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On July 11, Mike Garrison climbed into the chute at Cowtown Rodeo in Pilesgrove. He centered himself, wrapped the bull rope around his hand and nodded, signaling for the gate to open.

The ride lasted only half of the eight seconds required to get a score. The 23-year-old was bucked off his bull and scrambled to the safety of the fence.

Score or no score, the ride was a victory for Garrison.

It came only a few days short of a full year since he had been on his last bull at a rodeo in Fair Hill, Md. That bull, “Rocky Road,” shattered Garrison’s face.

It took a year and several surgeries before he was ready to climb into a chute and grab a rope wrapped around an angry 1,500 pound animal ready to wreak havoc on its rider.

His right cheekbone and eye socket, shattered beyond repair in the ride at Fair Hill, are now metal plates. His nose is plastic underneath his skin. Like more and more bull riders these days, a helmet with full face mask has replaced his cowboy hat.

What isn’t gone is Garrison’s desire to ride bulls. And so, knowing what could happen, he still climbs into the bucking chute ride after ride.

Injuries of that nature and usually of a lesser degree are not uncommon in bull riding.

What is uncommon is the fact he waited a year until he could ride again.

There is a saying about bull riding that it’s not if you get hurt, it’s when and how bad.

Bull riding is a sport where the norm is to ride with the pain, through the pain and in spite of the pain. There are no time outs, no substitutes to send in from the bench and no paychecks if you don’t ride. If an injury doesn’t make it physically impossible for a bull rider to get on the bull, he gets on.

The big difference between bull riding and most professional sports, three-time Professional Bull Riders (PBR) World Champion Adriano Moraes explains, is “We have to ride with injuries. We’re not tougher or weaker than any other athlete. It’s our sport, and we have to ride.”

In most professional sports, you blow out a knee, and you’re on the bench until you’re healed. In bull riding, a week or two off is all a rider takes for the same injury. If you don’t ride, and ride well, you don’t get paid in bull riding.

Bulls don’t know and don’t care how many titles you’ve won, how many bones you’ve broken or how much you’re hurting that day.

It doesn’t matter what level a bull rider is competing: a local rodeo, as part of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) or the PBR. If you ride bulls, you’re going to get hurt.

It’s not always because of the actions of the bull, although bull riding is one of few, if not the only sport where your “equipment” can come back and try to hurt you. Some injuries come from contact with the bull, during or after the ride. Others happen during the ride itself – torn muscles or tendons, knee damage, and the very common and painful groin injuries.

In Garrison’s case, the damage to his face came from going head-to-horn while still riding the bull.

“From what I remember, the bull was spinning to the right, and I was sliding into the well,” he explained recently. “In the middle of the spin, the bull lunged forward. He threw his head into the spin. When he threw his head back, that’s where I was, and he hit my face.”

“Into the well” is a term riders use that means sliding off the center of the bull in the same direction the bull is spinning. It is the worst possible way to buck off, because the bull is still spinning, heading right where the bull rider is going to hit the dirt.

Garrison explained when the bull threw its head back “we went face to horn. The horn won.”

Injuries are part

of the game

Injuries are going to happen in bull riding, no matter how big the event or the rider’s experience level.

Adriano Morales is a superstar to anyone familiar with bull riding. The Brazil native won two PRCA National Finals Rodeo titles, then went on to be the only bull rider to win the PBR World Champion title three times (1995, 2001, 2006).

Moraes, age 39, retired from bull riding in November 2008 after 15 years with the PBR. That part of his career included 29 event wins and more than $3.5 million in earnings.

It also brought him 26 broken bones and nine major surgeries, in addition to dozens of other injuries.

Having survived broken bones, multiple concussions and even riding days after the tendons in the bicep on his riding arm were torn, Moraes still maintains injuries are an unfortunate but inevitable part of the sport.

His worst injury, he says, was the dislocation of the elbow on his left arm – his riding hand – in 2003. The dislocation was not the problem, Moraes explained in July, but scar tissue that resulted made it difficult for his fingers to bend enough to grip the bull riding rope.

“If they couldn’t fix that, it would have ended my career,” he said.

In bull riding, the bull rope is wrapped around the bull just behind its front shoulders, and then the end of the rope is wrapped around the bull rider’s hand. Rosin is used to help make the rope stickier, but it is only the rider’s gloved hand that keeps hold of the rope. Without the ability and strength to hold his hand shut and hold the rope, Moraes would not have been able to ride bulls.

Of his torn bicep, where the tendons were torn away from the bone during a ride at the PBR World Finals in 2004, Moraes explained it away.

“The torn bicep wasn’t that bad. The pain was pretty big, because the tendon was detached,” he said, “but I could still ride. It hurts, but you have to be able to block out the pain if you’re going to ride because if you ride bulls it is going to hurt. As long as I could keep my hand closed and hold my rope, I could ride through it.”

Just a few days after that bicep injury, while many in the sport questioned Moraes’s ability to ride his next bulls at the World Finals, or even if his career would end, he showed how tough he was.

In round four of the 2004 PBR World Finals, he drew a bull named “Crossfire Hurricane,” one of the toughest bulls the PBR has had.

Not only did he ride the bull, but Moraes put up a blistering 93 point score on “Crossfire Hurricane,” who hadn’t seen a cowboy make a successful ride in over two years to that point. He won that round of the finals.

Moraes said that a ride, to him, is an example of what bull riders have to do on a regular basis.

“You have to deal with the injury, but when it’s time to ride, you have to block it out in your brain and focus on what you have to do to ride,” he said. “People have a misconception about bull riding, that all you do is squeeze hard and hold on, but this sport is as much a mental game as it is physical. The extra pressure, especially if you’re injured, can be unbearable. So you have to block out every obstacle ...”

Ordinary is not a term often associated with Moraes and the interview was no exception. At one point, he had to stop for a moment to shoot a coyote that was threatening livestock on his Texas ranch.

Showing his ability to focus, he picked up the interview mid-sentence – although he did miss the coyote.

“... and pretend that bull you are riding at that moment is an ordinary bull in an ordinary situation,” he continued, adding with a chuckle, “and I missed the coyote... this time. He was too far away.”

Moraes, with 15 years experience of riding through injuries with the PBR, and years prior to that riding in the PRCA and in Brazil, admits he has little patience for bull riders who, he says, “come to an event injured and don’t even try.”

“If you show up at a bull riding, you do what you have to do, whatever that is, to get the job done. If you’re injured, whatever it is, if you’re not going to try, then don’t get on the bull. I will tell them, even my friends, ‘either get on and try or don’t even get on, and let someone who will try their hardest have the chance to ride.’”

Don’t follow in

my footsteps

Most rodeo events are considered family sports, and it is common to see a son or daughter who has been around the rodeo watching mom or dad compete grow up and want to compete in rodeo events too.

Ask a bull rider, however, if he would want his child riding a bull. Most say no.

In January 2008, at a PBR event in Madison Square Garden, Moraes announced his plans to retire at the end of that year.

After the announcement, asked if he could picture himself sitting in the stands one day watching one of his sons ride, Moraes was adamant that was a situation he prayed would never happen.

“How could I sit there – knowing how bad they can get hurt because I lived it – and want my sons to ride bulls,” he said. “I hope none of my boys ever want to ride bulls. If one of them really has that desire, that passion for it, I will support them, but I will never encourage them to try it.”

Asked the same question last month, Moraes said with a note of relief in his voice, “I’m pretty sure I will not have to do that. They won’t ride. They don’t want to ride.”

While his three young sons saw the glamour and fame of what their father achieved, he said, “I showed them the reality too.

“People see the glamour, the fantasy, the 93 point rides. They don’t see the pain, the surgeries, the recovery and the blood,” Moraes explained. “I had my face busted by a bull and my sons saw it. They were there when my face was so busted I didn’t look like me or when I hurt so bad it was hard to move. The broken bones, the injuries, the pain, we all went through that together. They know the real side of bull riding, the hardest part of bull riding, because it came home with me to our house every week.”

Watching her son get back on a bull

Mike Garrison had a similar change of heart about bull riding after his injury last year.

“My cousin Nathan, he’s my mini-me. I was always asking him when he was going to try riding, when he was going to get on a sheep and get started with mutton busting,” Garrison said.

“After my injury, I told him ‘you are not getting on the back of any large farm animal, ever.’ It would kill me to watch him ride, knowing he could get hurt.”

The busted face wasn’t Garrison’s only injury. In the years he’s been riding bulls, he was stepped on, damaging a vertebrae in his back, “and I couldn’t move for three days,” had his calf muscle crushed by a bull, and broken several bones including an ankle and his wrist.

His mother, Janie Garrison, was holding her breath on July 11 when Mike chose to return to Cowtown and get on his first bull.

“I didn’t want to see him ride. I knew he wanted to get on a bull again, and I had to support that, but that doesn’t mean I could watch it,” Janie said.

She was at the rodeo in Maryland when Mike got hurt last year. She watched his ride, but had looked away after he bucked off, not knowing he was hurt. It was only when bull fighter Wayne Kroll came over and got her, to take her to Mike, one of her worst fears was realized.

“Mike rides bulls, he’s going to get hurt,” Janie said. “When they took me into the arena, where Mike was still on the dirt, well that never happened before and right then I knew it was bad. My heart just dropped before I ever saw Mike’s face. I knew.”

Many hours at the hospital followed including one point where, Janie said, Mike – loaded with pain medication – told her he would never ride a bull again.

“I told him then ‘Mike, wait until you’re healed, and then tell me. If you mean it then, I’ll support whatever you decide. But don’t make that decision now, while you’re not thinking straight,’” Janie said. “Yeah, part of me hoped he wouldn’t get back on, but I knew it had to be his choice, when he was ready to make it.”

In July, Mike Garrison decided. He got back on a bull at Cowtown.

Cowtown Rodeo, just outside Woodstown, is the longest continuously running weekly rodeo in the entire country – right here in south Jersey – and offers a full card of events, including two rounds of bull riding and a round of junior bull riding (ages 12 to 17) every Saturday night from Memorial Day through the end of September.

“I was scared that night, I won’t lie,” Garrison said. “If I wasn’t scared, there was something wrong with me. But I tried to handle it like it was any other day. If I started thinking about what happened last year, it would be over before I ever got on.”

Then he made another decision that scared Janie even more. He entered the rodeo two weeks later at Fair Hill.

“Returning to the scene of the crime,” is how he explained it. “I’d been lucky until last year. I’m not saying it can’t happen again, but I’ve been going at riding for years. I still have that need to ride.”

Garrison got on a bull – not “Rocky Road” – at Fair Hill late last month. It was a tough night for his family and friends to watch, but he tried to handle it like any other bull riding.

“It wasn’t Fair Hill that hurt me. It was that one bull. I thought about if I’d ride if I drew the same bull. My mom told me no, but I think if I had the chance I would get on him again.”

The return to Fair Hill wasn’t without its moments, though.

“I was cool with it the whole time. But I climbed up in the chute gate, looked out into the arena, right where I got hit last year and was lying in the dirt, and my mind started wandering back to that,” Garrison admitted. “But I had to get that out of my head and just take this ride.”

During this year’s ride, he had another close call.

“When I was sliding off the side of the bull, and he turned to buck to the left, he swung his head at me, and that horn came toward my face,” Garrison said. “I was like ‘yeah, bring it, I got a helmet on now. Let’s see what you got.’”

He knows a lot of folks, including his mom, thought he was crazy to return to Fair Hill after the injury last year, “But I got some revenge, and I put that demon to rest and a lot of things fell back into place.”

“If you are a bull rider,” Moraes summed it up, “it’s not what you do, it is who you are. It’s part of you. I hurt every single day when I was riding, but I miss riding still, every single day. It hurts to not get on. I still crave riding bulls every day. I think I will forever.”

Cowtown Rodeo, just outside Woodstown, offers a full card of events, including two rounds of bull riding and a round of junior bull riding (ages 12 to 17) every Saturday night from Memorial Day through the end of September.