Big White Hats Fit Good Guys in This Arena

A hush falls over the arena. The spotlight switches down to the chutes, where a 2,000-pound Brahma with horns like daggers and hooves like hatchets is systematically kicking dents in the iron bars and slamming his massive head viciously against the gate.

Suddenly, from stage right comes sauntering this grizzled old cowboy, nonchalantly rolling a cigarette and pushing his ten-gallon hat back on his head. It’s old Wyatt Murray himself, the Pecos Kid, the roughest wrangler of the Old West, a combination of John Wayne and Geronimo, part gunfighter, part Indian, all man. They say he killed two renegades selling whiskey to the Indians before he was 11. He cleaned up Dodge City, marshaled in the Oklahoma Territory, rode shotgun for Wells Fargo and was the dealer in the card game where Wild Bill Hickok got shot dead. He had more notches on his own gun than Billy the Kid ever had.

He’s a legend in his own time and his faded blue eyes seem to be scanning the horizon for smoke signals as he stands on the rodeo tanbark. His sidekick looks at him imploringly. “Wyatt, you ain’t gonna get on this double-rank man-killer!” he pleads. “Why, he’s stomped more cowboys to death than a stampede in a thunderstorm. He ain’t been rode in 15 years and he’s throwed more people than they have in Wyoming! They got a whole section in Boot Hill named after him!”

Wyatt looks unimpressed. “He just looks like a whole mess of T-bones to me,” he drawls coldly. “What’s his name?”

“Adolf,” the sidekick tells him.

Wyatt sniffs. “Well, fix up the rigging,” he says menacingly. “He’s going to get rode today. I’ve put better bulls than this in a slaughterhouse. By the time I get through with him, you’ll be able to put him in a merry-go-round. Kids can get their pictures taken on him. He’s throwed his last man. I may ride him home tonight. And get him to bring me my slippers.”

People think most sportswriters are frustrated outfielders or quarterbacks. Or they really wanted to win the British Open or the middleweight championship.

But actually, most Americans’ fantasy is to to be riding the range and answering to the name “Buck.” The Wild West is the fabric of most daydreams. When Europeans think of America, they think of cowboys. They’d rather see the OK Corral than the White House, Main Street instead of Wall Street. Our national heroes wear Stetson hats and embroidered boots, not three-piece suits and attache cases.

The cowboy is the enduring stuff of America’s image of itself. Loyal, laconic, fair, a tough guy who doesn’t act it. Sleeps on a bedroll with the sky as a roof and the howl of a coyote as a lullaby.

The rodeo is the last stand of this way of life in our society. And a guy who might have no desire to play center field for the Yankees or be in the final at Wimbledon likes to think of himself as taming a mustang, throwing and trussing a runaway steer, outlasting an enraged bull. It’s always 1890 in a rodeo. A better time.

Lewis Feild probably typifies the rodeo cowboy. A wily old veteran of the bronc-riding circuits from the Badlands to the border, he is a cowboy’s cowboy. He’s been on so many bucking horses, he’d probably fall off one that stood still. He’s been rodeoing for a decade and has more air time than Lindbergh. He’s been the world champion cowboy (all around) twice, but he never gets the notoriety of, say, a Casey Tibbs or a Larry Mahan because, for Lewie--as the rodeo hands call him--”Yup” used to be an oration. He made Gary Cooper sound like a motormouth.

Lewie Feild comes from a long line of homesteaders who threw out the anchor and busted sod or raised longhorns in the valleys of Utah in the last century after coming west on the covered wagons.

Some kids get turned on to sport when their dads take them to their first ballgames. Lewie’s grandfather took him to a Fourth of July rodeo when he was 4, and he saw his first bull ride. He was, so to speak, hooked. He went home and began to ride calves around the family ranch till he got old enough to break ponies for the roundup.

Rodeo cowboys belong to the self-reliant world of athletes: No coaches to tell them what to do from the age of puberty on up. No team buses. No training table. Scholarships are given at a few land-grant schools but they’re not widespread.

They don’t get drafted. Nobody holds out any big-money contracts. The most Lewie ever made in one year--one of the years he was the world’s best--was $166,042. Placekickers get that a game.

Rodeo cowboys don’t have their own planes. Feild travels the circuit in a four-wheel-drive Ford truck, sometimes with a camper stuck on the back. He stays in cut-rate motels, eats at the counter. Life is just a kind of complicated bunkhouse.

There is no equipment manager, no agent. Lewie buys his own saddle, riding gear. It’s no small item. Saddles cost $1,000, and you wait a year for delivery. Saddlemakers are as rare as buggy manufacturers. He even pays to compete. Like pro golfers, rodeo cowboys post an entry fee. They make only what they earn on horseback--or bull horn.

They’re not even like fighters. They don’t get to pick their opponents. The stock is chosen by random draw. They never hope they get some palooka. You don’t make money unless your horse--or bull--is a four-legged psychopath.

Lewie would have been one of the favorites in the National Finals Rodeo this week at the Thomas And Mack Center in Las Vegas, an event he has won three times in the past, except for his second ride last Tuesday night. Feild was not tied on the horse, an outlaw named Kingsway, when they sprung the barrier. Lewie should have gotten a re-ride, but he hadn’t time to grasp the mane rope with two hands, the signal of a false start. He was charged with a buck-off and given no points, a fatal score in a national final where every cowboy is the modern equivalent of the Durango Kid.

You don’t ride bareback straight up in the air like an Englishman chasing a fox. You lie back on the horse’s haunches like a guy in a hammock, the better to rowel his neck and cushion the force of his upheavals. It doesn’t always work. Lewie Feild, like most rodeo cowboys, chronically suffers lower-back problems.

It’s a hard life, but so was the old Chisholm Trail. It’s as American as a harmonica around a campfire. But in an era when Swiss bankers and U.S. Presidents might show up in Stetson hats and boots, Lewie Feild is the real article. Entitled. He’s a throwback. He wears the gear because people in the Feild family have been wearing it since the days when Sitting Bull was in the hills.

He believes he’s doing what every red-blooded American boy wishes he was doing. Sitting on some blade-backed, fiddle-headed old man-hater who would throw him through the roof and his hat and boots with him, if he could. Every guy who ever pretended as a kid to be Buck Jones or Yakima Canutt has to be not green, but red, white and blue with envy.