What are you—a nut case?

You—being a bull riding fool—probably get to hear a lot of off-the-cuff opinions about bull riding from various people. Relatives, your parent’s friends, etc… people you meet who know little, if anything about rodeo. After half a lifetime of listening to these comments, you will come to realize that most “normal” people think YOU are a suicidal lunatic.

I’m sure you’ve heard this: “The only way you’d get ME near one of those things is to put it on a plate with a little steak sauce.”

There’s really nothing you can say to explain yourself and make these people think you are sane (unless you win big $$ and then maybe not), so you end up trying to educate them a little. “Nah, there’s not much chance of getting gored… it’s more like being run over by a small stagecoach.” You can come up with answers to their questions, but what they really want to know, you can’t explain to them in a way they would understand—why you ride bulls. It’s hard to justify the risk involved in riding bulls as even a part time profession to someone with no concept of what your life is like. It’s likely that a lot of people will think of you as a thrill seeker, addicted to the risk—like people who go sky diving or bungee jumping—but that’s just a small part of what made you get on the first one.

If you’re riding bad, it doesn’t help to be quizzed about why you are nutty enough to be a bull rider in the first place. It’s easy to get down on yourself without someone else’s help. But hey—who cares what “normal” people think? You’re a bull rider—you’ll never be normal, thank God! Those people will never be like you either. They’ll never drive 700 miles to stand in a puddle behind the bucking chutes of some little arena in some little town with cold rainwater dribbling off the front of their hat—waiting to get on the juice of the herd with a wet glove and wet rope and a bad case of hypothermia. But you will, and you’ll try to win. There’s really no way to explain that. Hate to even try.

Fact is that most people would be scared silly if they had to get on a bull. Guys that do get on them are scared too. You might climb on your first one on a dare, or maybe you’ve always wanted to try it, so you do. And it’s scary, but you live through it… get a rush from it… it’s exciting. So you try it again, and it’s still pretty darn scary—it stays that way. But some guys reach a point where the fear of getting hurt or the fear of the unknown is displaced by the fear of losing and the unwillingness to quit. These are the guys that become Bull Riders, and that day when they are no longer intimidated is the day they earn the title. Most normal folks would not make it that far.

In a way, that is why you ride bulls—at least it's what makes you a bull rider—you're more afraid of losing than you are of getting hurt.You no longer see the bull as the aggressor—YOU are now the aggressor... the intimidator. It's a great feeling.

With the money in the big bull ridings these days, a young guy with a little talent might not ever find himself standing in a puddle with rainwater dribbling off the front of his hat, but he'll have to face something.You'll have a day when your back's against the wall, and nothing is working out like you planned. You’ll also always remember that day and the others like it; in the rain, in the mud, in the cold, when you had the juice, when you were hurt, or sick, or scared, or in a slump—and you anted up and tried to win.. That’s what you get to find out about yourself—by being a bull rider—and what most people don’t see and will never know or understand.

When all is said and done, you may walk away from bull riding with enduring fame and fortune, a sack full of buckles, dozens of perfumed love letters from supermodels, and a mansion in Beverly Hills with a cement pond—or maybe just a knee and a shoulder that tell you when it’s going to rain and a hole where your groin muscle used to be. But what will be the most valuable to you will be the confidence and poise that comes from knowing that you are capable of more than even you thought. Whatever else you get from bull riding, you'll have earned that. Which makes a bull rider seem like a reasonably sane and pretty cool thing to be—if only there was an easy way to explain it.

Slade Long
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