Sport: Broadway Rodeo

As 600 head of fractious livestock and 200 cowboys and cowgirls clattered into New York’s Madison Square Garden last week for the 12th annual World’s Championship Rodeo, one important face was missing, the fat, wrinkled features of Promoter William T. Johnson. After eight years in his highly speculative business. Promoter Johnson had sold his rodeo livestock, equipment and Garden contracts, (New York and Boston), retired to devote all his time to his three great ranches in Texas. His former roaring, rollicking exhibition, however, went right on last week to shatter last year’s attendance records.

The World’s Championship Rodeo has no world’s championships to offer in calf-roping, steer-wrestling, bronco-riding or any other spectacular event of a rodeo. Nearest approach to such championships are the point scores compiled annually by the Rodeo Association of America (which the Garden rodeos joined last year) on the basis of some 50 rodeos, including the famed contests at Cheyenne, Pendleton, Calgary and Salinas. But the World’s Championship Rodeo is champion in one respect, drawing more first-rate performers than any single Western rodeo.

So last week most of the top-flight cowboys of the North American rodeo circuit circulated around Broadway movie theatres and bars, wearing at the Garden’s special behest the widest hats and brightest shirts they could buy. As contestants in what is one of the most unprofitable as well as one of the riskiest of sports, rodeo cowboys average about $3,000 a year in prize money, spend most of it on traveling expenses, clothes, entry fees, hospital bills. Few, therefore, can afford to pass up the Madison Square Garden rodeo, which offers the season’s biggest total prize money ($38,000), augmented this year by the entry fees in all events.

Without Colonel Johnson, the opening parade up Broadway was led last week by the new impresarios: his rangy, longtime arena director, Everett Colburn, and boyish Harry Knight, a onetime bronco-rider and son-in-law of Cowboy Tom Mix. A third, also in the parade, was an Arizona cattleman named Mark Clemens, who had put up the cash to buy Promoter Johnson’s string of broncos, steers and wild cows, and to send “Gorilla” Mike Hastings scouring the West for more. Scout Hastings was visibly pleased last week with one of his most celebrated finds, a bucking horse named Hell’s Angel. So vicious that in five years no one has ridden him the prescribed ten seconds at the garden, Hell’s Angel on opening night Bought about the downfall of one Fritz 1 ruan only a yard out of the chute.

The rest of the show was the smell of tanbark, a display of gay bandanas, a pounding of hoofs, a whooping of cowhands and a continuous schedule of feats of skill and vigor. Among them: anexhibition of trick-roping by 44-year-old Chester Brers who learned some of his stunts from Will Rogers and has been No. 1 U. S. trick-roper so long (20 years) that no competitors were entered against him last week; cowboys trying to throw light Mexican steers, to ride huge, humped, 1,250-lb. Brahma steers,* to rope and hold wild cows long enough to make them yield a pop bottle full of milk, to mount and ride wild horses in a race across the arena; cowgirls riding broncos (with the stirrups tied down as a concession to their sex); Cowboy Billy Keen vaulting over an automobile with two horses; trick Horseshoe Pitcher Ted Allen knocking a paper bag from the head of an assistant in the course of making a ringer, lighting a match with another ringer: mounted basketball, a game with all the punishing features of water polo, football and a riot in a picket line; Trick-Roper Gene McLaughlin, 7, of Del Rio, Tex. performing with his brother Donald. 8.

*On the fourth night of the show Steer Rider Walter Cravens, one of the best on the circuit, was thrown and trampled on: died next day of a punctured lung.