Word: rodeos
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...rodeo is still rock-hard with flinty characters. Wick Peth, 44, could be relaxing at his ranch in Bow, Wash.; instead, he runs around rodeo arenas as a bullfighter trying to keep marauding horned brahmas from impaling riders who have toppled in their path. Earlier this year, Peth was gored in the leg and ripped both Achilles' tendons; three weeks later he was back in action. Malcolm Baldrige, 51, is more fanatical than flinty. Chairman of the diversified Scovill Manufacturing Co. in non-cowboy Waterbury, Conn., Baldrige takes every chance he can get to join the tour and rope...
Struggling Cowgirls. "Rodeo is tough," says Steer Wrestler Walt Garrison, who doubles as a Dallas Cowboy running back during the football season. "You got to be in good shape." The cowboys are all business as they wait their turn to compete, watching the action to pick up pointers or carefully dowsing their gloves and chaps in resin to improve the grip. "These fellows have changed a lot," says Frank Barrett, rodeo doctor at Cheyenne Frontier Days (attendance this year: 101,000) for 23 years. "I can remember when cowboys used to squat down and drink up before riding. I treated...
Another change is cowgirl competition. The cowgirls have been around for years, but now, instead of performing merely as a side show to the men's rodeo, several hundred female ropers and riders have organized their own circuit. With only 30 rodeos and prize money so limited that the leading competitors earn less than $1,000 a year, the cowgirl tour is struggling to gain parity. "We're out there riding the same broncs and bulls the men are," says top Bareback Rider Benjie Prudom. "There's no reason we shouldn't get paid the same...
Ferguson started roping chickens and cats at home in Tahlequah, Okla., when he was three. The son of a clothing retailer who was once a steer wrestler himself, Ferguson later attended California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo "because it was a good rodeo school." With him in the saddle, Cal Poly won the national intercollegiate championship three out of four years - and for the period 1967-72, Ferguson...
...hopes to keep winning big until he is 40. For now, he sees no reason to think about much else. In that single-minded devotion he is like most other rodeo hands. "I can't really say I'm looking forward to this forever," says one, "but I know that if my ass ain't spinning around off some bronc's back, I just ain't happy or content...