When he was a little boy in Choteau, Mont., Flint Rasmussen said sometimes he would go to bed and not be able to sleep. He remembers hearing a familiar voice, and the laughter of grown-ups coming from downstairs. The grown-ups were his parents, Stan and Tootsie. The familiar voice was Johnny Carson’s.
In 1987, when I was the new guy on the sports staff, I was assigned to cover the National Finals Rodeo at the Thomas & Mack Center, because that was what the new guy did. A quiet man from Utah named Lewis Feild was awarded the gold buckle for being the best all-around cowboy.
You wouldn’t know it from his name, or from the songs he sings, or from the way he styles his hair that Chadwick Johnson is a singing cowboy.
With the Professional Bull Riders in town to decide their championship at the Thomas & Mack Center, I asked J.B. Mauney, one of the best, how his sport would be different if a guy was required to ride for seven seconds, or for nine, or for some other arbitrary length of time, instead of for eight seconds.
The renegade PBR still blazes its own trail, bringing a pool party, bikini contest, high-voltage concerts and, of course, tough cowboys trying to ride angry bulls to Las Vegas this weekend. The audacity even surprises the PBR founders.
