Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal History of Dodge City

How to Ride a Bronc

How to Ride a Bronc Bronc riding isn’t one of them halfhearted -effort deals. —Dan Etbauer Growing up around horses and ranch people does not guarantee that one will develop an interest in rodeo, any more than growing up around snow guarantees an interest in skiing. However, having this background does at least admit the possibility of such an interest taking root; and should the interest happen to grow, metastasizing to the point at which others begin to doubt one’s mental equilibrium, well, then, at least one knows where to go to find people capable of aiding and abetting one in the craziness. “Am I nuts or what?” I asked Kent Crouch, the Dodge City Community College rodeo coach, a man I knew only through e-mail messages and long-distance phone conversations. “Heck, no,” Crouch said in his characteristic nasal twang—the same twang that I could still summon if the need or the desire arose. “The way I look at it, if a guy gets to thinking he wants to ride broncs, then that’s probably something he ought to look into. Of course,” he added with a laugh, “it would’ve been a whole lot better if you’d had this idea twentyfive years ago . . .” “No doubt,” I said, laughing myself. It was the week after the Fourth of July . The Dodge City Roundup, my hometown’s annual, week-long rodeo, was a little more than ten days away . For the past couple of days, I’d been running the idea of a bronc-riding adventure past various people 2 0 2 ❍ O f H o r s e s , Ca t t l e , a n d Me n I knew in Dodge City, and to my amazement, they all seemed to like the idea. “I don’t see a problem so long as you sign a release,” a media relations person with the Roundup said to me. “Really?” I said, incredulous. “Sure,” the woman answered, sounding a little bored now. “Why not?” The response in Indianapolis had been very different. “Have you lost your fucking mind?” a colleague asked. “You’re a forty-something university professor. You’ve got no business riding broncs.” “Billy Etbauer is forty-six,” I countered. “Who?” “Billy Etbauer. The greatest saddle bronc rider in the world.” “My God, you’re serious, aren’t you? Listen to me. Don’t do it! Come to your senses before it’s too late!” But as far as I was concerned, it already was too late. A part of me was already on that bronc, waiting for the chute to fly open and whatever happened after that to catapult me into some new, more passionate existence. At dinner the night I talked to Crouch, my wife, Alyssa, sat wordlessly, head in her hands, while I ticked off some of the factors that made bronc riding a “safer option” than bull riding. “First of all, a bronc won’t come after you when you’re bucked off, the way a bull will,” I began. “Please,” Alyssa said, holding up a hand to stop me. “The less I know about this, the better off I’m going to be. I need just one thing from you right now, and that’s a promise you’ll buy more life insurance before you leave.” “Life insurance!” I laughed. “You’re kidding, right?” “Do I look like I’m kidding?” she responded. ❍ As a kid growing up in western Kansas, I never paid much attention to rodeo. It was just another of my hometown’s hick pastimes, of which there were too many to count. I didn’t attend my first Roundup until I was fifteen or sixteen years old, 2 0 3 ❍ H o w t o R i de a B r o n c and even then it was just to hang out with my friends and sneak beer, the entire ragtag bunch of us dressed in concert T-shirts and tennis shoes. We understood that rodeo traced its roots to the days when Dodge was the unquestioned Queen of the Cowtowns and that the Roundup, held each year the week after Cheyenne Frontier Days, was one of the largest and richest rodeos on the professional circuit. However, none of this moved us very much. Rodeo to us was a hokey, hodgepodge affair—a track meet crossed with a circus, with a...