Spurred West. Ian Neligh

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ flung into the air. Injuries are just a part of the job, an accepted hazard. Bullfighters often break multiple bones and worse, but they understand what they’ve signed up for.

      “I’ve been very fortunate as far as injuries go, knock on wood,” he says. “And I just kind of attribute that to good fundamentals and doing things correctly. Good fundamentals get you a long way.”

      Even the best training can only prevent accidents some of the time. Just a month ago, Munsell was at a rodeo in Dodge City watching a cowboy dismount from a bull when things suddenly went wrong.

      The rider flew off a bull’s back just as the animal kicked up and turned, flipping the man in the air. Munsell raced to help the contestant and got hit on the head by one of the cowboy’s spurs. This was a particularly awful injury because the spurs used by the riders are dulled so as not to pierce the skin of the animal. A sharp spur might just cut Munsell, but a dull one was assured to do more tearing than cutting—and in the process cause a nastier wound.

      “I’m going through the gap, he’s landing, and something just hits me in the head,” Munsell remembers. “And I didn’t think nothing of it because it wasn’t a super hard hit or anything, so I just keep going and passed around that bull, and I can see red coming down my face, and I just take my hand and check up there and I’m bleeding like a goddang stuck hog.”

      After the bull was back in the pen, Munsell walked over to the athletics trainer who looked at him with a horrified expression on his face. Munsell’s injury was a nasty, deep slice just above his eye and had to get stitched up.

      “It’s not scary at the time because you don’t know what’s just happened because it happened so fast,” Munsell says. “When you sit down and think about it, you’re like, ‘Son of a gun, that coulda put my eye out …’ That’s the only thing that kind of scares me, is when it is something like that.”

      Another similar injury occurred at the Denver Stock Show eight years before. A bull bucked its rider off, and when Munsell raced in the animal ran him over. He fell as the rider was getting to his feet.

      “I just thought I hit my head on something really hard and just kind of sat up and gathered myself, and a buddy of mine standing in the back of the chutes said, ‘Hey, you need to get yourself checked out.’ And I said, ‘Man, am I bleeding? Because I can taste blood?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, go look.’” Munsell had landed face first on the rider’s boot spur, which punctured through his cheek and knocked out a tooth.

      “Same kind of thing, I just hate things happening in or around my head,” Munsell says. “You can hit me anywhere else you want—just not my head.”

      Not being hurt often means getting off the ground and avoiding being stomped on by a bull, which can weigh more than a thousand pounds. Munsell wears safety gear comprising of a protective vest, and leg and knee protection designed to let striking hooves and horns slide off easily—but at some points it must feel a bit like a can of sardines being run over by a car.

       A Bullfighter’s Legacy

      While the West and Western culture is Munsell’s way of life, he says one day if he has children he’d like them to experience it—but he wouldn’t push their involvement in rodeos. He knows being a bullfighter is a profession that has an expiration date on it.

      “Every former bullfighter that I know has said the same thing: the bulls will let you know when you need to quit,” Munsell tells me. “I don’t want to get to that point.”

      His own father worked in the industry until he was forty-one. Munsell says he couldn’t see himself working much past that age.

      “Being in the position I’m in, being one of the top guys in the game, I don’t want to do anything to prevent me not being seen in a positive way when I do retire,” Munsell says. “There’s a lot of great bullfighters that went out way too late, and they were very good when they were in their twenties and thirties—and could have had a better legacy if they had the foresight to retire sooner.”

      The oldest bullfighter he’s aware of fought until he was fifty-five years old, something Munsell has no desire to do himself. He says he wants people to say he went out while he was at the top of his game. But that time is still years away. In the meantime, Munsell is back in the arena, in position and ready for whatever happens next.

      CHAPTER 3

      SHOOTISTS OF THE OLD (AND NEW) WEST

      The man is half bent over backward, precariously balancing on the heels of his cowboy boots, the fingers on his right hand itching for the handle of his single-action revolver. His left hand hovers in the air in front of him, fingers trembling with anticipation. In this position, he waits for maybe five seconds. Then the light in the center of a metal target twenty-one feet away turns orange, and he and the five other Cowboy Fast Draw competitors pull out their pistols and fire. He misses his shot. There’s no doubt the man is as fast as an angry rattlesnake, especially when his holstered gun is horizontal with the target, but he can’t get the points if he doesn’t hit the target. There would be another chance. Again he assumes the half-bent position, thighs straining, left hand dangling in the air. His peers down the line take a somewhat more traditional vertical shooting position. The light turns orange and gunfire once again fills the air.

      It is the Four Corners Territorial Fast Draw Championship in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, where the best in four states would see who is the fastest shootist of them all. They pull guns and fire in less than half a second, sending wax bullets into, or in some cases somewhat near, the target. All things considered, that was also the way it was when trying to shoot quickly back in the Old West. In a gunfight, speed was sometimes used at the fatal cost of accuracy. They often attribute the legendary Wyatt Earp as saying, “Fast is fine, but accuracy is final.” Wild West lawman Bat Masterson agreed during an interview that speed was important during a gunfight, but nerve was even more so: “I knew a man named Charlie Harrison in the old days. He was the most brilliant performer with a pistol of any man I have ever seen and he could shoot straighter and faster than many of the great fighters, yet when he got into a scrap with a man named Jim Levy he missed him with all six shots at close range before Levy could reach for his weapon. Levy coolly dropped him with a single shot. Harrison was brave, but he had no nerve, you see.”

      Behind the target and a burlap-like curtain that stopped the errant wax bullets from harassing the town’s tourists, I sit at a table with David “Mongo” Miller and his wife Shirley, also known as “Wench.” “That’s like you see in a saloon—not like you find on a jeep,” David says of Shirley’s alias. The retired couple, both dressed in period-authentic clothing, have long participated in the fast draw sport since its earliest days in 2004—and are some of the quickest around. David has finished tenth overall in the world six times.

      Big Ugly, Annie Moose Killer, Ben Quicker, Mad Dog Martin, Mr. Big Shot, Nitro—everyone involved in the sport of Cowboy Fast Draw has an alias, not unlike the original Old West personalities like Sundance Kid, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill, Curly Bill, and Buffalo Bill. “You just kind of pick them at random,” David admits, adding his own name Mongo was after the large, rather slow character played by Alex Karras in Mel Brooks’s 1974 comedy classic Blazing Saddles. David served in the Marine Corps from 1969 to 1975 before selling dialysis machines, where he met Shirley, then a nurse. David sold computers for years before retiring in the early 2000s. Like many from his generation, he grew up watching television’s classic black-and-white Westerns.

      “We watched Bonanza, we watched Gunsmoke, we watched Have Gun – Will Travel, we watched all that stuff,” David says. “That’s СКАЧАТЬ