After the Last Gate

BY TG MAYWALD

For most of his life, Bodacious was moving.

He was exploding out of a chute, twisting through the air, and leaving some of the greatest bull riders in the world lying in the dirt. He traveled thousands of miles in the back of Sammy Andrews’s trailer, from one rodeo arena to the next, while the stories about him traveled even faster.

By the time he retired, nearly everyone in rodeo knew the broad-shouldered yellow bull with the dark eyes and the habit of bringing his head up at precisely the wrong moment for the man above him.

Jim Sharp drew him three times and never made the buzzer. Ty Murray drew him three times and never made it, either. Tuff Hedeman faced him five times and managed to hear the whistle only once.

Those numbers still astonish me. These were not cowboys trying their luck at the county fair. They were among the greatest bull riders who ever lived, and together they climbed onto Bodacious eleven times and completed one qualified ride.

One.

There is a reason the stories have lasted.

For years, I thought Bodacious’s retirement would be the natural ending of this book. His career had moved steadily toward that final night in Las Vegas, when Sammy put him beneath the lights of the Thomas & Mack Center and an entire arena stood to honor him. The most feared bull in rodeo had bucked for the last time. The gate closed behind him, and that seemed like the place where the story ought to end.

Except Bodacious was never particularly cooperative about doing what people expected.

Not in the chute, and apparently not in my manuscript.

As I began working on the final portion of the book, I realized that retirement did not end his story. It only changed it. There were no more rides to reconstruct, no more scores to verify, and no more grainy videotapes for me to watch frame by frame while wondering how any human being survived what I had just seen.

Bodacious went home to Texas and became something even more unusual than a famous bucking bull.

He became a living legend.

People came to the Andrews Ranch simply to see him. They stood along the fence and looked at the bull they had watched on television, the one announcers had described with equal parts admiration and alarm. Some had seen him buck in person. Others knew him through videotapes, magazines, and stories that had been told so many times they had begun to sound less like rodeo history and more like folklore.

By then, Bodacious had escaped the boundaries of the sport that made him famous.

He became the first bull to have his own trading card. He appeared in Sports Illustrated and GQ, and he was even featured in an article in Penthouse, which is not a sentence I expected to write when I began the official biography of a bucking bull.

Then again, very little about Bodacious stayed where anyone expected it to.

Before him, the bull was too often treated as the nameless half of a bull ride. People remembered the cowboy, the score, and whether he made the buzzer. The animal beneath him was simply the bull he drew that night.

Bodacious changed the conversation.

People knew his name. They recognized his face. They followed his career and debated whether anyone could ride him. When his name appeared beside a cowboy’s on the draw sheet, the attention of the entire arena shifted. Fans did not merely want to know who a rider had drawn. They wanted to know who had drawn Bodacious.

He brought the American bucking bull into conversations about great animal athletes. He was discussed with the kind of awe usually reserved for champion racehorses and other animals whose ability made them larger than the sport around them. He had his own style, his own following, and a reputation so powerful that it often arrived in an arena before the trailer carrying him did.

That reputation did not retire when he did.

The performances stopped, but the fascination with him only grew. So did his influence. Bodacious retired at a time when the place of the bucking bull within the sport was changing. Breeding became deliberate. Bloodlines began to matter in ways they had not before. Fans learned the names of the bulls as readily as they knew the names of the riders, and the animals began to be recognized as athletes in their own right.

Bodacious did not create that world by himself, but he helped shape what it would become.

Now I am trying to write the part of his life that followed the noise—the years when he no longer had to buck to draw a crowd, nearly kill a World Champion, or prove that every story told about him had a fair amount of truth behind it.

There is something unexpectedly moving about that part of his life.

I have spent years writing Bodacious in motion. On the page, he is always waiting in a chute while a rider pulls his rope tight. The gate is about to open. Sammy is standing nearby. The crowd is leaning forward, and everyone in the building knows something is coming, even if no one can predict exactly what it will be.

Writing about him standing quietly in a pasture requires a different kind of attention.

It also requires me to accept that the ending of his career was not the ending of his importance. The rides made him famous, but what came afterward reveals how deeply he had entered the culture of rodeo. He remained present in the stories people told, in the bulls that came after him, and in the memories of the men who had faced him.

Thirty years later, those men can still describe the moment they saw his name beside theirs.

Some laugh when they tell the story. Some shake their heads. Some remember every movement as if the ride happened the night before. Even the men who climbed onto him more than once never speak about Bodacious as if he were simply another bull they happened to draw.

A few years ago, I could not have imagined that the man many consider (me included) the greatest bull rider of all time would someday have me programmed into his phone as “Tammy Bodacious”—much less that Jim Sharp would take such delight in teasing me about it. But Bodacious has been taking me places I never expected to go for quite a while.

Maybe that is where the real measure of a legend can be found—not only in what he did, but in how long people continue to feel it.

I began this book believing the last gate would give me my ending. Now I understand that it gave me one more story to tell: what happened after Bodacious no longer had to explode from a chute to hold the world’s attention.

The bucking stopped.

Bodacious still has not.