Lonesome Cowboys, Unite

Rob Lyman’s horse paws the ground, penned in on three sides by the wooden planks of the chute. Both rider and horse focus on the tiny trip wire in front of the cage that holds them back. A moment later the wire snaps as the horse erupts in a fury, bolting forward, sending a cloud of dirt into the air. Lyman, the reins in his left hand, is already leaning to his right, waiting for the right moment to slide onto the 500-pound steer being pushed toward him by a rider on a second “hazing” horse.

In a series of quick movements, Lyman is off his horse, wrapping his arms around the steer’s neck, careful to keep his head away from the flailing taped horns. He plants his feet in front of the steer, stopping it cold, and twists its head up and toward him, using his 6-foot-4-inch frame to drag the animal to the ground. This particular steer is not cooperating. Lyman struggles to bring it down. His time, 10.5 seconds.

He knows it’s not fast enough to be in the money. He retrieves his hat and walks slowly toward the contestants’ area. If you look closely, you can detect a slight limp.

Momma, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. This might be one of the few times when Lyman, a professional steer wrestler, wishes his mother had followed Willie Nelson’s advice. Lyman is in Houston to compete with more than 500 other cowboys for $700,000 in prize money at the Houston Rodeo and Stock Show. But he has other important business: He is leading a surprisingly strong attempt to unionize the nation’s approximately 8,000 professional rodeo cowboys.

Lyman has a vague notion of who Samuel Gompers was. “Didn’t he start the unions?” he asks. But even if he is not familiar with the antique personalities of labor history, Lyman might make history of his own if he succeeds in corralling America’s quintessential individualists into a contestants’ union. Such a union would give a big boost to a labor movement that is reaching out to new groups of American workers. “We are professional athletes,” Lyman says. “We need to take care of ourselves and be regarded as professionals.”

Lyman’s home is in Lolo, Mont., but this week he will travel from Houston to rodeos in San Angelo, Texas, and Phoenix. In reality, home is where his pickup truck and camper are. And that may be in one of the 80 to 100 cities he will visit this year. At all of these rodeos, he needs to twist a steer to the ground faster than the dozens of cowboys he competes against.

Jimmy Powers, 53, Lyman’s friend and road mate, who lives in Sonora, Texas, rides the hazing horse, which controls the steer, for Lyman, and provides them for other cowboys. Powers and Lyman are the unpaid organizers for the as-yet-unnamed cowboy union. They started the organizing drive last year after unsuccessful attempts to make headway through the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Assn. (PRCA), which oversees pro rodeo. They have already signed up more than 3,000 members and hope to forge bonds of solidarity among cowboys who shun organizational life and compete against each other for prize money and celebrity.

Powers, like most cowboys, is not a militant, or even a loud man. But he is outspoken in his defense of the contestants.

“The rodeo is the contestants,” he said, sitting atop his favorite steer-wrestling horse Yellow Dog. “And we are not getting our fair share. We want prize money to go up, we want better health insurance, we want a retirement plan and we want more control over rule changes.” He compares the professional cowboy to baseball players before free agency, caught in a system that does not provide job security, a living wage or basic benefits.

The rodeo association has an 11-member board that sets the rules for the circuit. It also determines what percentage of the money generated at the gate goes toward prize money and negotiates advertising agreements with corporate sponsors. The cowboys have four seats on the board, which has led to a growing sense of powerlessness. Two board seats go to the stock providers, two members represent the local committees, there are two independent directors, and one seat is for the specialty acts, the clowns and other entertainers.

The cowboys have moved from trying to influence the board internally to outside pressure tactics. Their attitude is that they gamble with their bodies every time they show up for work, and the economic odds are stacked against them. A long rodeo career is 10 years, and there is a universal expectation that at some point they may be seriously injured. They are not covered by workers’ compensation laws.

“We bring the people here every night,” says steer wrestler Doug Houston. He made $40,000 last year in prize money, but spent $30,000 on travel and expense. “After 14 years you begin to think, I’ve had five operations on my knees and I’ve got some stitches and a couple of belt buckles to show for it.”

Louis Crier is in his ninth year as commissioner of the Colorado-based PRCA. Putting together a rodeo is more than horses, barrels and a few brave cowboys. “The contestants look at other sports and see athletes getting rich. They see themselves as the most important element, but the people who put up the money have a different idea. I have to be sensitive to the diverse interests of rodeo.”

Crier defends his record as a slow but steady progress toward bringing more money to cowboys while imposing some order on an anarchic system. “I have increased prize money $10.5 million from 1987 to 1995,” he says. According to Crier, rodeos gave out $25.3 million in prize money in 1995, most of it to the best cowboys. He defends the Darwinian logic that distributes 60% of all prize money to the top 50 cowboys in each event. “The best cowboys are going to make the money.”

As for health insurance, Crier argues that 85% of the health and accident cases are handled by the insurance program currently in place. “The cowboys don’t understand that we can’t have a better health insurance program that doesn’t cost them anything.” The existing plan covers up to $12,500 of accident insurance. “When you step on that bronc or bull, you accept the responsibility that you might get killed. That’s the tradition and that’s rodeo. It may not be right but that’s how it’s been.”

For the contestant, the bull or bronc they ride or the steer they chase can make the difference between a profitable rodeo and going home broke. In the so-called rough-stock competitions--events based on scores rather than times--50% of a contestant’s score is the rider and the other 50% is the animal’s bucking efforts. The wilder and stronger the animal, the higher the score. The cowboys want more control over the selection process.

Benny Butler, who represents the stock providers on the PRCA board, agrees that the cowboys have a point when complaining about the quality of the stock. But he adds, “If you do everything the way the cowboys want, we’ll be out of business.”

At the Houston rodeo this spring it doesn’t take long to discover that for a cowboy, the only thing that’s worse than a dog that won’t hunt is a horse that won’t buck. Twenty-two-year-old J.L. Schaffner stands outside the contestants’ registration office underneath the Astrodome bleachers. In his hand is a waiver and release form that he must sign before participating. The form warns him that “the risk of danger is significant,” not exactly news.

Schaffner has just arrived from a San Antonio rodeo where the saddle bronc he drew was not up to snuff. Growing up in Redmond, Ore., Schaffner had little sympathy toward unions. After just one year on the rodeo tour, he’s changed his mind.

Before the rodeo begins, the “Catalina Cowgirls” circle the dirt floor of the Astrodome dressed in sequined costumes, trotting to a rock blare. The announcer bellows after the short ride, “give a hand to these painted horses and pretty girls.” This is not exactly a PC crowd. Fifty-thousand fans stand and sing along with the national anthem that the announcer adds is “brought to you by Coca-Cola.”

The million fans who will come to the two-week-long Houston rodeo will also be welcomed by Texaco, various banks and Budweiser. The two weeks of rodeo events will include concerts by country music’s biggest stars. There were 34 televised rodeos last year.

There is another, small-town reality. More than 700 PRCA sanctioned rodeos take place each year, often in places like Bakersfield or Butte, Mont. Unlike in Houston, or the Las Vegas finals, the Super Bowl of rodeos, these weekend events often lack high stakes or high-quality stock. Rodeo is caught between the quaint traditions of the sports past and modern tensions. About a third of the PRCA’s 8,000 members give rodeo their full-time attention, and some cowboys think 3,000 full-timers is too many.

In the mythology of baseball, players were once willing to play for the love of the game alone. Cowboys actually do. In fact, 52% of the overall prize money comes from contestant entry fees. The 500 cowboys at the Houston rodeo put up $500 apiece for the chance to win their own money back and then some. Rodeo economics is essentially a gambling casino.

Bull rider Ted Nuce has made the national finals 14 years in a row. In his best year he earned $200,000 in winnings and endorsement money. His current sponsors are Wrangler jeans and Bud Lite. “I love what I do and so does every cowboy. But we have to get together to have some power. Individualism is the image of the old-time cowboy.”

Nuce straps on a flak jacket before climbing atop a 2,000-pound Brahma, Bad Medicine, his transportation for the next eight seconds. He’s worn the jacket since having his lung punctured by an angry bull. After what looks like a bone-jarring ride, he walks behind the chutes shaking his head, disappointed at his score. Before departing out the back gate of “the Dome” he throws his chaps over his shoulder, the picture of a tired cowboy.

It will not be easy to organize a successful rodeo union. Cotton Griffin, a former rider, now provides mules for the rodeo opening parades. He’s watched successive generations of rodeo professionals come and go, and he’s not keen on cowboys with a union label. “They get a union, next thing they’re on strike and then nobody makes any money.”

But Yale labor historian David Montgomery challenges the common view of cowboys as America’s ultimate individualists, inherently suspicious of collective power. “The image of the cowboy is that they shun organizational life, but the Knights of Labor [the largest labor organization in the 19th century] organized cowboys on cattle drives in the late 1880s,” he says. “One expression of ‘manliness’ is when workers collectively decide that they will no longer be taken advantage of.”

Lyman and Powers have spent the past year generating, if not total solidarity, at least a healthy camaraderie among their peers. Their next move, when more than half the cowboys have signed on to the Professional Rodeo Players Assn., will be to request recognition as the official representative of the contestants and to begin negotiations with the association. But Lyman and Powers are also transitional figures, at the end of their careers fighting for a cause that will benefit not themselves but only those who follow them.

They and other cowboys know that nostalgia will not pay the rent. If the rodeo cowboy image is going to be used to sell products to America’s consumers, they want the cowboy to be in on the action. “You used to be able to just be a good cowboy and get by,” Lyman says. He tenderly brushes the mane of his horse. “Now you have to be an accountant, a businessman and a travel agent. Everything has to progress. Rodeo has just taken longer.”