Do you have what it takes to be a rodeo clown?
The Call to Adventure: I was looking for interesting challenges online and I came across the Sankey Rodeo School website. Bull-riding had little appeal to me, but when I saw they had classes in bullfighting that caught my attention. American Bullfighting is the preferred term for what townfolk like myself would call a rodeo clown: The fellow who’s job is to distract the angry bull from the fallen rider, putting their own bodies in peril to protect others. I loved the idea of becoming a bullfighter, facing danger and dancing with it.
It should be noted that bullfighting seems like a misnomer here. The only aggression is on the bull’s side. The human’s role is to attract the bull’s attention and get out of the way at the last possible moment. The people who practice this skill feel that “rodeo clown” is pejorative. However, to me – being confused with a Spaniard in fancy pants who stabs livestock seems no lesser insult than being thought of as a circus performer. But I’ll leave it at that.
Lyle Sankey of the Sankey Rodeo School.
So why the hell would I want to do this? Nobody I’ve ever known has done this and to me that’s sort of a draw. After graduating the Sankey Rodeo School you can go find work in rider protection at your local rodeo. This can pay $300 or so per night. While I’ve got a good gig in advertising, who knows when I might need a second career? Plus I could be the guy who is both CEO of an advertising agency and a bullfighter on weekends. I’d probably be the only person in America with those two jobs! And finally – and this is the hubris that led to my downfall – all my life I’ve been good with animals. My mother was a wildlife rehabilitator and I grew up with all sorts of wild animals in the house. Our domestic animals included several dogs, cats, birds and a rabbit. I once challenged a friend in the Boston Commons, to see who could get more squirrels to eat from their hand and it wasn’t a close contest. I’ve dove with bull sharks and great whites. I believed – deeply -- that I could project an aura of confident peacefulness that had a calming effect on animals of the air, land and sea, and surely I thought that extends to cows. I was quite wrong.
“Livestock Temperamentally Suited To Your Skills” The Sankey Rodeo School website (at the time) promised that you’ll be given training and then “matched to livestock which is temperamentally suited to your skills”. So I called the school and spoke with Marjorie Sankey – the wife of school head Lyle Sankey. I noted that I was not skilled in bullfighting and I hoped that they had some peaceful bulls like Ferdinand to practice on. She said she’d try her best. Later, I did some YouTube searches for Rodeo Clown School and pulled up some videos of people training on young calves. I was pretty sure that this is what was in store for me, and I approached the weekend of my classes with totally unwarranted confidence. When I showed up at the ranch for my training, Lyle Sankey - upon hearing my name exclaimed “Ferdinand” and laughed quite a bit. Maybe a bit too much. Nobody had ever asked for a mild-mannered pacifist bull before?
I thought they might team me up with “Norman”. I was wrong.
My School: The location of the training was Larkspur Colorado - which is somewhere between Denver and Colorado Springs. When I got there it was clear that It’s not purely a rodeo clown school, it’s mostly a rodeo school. There are about 30 people there to do bull riding classes and there’s 4 of us doing bullfighting. My team of wannabe bullfighters includes a pastor from a small church in Washington, a recent air force veteran AC-130 gunner looking for a new career and a skinny kid who might have been 14. Our instructor was Brooks Forsythe – a professional bullfighter who was either 25 or 50 and had broken more bones in his body than Evel Knievel could ever aspire to.
The Training: Training for the morning involved Brooks charging at us with a smallish set of plastic horns mounted above a bicycle fork and wheel. (Think basically a wheel barrel with horns.) He would charge at us and we were supposed to side step and “find the pocket” — the space roughly mid-bull where his horns were not going to touch you, no matter how wildly he thrashed about. We learned to “throw a fake” - lean far to one side and then quickly sidestep to the other just before the bull hits you. We learned to get in between the fallen rider and the bull and … tap him on the head or something? I forget how that was supposed to work. In total we practiced these maneuvers for about 4 hours. Towards the end some of us were getting decent at dodging the plastic horns and Brooks voiced his approval of our techniques.
The Cowboy Myth: Growing up in America we were taught to respect the wisdom of cowboys. Popular culture tells us that they are wise, strong, poets and warriors. So when there’s this cowboy with a big hat and oversized belt buckle telling me that I’m doing a wonderful job… well… I believed it. When he told us that we were ready for the next challenge, that little part of me that said “you are not ready for what comes next” was overwhelmed by the part of me that thought “I might be a natural at this.” Bring it on!
Getting Into The Ring: I really wasn’t sure what was going to come next, but a few things dawned on me at about the same time: There is a big stockyard full of adult bulls and I don’t see any baby ones. 30 people who have been training for bull riding are all lining up for their opportunity to ride. Each plans on going perhaps 2-3 times. So that’s 60 to 90 bull rides and we’ve got 3 people in our group doing rider protection. (Brooks had wisely told the 14 year old to wait out the first day as his horn-dodging skills were still lacking.) So at a bare minimum I’m going to be facing 20 bulls before the day is over. All of them big full sized bulls that just threw a rider. None of them temperamentally matched to me. Somehow this realization didn’t faze me at all.
Before we started, the chaplain spoke. We said a prayer together and the chaplain gave a bit of a motivational speech. “You are heroes out there” he said. “Remember that children look up to you” and above all he admonished “no matter how bad it gets, do not swear or take the lord’s name in vain.”
I watched my two fellow students go before me. The bull and rider would get released and the bull would throw the rider after a few seconds. At this point the bull has completed it’s mission… it looks immediately for the escape. They open the door and the bull exits peacefully. My two fellow students didn’t need to do much in the way of rider protection because the bull stopped being aggressive the moment the rider was off him. This - however - wasn’t teaching us to dodge the bull. “Get his attention and then dodge him” Brooks told me as I entered the ring for my bout. No problem.
My bull threw the rider and then peacefully looked for the exit. But… following my instructions I pursued it - waiving my arms. This did in fact succeed in getting the bull’s attention. It went from being a happy bull to an annoyed bull very very quickly. The bull lowered it’s head to charge at me. What I should have done is thrown a fake… leaning over with my head down low… right to where the bull’s head was… and quickly dodged to the other direction as it approached. Do you know how counterintuitive it is to put your head into the path of a charging bull? Well it is. I did a shitty little sidestep and the bull plowed right into me, knocking me off my feet. Luckily I have video of this.
Aftermath: Brooks acted quickly to distract the bull from hitting me a second time. I got up from my blow but my arm was bending in ways that didn’t seem right. It was flopping about like a spaghetti noodle. It hurt. “Oh fuckity fuck fuck goddamn fuck” I exclaimed, just before I caught the eye of the chaplain. I caught myself, looked at Brooks and apologized for my profanity. He said something to the effect of “don’t stress it… we all do.”
There was an EMT team on duty and they attended to me and later took me to Castle Rock Adventist Hospital. I was concerned that perhaps Seventh Day Adventists didn’t believe in medical treatments but it turns out I had them confused with Jehovah’s Witnesses. Adventists seem pretty good on medicine. They had plenty of painkillers and I used as many as I could. The staff was in fact very pleasant and they checked me for brain damage either from my bull injuries or perhaps as some pre-existing condition that might explain why a middle aged advertising executive was attempting to fight a bull in the first place.
The following morning I got calls from Lyle Sankey to check in on how I was. He promised me photos and videos of my adventure but to date I never received them. (Maybe lawyers suggested otherwise.) Later Brooks called me. He was also in the hospital. The same afternoon - In protecting aonther classmate he had damaged his spine. My understanding was that day two of the classes was going to be cancelled. Though spinal injury seems like one of those things that puts one in a wheelchair, I noted shortly afterwards that he’s back and doing what he loves again. The man may be partially made of adamantium.
The doctors at Castle Rock put my bones together with some titanium bars and screws. I flew back to Los Angeles a few days later and did about 3 months of physical therapy to get my arm working like normal again. Today I feel just a little sore at times lifting weights and I have a scar where they put in the titanium bars, which I thoroughly enjoy explaining when people ask me about it.
Worth Doing? There’s a scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence puts out a match with his fingers. Another soldier, upon seeing this, tries it and burns himself. “It damn well hurts” he exclaims. “Certainly it hurts” replies Lawrence. “Well what’s the trick then?” “The trick is not minding that it hurts.” I think that’s applicable here. If you try bullfighting you will get hurt. Maybe not as badly as me in your first 30 seconds, but over any reasonable period of time the chances of survival unharmed go down to zero. When Brooks first tried bullfighting he knocked out his lower teeth on day one. Yet he loved the experience and got back into the ring again and again, after multiple injuries. There was something about the sport that he loved. He learned to not mind that it hurts. I didn’t get there. I accept that my injuries are the result of my own hubris and that getting hurt was a foreseeable consequence of the decisions I made. I don’t mind that I got hurt, but I’d like to avoid doing it again. Also, as a side note - I haven’t felt so bad about eating hamburger since this event.
