Airplanes landing at O’Hare often fly right over the Rosemont Horizon, and even inside the enclosed stadium you can hear the whine of their engines as they drop. The Horizon is nearly three quarters full on a cold, drizzly Saturday night in late February, the third night of the International Championship Rodeo. Some of the spectators say they have come because they have free tickets, some because they remember going to the rodeo when they were kids, some because they like animals. There are children who pull their fathers down to the rail above the pens that hold bucking broncos and bulls, and then hold their hands out toward the horses. Their fathers stand awkwardly behind them, watching the young men in boots and broad hats rosin their gloves or walk their horses up and down the ramp that leads under the stadium. One 15-year-old boy who’s trying to find an empty seat down in front says he loves coming to rodeos and wants to be a bull rider when he grows up. “I think it’s part of–like history and all that,” he says. A woman who’s never been to a rodeo says she came because she thought her six-year-old grandson would like it. “The horses, the action, people falling off and running around. And the popcorn, the candy, tacos–the works. And he likes going with grandpa and grandma,” she says. “I didn’t know what to expect–all this dirt that they brought in. And it doesn’t smell–I thought it would, but it doesn’t.”
The second rider doesn’t last much longer than the first. There’s a disappointed groan from the crowd, and then a roar as the third rider bucks out of the gate without falling off. “Stick on it! Stick on it!” a man screams. The rider snaps back and forth on top of the lunging horse, but he “makes the whistle”–staying on the minimum eight seconds. The crowd whoops.
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Benny Jordan is one of the two “pickup men” who travel with the rodeo. They corral the loose bulls and horses and help lift riders who haven’t been thrown off the bulls and broncos. Jordan is not a large man, but he’s powerful enough to lift a rider off a horse using only his left arm. At 36, he moves on his horse with an easy, unconscious grace. Like his father before him, he competed in rodeos for years, starting at 12 riding bulls and bareback and saddled broncos. In 1979 and 1981 he was the International Rodeo Association’s world bareback-bronc champion.
Jordan is on the road most of the year with the rodeo. He speaks quietly in a quick Oklahoma twang. “I’ll be home a couple weeks, then I’ll be gone a month or so. Just kind of depends on the rodeo. It’s hard to say.” He says he hasn’t been home since before Christmas and rarely has a chance to see his two sons, who live with his ex-wife. On Sunday he’s headed for Des Moines, Iowa, and after that he may have a couple of weeks to go back home to Oklahoma, where he and his father have cattle ranches. Then he’ll work a rodeo in Oregon and two more in Tennessee, then go back to help his father and brothers, who take care of his ranch while he’s gone, do the spring work until the summer rodeo circuit starts.
Later, when describing the one time he lived in a city, he says, “In ’70, I think, I broke my hip in Winston-Salem–I forgot about that. And I was crippled for years.” He had a job training and conditioning racehorses, and he says he just rode through the pain. “After five years ridin’ them I worked it out, and it’s never bothered me since.”
Apparently everybody on the major rodeo circuits knows or knows of just about everybody else. The riders’ paths often cross as they travel around the country from one rodeo to the next. Many of those who rode in Chicago on Thursday or Friday night have gone on to another major rodeo in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; many of those who will ride here on Saturday and Sunday will have just come from there.
Smith and Olson laugh. “It’s a fun life-style,” says Olson. “I could do this and have $800 in the bank at the end of the year. Or work nine to five and buy a stereo and a couch, and then make more money and buy a bigger couch and a house–and I’d still have $800 in the bank.”
