Sport: Circuit Riders

A professional wrestler would run away from a Brahma steer which weighs 1,000 Ib. and has horns a foot and a half long. No polo player in his senses would risk his neck on a bucking-bronco. A cowherd who tried to milk a wild cow would promptly have his brains kicked out. Performances like steer-wrestling, bronco-riding and wild-cow milking were a part of the World Series Rodeo that arrived in Manhattan last week for a stay of 19 days at Madison Square Garden. Grand climax of a circuit that attracts more than 3,000,000 customers every year, takes in $8,000,000, the World Series Rodeo offers $40,000 in prizes, annually awards “world’s championships.”

No one knows where rodeos started. Prescott, Ariz. held a championship cowboy contest on July 4, 1888. Pecos City, Tex., claims to have had an earlier one. Cheyenne’s Frontier Days fiesta, though it has since become better known than Prescott’s, started nine years later. Long before any of these, rodeos were part of fiestas in Mexico. There are now over 400 places in the U. S. which hold annual rodeos. Most famed are Cheyenne Frontier Days, the Pendleton Roundup, the Calgary Stampede, Fort Worth Rodeo, the Cowboys’ Reunion at Las Vegas, N. Mex. Originally, rodeo events, like riding ‘”outlaw” horses and roping cattle, were tests of cowboys’ ability to perform their chores. Spectacular frills arrived later. A Negro cowboy named Bill Pickett introduced steer-wrestling some 25 years ago, dared his confrères to copy it. In addition to freakish specialties like milking wild cows, last week’s world series rodeo included also a mounted basketball game, in which a team of cowboys challenged all-comers; performances by stunt horses; a juvenile chariot race; singing of hillbilly songs rarely heard except by radio west of the Hudson River.

While baseball attendance has fallen off in the last five years, rodeo’s has tripled since 1928. A good rodeo performer makes $12,000 a year; the best, more. Possibly the most dangerous sport in the world, it supports 250 performers a year, of whom many graduate to other professions. Onetime performers at Prescott were Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Harold Bell Wright, Russell Boardman, Earl Sande. Will Rogers reached the Ziegfeld Follies and Hollywood by way of the rodeo. Wandering about Times Square last week, wearing broad-brimmed Stetsons and high heels, were half a dozen rodeo performers whose names are as familiar to rodeo enthusiasts as the names of Babe Ruth, Mickey Cochrane and Dizzy Dean to sports-page readers in the East.

Chester Byers has been the No. 1 U. S. trick roper for eighteen years. Since he beat Bee Ho Gray, outstanding pre-War roper, in 1916, he has been defeated only twice. Born in Illinois, he learned his profession in Oklahoma, perfected it by copying Will Rogers whom he admired at the St. Louis Fair in 1904. In return for advice about trick roping, he taught Will Rogers how to rope calves, became his close friend. Now 41, Roper Byers makes $15,000 in a good year, hopes to organize a school in Manhattan to teach policemen how to rope thugs.

In 1926, the late Tex Rickard saw Dick Shelton at a rodeo, urged him to become a pugilist. He refused. Now 32, he has for five years been considered one of the ablest steer-wrestlers in the U. S. Six feet, 3 in. tall, 225 lb., built like Jack Dempsey, he hunts lions and deer in Texas and Mexico when not performing in rodeos, helps his wife, Reine, one of the 20 U. S. women who make a living by trick-riding, train their son to handle broncos.

Tad Lucas is the most famed female rodeo trick-rider and bronco-rider. She makes $12,000 a year, designs and sews her own costumes, of which she always has at least a dozen on hand, lives outside Fort Worth, Tex., with her rodeo-performer husband and their two children. Her costume-cleaning bill is $5 a day. She wears sheer silk underwear, uses Black Narcissus perfume, likes red riding breeches.

Promoter of last week’s World Series Rodeo, Colonel William T. Johnson was a rancher until he lost $40,000 promoting a wild west show for an American Legion Convention in San Antonio six years ago. He decided to promote his money back. Now he puts on five rodeos a year in Boston, New York, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Indianapolis, expects to make $1,000,000. Fat, wrinkled, round-faced, his contract in New York brings him $75,000. In return, he furnishes 628 head of livestock. He says rodeo, not rodeo, owns three cattle ranches in Texas which he visits in a Packard sedan loaded with soft drinks, loses $6,000 a year in loans to irresponsible cowboys. His right-hand man is “Gorilla” Mike Hastings, who buys bucking horses at from $100 to $1,000 depending on their unwillingness to be ridden. Hastings became a bulldogger 25 years ago, when there were only two other white bulldoggers in the world.