He Rides Broncs to Get Bucks

The dream was recurring . . .

It is the final night of the rodeo. The strobe lights play around the chute where the fiercest bull in Christendom is busy kicking the gate to splinters, his mean little eyes red with fury, his hoofs cutting like razors, his dagger horns glistening in the spotlight like ivory sabers showing the blood spots.

This is the Brahma known as Sudden Death, who has never been ridden, who has two kills, 44 maims, two paralyses and 19 positively-refuse-to-rides to his credit.

Out of the contestant’s pen comes a shambling figure, part John Wayne, part Buffalo Bill. He is as loose as a rocking chair, rolling a cigarette, a sardonic smile playing about his lips as he approaches the pen and climbs the fence to get on the one-ton mound of quivering, enraged flesh that is bull No. 999.

It’s ol’ Saddle Sore Murray, the king of the range, the Lone Wrangler, the hero of every bunkhouse in West Texas.

His faithful old sidekicks are panicky.

“Don’t ride this killer, Sad!” they plead. “He’ll stomp you till you look like that 2000-year-old body they found in the Alps the other day. The only way they’ll be able to tell you is by your teeth!”

Murray’s lips curl in contempt.

“Outta the way, you greenhorns!” he snaps, crushing his cigarette on the bull’s horn. “Why I’ll have this critter so tame, they’ll be able to make him a ride at Disneyland afore I’m through. I’ll break his spirit to where you’ll be able to put a basket of eggs on him without him breaking a one. Now, open that gate and let me turn this Bolshevik into a house pet!”

And the gate slams open . . . and I wake up.

In the light of that, you can imagine my feelings the other day as I traveled here for the National Finals Rodeo and found, of all things, that the defending all-around champion here was a cowboy named Murray.

You meet Ty Murray and you figure Billy the Kid must have looked like this. The innocent baby face betrayed only by the eyes with the unholy look of the born competitor, the body lean as whipcord, the speech slow and drawling and matter of fact. If you saw him riding into town, you’d go warn the sheriff.

He is as pale as Texas sunlight and so young, just 22, and slight, 5-feet-8 and 140 pounds, that he looks more like a gymnast, which he was, than the bronc and bull rider he is. Even his black hat looks two sizes too large on him.

He went right from his crib to a calf. He was riding ranch animals at 2. So he is as at home on a bull or bronc’s back as he is in a car.

Ty doesn’t bully his critters into submission. If he were a golfer or a ballplayer, you’d say he has a good swing. Rodeo cowboys have to score on form, like Olympic divers. Some rides look like Dempsey-Firpo. Murray’s look more like those a guy named Sugar Ray would have.

In 1989, he was the first cowboy to qualify in three events in the National Finals--only the top 15 in the country in each event make it--since Larry Mahan did it in 1973. He competed in the saddle bronc and bareback bronc events and the bull ride. He won the all-around--most money scored in the rodeo--that year and repeated in 1990 and is leading again in this year’s rodeo at the Thomas & Mack Arena here this week.

Riding three bad-tempered bucking animals a night is a back-jarring, brain-jarring way to make a living. The centrifugal force generated by a spinning bull can get the blood churning and the eyes crossing.

Ty Murray’s events are known as “rough stock” events, which should give you an idea of the degree of difficulty. Getting thrown from a spinning bull involves about the same impact as being thrown from a moving train. Most bulls look like locomotives with horns anyway. And you don’t get seat belts.

In some sports--notably boxing and college football--the idea is to pick opponents you know you can beat, pushovers to fatten your reputation or standing in the polls. In rodeo, you try to schedule the best, the meanest, trickiest competition you can find. You get no points if the bull stops to smell the flowers or the bronc stands still.

Rodeo cowboys comb the corrals to find four-footed public enemies with the social outlook of cornered sidewinders. You get no score if the bull goes in the tank.

Rodeo-ing came into existence as a kind of harvest festival after the long cattle drives of the 1800s. Today, the sport is as organized as the NFL. Colleges even give scholarships. Ty Murray learned to be a bronco buster in Arizona, the birthplace of the sport, but he honed his style on a scholarship to Odessa College. There, he won the rodeo equivalent of the Final Four--the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Assn. title.

It’s a team sport in the roping and bulldogging events but otherwise as individualistic as Dodge City.

Murray would probably be “the Arizona Kid” in another era. Probably a gunfighter, certainly a cowpuncher.

“Did cowboy movies--John Wayne, the Sundance Kid--influence you when you were young?” he is asked.

“Why would cowboy movies affect me?” challenges Ty. “I am a cowboy.”

And he is. One of the best. You don’t have to be eccentric to be a bull and bronc rider. It’s just that most are.

You would think, for instance, that a rodeo hand would be a rancher. And Ty Murray is that.

And you would think that he would raise cattle.

Wrong. Murray raises ostriches.

You heard me. No git-along-little-dogies for this old cowhand but instead that old range rover, the Struthio camelus, the world’s largest living bird.

These 300-pound, earthbound, feathered monsters can’t even fly. But they grow to eight feet. They are faster than horses and meaner than rodeo bulls. Their feathers, once the backbone of the millinery trade, have dwindled in value but Ty says a pair of top breeding ostriches can bring $400,000.

“Ostrich meat sells for $25 a pound. They lay 20 eggs and I get $500 an egg. They make shoes and purses out of (ostrich skin) and there are not many left in the world.”

You wonder what Wyatt Earp would think, seeing an ostrich at home on the range where the deer and the antelope roamed.

But Ty doesn’t even need the ostrich money. He already has earned more than half a million on the rodeo floor, almost as much off it.

In the Old West, Jesse James would have had to rob trains or hold up the stage to make that kind of money. Ty makes it with his own kind of cattle rustling.