Gulden Is Not One to Let the Bull Get Best of Him

I have never been able to figure out why a guy with a $2-million house in Palm Beach, a Rolls-Royce or two in the garage, a flat in London, a racing stable and a stock portfolio in the millions needed a shrink.

But I have no trouble in understanding how a man who makes a living, and a modest one at that, by climbing on the scissor-backs of dagger-horned, 2,000-pound Brahma bulls, one massive ton of homicidal fury that will buck, spin, kick and gore to get that human nuisance off his back so he can kick him to death, needs an analyst. I’m surprised a guy who would do that isn’t in a rubber room already.

The next time you ooh and ah over a standard-sized football player daring to tackle some 250-pound running back in an open field, go take a look at a rodeo bull and ask yourself if you’d get within 100 feet of one if you weren’t armed. Buddy Gulden gets on one of these hunks of horror almost every night. And he has the broken bones, the scar tissue, the sore back and the torn Adam’s apple to prove it. Bullriders don’t need a shrink, they need an orthopedist. Sometimes, a priest.

You can always tell a bullrider between rodeos. He’s the one who looks like the Invisible Man. He has bandages everywhere but over his eyes. As Buddy Gulden puts it, “If you run into a guy in a bar who says he was a bullrider, if he’s got teeth, he’s lying.”

Footballers get guaranteed million-dollar contracts for battling the bulls in helmets in the NFL. Buddy only gets what he earns--which is zilch in the event the bull throws him for a change. And this is one sport where the bull throws the man for a change.

So, no one was completely surprised, no eyebrows were raised, when Buddy sought the help of a hypnotist-psychologist, Pete Siegel. He didn’t exactly put Buddy under to have him cluck like a chicken or try to remember if he was scared of the dark as a child, he merely tried to get him to remember what he did right the last time he scored 90 points over the horns.

What you do right, it seems to me, is get off. But even that can be nightmarish. Buddy is one of the 15 best bullriders in the world, but he got hung up in the rigging at the National Finals Rodeo the other night and got dragged (“drug,” is the way the cowboys put it) around the Thomas & Mack Arena under the hoofs of an enraged bull for more than 60 seconds. If it weren’t for the clowns, the Brahma would have turned Buddy into a plate of steak tartare given a little more time.

You’ve only got to stay on the bull’s back for eight seconds. Now, that’s not much time if you’re waiting for a bus. But time goes by real slowly on the back of a bull.

They name these things Dillinger, or Typhoon (in honor of their spin), or Snake Oil, or Murder One, or Whiplash or Crash Landing. Gulden was dragged around the arena by a milky-eyed serial killer named Smoke Screen on Sunday night. It would have been the first time in history a bull filleted a man.

No one has ever been able to figure out why a man would ride a bull for a living when he could, say, make one putting out oil-well fires--or driving a cab in New York City after dark.

Riding a bull is easy, Buddy says. You just let your mind go blank. Thinking weakens the team. He always has a game plan, however. In order, the four main strategies are: 1) Don’t let the bull raise up on you; 2) Keep your feet down; 3) Keep your head up; 4) Stay on. If No. 4 doesn’t work, you can forget the other three. If No. 4 doesn’t work, you either a) Curl up in a ball, or b) Run like hell for the chutes, or c) Pray.

Mechanical bulls in nightclubs are no help, Buddy says. “They stay in one place. They buck and spin, but they stay under you. A real bull also moves and runs out from under you.”

In a National Finals Rodeo, you get the best bulls they can round up. Or, rather, the worst. They comb the stock farms for the most sociopathic, the taurine equivalent of ax murderers. They had a bull named Capone a few years ago who maimed more humans than his namesake.

The bulls had a shutout going against Buddy Gulden this week at the national finals. He was airborne more than a DC-10. Until Monday night, when they sat him on Bull No. 326, a steel-hoofed pile of malevolence named Chainsaw.

Sometimes, they have to dig three feet down to get one of Chainsaw’s riders (or, ex-riders) but Gulden kept his feet down, his head up and stayed aboard to draw an 83 rating from the judges, good enough for a tie for third place and a split of $7,000.

Then, on Tuesday night, they loaded the meanest set of bulls in the pens they could round up, and it was the Wild West’s worst night since Little Big Horn. The bulls had a shutout going, the cowboys littered the floor and the final tally was Bulls 11, Cowboys 4. One of the four who stayed on was Buddy, who won the go-round (and $12,002) on a public enemy with a rap sheet of 19 consecutive buck-offs.

It’s not the bullrider who should be on the psychoanalyst’s couch, it is the ridee. The bulls are the ones who should get in touch with their feelings. Find out what it was in the bull childhood that made them hate and distrust humans so much, and then deal with it maturely.

Of course, the bull might not think it’s such a hot idea. “What, and leave show business!?” he’ll want to know.