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.
Jake Barnes was bleeding in three places within his brain, his ankle broken and a hand badly injured. His horse had fallen during a training run and stepped on Barnes, leaving the 56-year-old and seven-time world champion team roper in a dangerous and traumatic place.
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.
They divvied up the last of the $6.3 million purse at the record-setting National Finals Rodeo following Saturday night’s final performance. Load up the livestock and alfalfa bales, pardners. Y’all come back again, ya’ hear?
The Cowboy Christmas and Fanfest drew 66,258 shoppers to giant shopping the Las Vegas Convention Center on opening weekend. Is it any wonder Orlando and Dallas tried to rustle the cash cow that is the National Finals Rodeo?
Last weekend, when he was driving toned-down NASCAR stock cars at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, it was hard to discern the perennial all-around world champion cowboy Trevor Brazile from the racing machines.
Rodeo cowboys usually don’t talk trash. Unless you get them behind the wheel on a racetrack. Then they will talk more trash than a mob boss when the feds are tapping wires.
Breakaway leagues usually end up as broken dreams. But the Pro Bull Riders started 21 years ago in an Arizona motel room with $12,000 in a cowboy hat, and this week the riders compete for $2.2 million in the World Finals at the Thomas & Mack Center.
You might have missed it amid all the Super Bowl weather reports, but Bushwacker the bull — the baddest bucking bull on the planet — announced his retirement in Oklahoma City the other day.
He is from Wisconsin, and if truth be known, his sports uniform of choice probably would be a wrestling singlet, given he once was an All-America grappler at the university in Madison. But come the first week of every December, Las Vegas Events president Pat Christenson dons a cowboy hat to celebrate the National Finals Rodeo coming to town. He has been donning that cowboy hat for so long that he almost looks good in it.
