Spurred West. Ian Neligh

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      CHAPTER 2

      THE BULLFIGHTER

      Spending more time in the air than on the ground, the bull is a spinning two-thousand-pound nightmare of hooves and horns. The rider hangs onto the back with one hand to what is essentially a homicidal centrifuge. The state fairgrounds in Pueblo, Colorado, the packed and roaring stadium, the blaring music, fellow cowboys—everything is a blur of bucking insanity. Then it happens: the whiplashing rollercoaster ends and the rider is flung loose, legs kicking, to drift through space above the rodeo grounds and away from the bull, his inelegant feet going one way with arms pinwheeling in another. The dusty rodeo grounds come up fast to make his less-than-friendly acquaintance with a bone-jarring thud and a cloud of dust. Knocked a little senseless, the cowboy scrambles to his feet, boots working hard to make purchase in the fine dirt, as he tries to make sense of where he is and how he can get out of the arena. He knows that he’s in danger. Through that disorientating fog comes the bull charging straight at him. They bred the bull for its aggression and murderous intent—and this is its chance for a little payback.

      Thirty-two-year-old Wacey Munsell seemingly comes out of nowhere, stepping in front of the bull. Wearing clown makeup and baggy clothes, Munsell instantly attracts its attention, giving the cowboy time to run for the fence. Sometimes after a ride, a bull will walk back to the open pen, knowing its job is done; but sometimes it’s looking for blood. This one decides not to end the night on an easy note. The giant animal goes for Munsell, who moves to the side and toward the bull, putting it off its target. The bull wheels around and charges again, and Munsell avoids being gored by staying just a step or two ahead. He and another bullfighter try to steer the bull back to its pen using their bodies and the bull’s massive momentum against itself. There’s no Spanish bullfighting cape, nothing to hurt or further antagonize the bull; just its natural aggression and the deft movements of the bullfighters. It works 99 percent of the time, but this isn’t one of those times. The bullfighters decide discretion is the better part of valor and run for the fence. The bull still has its eyes on Munsell and is just feet—then inches—behind him as he moves towards the fence. He reaches it and clambers up as fast as his boots will allow him. Denied, the bull turns in frustration and leaves the arena. Munsell climbs back down. While he saved the bull rider and himself, it’s not a performance he is happy with.

      “I don’t like doing that because that just means the bull might have bested me in some way,” Munsell later tells me. “And the second thing is the fence is never your friend. That fence doesn’t give—and that bull’s head is much harder than any bone in your body, so something is going to give between the bull’s head and the fence, and it is generally you.”

      There’s also a professional pride in not being chased out of the arena. After all, Munsell is one of the top ten bullfighters in the United States.

      “I never want to get run up a fence. It is just something in me that doesn’t want to be beat like that,” Munsell says. “Even though I’m not competing—I’m competing against the animal and I just never want the bull to leave the arena the winner.”

       The Birth of the Rodeo Clown

      Rodeo is an essential part of Munsell’s life and his family’s going back three generations. The bullfighter lives in Ulysses, Kansas, where he grew up watching his father, Doug Munsell, work as a rodeo clown.

      “My mom and dad joke around that pretty much the day they had me, they strapped me in a car seat and we went rodeoing,” Munsell says. “It was what we were good at.”

      He also recalls being involved in his father’s rodeo clown comedy acts from a very early age. The first rodeo he remembers taking part in was when he was four years old in White Deer, Texas, where his father worked as a bullfighter. Munsell tells me that only in the last twenty or thirty years has there been a significant difference between a bullfighter and the more traditional “rodeo clown.” Today a rodeo clown is primarily there to entertain the audience, whereas a bullfighter’s job is strictly to save bull riding contestants—even though they’re often both dressed like clowns.

      In the early days of rodeo, the two jobs were one. The concept of a rodeo clown came about in the early 1900s when rodeo producers were looking for some way to fill the time between competitions and essentially “asked one guy to go out and tell jokes.”

      “Because back then rodeos lasted hours on end, so they needed something to go in there and fill the time, so they told some guy to … go be funny,” Munsell says. Before long, the exciting and incredibly dangerous sport of bull riding was incorporated into rodeos.

      “Some of them were kinda mean, so they would tell that guy, ‘Go in there and distract that steer or that bull,’” Munsell says. “So the clown transitioned into a lifesaver, so forever the two were always intermixed—you were funny and you fought bulls. But here in the last twenty years they’ve expanded, and one guy does one and I do the other.”

      When Munsell’s father was in the business, he was considered a rodeo clown—even though the most important aspect of his job was to save lives.

      “A clown had to be funny and tell the jokes and do the comedy acts and also had to fight bulls. My dad had done a lot of that,” Munsell says. “Most rodeo bulls are bred for their tenacity and aggression because it makes for a cooler show. It wouldn’t be exciting if the bull didn’t chase somebody, buck the guy off, and walk out the gate; that’s not very exciting.”

      Munsell grew up around cattle and cowboys and often watched his father’s acts from the fence, yelling advice. Despite the obvious danger, Munsell never got nervous about his father’s numerous close calls. His father, after all, was a professional.

      “I was probably less excited than a lot of people just because I’d been to so many at such a young age, so it was pretty second nature,” Munsell says. “I didn’t get too wrapped up if a bull got a hold of him or something. And I’d go up there and tell him, ‘Oh man, you could’ve done this or that to avoid that.’”

      Munsell was thirteen years old when his father decided to take him to the Rex Dunn’s Bullfighting School, named for the famous bullfighter. The transition from standing on the sidelines to СКАЧАТЬ