Gored by Pamplona bull, Chicagoan turns fire on fellow Americans

Chicagoan Bill Hillmann hit the headlines this week when he was gored for the second time while running with the bulls in Spain.

His moment in the spotlight came with its fair share of online criticism, especially after he declared following his most recent goring in the buttocks Saturday that he intended to run again before the festival is over.

But reached in his Pamplona sickbed by Chicago Inc., Hillmann, a 35-year-old writer who says he has completed more than 300 bull runs, has a cheerful message for his haters: “You’re boring, pathetic ... fat dumb people who vote for Donald Trump and have no interests except McDonalds and malls.”

And that’s not all. “America by and large is full of idiots,” Hillmann added, calling cowboys and rodeo performers exceptions to his sweeping judgment. “Americans watch too many Disney films and are out of touch with what it is to be human. ... The most interesting thing that happened to them this year is probably somebody shouted at them because their dog was barking.”

By contrast, Hillmann said, the Spanish people “are the most incredible, good, beautiful people.” Thanks to his notoriety from running at so many bull-running festivals across Spain, he said, “I walk down the streets here and I am beloved. They are grabbing me and taking my photo. The best runners in Spain are at my bedside.”

Hillmann, who checked himself out of hospital after 36 hours and admits his wife is a little mad at him, said he’d come to love and appreciate the culture of the “balletic art” of bull-running after more than a dozen years. (He was first gored in 2014.) He said that, himself excepted, “Americans should not be running — I was an idiot when I first came to Spain, but now it is a part of me.”

The appeal of bull-running, he explained, is more than the simple thrill of danger, and is rooted in the primeval “interaction with bovine, big-horned beasts.”

Human evolution took a turning point when early man learned to run large game into traps, providing a steady supply of meat that “made our brains bigger and our stomachs smaller.”

“It changed us deep down,” he said. “There’s a subconscious call from our ancient past to do this.”

Janssen writes for the Chicago Tribune. Follow him on Twitter: @kimjnews