richard Roundtree, and actress Kay Lenz, along with Patrick Duffy, Bo Hopkins, Linda Blair, Patrick Wayne, Clayton (the Lone Ranger) Moore, Doug McClure, Anne Lockhart, Chris Lemmon, Lee Horsley. . . .

Rodeo champions such as Casey Tibbs, Larry Mahan, Donnie Gay and Hawkeye Henson will do the heavier work, astride the rampant rumps of broncs and bulls. (Not that the actor folk couldn’t buck with the best of them, if they had a mind to. “Nothing to it,” says a grinning Roundtree, who’s just wrapped an oater entitled “Bad Jim.” “They want a wild stallion broken, I just call the stunt double.”)

Sunday’s Ben Johnson Pro/Celebrity Rodeo in Burbank, open to the public, climaxes a three-day jamboree that will have included an auction, a “Taste of Texas” dinner and a country hoedown, all benefiting the Permanent Charities Committee and the Entertainment Industry. In past years, venerable wrangler/actor Johnson has rounded up celebrities and staged the rodeo at various sites throughout the country, raising more than a million dollars for the charities. This is his first in the L.A. area.

No tinsel at the rodeo, though. Plenty of unvarnished bull. Plenty of fine-muscled horseflesh and quivering starflesh. And a rare chance to observe firsthand the durable affinity between horse and ham that dates back beyond even Tom Mix and Rod LaRoque.

Cord, Hollywood’s most articulate exegete of the equine mystique, is a man who never sits when he can saddle up. Along with acting, he has written--and optioned--a successful novel (“Sand Song”) and a number of screenplays. All of which, he confesses, simply serve to feed his habit.

“I’m one of those people who was born with an affliction,” Cord says: “an addiction to horses.

“My parents put me on a pony at the age of 2--there’s a photo of me grinning from ear to ear--and I’ve never stopped. I’ve been riding for more than 50 years, and I’ve competed, I think, in every equestrian event there is”--dressage, racing, rodeo, riding to hounds (“I’m a whipper-in”), hunter/jumpers and “serious polo, a disease for which the only cure is poverty.” Everything, in fact, but rustling, though Cord figures there’s still time.

Cord, who will compete Sunday in the roping and cutting events, grew up on Long Island, a mile away from Belmont race track. He dreamed, naturally, of being a jockey.

“I’d bicycle over to Belmont at dawn, before school. I’d hide the bike in the hedges, hop over the fence and hide in the bushes, just to watch the racehorses go by.” In time he outgrew the dream, but never the ardor.

“There is a potent, influential energy that comes from within the horse,” Cord says, “and those who fall under its spell are the slaves of a grand passion.”

Richard Roundtree doubtless would put it a different way. Some men have etchings; others have horses.

Roundtree grew up in New Rochelle, a posh suburb of New York, where he was a member of his high school riding club and learned to say RO-deo, not ro-DAY-o. (“Ro-DAY-o’s the drive, right? I mean, you say COWboys, not cowBOYS.”)

The equestrian bit, he reckons, is “regression to childhood, when we played cowboys and Indians, and watched Westerns: pretty romantic stuff.” When Roundtree moved to Los Angeles after the success of his “Shaft” films, “I went crazy. I was single, a bachelor, and horses seemed to be the hip, cool thing to do.

“I ended up with six or seven horses, kept them all up at Victorville. I had my share of dates, you know, and it sounded pretty good to say, ‘Why don’t you come up and see my horses?’ ”

“At this point in my life,” he says, “I still ride and I still love horses. But I ride and love other people’s horses.”

Still, he’s no Whinny the Pooh. “I’m pretty good,” he concedes. “I can hang with just about any actor who rides.”

On Sunday, Roundtree will compete in team penning. “There are three-man teams,” he says, “and 15 or 20 cattle at the opposite end of the ring. As you cross an imaginary line, they yell out a number. You cut the three cows wearing that number on their sides out of the herd, bring them back to the original end and put them in the pen.

“No, you can’t whack the cattle over the head, or the horse either, for that matter. You can’t even wave your hat. It’s just a lot of yelling and screaming--and horsemanship.”

“It’s all done at great speed,” says Cord, who also pens. “You ride in there and scatter the herd like a bowling ball.”

The cutting competition, Cord explains, is “just the opposite. You have one man (or woman) riding one horse. He goes into a herd of cattle quietly--points are deducted if you disturb the herd. Your horse has to go in there like a cat sneaking into a family of mice. You nudge out maybe four or five cows, pick the one you want and the rest will drift back to the herd.

“Up to this point you guide the horse, but then you have to drop your hand on the reins. From that moment, it’s a contest between the horse and the cow.”

Cord, who’s done it all, says cutting “is the most exciting thing you can do on a horse.”

Kay Lenz doesn’t disagree. The actress--riding three feet above the saddle after winning an Emmy nomination last week--won the cutting event in 1984 and is gearing up for a second ribbon.

She’ll also be competing in the penning competition, one she didn’t win the year she rode out with fellow actress Anne Lockhart. “There were three steers with the No. 1, three with No. 2, etc., and as we’re riding across the line the guy yells ‘Nine!’ ” Lenz recalls. “We’re plowing through the herd looking for the 9s, and I don’t see any. I shout to Annie, ‘Do you see a 9?’ and she shouts back, ‘No, do you?’ and the cows are milling about and we never did see those 9s. Lots of 6s, though. They’d put the numbers on upside down. . . .”

Like many of her fellow celebrity riders, Lenz, born in Hollywood and raised in the Valley (“when it was the Valley “), has been “around horses all my life.” Riding is “very simple, very basic,” she says, and “when you’re bogged down in work, mentally harassed and you have to be here or there at a certain time for a certain shoot, there’s nothing like getting on a horse and riding up in the hills for a spell.”

Lenz took lessons at the age of 6 or 7 at Glen Reynolds’ fabled ranch: “He had Trigger there, and Rex Allen’s horse, Cocoa, and the horse that was in the Ajax commercial. Cochise’s horse and Zorro’s horse. I got to ride ‘em all.”

You’d think that by now Lenz would have starred in a Western, but “the closest I’ve gotten was riding behind Lee Marvin on his horse. Oh, and I did a couple of episodes of ‘How the West Was Won’ too.” Earthbound, alas: “I was playing a hooker.”

When we left Steve Ford, scion of the Prez, he was heading West in his Jeep, young and restless.

First was a job as cowhand in Utah, then another ranch in Montana, soon afterward a gig as a rodeo roper, a job in which “I was going to starve to death, bad as I was. But it was a great time of my life: You’re carefree, you’re in your early 20s, you’re going from town to town, lots of good times, lots of good stories--the kind of life that if you did it for more than three or four years you’d be dead.”

Today, Ford has a pied-a-terre in Santa Monica, a ranch in San Luis Obispo and his own company, putting together partnerships in breeding and racing horses. Sunday, though, he’ll be trying his hand again with the lariat.

“Like many rodeo events,” he says, “its origin (roping) stems from real-life situations. Say a couple of cowboys are out on the range in the middle of nowhere and there’s a steer that must be tended to. They have to immobilize the animal first, so one ropes him by the horns and the other by the hind feet, and they stretch the animal out between the horses so they can give him an injection or whatever. That’s what team roping is, and that’s what I’ll be competing in.”

Ford will be the “header,” looping his rope around the horns, while a partner--the “heeler”--will try to time his rope throw for the instant the cow’s hind feet leave the ground. “Heading is easier,” Ford concedes, “but if I miss, the heeler never gets to show how good he is. The heeler always has an excuse. If I miss, it’s embarrassing.”

Only temporarily. Now that the smoke has cleared from the Oval Office, Ford appreciates that his parents “allowed their kids to make their own mistakes--or their own good decisions. The horse has changed my life, made my living. Hell, if it weren’t for them--and my folks--I might be an orthodontist in D.C.”

Last word on riding and rodeos has to go to Alex Cord, simply because he says it best.

“It’s not a question of mastering the horse,” Cord says. “That’s a misconception. What you do is marry a horse rather than master him--so that you become part of the horse and the horse becomes part of you, and you come together as a third entity.

“The horse’s power then becomes yours, and you become godlike.”

Ticket prices are: general admission, $10 for adults, $5 for 12 and under; reserved seats $25, box seats $50 and $100--all tax-deductible. Tickets available at Ticketron or at the L.A. Equestrian Center Box Office, 480 Riverside Drive, Burbank, (818) 840-9063. Rodeo begins Sunday at 11 a.m. with the Grand Entry. The public may attend today’s practice session at general admission prices only.