THE RIDE

By: John Long

We pulled into Del Rio at high noon, mummified by dry heat till another Talon fighter jet streaked in from nearby Laughlin Air Force Base and startled us back to life. We came for the annual George Paul Memorial Bull Riding challenge, “The Toughest Rough Stock Event in Tarnation,” according to promotional flyers tacked around the Texas border town. The promo fliers, now collector’s items, were Lone Star reboots of the Return of Godzilla movie poster, where the monster, with glassy eyes bugging and giant teeth barred, clawed air swarming with squadrons of Japanese fighter planes. The Del Rio flyer had swapped out the monster for a fire-breathing Brahma bull, with supersonic Talons jetting between its horns.

Many champions, past and present, were there in Del Rio, including the current points leader out of Henrietta, a five-time world all-around champ and the only man on the circuit to ride each rough stock event: bareback, saddle broncs and bulls. But we’d come to shoot Jaime “Legs” Maldonado for Telemundo, a Spanish language TV channel that I occasionally worked for in the late 1980s.

Back then, Legs was one of the few Mexican-Americans on the pro rodeo circuit. Whenever a rodeo hit Texas, Arizona or New Mexico, or wherever there were other Mexicans, they all turned out to watch Legs ride. Only 24, Legs labored to milk high scores out of pedestrian bulls. But on rank stock, where even the best hoped only to stay on board for eight seconds (a qualified ride) and to escape without bleeding, Legs shone.

The long-forgotten Telemundo show was an early iteration of the Bulls Only rodeos that, three decades later, would pack venues from Madison Square Garden to the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Shortly after the Del Rio event, 21 cowboys gathered in a hotel room in Scottsdale, Arizona, and threw $1,000 each into a collective kitty to fund the start of a pro bull riding circuit. If you were one of the original investors in Professional Bull Riders, Inc., your seed money is now worth over $4 million in a sport broadcast into more than half a billion households in 50 nations and territories worldwide. But this was 30 years ago, when the overall winner took home a silver buckle and $2,500 cash money, and when bullriding clips were used as filler on late night cable, between cooking shows and “Bonanza” reruns.

As the writer on a proposed documentary on Legs (which never came off), I had zero qualifications, having never seen a rodeo. My grade-school friend, director Ruben Amaro, gave me a three-hour crash course on Legs, Del Rio, and bull riding — “the world’s most dangerous organized sport” —during the flight down from LA. Brazilian riders were climbing up the world standings, said Ruben, complaining that the sport was getting outsourced. But what I saw was “rawhide” (American) all the way.

Most of the crowd had spent the day just over the border, in Ciudad Acuña, and many had a load on by the time the rodeo kicked off. When the stadium lights clicked on, the sun guttered on the horizon like an open wound and it was dusty and heat waves rippled off the blind above the bleachers. A water truck rolled through the arena and dampened the dirt, then made a second pass with one hose turned on the stands where men stood bare-chested with brown reservoir water gushing over them and into their open mouths and blowing the hats off their heads. Then the announcer, who went by the stage name of Ferris Irons, shuffled around the arena with a wireless micro­phone, and over a John Philip Sousa march blaring out of the P.A., in a drawl thick as linseed oil, gave a speech about “these great U-nited States.”

Miss Del Rio — a corn-fed Nefertiti with valiant, torpedo breasts and most of a string bikini— cantered into the arena on a haughty palomino and half the crowd leaped up whistling and punching the air. As Miss Del Rio circled, cargo bounding and clutching a wooden flag pole as ‘Ole Glory rippled overhead, the national anthem sounded over the PA and everybody took off their hats and held them over their hearts and sang. Then Ferris Irons eased us into prayer and everyone bowed their heads as he consecrated the riders, the stock, the fans, Yankee Doodle, Old Mexico, and all of creation.

I glanced behind the corrals, where the cowboys were limbering up and rosining their gear. Each of them had taken a knee, their hats off, eyes closed, faces set like Rodin’s Thinker as Irons, with the solemnity of last rites, finished bargaining with Lord Jesus Christ about “being on the square” with the cowboys, and “protecting Our Father’s champions,” and a bunch of other blasphemies in this high kitsch theater.

Irons said, “Ah – Men,” heavy-metal rock burst over the PA and the crowd exploded.

Telemundo threw little money at these one-off shows, so we didn’t have a remote video truck with real-time displays, meaning the two cameramen were shooting “iso.” Once he got the cameras into position, there wasn’t much for Ruben to direct till the interviews after the show, so the two of us climbed up onto the catwalk just above the chute, where the bulls were herded into a stall as the cowboys mounted and were released through a swinging gate into the arena. We were perched over the last partition and could peer down at the first cowboy, straddling the steel fence poles beside the first bull.

The stall was just big enough for the colossal, slobbering Brahma bull, which snorted and pitched as the cowboy shimmied around on its bare back, trying to find the sweet spot. The bull hated being mounted and clearly saw it as an act of domination, made worse by several men cinching a braided rope around its torso, just behind the big hump on its neck. On top of this rope was a thong handle for the cowboy’s gloved hand, gummy with rosin, around which the tail of the rope was lashed tight as the rider could bear. Then they cinched a second, bucking rope around the bull’s belly, close to its furry, pendu­lous balls. And they didn’t merely cinch it. Three men heaved till the bull started jumping and jackhammering the stall with its rear hooves, its horned head rearing back to gore the rider on its back, savage eyes red as the sun.

“Coming out with Travis Pettibone on Skoal Psycho!”

The guy working the P.A. cranked up the rock track. Travis Pettibone shoved down his hat, gritted his teeth and nodded. Then the gate flew open and a ferocious chunk of snorting, bucking, chuck roast from hell exploded from the chute, spun left, kicking its back legs so high it almost did a handstand, snapping its massive head straight back. The bull was all violent kicks and front-end drops, and so fast that the whole works looked sped up. This was no farm animal, but a highly tuned athlete in its own right. Travis was all flying limbs but hung on somehow and the crowd went off.

Then Skoal Psycho spun right and yawed into the fence, slamming Travis into a sheet-metal sign for Manuel’s Steakhouse. The bull whirred away and Travis dropped limp to the ground. The clowns, called “bullfighters,” raced up and lured the animal toward a guy on a tall black horse, who hazed it toward a gate that opened to the back corral. The bull shot through the breach knowing another guy was waiting back there to ease the rope cinched round its belly.

The second the arena cleared, paramedics raced in with a gurney, loaded Travis up and wheeled him off. An ambulance with its tailgate open was already backed up to the rear of the arena. When they got the gurney there, Travis sat up and tried to get off, but a clown gently pushed him back down. They loaded Travis up, the ambulance sped off, and another, lights flashing, backed up in its place.

I ran back along the narrow catwalk to see the next ride, my sneakers sloshing through pools of inky “tabacca” juice that crooked old rodeo hands kept spewing onto the slats. Jimi Hendrix’s Astroman blared over the P.A., and Irons yelled, “And it’s Cody Lambert on Cajun Moon!”

The gate flew open, Cajun Moon rumbled out and jumped completely off the ground, sunfishing—kicking all fours, twisting and rolling — then landed like a runaway train, dug its hooves, snapped its haunches almost vertical and Cody Lambert shot off into the night, landing in a welter of elbows, knees and trampled soot. He must have wrenched something, but he crabbed to his feet, then sprinted to the fence and clawed up it as the big black Brahma bull rumbled after. Cody was safe enough, clinging 15 feet up the chain link, but Cajun Moon kept snorting and bucking beneath him, trying to loosen the rope that was strangling his gut. Then the clowns decoyed Cajun Moon around and the man on the black horse drove it back into the corral.

The clowns were if anything more athletic than the riders. One wore football pads and the other a knee brace and soccer cleats. Each time a cowboy ate dirt, and they did most every ride, the clowns would jump straight between the bull and the rider, diverting the furious animal from close range, feinting, circling and sidestepping with their bare hands palming off the Brahma’s horned head. Often they got grazed or kicked and when Cooter Flynn took a dive on the fourth bull out, one clown was launched rag-dolling through the air when the rearing bull’s head got under him. That any clown made it through an entire rodeo was a wonderful thing, and the rider’s showed their gratitude after every ride with back slaps and fist bumps all around.  

“And give a big Del Rio welcome to D.J. Mulroon, on Black Ratchet!”

The star of this match was not Mulroon— still futzing with his rope —but the bull, who’s name brought cheers from the crowd and whose career Irons described with corny flair, ending with his buck-off rate: 96 percent over the last three years. Outside the stadium, several venders were selling t-shirts with silkscreen images of bulls. One of them was Black Ratchet.

“The bull’s are the cowboy’s dance partners for the night,” said Ruben.

Black Ratchet vaulted out and hobby-horsed wildly in front of the gate, went airborne and “broke in two,” uncoupling in the middle, hooves kicking, slammed to earth and spun like a cyclone but D.J. hung on for four, five seconds, and the crowd went off again. Then Black Ratchet juked to one side and D.J. skidded off center and slipped forward. The bull’s rearing head slammed into D.J.’s chest and bashed him back to meet the monster’s rearing flank, which drove him into the ground like a railroad spike —one hell of a one-two punch. The clowns raced up and drew the bull away, but D.J. Mulroon didn’t move. He was bleeding from his mouth and one ear. The image of the cowboy lying in the dirt like that, with his limbs all akimbo and not moving, reminded me bodies piled up at the base of a cliff after a climbing accident. Scared the shit out of me.

“Guy’s dead,” I mumbled to Ruben.

“No se,” said Ruben, who broke into Spanish whenever he got excited. “These guys are duro, John. Give him a chance to get his wind back.”

The paramedics stormed in. After a few minutes, D.J. came to, but he wasn’t going anywhere on his own. As Irons likened bull riders to gladiators, slipping in Disraeli’s words about courage being fire and Jeremiah’s promise that the lord would restoreth. The paramedics fitted D.J. with a cervical collar and loaded him up on the gurney. D.J. waved a limp hand to the restless applause. Then they wheeled him off and into the ambulance, which roared away as another backed into the hot spot.

In the next 15 minutes I saw two more cowboys body-slammed to the ground and another pitched into the fence and knocked cold. I saw a Brazilian cowboy from Dos Santos get kicked in the groin and another fracture his arm after an electrifying cartwheel exit off a bull called Hum Dinger, who got a standing ovation from the crowd as it rumbled around the arena. Two other riders — the Fawcett brothers, who both looked about 19 — went one after the other. Both got rudely chucked off but not hurt. They gathered their gear, stumbled to the dirt lot behind the arena and we watched them slump into a rusty old pickup and sputter off.

Only top riders could afford to fly to rodeos, said Ruben, which during the season averaged several a week in cities that might be thousands of miles apart. The top 30 or so guys made their money from sponsorship deals, mostly with beer, chewing tobacco and apparel companies. Champion-caliber riders often owned planes and would sometimes hit two rodeos in the same day, picking and choos­ing high-profile contests with full purses. But most riders lived closer to the bone, forming partnerships with other wannabe pros and following the circuit in old pickups like the Fawcetts’. Win or lose, it was right back into the truck for another all-nighter to another rodeo in Tuscaloosa or Dodge or Tuba City.

If their vehicle didn’t break down they’d arrive soon enough to eat and rest, and maybe get a bum elbow rubbed down and taped up as they psyched to do battle. But often the journeyman rider would wheel in ­road-warped, hungry and sore — and with little or no warm up would jump straight onto a bull. They’d hang around if they made it through the first go-around, maybe one out of three or four outings. Otherwise it was down the road in the old pickup, one passed out while the other drove, chasing a dream wherever the bulls were bucking. It was a tough go but they weren’t asking for sympathy and they wouldn’t get any.

Buddy Dollarhide, from Checotah, Oklahoma, was the fifteenth rider out, and like most of the others went at about five-foot eight, was lariat thin and wound tighter than a hair in a biscuit. We watched him swagger up to the gate, a bantam rooster in embroidered chaps. He was only the fourth to ride eight seconds to the horn, but he couldn’t get off clean, landed with his legs crossed, flopped on his side and one of the bull’s hooves mashed his left ankle. The clowns got the bull’s attention and Buddy Dollarhide hobbled off, but I could see the jagged white bone jutting through a hole in his boot.

They’d run out of ambulances, so Buddy slouched back on the stairs below the judge’s booth off to our left, yelling, “Goddamnit! Goddamnit to hell!”

A couple other cowboys rubbed his shoulders, and a man with a face like a saddlebag pulled a half pint of Crown Royal from his hip, twisted off the top and handed it to Buddy. He gulped, hauled up his pant leg and poured the rest into the top of his boot, screaming, “Son of a fucking bitch!” as the amber liquor streamed out pink through the hole in his boot and over the jutting bone. Buddy chucked the empty bottle against a horse trailer, then another ambulance wheeled up and took Buddy away.

The moment Skoal Psycho first burst from the gate a tsunami of adrenaline tore thorough me that ride after ride felt to carry me outside my body. I’d spent nearly 20 years risking the farm but here, when things went south, there was a malevolent, two-thousand pound antagonist who wanted nothing more than to stomp your brains out, and that felt like a whole different thing. The whole thing felt illegal.

“Coming out with Waco’s own Bobby Reeves on A-Bomb!”

I glanced down at several cowboys limbering up on deck. One glanced back and straight through me, eyes fixed on the oldest drama on earth: man against beast. Jumping onto that beast’s back was a direct deed hotter than Godzilla’s fire, a fictional bugaboo made frivolous by mounting a stack of critical whoop ass, prefaced by hayseed salvation and jingoism, then enacted gruesomely to a rabid crowd and a feckless few thousand surfing late night cable TV. Raunchy? You bet your ass. But when a bull and a cowboy thundered out of that gate it was real and it was thrilling and the effect was like hauling a magic lantern into the cavern of our lives.

After about three turns, A-Bomb chucked off Bobby Reeves and a clown helped him stumble away to “shake off the bad.” Reeves sank to one knee and pawed at his back.

“Getting a few golpes is part of the fun for these guys,” said Ruben, but this went beyond fun by a country mile.

Ruben clasped the railing, peered over and said, “Mira, John. Here’s our paisano.”

We shuffled till we were directly above the gate, where we had a straight shot of Legs easing onto a big tawny bull. Legs couldn’t have been more than five-foot-six, but thick-necked and ripped. A couple boys yanked on the rope running across the palm of Legs’ gloved hand till he muttered, “Yup,” in that edging into Cajun twang you hear around Stevensville. Legs fiddled with the lash around his hand, folded his fingers and thumped them with his fist for purchase.

“Boy’s got sand,” said Ruben, referring to the self-contained grit cowboys so prize.

Legs slid forward so his rope hand was right at his crotch, nodded quickly, and was gone. When the horn sounded, Legs reached down and loosened the lash, and using the bull’s bucking action, let himself be thrown, land­ing on his feet in a sprint — a nimble, trademark move that earned Leg’s his handle.

Legs rode differently than the others. He was a little stronger, a little more confident, had a little better balance. And when the tawny bull jumped straight up, twisting and rolling and kicking Legs’ center of gravity across the arena, he snatched it back with his free hand, cutting the air for balance, his rope hand clenched to the braided line, a meager filament holding the two together.

All the Mexicans, including about 50 Mexican nationals, were sitting together on a bleacher off to the side, and they all whistled and clapped and shook each other’s hands.

Legs’ score wasn’t huge, a 74, I think, because his bull wasn’t as homicidal as some of the others, so required less moxie to ride. But when a cowboy lasted till the horn, and if he got away unscathed, that man won, and no person who actually saw it could believe otherwise.

After about half an hour the first round was over and the arena cleared as the judges made the draw for the championship round. Of the 32 riders, only nine had ridden to the horn. Ruben and I climbed down off the catwalk and made our way over to the Mexi­cans, where Ruben had several friends.

It was a wide mix of people we met in that crowd, from Humberto Juarez, a multi-millionaire who owned a shoe factory, to rustic frijoleros who had snuck in through a hole in the fence. In Mexico, men like Juarez wouldn’t be caught at a funeral with most of us, but in the arena they all kept together because they were Mexicans who had come to see Legs ride. I couldn’t join the conversation because I didn’t know rodeo talk. Plus it was hard to follow their rapid-fire Spanish.

Shortly the draw was announced and three thousand “Ooooo’s” sounded from the crowd: Ferris Irons said Legs had drawn Vulcan. In the other bleachers, people were nodding their heads and shaking their hands in the air and whistling louder than when Miss Del Rio bounced through the arena on her big paint.

“Hell and devils!” cursed a man beside me, pulling at the corners of his moustache. “Vulcan!”

“Who brought that bastard here?” Ruben asked.

“He’ll kill our boy just like he killed that gringo kid,” said Humberto Juarez, extending his fists toward the others. The man was sincerely mad. And scared.

“You think Legs will even try Vulcan?” someone asked.

“Sheeeeet yes, he’ll try,” Ruben said in English.

The Mexicans started talking fast, arguing over each other, not sure if Ruben’s forecast was the best or worst news they’d ever heard. Vulcan was a killer. Later, on the ride home, Ruben told me that only three bulls in history had ever been more than five years on the circuit and never ridden to the horn. The other two were in the Rodeo Hall of Fame. In the past three years, Vulcan had killed one cowboy outright, and had maimed a dozen others. One cowboy had a plate in his head courtesy of Vulcan, and felt he got off lucky. During the previous season riders often came down with groin pulls or bum elbows after drawing Vulcan. But this season nobody bothered feigning injuries, they just refused to get anywhere near the bull. So when word got out that Legs was actually going to ride Vulcan, or try to, the mood grew ominous.

During the short intermission, Ruben and I went down to the food stands and got a soda, and I learned how the rider’s score was accrued from both the bull’s and the rider’s performance, each having a possible max score of 50 points. As I’d seen in the first go-around, the rankest bulls earned their riders high scores, but also concussions, broken bones and buck offs. “Thinning the heard,” as Ruben called it.

As the crowd pooled around the beer venders, I found a quiet bench out by the tack house and started scribbling ideas in my notebook, searching out an angle for the documentary we never made. They called it sport but I needed some figurative theme to push Legs and bull riding into a larger context. Problem was I didn’t really know what I was seeing because it didn’t feel like anything else. But what if this Bulls Only rodeo was a hayseed twist on a passion play, where cowboy messiahs faced life and death in the dirt? Jesus fought the devil and was completed. The cowboys battled the cosmically evil bull, who had to be defeated — if only for eight seconds — stomping, goring, maiming the foredoomed sub-heroes in their crazy do-si-do. I closed my notebook and smiled. When Ferris Irons announced that the bulls were running in 15 minutes, I hustled back to arena, hoping I’d sorted out bull riding.

The catwalk overflowed with photographers and a video crew from ESPN, plus a couple local news stations. The rock soundtrack kicked back in and when Irons yelled, “Are we ready to ro­deo?” the crowd went off again.

“Hide the jewels, it’s Shoat Tremble on Doctor Gizmo!” And life was a blur once more, all streaking limbs and thundering hooves. A crash and burn, a perfect ride to the horn, another rider mashed into the fence, and the shrill wailing of the ambulance siren. But no stopping now. The ESPN video crew flicked on some lights, and the cameraman bent over the guardrail, an assistant holding onto his waist. ZZ Top’s “She’s got Legs” came over the P.A., and the crowd erupted.

“Dad-burned right,” said Irons. “We’re talkin’ ’bout Señor Legs on that son of a biscuit Vulcan, rankest beeve since the Forest Bull. So leash the dog and hide the kinfolk ’cause here comes Legs!”

I heard the gate fly open and the rowdy crowd roar but the catwalk was too jammed to see anything for several seconds. Then the bull snapped into view like a giant eel fighting a riptide, writhing flanks, head and legs all convulsing in different directions and with the violence of an electrocution, now corkscrewing in midair, now hooves slamming into the dirt, pancaking Legs into the bull’s back. And Legs stayed on onboard. Then Vulcan bolted to the center of the arena and whirred into a flat spin. The beast was chocolate brown streaked with black, a grim and rippling hunk of heart meat.

After about five seconds, the crowd noise drowned out the music. Vulcan vaulted and reared his head, scalding bolts of snot firing from his nose. Legs seemed nailed to the back of the creature. Once, both his legs flew up over his head, then his torso doubled over to one side so far that the bull’s flank knocked his hat off. But Legs was still there, still over his rope hand, the bull and the cowboy melded together like a Minotaur. The horn sounded — but the ride was just getting started for Legs.

Vulcan broke into a bucking sprint. And Legs’ rope hand was hung up. He tried loosing the lash with his free hand, clawing at the cinched rope between bounds, his boots trawling furrows in the dirt. But it was no good. Twice they circled the arena, Legs flopping wildly, clawing at his hand, lashed in tight. Then Vulcan dug in and plowed to a stop. Legs flew over the horns, somersaulted and landed about 30 feet away, his limbs splayed awkwardly. One of the clowns dashed up, and Vulcan turned and chased him up the backstop fence (the arena doubled as a baseball park). The bull wheeled and rumbled after the other clown, who dove into a big red barrel just before Vulcan’s lowered head crashed into it; and I swear that barrel sailed 20 feet before hitting well up the fence and thunking back to the dirt.

The guy on the black horse dashed in. Seeing Vulcan charging straight down the pike at it, the horse ground into a turn and galloped away for its life, sailed over the retaining wall at the far end of the arena and, unable to veer or completely stop, caromed off the Pepsi-Cola stand. Vulcan pawed the dirt, shimmied, tossed its head, and finally hobbled off and slipped through the open gate into the back corral.

Legs lay face down and didn’t move. They cut the music. Everyone held their breath as the clowns raced over to Legs. Then, holding his side, and with a clown on each arm, Legs tee­tered upright and stared up into the sky, his mouth open and sucking air. Half the crowd clamored up the screen and hung by their fingers, screaming and rocking back and forth, nearly pulling the whole works down as the Mexicans stampeded over the rails and into the arena.

Someone put a sombrero on Legs’ head and they started parading him around on shoulders to the strains of “She’s Got Legs” cranked so loud people could have heard it in the Yucatan. Then the other cowboys came into the arena and hoisted Legs up in the air as well, and he tried to force a smile, though he mostly grimaced.

It took Irons 10 minutes to clear the arena. They prodded Vulcan back inside, where despite favoring a leg, he hissed and feigned charges at the crowd, his savage breath mixing with the steam welling off his body. Every man, woman, and child pressed up against the screen or the fence and gave the great bull a standing ovation. The cowboys were what the bulls made them, and Vulcan had just made Legs a champion.

I noticed one of the other riders, standing alone. He was big and lanky with a loud or­ange shirt, and we all watched Legs hobble over and embrace him. According to an old-timer there on the catwalk, the guy used to be traveling part­ners with the rider who’d died on Vulcan several years before. We watched him stretch one of Legs’ arms over his shoulder and walk him back to the trainer’s tent. Then Miss Del Rio, who’d changed into gold lamé hot pants with matching bustier, rode through the arena once more for good measure as the crowd, purged of a great tension, stood and clapped. Irons dropped his MC persona and said in plain English that he and everyone else had just witnessed history.

But they hadn’t witnessed a passion play, or man against beast, or any of the other misguided ideas I’d cooked up while riding a wave of adrenalin in Del Rio, when the crowd was small and the purse modest and the half a billion viewers of the future had never heard of the George Paul Memorial Bull Riding challenge, or anything like it. It was blood sport, no question, but also a ritualized chance to flout the taboos and let it rip, full fucking throttle. Miss Del Rio and baby Jesus, the great Devil bulls and stone cold crazy riders, blood on the dirt and 20 beers in your gut, lust, violence, melodrama, shameless sentimentality— all those passions that can move us to shudders and tears, yet strangely leave us feeling not shaken but reassured that someone, somewhere is not merely waxing genteel, but embracing the whole divine catastrophe, for the length of a hot Texan night.

A couple weeks later, back in LA, Ruben told me that when Legs was flopping around on Vulcan he’d broken some vertebrae and would never ride bulls again. Vulcan was through as well. He’d torn the big tendon in his hind leg.

“They retired each other,” Ruben said.

That was my last gig for Telemundo and I never went to another rodeo.

For years the Bulls-Only Rodeo in Del Rio dozed in my mind like a fevered dream. Every time I brushed against it the events seemed more starry till I wondered if time and distance hadn’t worked the fantastic on an ordinary day at the rodeo. As the Pro Bull Riding circuit slowly blew up in the popular media, and even was sketched Talese-style in the New Yorker, I occasionally watched clips on You-Tube of events so glitzed and so packaged they little resembled the unvarnished article I’d experienced in Del Rio.

Then work took me to Odessa, Texas, a rodeo town from the ground up. During a lunch break I strolled through Gentry’s Western Gallery.

Much of the displays in Gentry’s featured archive material — crackled leather and tarnished silver tack, a pictorial exhibit of a three-time saddle bronc champion from the ‘60s, and some charcoal sketches of World War Two-era roper J. Seth Granger, to mention a few. The rest of the space was given over to stars of the current Built Ford Tough, 30-city event series, the “major league” tour of Professional Bull Riders competitions. Leading riders, each a well-deserved millionaire, were present in life-sized cardboard cutouts as a video monitor played a highlight reel of spectacular modern rides and dreadful wrecks in football stadiums and convention centers with six-figure crowds. The action was intense as a hanging, but gone, it seemed, was the illicit thrill of every passion running amok and the corn-pone nostalgia that gave the show such heart. Or so it seemed.  

Just past the display was a small rotunda floored with cushioned mats and a dozen young kids yelling and taking turns riding a big mechanical bull, with “Vulcan” emblazoned on the side. On the far wall of the rotunda hung a four-by-five-foot special edition lithograph, with the number 793 next to the tidy signature. The mural showed a muscular, swarthy cowboy aboard a brown and black-streaked bull at the George Paul Memorial Bull Riding challenge in Del Rio, Texas— from way back when. The great bull was corkscrewed in the air, his massive head rearing back, blind rage in his red eyes and steam blasting from flaring nostrils. The muscles and veins bulged in cowboy’s rope arm. His jaw was fixed like granite, his free arm crooked above his head.

At the bottom of the mural a small brass insignia read, “The Ride.”