Watching Lonesome Dove is the closest most of us will ever get to the Old West. But part-time rodeo pros find their inner cowboy every weekend.


BUCKLE CRAFTED BY MAX LANG AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY PAT HAVERFIELD.

There’s something about a livestock show and rodeo that brings out everyone’s inner Texas Ranger. Walking up to the Star of Texas Fair and Rodeo in Austin, where the neon-lit Ferris wheel slowly spins and the smoky smell of barbecue floats on the unseasonably chilly breeze, people stand up straight and tall in their western wear. A few start to swagger. More than a few spit into the grass.

Amid the shiny boots and fringe worn once a year, Kelly Maben sits on a bench, wearing a T-shirt and sneakers, bouncing her baby daughter, Macye. In the barn behind her, her horse waits patiently for his four p.m. feeding. One more barrel-racing run in this arena 340 miles from her hometown of Spur, Texas, and Maben and family will be on the highway, heading home. If she wins, she’ll be $2,000 closer to a year-end total that she hopes will qualify her for the National Finals Rodeo (NFR) again.

Tomorrow it will be dark when she gets up in the morning, looks out of her bedroom window at the barn to check on the horses, and dresses for her twice-daily trudge out onto the high Texas plains to feed them. And it will be dark when, just before bedtime, she takes one last look out that window to make sure they’re safe.

There’s a lot riding, so to speak, on the safety of Maben’s horses, particularly her star 13-year-old gelding, Mystic Angela, a.k.a. ­Bubba. He’s been her ticket to the NFR two out of the last three years. He helped her supplement her salary as a teacher in Spur, some 40 miles from Lubbock, by more than $100,000 last year. If something happens to Bubba, Maben’s barrel-racing career could screech to a halt, at least temporarily.

“I could walk out to the barn tomorrow and find him lame,” she says. “It took me three years to get him used to rodeos. I’d have to start all over with a new horse, and it might be three more years before I won anything.”

It’s that uncertainty that keeps Maben teaching English and writing­ to third, fourth, and fifth graders in Spur instead of going on the rodeo circuit full-time. Her day job is like an accidental­-death-and-dismemberment insurance policy, only it’s for Bubba ­instead of for her.

Hundreds of rodeo cowboys and cowgirls keep the same kind of insurance policy. They work during the week, and on the weekends, they hitch up the horse trailer and drive to the nearest Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association rodeo. They keep their jobs ­because they don’t earn enough rodeoing to support a family. Or they fear that injury — their own or their horses’ — could sideline both them and their income. Or their day jobs have benefits they can’t pass up. Or they know rodeoing full-time would mean they’d spend more time on the road than with their families, and they don’t want to make that trade.

“Percentagewise, the majority of our membership are guys who don’t travel all over the place,” says Ann Bleiker, PRCA spokeswoman. She talks about an orthopedic surgeon in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, who rides broncos; a lawyer in Austin who barrel races; a real estate agent in San Angelo, Texas, who wrestles steers. “They’re circuit cowboys, weekend warriors.”

Top full-time pros are sitting for interviews on ESPN and CMT, and then hopping a plane or fueling up the F-350 for the next drive. Part-timers like Maben and Craig Cavaness are working, helping their children with homework, mowing the grass, feeding their horses.

Rodeo is sweaty, dirty, sometimes painful. Before and after can be mundane. But truth-in-myth notwithstanding, rodeo is like most things that inspire devotion: a little bit addictive, a little bit habitual, a little bit insane.

Just outside Brenham, a sign welcomes visitors to Washington County, the Birthplace of Texas. Stephen F. Austin’s original colony lies just over the rolling green hills, and the state’s first capital, Washington-on-the-­Brazos, sits somnolent and restored a few miles away. Not all the settlers hereabouts were fit for commemoration, however. When New Yorker Frederick Law Olmsted toured Texas in the 1850s, recording his journey for posterity in A Journey through Texas, he denigrated the East Texas settlers for their laziness and laxity. They sat in their cabins, north wind whistling through holes in the walls, and bestirred themselves only when necessary — to plant corn or to make a supper of fried meat, corn bread, and bad
coffee. It wasn’t until Olmsted crossed the Colorado River near Austin that he expressed any hope for the new state’s fortunes.

Clearly, Olmsted didn’t meet anyone in East Texas like Cavaness.

A Houston firefighter and an EMT, Cavaness works two 24-hour shifts — 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. — each week; one week a month, he works three shifts. On his days off, he wrestles steers at PRCA rodeos all over Texas. On the side, he shoes horses. In his spare time, he works on his well-groomed farm near Brenham, welding fences, clearing land, and building sheds. Somehow he finds time to ride with his wife and eight-year-old daughter, who’s learning to use a lasso with a cast-iron roping dummy in the barn.

What he doesn’t do much is sleep. “At the firehouse, I might not even get a chance to lie down,” he says. “Sometimes I get some sleep between four and six in the morning, or, when I get home at about eight, I’ll sleep till 11. A regular night’s sleep is about four hours. Six is really good.”

Sometimes Cavaness comes home from the fire station only to gather his farrier equipment and spend the rest of the morning at a nearby ranch, setting hot iron to horse hooves. Then he’ll take a nap and leave for a rodeo, where he’ll race his horse after a 600-pound steer, jump off, dig his heels into the ground, and wrestle the calf to the ground.

“I work tomorrow,” Cavaness said one recent Wednesday while seated at a wooden picnic table in his airy metal barn. “Friday, I’m at a rodeo in Beaumont; Saturday, I’m at one in Helotes.”

He pulls an index-card-size paper calendar from his wallet; his days at the fire station are highlighted in yellow. Next week, there are three yellow squares. He hopes to make 40 rodeos this year, but that depends not only on his work schedule but also on the PRCA’s computer, which slots steer wrestlers — a.k.a. bulldoggers — into each rodeo’s lineup. If Cavaness doesn’t get a time slot that works with his schedule, he has to trade, either with another cowboy or with another firefighter. “I spend a lot of time on the phone,” he says.

And a lot of time driving. Take his current plans, for example. It’s 160 miles from Brenham to Beaumont. From Brenham to Helotes, west of San Antonio, it’s 175 miles. And he doesn’t travel from rodeo to rodeo but from home to rodeo and back, and home to rodeo and back. He leaves when the rodeo wraps up at one a.m., and usually he’s in bed by five a.m. To make those contests next weekend, he’ll drive some 650 miles in three days. In 2002, the second year he won the circuit finals, he went to 56 rodeos and spent only one night away from home.

With that kind of schedule, Cavaness could be one harried, tense man. He’s not. He doesn’t even talk fast. His mother tells him he works too much, but he considers his jam-packed calendar completely natural. Even when he could kick back in the barn and watch the horses graze — like ­today — he does chores instead. A trailer full of fertilizer is hitched to his pickup truck, and when his visitors leave, he’ll spend the rest of the afternoon spreading it.

He’s been this busy since high school. He started bulldogging when he was 15, under the tutelage of a local businessman who wrestled steers in his spare time. Soon he was bringing home belt buckles and prize saddles, and when he was 16, he went to the high school national finals. At the same time, he played football well enough to win a scholarship to Sul Ross State University. He was president of the local Future Farmers of America chapter. He ran the Health Occupations Students of America club. “Life was as crazy then as it is now,” he recalls. “Preparing for the future, I guess.”

His future took a slight turn just before college, when another school offered him a full ride to help start a rodeo team. He accepted; he’d thought football was his route to college, but he’d rather rodeo. After he graduated, he still felt the same way, even though he’d blown out his knee in ­Bozeman, Montana, at the College National Finals Rodeo. He went on the road. “I’d always wanted to do it full-time,” he says. “It was a dream of mine.”

Then came another turn, this one more abrupt: When he was 21, he’d been hopping from rodeo to rodeo for two weeks, and he called home from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to talk to his parents. They said the Houston Fire Department wanted him to come in for a job interview — in two days. He turned out his second steer at Cheyenne Frontier Days and went home. He was hired. “I accidentally got a good job too young,” he says. “If I could go back, I’d rodeo three or four years, hard, before I started work.”

Now people ask Cavaness if he’d rather rodeo full-time. His common sense says no. “How can you, with a good job, good retirement?” he asks.

How can he, knowing firsthand what can happen in a flash? In 2003, fresh off back-to-back circuit championships, he was having another great year — until he got to Corpus Christi, Texas. There “the ground was bad; the steers were bad,” and when Cavaness leaped off his horse, he landed badly: “My knee popped completely out of the socket. I tore everything.” He had surgery and sat out the rest of the year and all of 2004. “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever bulldog again,” he says. “The way I look at it, God must want me to do it, because if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be bulldogging today.”

Over Cavaness’s shoulder, in the barn, there’s a black-and-white photo of him leaning out of the saddle, arms extended toward a wide-eyed steer running alongside his horse. Frozen in time, he seems to be floating on air, though it’s the interplay of gravity and momentum that is carrying him toward the steer. His face is perfectly placid. Some people work for years to find their place in life. Cavaness found his in a precarious balance between horse and steer, rodeo and work, family and farm, momentum carrying him through all-but-sleepless nights, gravity keeping his feet fixed firmly to the Austin County earth.

Kelly Maben isn’t secretive about herself, but she definitely prefers talking about her horse. Barrel racing is one of the rodeo events that tests the horse as much as its rider, and to hear Maben tell it, Bubba is quite an athlete. He can run the cloverleaf pattern around those barrels in under 14 seconds.

In a sweet, Panhandle-accented voice, she discusses Bubba’s likes and dislikes, his quirks, his strengths. He’s lazy, but he’ll work hard if she pushes him. He prefers Cheyenne’s Frontier Days to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. His best weeks of the year are in July, when his favorite rodeos come all in a row. “I tried Houston a couple of times, but he doesn’t like it,” Maben says. “He wouldn’t turn at the first barrel both times, the same mistake, so I know it wasn’t the ground. He just doesn’t like it. There’s no sense going if he doesn’t.”

Maben’s parents, who are professional horse trainers, bought Bubba off the racetrack when he was three, and Maben has been racing with him since he was seven. From the start, she knew he was the kind of horse who could win. She knew, too, that if her parents hadn’t been in the business, they probably couldn’t have afforded to buy a horse like him, who might be worth six figures.

Taking care of Bubba is a big job: He has to be groomed and exercised daily. He’s fed twice a day. His stall has to be mucked just as often. He’s reshod every six weeks or so. He gets regular shots and deworming treatments. Sometimes he takes acupuncture. He takes his glucosamine and MSM daily.

Then there are Maben’s other two horses, whom she’s training to take Bubba’s place someday. They need much of the same care, and they need practice, so Maben takes them to barrel-racing contests near Spur.

And, of course, there’s Maben’s husband, Tye, and her daughter, Macye. And her job.

To squeeze it all in, Maben gets up at five a.m. to shower and dress before Macye wakes around 5:45 to be fed and then handed over to Tye. Then Maben feeds the horses. She leaves the house at 7:30 to get ­Macye to the babysitter before the school bell rings at 7:50. Maben teaches all day, leaves school at 3:45 p.m., picks up her daughter, and, at home, feeds her a bottle. Another babysitter arrives at 4:30, when Maben rides and feeds the horses again. She comes in for dinner and plays with Macye until it’s time to get ready for the baby’s 8:30 bedtime. Once her daughter is asleep, Maben tidies up and washes baby bottles. She gets into bed about 10:30 or 11 and then does it all over again the next day. Luckily, she has plenty of stamina. “Maybe a few days at school, I might be grumpy,” she says. “But that’s all. I’m not one to slack off.

“About the only thing I’ve totally cut out of my day is cooking supper,” she adds. “I’m not a big eater; I don’t care much about what I eat, so we get lots of stuff I can throw in the microwave. I guess my husband is the one suffering for it. But I’m not sure when or how I’d be able to cook.” A housekeeper also cleans house for her: “I never did like doing that anyway,” Maben says.

Now Maben knows her successful balancing of rodeo, teaching, and family life depends on Bubba: Because he can win a solid chunk of cash at each rodeo, she doesn’t have to travel as much as she might with a less-­talented horse. He can help her qualify quickly for the NFR, which typically takes about $50,000 in winnings. “He’s one in a million,” she says. “I only had to go to 30 rodeos to get to the NFR the last two years. I’ve won $70,000 this year and am headed back to the National Finals Rodeo in third position.”

During the school year, Maben doesn’t travel much; she makes the big contests in San Antonio and Fort Worth, and she’s here in Austin because it’s spring break. She hits the road hard during summer vacation, traveling with her stepmother and, this year, with a babysitter who’ll keep Macye while Maben trains and competes, sleeping in the living quarters tucked into her horse trailer. “The bad thing is, the good rodeos are a long way off,” she says, ticking off the cities she’ll visit in a few months. Greeley, Colorado, and Pecos, Texas, over the Fourth of July weekend, and after that, a couple of “good money weeks,” she says, in Wyoming and Utah.

Maben is also conscious of the fact that Bubba can’t win forever, so she needs to take him to as many rodeos as she can while he’s fit and able. People ask whether she’d like to quit her job and take him on the road full-time, but she’s wary, and not simply because teaching jobs like hers are hard to come by in Spur. Mostly, she fears that rodeoing wouldn’t be as enjoyable — or as profitable — if she had to view it as a job. “I worry about things all the time,” she says. “Now I know I can pay my bills, because I teach school for a living. If I had to pay my bills off the rodeo, I might be too worried to win.”

The first time Maben went to the NFR, she felt a bit overwhelmed. But soon her no-nonsense work ethic took over. She went out into the arena to take a look at the ground. She walked the barrels. She took Bubba out for a dry run. She wouldn’t prep this way for a typical rodeo, but she knew that she would run 10 times in that arena, so getting Bubba accustomed to the place made sense. If he made a mistake on one run, she’d take him into the arena and school him for the next. She even let him roll in the dirt. It paid off: She won $32,000. Her second time at the NFR, in 2005, she netted $58,000.

“I don’t like to do anything halfway,” she says.

Maben is feeding Bubba now, in preparation for her run at seven tonight. When she opens his stall, he comes to the threshold and stops, calmly. His mane is tied up in rubber bands to keep the hair off his neck so that he won’t sweat in the Austin humidity, which is so different from the dry air in Spur. He stands still, perhaps listening to Maben praise him again. “He’s a sweet horse,” she says, patting him. “He’s really a good horse.”

Does Bubba know he’s a $100,000-plus creature? Does he know his sprint around those barrels is money in the bank? If he does, he shows no sign of it. He’s no prima donna thoroughbred with brittle nerves. He’s Maben’s partner, her workhorse. She might be saddling him, not for performance before an audience but for a long trail ride with a herd of longhorns. Watch her with Bubba, and a hundred-plus years simply fall away. All you see is a cowgirl and her horse, ready to ride off into the sunset, whistling gratefully.