The Spirit of West Rides Tall

There are lots of places I would not want to be. The deck of a burning ship, in an elevator stalled between floors, the electric chair, down in a leaky mine shaft. The cockpit of an Indy car going in the corners at 240 m.p.h. On the ropes with Mike Tyson coming at you. The Chicago Bears’ two-yard-line with the football. And the score tied.

But probably highest among them would be the knife-blade back of a milky-eyed, panicky, homicidal wild bronco whose only ambition in life would be to throw you through a skylight and, if you came down, kick you into a coma.

You think you know all about horses from watching Roy Rogers reruns or John Wayne or Disney movies. Those are benevolent animals that rescue their cowboys from burning buildings, fan them with their hats when they are knocked unconscious, whinny to warn them the rustlers are coming.

A horse like that would never get into the National Finals Rodeo, which is being contested up at the Thomas & Mack Arena this week. Rodeo animals are picked for their antisocial behavior. They would carry their cowboys into a burning building, would drag them in the stirrup if they fell unconscious and would probably belong to the rustlers. These are not named Trigger or Tony or Champion, they are named Midnight or White Lightning or Satan. If they were human, they would be in the Mafia. You don’t feed them sugar and put them on bridle paths. These are four-footed sociopaths. Serial killers.

I always thought of rodeo cowboys as Billy the Kid types. Wild, reckless, as untamed as the mounts they ride, hell-for-leather guys who could tame a cayuse or bust up a bar with the same degree of skill and enthusiasm.

Rodeo-ing is not for the faint-hearted. There are nights when it is an orthopedic nightmare. A 1,200-pound horse is hard enough to ride when he doesn’t mind. When he hates it, you are better off in a crashing bus.

Wayne Herman is as at home on the back of a bucking, kicking bronco as an accountant is at a desk. The meaner a cuss he is on, the better he likes it. You might get Super Bowl points for a one-sided football game, but a one-sided bareback bronc ride is a cowboy’s dread. You don’t get points for a simple canter on a gentled mustang. You get them if he tries to throw you through the roof. Unless, of course, he does. Then, you get no points at all.

Much as the livestock has to pass stern tests to get to the National Finals, so do the riders. Only the top 15 in each rodeo event make the finals. Like the stock, they have to be elite.

You look at Herman, and you know he couldn’t be anything else but a cowboy. He is as western as a bunkhouse. You figure Billy the Kid looked like this, bright-eyed, quick-on-the-trigger, alert. He was raised in Wild Bill Hickok country, the Dakotas. He has been on a horse as long as he can remember, long enough not to trust them.

But if you were casting, Herman would run more to the lawman than the outlaw. He doesn’t look as if he would go around robbing stagecoaches, shooting up saloons or riding with a black hat gang. He looks more like a guy who would save the fort.

He showed up with a black eye and a bump on the temple the day I caught up with him, but he hadn’t been in a saloon brawl, he got it from the horse lying on top of him on the tarmac. It was almost a case of the rider throwing the horse. Herman’s hand got stuck in the suitcase handle hold the bronc busters have to hold onto to keep from going sub-orbital. The horse, Madonna, was named by someone with a weird sense of humor. He should have been named Hulk Hogan.

The modern cowboy does not get from place to place on Old Paint. He does it in the family van. Wayne is a bareback rider, not only the best in the West, but the best in the business, the bareback leader after a hundred rodeos.

He led the bronc busters in earnings--$84,697--going into the national finals but, in spite of his usual commitment of consistent rides (he scored 79, 73, 75, 73, 81, 78 and 77 in his first seven go-rounds), he had yet to win money in that rodeo this year.

The field was creeping up on him as he took to the chutes Friday night, black eye, head bandage and all. They had given him a scoundrel aptly named Khadafi to ride. Khadafi had the soul of a mass murderer. He could have been named Hannibal Lecter. He bucked, spun, frothed at the mouth. Not since a horse in Medicine Hat kicked his arm into matchsticks had Wayne been on a tornado like this one. He decided it was prudent to stay on.

He got 78 points for not letting Khadafi eat him, good for second place and a year’s earnings of more than $90,000, which might have ensured him of the 1992 championship.

A rodeo is the last stand of the Old West in this country (this side of a sound stage). It is a salute to the most romantic era any country ever had, a time and a place that is as long gone as Caesar’s Rome. Or, at least, the Pony Express. But it will never completely die out so long as there are daring, wild young sons of the pioneers like Wayne Herman willing to climb onto the backs of crazed critters who bite on one end and kick on the other and would like nothing better than to heave that guy on their backs in front of a train. I’d like to see John Wayne ride Khadafi. Wyatt Earp wouldn’t get out of the chute.