Generations and Other True Stories (25 page)

The rest is, as they say, history.

Although readers around the world will miss their daily visit to
The Far Side
, another, smaller group isn't at all unhappy to see Gary retire. In secret, they're clicking heels and slapping high fives. They're other cartoonists, who hope to fill the newspaper space Gary's vacating.

Especially jubilant are two syndicated Dallas cartoonists—Dan Piraro and Buddy Hickerson—whose work teeters with
The Far Side
at the top of the weird-o-meter.

“People like me are going to be the least upset by Larson's retirement,” says Mr. Piraro, who draws
Bizarro
. “It saves us from having to wish he would go down in a plane.

“On the other hand,” he acknowledges reluctantly, “Gary's a terrific guy, and he's awfully darn good at what he does.”

Mr. Hickerson, who draws
The Quigmans
, calls Gary “the grand titan of cartooning,” and says
The Far Side
was an important influence on his own early work.

“But he was hanging around too long!” he mutters. “Let him go! Bon Voyage! Don't let the door hit him in the butt on the way out!”

A few years ago, Gary declared himself burnt out and took a sabbatical, traveling to Africa and the Amazon to look at strange animals and to Greenwich Village for jazz guitar lessons. Then he returned to work. Is it possible that his present retirement will turn out to be temporary as well, that at some future time he might bring back
The Far Side?

“Over my dead body,” says Mr. Piraro with a curious chortle.

January 1995

I'll never understand the thinking of the rodeo cowboy. I can understand rolling around in the dirt with a steer if a cowboy's job requires it—if the beast has to be branded or doctored for worms or something. But to do it for fun? Naw
.

So how can I explain men who lay down hard-earned cash to
learn how
to roll around in the dirt with a steer? I can't. All I can do is describe them
.

A School of Hard Knocks

The men are standing in a semicircle in the shade of the 7/F Arena, a metal-roofed, open-sided rodeo ground that stands next to the 7/F Ranch Supply store beside Interstate 45 in Madisonville, Texas. In the sun-warmed trees along the south side of the arena, a chorus of birds sings of springtime, but the men in the shade—about forty of them—are silent. Although they're standing together, each man seems isolated from the others in that way that men have of seeming alone when they're in a crowd of male strangers. Some seem wary, their eyes shifting, squinting. Some gaze downward into the soft brown dirt, kicking lazily at clods. Some stare intently at the tall young man standing before them, who is talking.

They've found their way to this small courthouse town from every part of Texas, from Louisiana, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada, from North Dakota, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Mississippi, from Indiana, Alabama, Oklahoma, Virginia, Wisconsin, and California and paid $250 apiece to hear what the tall young man and his father can teach them.

The young man—Rope Myers is his name—is demonstrating a machine that looks like something a bunch of kids might have put together from junk they found behind the barn. Its identifiable parts are a shock absorber and a coil spring from an automobile, several slabs of iron, a couple of hinges, a number of nuts and bolts of various sizes, about half a roll of duct tape, some foam-rubber padding and a fake steer head made of fiberglass. The machine is attached to a steel frame with two rubber-tired wheels on it, which is hitched to a pickup truck.

This machine, Rope tells the men, is a “Steer Saver.”

Then he shows them another machine which, he says, is a “Sure Catch.” It's a four-wheel-drive off-road vehicle—a sort of four-wheel dirt bike—with a framework of two-by-four lumber attached to its back. An old saddle is cinched to the top of the frame.

The machines are inventions of Rope's father, Butch Myers of Athens, Texas, world champion steer wrestler of 1980 and nine-time qualifier to compete in the National Finals Rodeo. Butch is to steer wrestling what Arnold Palmer is to golf, say, or Jimmy Connors is to tennis. And he's the inventor not only of these odd machines, but also of his own method of steer wrestling, or as many of its practitioners still call it, bulldogging.

“There's so many things you've got to do to make bull-dogging work,” says Ron Wilkinson, a thirty-seven-year veteran of the rodeo circuit who is watching the quiet men listen. “It's the most complicated event in rodeo. It involves five living things—two men, two horses, and a steer. This makes it pretty unpredictable. But Butch's philosophy of steer wrestling is that there's a reason and an explanation for every move you make, and every move is teachable.”

Those moves go something like this: 1. Release a steer from a chute; 2. Chase him on horseback; 3. Jump off the horse onto the steer, landing with your weight on the steer's shoulders; 4. Grab the steer's right horn in the crook of your right elbow; 5. Grab the steer's left horn with your left hand, holding the elbow high; 6. Lift your feet off the ground and fall on your butt, simultaneously turning the steer's head; 7. Allow the steer's momentum to pull you back to your feet, but continue to hold the steer's head down; 8. Place your butt against the steer's side and twist his head to the left; 9. Grab the steer's nose with your right hand and turn his head until he falls; 10. Do all this within about thirty yards and in as few seconds as you can. (During all this commotion, a second rider and horse are “hazing” the steer from his other side, trying to keep him running in a straight line.)

Since 1969, Butch has conducted at least two and as many as fourteen schools a year to teach men how to make these moves. Now, at forty-eight years old, he has turned over much of the teaching to twenty-four-year-old Rope, who in 1992 followed his father's training to win the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association's overall Rookie of the Year Award.

It's Friday, the first session of the three-day school. Rope shows the men the proper way to deal with the Steer Saver. “You don't have to be big,” he says. “A hundred and sixty pounds is enough weight to throw a five hundred-pound steer if it's applied in the right place. Where's a steer's head going to go with 160 pounds on it? Down. But if we stick our feet in the ground, how much of the 160 pounds is on the steer? Very little. You can go anywhere in the world but here to learn how to bulldog, and everybody will tell you to do what? To stay on your feet, stay on your feet, stay on your feet. But if you're going to learn this method of bulldogging, you've got to learn how to fall on your butt.”

With the Steer Saver he shows them how. He makes it look simple.

Butch, sitting on the arena fence, says, “If we started these boys out on steers, in thirty minutes they would be through for the day. They would be wore out. But starting them out on the Steer Saver, they should all be here Sunday night. We're going to have a guy with a sore ankle Sunday, a guy whose ribs are hurting, maybe a hurt shoulder and some sore spots. But generally speaking, we hurt very, very few. Since I started these schools in 1969, we've had only two broken legs, one broken arm, and knocked out only one boy.”

Since this is the first session, most of the students aren't yet ready for the Sure Catch. They must learn to walk before they can ride. As the pickup tows the Steer Saver slowly around the arena, the students trudge silently behind it, taking turns at grabbing and twisting the fiberglass head. The machine simulates all the movements of a steer except the falling. Some of the men already understand the basics, some show a natural aptitude and are learning quickly, a few obviously are near hopeless. But no matter how ridiculous they look or how badly they fail, nobody laughs.

“I won't let them,” Butch says. “I won't let anybody hurt somebody else's confidence. I've thrown people out of the arena for laughing.”

Bulldogging was invented by a black cowboy named Bill Pickett in the 1870s, when he was working on ranches in the Brush Country of South Texas. Sometimes the brush was so dense that roping was impossible, and the cowboys would have to catch a cow by wrapping her tail around the saddle horn or haphazardly wrestling her to the ground by her horns. One day Mr. Pickett was having a hard time with a particularly tough cow when he remembered seeing a cow dog bring an animal down by grabbing her nose with his teeth. So Mr. Pickett twisted the cow's head around, gripped her lip or nose with his own teeth, and pulled her down.

This method of catching wild cattle in the brush was so effective that Mr. Pickett began using it regularly, and exhibiting his peculiar skill at various Texas stock yards. Sometime in the 1880s he began performing at county fairs, and, as his fame grew, he was booked by circuses and Wild West shows and staged bulldogging exhibitions at rodeos in which he was competing as a bronc and bull rider. During his forty-year career as a performer, he toured North and South America and Europe with the Miller Brothers' famous 101 Ranch Wild West Show and appeared in several motion pictures.

Many years after his death in 1932, he was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Pro Rodeo Hall of Champions. A statue of him bulldogging a long-horn stands in front of the Cowtown Coliseum in the Fort Worth Stock Yards where he often performed.

Mr. Pickett's popularity attracted imitators, of course, and bulldogging eventually became a regular event in rodeo competition. But few of the imitators were willing or able to use his lip-biting technique to throw the animals. Most bulldoggers simply wrestled down the steer or bull in any way they could devise at the moment. In the 1970s, when the rules of professional rodeo specified that only steers, and no bulls, would be used in competition, the official name of the event became “steer wrestling.”

“I started steer wrestling in 1957 or ‘58,” says Ron Wilkinson. He's one of several rodeo hands who assist Butch and Rope with their schools. “And I had to learn the hard way. I got on a horse that had never been used for bulldogging, and a steer that had never been got down on. I had a guy hazing who had never hazed a steer before, and he was on a horse that had never hazed. I started from scratch. I started picking things up from other steer wrestlers, but I never had anyone who could sit down and explain every move to me: Practice doing this. Do that. This is why you keep your feet in front of you. This is why you keep your elbow up. This is how you get up off the ground. This is how you keep from getting hurt. This is when you want to go for the nose.”

Then Butch Myers taught him the right way. “But by that time, I was too old.”

Was he any good?

He laughs. “I don't remember. The older I get, it seems, the better I was.”

Butch's system of bulldogging and the ways he and Rope now teach it to others have evolved together over the past twenty-five years.

“When I started with the schools, it frustrated me that I couldn't get the kids to do certain things just out there talking about it or by showing them on the steer,” Butch says. “I couldn't get them to get down on the steer. So I built a stiff dummy and got them so they could catch that. But I still couldn't help them with what we call the ‘curl' or the ‘circle.' So I invented a dummy that would bend. I took movies on Super 8 film of people doing it the right way. I studied good runs real hard, because if you watch somebody doing something wrong, you'll start doing it wrong, too. You give your muscle memory bad vibes, bad images. But I burned up the film, running it back and forth. So about ‘82, I made my first video. Then when my kids were little, I turned off the cartoons, kicked in the video, and they watched it. Now, my little boy, Cash, who's fourteen now, is oriented to know where his body is supposed to be and what it's supposed to do. Any kid can do it. I think I could take any kid out of the city at eight or nine years old and start him with this process, and he would learn what his body needs to do. It's harder for some of these boys here, who have some experience, to change and do it right. They have their own wrong mental picture of what to do.”

The wrestling style that he developed amounts to a kind of steer physics involving speed, weight, balance, and leverage, using the animal's weight against itself. A kind of man-vs.-bovine judo. “Our total system is
our
system,” Butch says. “I developed it by studying the people who were better than me. That's how you get better, by studying the people who are beating you.”

He has had some unusual students over the years, such as a weight lifter from Las Vegas, who could pick up a steer, but couldn't figure out how to wrestle one to the ground, and a corporate jet pilot from Norway, who had never even seen steer wrestling before. “It was really fun to teach somebody who had no earthly concept of what it was all about,” Butch says. “But he was a good athlete. He picked it up real fast. He came to the school three times. The third time, he brought another Norwegian with him. But he never competed. I think that's a shame. To this day, I'm not sure he has ever seen a rodeo.”

There are no exotics in the Madisonville class. All the students are average-looking cowboy types, ranging from seventeen to thirty-five years old. “The oldest guy I ever started was fifty-seven,” Butch says. “He was from the East. The youngest I ever want to start is fourteen, and I really don't encourage that. Fifteen or sixteen is better.”

All the while he's talking, he's studying the boys' work on the Steer Saver. Now he sees something he doesn't like. He pounces with the fervor of an in-debt evangelist: “You're going to spend most of your life on your butt if you don't figure out that your butt has to go…where?”

Silence.

“Where's it got to go?”

Silence.

“Over your feet! If it goes over your feet, then what happens?”

Silence.

“You can stand up! If your butt
doesn't
go over your feet, what never happens?”