Hall Charts Fortune, Fame of Rodeo Cowboys : Heritage: Lucrative spectator sport grew out of 19th-Century ranch hands’ daily work.

Silhouetted on a bluff overlooking Interstate 25, six-time world champion Casey Tibbs spurs on Necktie, a head-down bucking bronc. Both are frozen in bronze, bigger than life.

The Edd Hayes sculpture graces the main entrance to the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame, a shrine to rodeo legends such as black frontier cowboy Bill Pickett, who invented bulldogging in 1882, and the reigning World All-Around Cowboy, Ty Murray.

“It’s important because it’s a part of our Western heritage,” said Pat Florence, assistant director of the Hall of Fame. “A lot of people don’t know rodeo developed from the everyday work of the cowboy.”

About 50,000 people browse the exhibits every year.

The hall opened here in 1979 after the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Assn. searched the Southwest for a suitable site. The Colorado Springs business community raised $500,000 for the project, part of the land was donated and the rest of the parcel was acquired cheaply, Florence said.

The Hall of Champions lies beyond the Western American painting collections and the bronze sculptures--freeze frames of cowboys and rodeo stock in twisting, violent duels.

Carpeted and softly lit with indirect lighting, the hall is a quiet place, completely unlike the wild arenas and roaring crowds where these men won their laurels.

Gazing out of the glass cases displaying the tools of the trade--spurs, chaps, tack, hats, boots and saddles--are the grainy black-and-white portraits of rodeo stars.

The late Casey Tibbs first won the world saddle bronc title in 1949, held it from 1951 through 1954 and took it again in 1959. In 1951 he also owned the world bareback bronc title. He was world all-around cowboy in 1951 and 1955.

To win an all-around title, a cowboy must win the most money in two or more events during the season.

Saddle bronc rider Sharkey Irwin won the 1928 World Champion All-Around Cowboy title at Frontier Days in Cheyenne, Wyo. His rodeo career proceeded fitfully after that. Fifty years later, Irwin won a team roping contest in Canon City.

A few spaces away, saddle-bronc rider Pete Knight’s chiseled features allow a faint Gary Cooper smile. The brief epitaph reads: “Knight dominated this event more than any other contestant of the era,” winning four world championships between 1932 and 1936, plus four Canadian titles.

In the bull riders’ display, craggy-faced Ken Roberts looks satisfied with his world championships in 1943, ’44 and ’45. Down the line, young smooth-faced Lane Frost, who won the world title in 1987 at age 24, grins back at viewers. A bull killed him two years later at Cheyenne Frontier Days.

Actor Ben Johnson, who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor for his role in “The Last Picture Show,” was a world champion team roper in 1953.

Among the other rodeo greats honored in the hall are All-Around Cowboys Larry Mahan and Leo Camarillo; bull rider Jim Shoulders; steer wrestler (bulldogger) Homer Pettigrew; bucking horses Hell’s Angel, Midnight and his smaller compadre, Five Minutes to Midnight, and fighting bulls Oscar--who never was ridden to the eight-second horn--and Tornado, who in a 14-year career bucked off 220 cowboys who climbed aboard. Freckles Brown finally went the distance aboard Tornado at the National Finals Rodeo in 1967--at the ripe age of 46.

Rodeo evolved during the great cattle drives out of Texas after the Civil War. After the herds were at last bedded down in stock pens at rail heads such as Dodge and Abilene, the drovers repaired to the corrals to settle the question of who was the best hand. They rode untamed mustangs and roped range-wild cattle, showing off their skills.

Then one of them must have said, “Durn right I can ride a bull.”

The historical section says the first rodeo offering a purse was probably held in Deer Trail, Colo., in 1869. Other early events were in 1883 at Pecos, Tex., and in 1887 at Prescott, Ariz.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show later toured the nation and the world and much of his showmanship and glitter was incorporated into the modern rodeo format.

In 1936 the rodeo performers demanded a bigger slice of the gate and walked out on Col. W. T. Johnson’s rodeo in Boston. At the time the total purse was less than the sum of their entry fees.

They formed the Cowboy’s Turtle Assn.--signifying their easygoing ways. That first cowboy union prompted Johnson to agree to their demands and grant them a $14,000 purse. Today’s National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas offers $2.8 million in prize money.

Those early rodeo performer unions evolved into today’s Professional Rodeo Cowboy Assn., with national headquarters next door to the Hall of Fame. PRCA membership now is about 10,000.

Each March, nominations for Hall of Fame inductions are made by a selection committee of seven--three hall-of-famers, two national media people and one each from the hall and PRCA boards.

A rodeo competitor automatically becomes a nominee if he has qualified for 10 or more National Finals Rodeos, or won three or more individual championships. Any performer can be nominated by the public.

While top cowboys used to drive Cadillacs from one rodeo to the next, they now ride in charter planes--from Pendleton, Ore., to New York’s Madison Square Garden, to Paris, Tokyo and Down Under.

The 700 sanctioned rodeos around the world today draw about 11 million spectators each year--quite a change from when the boys from the Mill Iron, Camp Stool and Hash Knife outfits got together at Deer Trail to compete for that first rodeo purse.