Cowhands Teach Kids the Ropes

Myron Marzett squinted into a punishing desert sun beyond the makeshift corral, a wooden fence enclosing the batting cage in Jackie Robinson Park.

The 12-year-old Marzett, who ropes steers professionally for the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, looked lean and serious under his cowboy hat.

An entourage of diminutive apprentice cowhands, until recently mere kids playing in the park, hurried behind him as he walked.

“What’s in the bag?” asked a boy with close-cut hair and baggy shorts.

“Ropes,” Marzett said.

“Are you gonna rope the calf?”

“Yep.”

Marzett was the youngest of six members of the Denver-based Bill Pickett Rodeo who visited the county park last week in Sun Village, a black enclave in the eastern Antelope Valley since the 1940s. They had two goals: entertainment and education.

The touring rodeo group represents part of an ongoing effort to retrieve the historical role of black cowboys from the margins of history books and the shadows of Hollywood sets. Cowboys such as turn-of-the century rodeo star Bill Pickett, whose technique for subduing steers involved chomping down on the animal’s lip with his teeth.

Talk about rough and tough.

Along with the cultural message, the rodeo presentations aim to inspire young people with a taste of the discipline and sweat that are part of being an American archetype.

“We were cowboys before we were basketball players,” said actor Glynn Turman, this year’s grand marshal of the rodeo. “It’s a whole neglected part of history.”

Turman starred as a Chicago high school kid in the 1975 movie “Cooley High” and plays “The Colonel” on the TV show “A Different World.” But he’s no celluloid cowboy. He raises real horses at his ranch near Lake Hughes.

The young audience at Jackie Robinson Park warmed slowly to the show. They fidgeted during a discussion of barrel racing. They were reticent about taking part in a demonstration with nylon rope lassos by Turman, and Phillip and Chuck Banks, two earnest and massive brothers who learned their horse science on a family ranch in Riverside County.

But when Marzett climbed into the corral with a hot-and-bothered-looking calf, lasso at the ready, 25 small children crowded against the rickety fence. Dani Stephens, 16, and a handful of teen-age friends in white T-shirts, black pants or cutoffs hung back, looking elaborately unexcited.

Marzett hit the mark, but the calf slipped free. Marzett prepared another toss; the kids surged forward; the calf bolted suddenly and burst through the fence, accompanied by the crack of splintering wood, shouts and laughter. Now there was a runaway calf making speed across the park toward the open desert. And suddenly the place was filled with cowboys.

“Everybody grab a rope!” Turman shouted.

Spectators Jesse Saldano and Terrel Weatherspoon were way ahead of him, giving hot pursuit on short legs with lassos held high.

Dani Stephens and his fellow teen-agers sprinted with sudden vigor to the end of a chain-link fence, where they adroitly cut their quarry off at the pass, so to speak, and sent the calf back toward Turman.

The grand marshal lived up to his billing with a lunging lasso toss. But the calf yanked the rope clean out of his hands and headed back into the crowd. It was finally subdued by Stephens and a numerous supporting cast, who animatedly described their roles in the capture while small hands reached out to touch the prone, quivering animal.

“I thought he was going to be slow because of the size of him,” Saldano said breathlessly.

“I almost got him,” said Tom Richter, 12.

Turman grinned at the scene.

“That was the best thing that could have happened,” he said.

Nobody feigned boredom as a bull-riding demonstration wrapped up the morning, with a barrel standing in for the bull. Chuck Banks laid out and explained his accouterments with the care of a craftsman: the glove that shields the hand roped to the bull, the spurs, the rosin.

Afterward, Robert Saxton, 6, laconically summed up his impressions of the show:

“Cool.”

Phillip and Chuck Banks talked at lunch about the importance of passing on their lifestyle, which their grandparents brought to California when they migrated from Texas and Colorado.

Chuck Banks, whose bull rider’s gait was exaggerated by two broken bones in his left leg, the souvenir of a recent bout with a 2,000-pound bull, likes to challenge street kids who think they are tough.

“I say, ‘Let’s see how tough you are; let’s see you ride this bull,’ ” he said.

Phillip Banks wants kids to understand that Western tradition was built by a legion of cowboys who were not portrayed by John Wayne: Blacks, Mexicans, American Indians, Basques.

“They talked a mixture of Spanish, Indian languages and black slave talk,” he said. “You have to hunt that information down. . . . The old people are dying out. The stories are going untold.”

Phillip Banks trains and raises horses when he isn’t on the bronco-busting circuit.

His dream is to have a ranch where kids could learn about horsemanship--about danger, skill and hard work.

“It is a challenge. Every morning I have to go out and feed horses, shovel manure. You have to haul hay and grain, understand and take care of equipment. It’s more than just putting on a hat and pair of jeans.”