Life and Times of a Superstar
The gate swings. A dusty yellow wave explodes into view. Two pounding leaps later, a cowboy hangs in mid-air as 1,850 pound bull spins away.
And you can’t be sure, but it looks like that cowboy let go, like he listened to a voice in his belly whispering, “This bull can’t be rode. This bull will hurt you.”
Easy to believe if the bull is Bodacious, bull riding’s living legend. Fact is, nobody rides Bo anymore: he was retired in 1995 for fear he’d kill someone.
But they still talk about him. In 1999, Bo was inducted into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame. He gets invited to fairs and grand openings. He has his own action video and an honest-to-God New York agent. Featured in GQ and Penthouse, he’s the bull people know even if they don’t know rodeo.
Does Bodacious deserve all the hype? Bo isn’t saying, but perhaps his life history can answer for him. More important, it makes for a fun tale, one of the few about Bodacious not yet told.
Bill McCann still laughs when he recalls the sunny day he sold, for pennies on the pound, the most famous bull in rodeo history.
Merrick Ranch is gone now, but in its day it was known for its high dollar Simbray (Simmental/Brahma) bulls and the hefty calves they produced. So when Bill, co-owner of the Geary Livestock Auction, got a call from Merrick Ranch at steer cutting time asking if he wanted to buy 300 head, he loaded up and drove to Oklahoma’s Arbuckle Mountains.
Four days later, Bill culled 16 or so of the fattest Merrick bull calves. He wouldn’t auction these. His buyers wanted smaller animals that wouldn’t drop much weight when castrated. And anyway, he liked the look of them: they were eye-catching gray-blues and creams. One was yellow. Someone would want them.
When rancher Jess Kephart showed up at the auction looking not for steers but herd bulls and potential bucking bulls, the “reject” pen of bigger calves suited him fine. “Rodeo people like loud-colored bulls,” says Bill. The yellow calf passed out of his hands.
Jess doesn’t laugh about how he in turn sold the bull that would be worth millions. He had pastured the calf in dusty mesquite and cactus land near Okeene, Oklahoma. The young bull got no extra feed in winter. He grew up ribby and raw-boned.
When the yellow bull was three, Jess decided he didn’t like him for a herd bull. He just wasn’t much to look at. So when rodeo stock contractor Phil Sumner came to see about a different bull, the rancher offered to toss in the yellow one. He could use the extra cash.
Phil Sumner paid Jess the going rate for beef on the hoof, about 50 cents a pound. The yellow bull received the brand J-31. J stood for Jess, 3 for March and 1 for 1991. In his records, Phil noted his vet’s estimate that the bull was 2 years old, an easy mistake: J-31 at three years of age weighed only 1200 pounds.
At first, J-31 seemed a poor rodeo prospect. He jumped high, but couldn’t seem to figure out the point: his first three cowboys easily stayed aboard until the eight second bell.
Everything changed his fourth time out: the young cowboy on his back didn’t just buck off -- he also caught his riding hand in the rope that encircled the bull’s chest. Frantic to escape the flopping man at his side, J-31 flung himself higher and higher. After that, he had a goal: airmail those cowboys.
Within a few months, riders at Phil’s amateur rodeos were refusing to board J-31. Phil would watch the bull, now sleek and muscular, wander across his hillside pasture near Goltry, Oklahoma, and say, “Young man, do you have any idea how you intimidate the cowboy that draws you?”
Guys like Phil are the farm teams of stock contracting. So when Phil realized he might have a big league bull, he called his friend Sammy Andrews. Like Bill McCann and Jess Kephart, Phil had no idea the animal passing out of his hands would take professional rodeo by storm.
Sammy named his new yellow bull Bodacious and almost immediately took him to Houston, to one of the Pro Rodeo Cowboy Association’s biggest rodeos. And Bodacious almost immediately knocked rodeo great Cody Lambert unconscious.
Still in 1992, a stocky young rider named Bubba Dunn drew the bull at Lufkin, Texas. He’d never heard of Bodacious, so he asked Sammy what to expect.
“He’s got a lot of down,” Sammy replied, which meant it would be hard not to bash heads with the bull. Bubba remembers that “down,” remembers pushing so hard with his riding arm as the bull dropped that he was arched back, staring at the arena rafters. But the serious young cowboy made the bell, becoming the first rider on the professional circuit to ride Bodacious and one of only six who ever did.
Two months later, Canadian Greg Schlosser drew Bodacious in San Antonio. He remembers Cody Lambert’s warning, “I don’t want to scare you or nothin’, but that bull is one of the baddest son of a guns I’ve ever been on.”
Greg had flown clear from Calgary to ride, though. He made the bell and 82 points.
But Bodacious was still growing. He gained a bulging neck and several hundred additional pounds. And unlike other truly massive bulls, Bo never slowed into a more ponderous bucking style. Now when he threw himself skyward and then jerked riders onto his broad head, he did it with the full force of his 1850 pound adult weight.
Rodeo announcers and riders began to comment that cowboys who drew the bull were letting themselves be bucked clear. “You can see it in their eyes,” bull riding great Tuff Hedeman once said. “They’re just looking for a place to get off.”
In 1995, the cowboys say, Bo learned a new trick, a sort of stutter hop on his front legs, followed by a faster, more powerful lift with his head. In Lufkin, Texas that February, Bubba Dunn rode the bull a second time, scoring 93 points. This time, Bodacious’ head creased the brim of Bubba’s hat and bruised his cheek. The rider considered himself lucky.
“Bo was psychotic. He didn’t like people.” says Cody. “If you were on his back, he wanted to hurt you.”
If that’s true, Bo was becoming good at getting what he wanted. A successful ride on the bull, never easy, had become nearly impossible. In October of 1995, two seconds out of the gate, Tuff Hedeman crunched into Bo’s rising head, shattering most of the bones in his face. At the National Finals Rodeo that December, Scott Breding drew the bull -- and donned a face mask.
“I knew exactly what was going to happen,” Cody says. “It was the ninth go-round, so I kinda suspected Scott’d try to ride him. If he did, that face mask wasn’t going to help.”
Bodacious fractured Scott Breding’s eye socket and cheekbone. The next night, uncertain he was helping rodeo but pretty sure he was saving a life, Sammy Andrews retired the big yellow bull.
So was Bodacious really the best ever, or is his reputation a creation of magazine writers and tee shirt promoters?
It’s probably true that the bull scared cowboys into allowing themselves to be slingshotted. Every bull rider’s worst fear is getting jerked down onto a bull’s head, and cowboys who stayed on Bodacious beyond the first two jumps usually got hurt. Of the bull’s 127 wins, more than a few were likely the result of cowboys deciding to let him.
And it is certainly true that, by nearly killing Tuff Hedeman, one of bull riding’s best, before TV cameras and thousands of fans, Bo made himself into a story writers don’t seem to tire of.
But if you ask top cowboys, the hype got hooked to a bull that deserved most of it.
“I don’t have fond memories of him, but Bodacious was the best ever,” says Cody Lambert. Tuff, who tried the bull four times, rode him the third and almost died the fourth, says Bodacious was one of the rankest bulls of all time, even though “by the end he was basically a cheap shot artist who would Sunday punch you.”
Sammy says the bull’s fame has to do with timing. Bodacious was a world-class athlete, but more important, he came along as TV was providing the sport with more coverage, he got tried by the best and, let’s face it, he was amazing to watch. Eighteen-hundred and fifty pounds of beef just isn’t supposed to move that fast, jump that high.
“Lord only knows, rodeo needs heroes,” says Sammy. And in the big yellow bull that intimidated even the best, it has apparently found one to hold onto.
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