Price Stays Bullish on Rodeo

You think the Chicago Bulls are tough to go up against? How about the Brahma bulls?

Scottie Pippen is tough. But he doesn’t have horns. He won’t stomp you to death.

Rodeo bulls will. They’d eat you if they could. Chicago Bulls may come 7 feet tall, 280 pounds. Brahma bulls come 10 feet long, 2,500 pounds, a full ton of homicide on the hoof.

They don’t throw baskets at you, they throw dagger horns.

Don’t mention the word bull in any context to Clayton Price. It’s like mentioning rope in the house of the hanged.

You can tell right away what Price is. He couldn’t be anything else but a rodeo cowboy. You don’t need the 10-gallon hat and the enormous silver belt buckle with the bucking horses on it.

Rodeo cowboys all look like you imagine Billy the Kid looked. The wild, reckless look in the eyes, the scars around the neck and ears, the restless way they seem to go through life. They look out of place without a horse underneath them.

Or a bull.

Clayton always hankered to be a rodeo rider. From the age of 4, if you can believe it.

His first ride was on that hallowed range animal, the bareback Doberman pinscher. And the Doberman didn’t stop at throwing him. “Bit the heck out of me,” Price recalls.

A Brahma would seem child’s play after that, but little Clayton used to practice rodeo-ing around the house with whatever he could make up into a critter--his bedroll, for example. A trash barrel. A family pet.

He got to practice his roping because there was a dairy down the street with a fine herd of cows. Neighborhood legend has it that none of the cows ever gave milk again after Clayton and a friend had spent evenings practicing rounding them up with a clothesline lasso. The farmer was not amused. He was even less happy to find that the two young boys were given to riding his calves.

Price didn’t go to a real rodeo till the ripe old age of 8. His parents had to sign a notarized permission slip and he found himself on a bareback bronc in a Simi Valley rodeo.

He wasn’t on long.

“I bet I didn’t make it two feet,” he recalls ruefully.

He woke up on the floor of the chute but that didn’t stop him. At an age when most kids would be scared on a merry-go-round, Price was riding real rocking horses.

He rode steers in rodeos till he was 16, when he got on a real Brahma for the first time.

It was a mismatch. The bull had a 2,300-pound pull in the weights, a very bad temper and he hadn’t eaten all day. As Price got on him, the stock contractor warned, “He’ll spin!”

Spin, he did. Price felt as if he had gotten in a washing machine.

“On the third spin, I got into the well. That’s where you’re down where the bull can get at you. He whacked me in the face with his head. Knocked me out. Broke my jaw. I fell off and he pulled me underneath him, stepped on me several times, broke my ankle, cut my ear open, severed the nerves on the left side of my face. There was blood everywhere; my head swelled up. “

The bull was still trying to get at him as Price was carried out on a stretcher.

“I was surprised he didn’t chase the ambulance,” Price says.

Clayton only got the number of the hit-and-run horned vehicle--Bull No. 01. He doesn’t know his name. Probably “Tyson.”

You would think an experience like that would make a man bearish on bulls for the rest of his life. But young Clayton was back riding the range on a ranch in Arizona in search of maverick steers when he came upon a runaway bull. He managed to trap the bull in a box canyon. Whereupon, the animal charged, broke the stirrup and threw Price off his horse.

Price scrambled up a tree and sat there till the bull wandered off.

“I sat up there till I was sure he was in New Mexico,” Price recalls.

But he still hadn’t gotten the message. He didn’t realize that his future didn’t lay on top of a bull till he was competing in a high school rodeo and a bull called Spitfire blackened both his eyes and raised a lump in his head.

It is said around a rodeo that you can always tell the ones who ride bulls because they wear more bandages than Claude Rains in “The Invisible Man.” All you can see are the eyes.

Price now rides saddle broncs and ropes calves. That’s not exactly rocking-chair and carpet-slipper stuff--but it beats getting on some four-footed sociopath called Murder One. When you take on a bull, you should at least get a sword and a cape.

Price is one of the cowboys who will be competing in the Great Western Rodeo at the Forum this weekend.

A bull paralyzed his face for a year, but a bronco tore the ligaments out of his knee when he flung him into a fence post at the whistle. But that’s life on the rodeo circuit--a lot of bull, some horse, a rope in the teeth and, sometimes, a hoof in the mouth.

Mamas, if you let your sons grow up to be cowboys, expect them to be walking around in a scaffolding a big part of their lives. Sitting Bull was named by somebody who was a bad judge of character.