A Cowboy Who Broke Broncos, Barriers : Tall in saddle: Wayne Orme of Poway fought racism to be accepted as a black professional on the rodeo circuit he’s been a part of for 25 years.

All at once, the metal gate swings open and the bewildered steer charges into the corral in a wild-hearted burst of snorts, defiant head tosses and pounding hoofs.

Wayne Orme knows it’s show time.

Swirls of dust devils in their wake, Orme and his cream-colored quarter horse light out from the corner of the corral, quickly matching the steer stride for stride. In one reckless moment, the cowboy swoops in close, hurling the wiry lasso deftly around the animal’s legs.

The other riders are hooting now. In less time than it takes to mount up, the 52-year-old Poway horseman has once again shown why he’s one of the most graceful steer ropers on the rodeo circuit.

Around the corrals of the American West, life wasn’t always so satisfying for the bronco buster with the signature baseball cap. Time was, a black rodeo cowboy brought out an ugly streak in people.

Judges fixed competitions, fans and fellow riders hurled hurtful epithets and promoters refused to pay out prize money to contestants who won fair and square.

Then there was the time Orme swallowed his pride and rode a horse named Nigger.

Orme rode the animal--owned by a white man--in a bareback bronc contest in the 1960s. He gulped down his anger, climbed atop the horse’s back and stayed on board as the bronc bucked, arched and kicked his heels. It was a ride no other cowboy--black or white--had been able to match.

“I never blamed that horse for his name,” Orme recalled. “He was a champion horse. He didn’t care if you were black or white or brown or purple. If you were on his back, he treated you exactly the same. He was just plain mean to everybody.”

Orme, a successful businessman, Hollywood stuntman and rodeo rider for a quarter century, winning riding and roping contests from New York’s Madison Square Garden to San Francisco’s Cow Palace, has also become a mentor to black athletes in his sport.

Among the first handful of blacks to break into rodeo, Orme helped organize the American Black Cowboy’s Assn., a 1970s trade organization to further black participation. He has sponsored benefit black-white rodeos and in the 1960s brought the first black rodeo to large black audiences in Watts.

The boys on the top rail say the no-nonsense Orme, who worked in the 1980s as a trail boss on several Wyoming cattle roundups, was the inspiration for the Jack Palance character in the film “City Slickers.”

Orme, a horse breeder who offers riding lessons at a city-owned stable in Escondido, still lectures regularly to minority students. Over the years, he has played the understanding father figure to black cowboys trying to get a boot toe into the rodeo door. He has loaned tack and horses, paid entry fees and given tired riders a place to bed down.

His motives are simple. Black cowboys played a large role in the American West. They fought Indians with the cavalry, blazed cattle trails across the plains and strung thousands of miles of barbed wire. But Orme figures their real role has been ignored by historians, their contributions glossed over.

The result, he says, is that blacks for years were seen as graceless outsiders to the rough and tumble rodeo sport whose very roots they helped develop as slaves brought to America for their horse-tending skills. Orme wanted the buck to stop right there.

“For years, I was looked at as a freak,” he said. “People came to point and laugh at the funny-looking cowboy with the black face. They didn’t understand what blacks had meant to cowboying.”

While black rodeo contestants have won world-champion status in some events in recent years, their numbers in the sport are still lagging at less than 1% of professional riders, Orme estimates. The Professional Rodeo Cowboy Assn. said it does not keep statistics of how many of its 9,000 members are black.

Although the numbers remain relatively low, experts say conditions for minorities such as blacks and Latinos in the rodeo world are improving. The participation, they say, will come in time.

“A lot of that progress has come because of people like Wayne Orme,” said Don Harvey of the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Los Angeles. “The stumbling blocks that were thrown in the way of people of color just aren’t there anymore. Wayne helped change that.”

Racial equality has never been Wayne Orme’s top priority. His first love was horses. He’s passionate about the animal he calls “God’s most magnificent creature.”

“I love horses more than almost anything else on earth. I’d rather have a good horse than a good car.”

Riding horses. Raising horses. Understanding horses. That’s been Wayne Orme’s life.

“I’m proud of being a cowboy,” he said. “We’ve been called the first nomadic athletes in the world. Whether you go to the Far East or Europe, people see you in boots, jeans and a cowboy hat and they immediately know that you’re an American.

“The cowboy is the most recognizable American symbol we have. Everybody knows what you stand for: a hard-working guy who don’t take no grief.”

Not even from his own mother. Orme grew up tending a neighbor’s horses in his native Kansas City, idolizing Gene Autry and John Wayne. His mother couldn’t understand why the fourth of her 13 children would steal away after school to ride and feed the neighbor’s team.

“I could never figure out how she always knew where I’d been,” he recalled. “It just never dawned on me that my clothes always smelled like the horse barn.”

Orme’s mother wanted him to become a priest. He had an appointment to the Army’s West Point Academy. Instead, Wayne chose the rodeo.

He heeded the call of the wooden corrals, barns and country-Western lifestyle. He has thrived in a violent sport where riders without helmets or pads match skills against wild-eyed horses and cattle 10 times their own weight.

Staying close to his family’s new home in Los Angeles, Orme attended UCLA to receive a degree in business administration, taking odd jobs, such as grocery store manager, to pay the bills. He also joined the Air Force ROTC program.

But Orme was down at the local fairgrounds each weekend, competing in any rodeo event he could. He rode bulls. He rode broncos. He roped calves and steers. And he won often.

He decided to turn professional at age 27. Earning his rodeo card with the Professional Rodeo Cowboy’s Assn., he hit the road--competing throughout the West and as far away as New York City.

At almost every stop, the black cowboy sampled the gritty taste of discrimination. Judges changed scores to put white cowboys on top. Black cowboys--none of whom could afford their own horses--were never provided quality animals on which to compete.

And black contestants were often turned away at hotels, or cheated out of their prize money by racist promoters. “Obviously,” Orme recalled, “you were a nigger in many people’s eyes, and they were quick to use that word.”

At a rodeo in Anaheim one summer, Orme was perched in the chute, ready to be launched into the corral atop an angry bull, when someone in the stands shrieked out a challenge that was accidentally picked up by the broadcaster’s microphone and carried all over the arena.

“He yelled out, ‘Ride that bull, you black nigger!’ That really hurt me. I mean, the guy wasn’t even a cowboy. He was just some drunk who had no idea of what it was like to get into that narrow chute with a 1,500-pound bull.”

But for Orme and other black rodeo contestants, the idea wasn’t to impress the fans or even the judges, but the other cowboys.

Their philosophy: If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em.

“No matter what they said to their friends, out in the rodeo arena, when you started beating some of those white cowboys, once you took their paycheck, you weren’t a nigger anymore,” Orme said. “They came to respect you. And they made it their business to see you got your fair share of prize money when you earned it.”

Several years on the circuit convinced Orme that riding rodeo was a hard way to make a living. He was kicked and bitten, stepped on and dragged around by so many animals that doctors twice told Orme he wouldn’t walk again.

He returned to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and eventually became a vice president in the insurance business. He cut down his weekend rodeo appearances to less than two dozen a year, trading his spurs for a suit and tie.

That’s when he learned another lesson about discrimination.

“As ugly as the name-calling and cold stares were around the rodeo, people were out in the open about things,” he said. “If they didn’t like you, they’d tell you to your face. In the white-collar business world, it was all behind your back. And I don’t know which is worse.”

There were still battles to be fought in the rodeo arena. Along with fellow black rodeo rider Cleo Hearn, Orme founded the American Black Cowboy’s Assn. as a way to offer black bronco busters a way to prepare for the big leagues without fear of discrimination.

He helped promote the first black rodeo in Watts and also staged several benefit rodeos for black audiences that included white contestants, proving that the two races could compete in harmony.

“Everyone said that it wouldn’t work, that there would be fistfights and all that,” Orme recalled. “Well, not a punch was ever thrown. There was just a lot of beer drinking and back slapping. And good competition.”

Black cowboys on the road also knew they had a home at Wayne Orme’s place. He has lent other professional cowboys valuable horses and paid the entry fees for amateurs trying to make their costly break into the rodeo ranks.

“People will call in the middle of the night and say they’re broke down 15 hours away and I’ve driven all night just to help them out,” he said. “A lot of them are like my boys. They’ve helped me out in the past.”

And that’s just a hint of Orme’s generosity, says Hearn. Not long ago, Orme paid the air fare, hotel and entry costs for six young black cowboys so they could compete at a roundup in Texas.

“Talk about giving something back to your sport,” he said. “Well, Wayne Orme gives it back. There’s been times when there have been 10 or 12 cowboys throwing down bedrolls at his house. He’s always been there to help.”

Jimmy Lewis, a 34-year-old black professional rodeo rider who has traveled the circuit with Orme, says the elder cowboy taught him how to handle the discrimination he met on the road.

“Wayne always said not to let that racist stuff bother you,” said Lewis, also a Hollywood stuntman. “He said we were there to rope. We were there to bull-ride and to forget the rest. It was easier to do when Wayne was around to help you put it all in perspective.”

Orme has also taken his message about black cowboys onto the trail.

He worked as the hard-driving trail boss for an annual city slicker cattle drive between Colorado and Wyoming, pointing out to his newly joined cowpokes that the trail they were riding was first blazed by black and Mexican cowboys more than 100 years earlier.

There were all kinds of city dudes on the four-day cattle drives--women from Georgia who smoked cigars, a couch potato who yelled “Yaa-hooo!” so loud he scared 120 head of cattle into a headlong stampede.

And then there was the Chicagoan who didn’t believe that a black like Orme could ride a horse, much less rope a wild steer.

“The guy didn’t know who Wayne was,” recalled Mike Klarfield, a San Diego attorney and friend of Orme’s. “All he saw was this black guy and he figured he wasn’t a real cowboy.”

After several challenges to prove his skills, Klarfield recalled, Orme hopped on his horse and roped an errant steer in a matter of seconds. When the embarrassed cowpoke asked why Orme didn’t mention beforehand that he was a professional, he replied:

“You never asked me.”

When he’s not working as a television and movie stuntman, Orme is at home in San Diego County with his wife, Loretta, and three dozen horse-riding students--a perfectionist who insists that riders try to understand horses before ever trying to mount a saddle.

And he’s quick to tell inner-city youths that in these times of slick rap artists and streetwise drug dealers, the American cowboy could still be the best mentor of all--bronc busters like Wayne Orme, who would rather be riding a half-crazy steer in some duty rodeo arena than be anywhere else.

“I thrive on the competition,” he said. “It’s knowing that I can meet the challenge of that wild animal better than anyone else. No questions. No hoping. No whole teams behind you.

“Black or white, just me versus him.”