The mountains to the south of Mars Hill, N.C., emit a radiant shade of Carolina blue as Jeff Robinson steps out from his newly built cattle barn. He offers a friendly handshake, grins and says, “Welcome to God’s country.”

His new barn, designed to resemble an equestrian stable for thoroughbred horses, is located a mile down the road from where he grew up.

“It sure is pretty country isn’t it?” he asks, before answering his own question. “I don’t think I’d ever want to live anywhere else.”

Robinson grew up a stone’s throw from the Mars Hill city limits.

The town of less than 2,000 people is 15 miles due north of Ashville, where the Blue Ridge Mountains meet the Appalachians.

“Anytime of the day, the mountains have that same blue hue to them,” he says, looking out over his ranch.

Top of the world

In a part of the country known for college basketball and NASCAR, Robinson has become a celebrity in his own right. This week, in Las Vegas, Robinson went from local Mars Hill hero – he was a two-sport athlete for Madison High School and played on the junior varsity basketball team for three years at the University of North Carolina – to nationally renowned PBR Stock Contractor of the Year.

For years, Robinson has produced several lower-level PBR events, and since 2004, he’s been hauling bulls to the Built Ford Tough Series.

In the past couple of years, he made a concerted effort to establish himself alongside the likes of Dillon and H.D. Page, as well as Chad Berger, who had been recognized as the top contractor for the past three years.

Thursday night it was announced that the Top 40 professional bull riders in the world had voted Robinson as the top contractor of 2010. He earned 36 of 40 votes.

“We gave it everything we’ve got,” Robinson said. “This is about as good as we can do.”

This year his best was the best in the PBR.

Robinson said that back in 2004, when he decided to focus on becoming a major stock contractor, he looked at the Pages as the benchmark of success.

He said it was important to consider how many bulls a contractor was able to haul to any given event, as well the number of events he was able to haul bulls to. One consideration he didn’t make was how many bulls a contractor was asked to provide for the PBR World Finals.

For Robinson this year, that number is 24.

Robinson brought RMEF Elk Country , Hank, Flip Side, Buffalo Hump and Closet Gangster, as well as three clones of former PBR World Champion Bull, Panhandle Slim: Mr. Slim, Slim’s Ghost and I’m Back.

In all, he brought 11 more bulls than any other contractor this year. Five of the eight bulls competing for the World Champion Bull title are his Voodoo Child, Major Payne, Uncle Buck, Highway 12 and Chicken on a Chain .

“Up until ’07, I was just taking a few bulls – kind of begging and pleading to go here and there – five, six, seven bulls,” he recalled. “And then in about ’06 (PBR Livestock Director Cody Lambert) started letting me take 10 or 12 bulls. In ’07, Chicken started to come into his own, and when you have a bull of that caliber, you can usually take a few more with you, and I was able to put a few more good bulls together.

“It’s grown substantially.”

The taming of the Chicken

There are moments in a bull rider’s life when a single ride can define a career.

The same can be said for stock contractors.

For Robinson, that moment was in the final round of the 2007 PBR World Finals, when Chicken on Chain bucked off Valdiron de Oliveira in 3.8 seconds. He was marked 46.25 points, and won the World Champion Bull title.

“Relief,” said Robinson, about how he felt when Chicken won the title. “I made myself miserable for those 10 days. I was so nervous.

“I didn’t really enjoy it. It’s the worst week I’ve ever had. He bucked good, and then you worry about him eating good the rest of the week, and then bucking good the second weekend. The second out was good, and you just hope nothing goes wrong.”

Developing Chicken was two-year process that almost never left the ground.

Robinson bought Chicken on a Chain when the bull was 4 years old, and said that he was “wild and mean.” In fact, he said the bull was so “hit and miss” when he was 5 years old that he “would have taken my money back that whole first year for him.”

Robinson said he’d load Chicken on the truck and haul him nearly every week in order to get him used to being on the road.

After the 2006 Finals and before the start of the 2007 season, Chicken finally matured and settled into his own on the Built Ford Tough Series, but even then, it wasn’t until an event in Greensboro, S.C., right before the Finals that Robinson finally thought to himself, “We have a chance.”

“It really didn’t sink in until that Sunday of the Finals,” he admitted.

Chicken was ridden one time in 12 outs that year, and despite 19 qualified rides in the three years since, he’s been consistent throughout his PBR career.

On the BFTS, he’s maintained an average bull score of just over 45 points, and is as much a favorite among the Top 40 riders as he is with the fans.

“A bull of the year gets you lots of attention,” Robinson said, “and it gets you places you wouldn’t have gotten to go otherwise.”

On the homefront

Robinson is a family man.

He and his wife Ann have six children – Kelsey, 20; Tate, 15; Chase, 15; Laney, 10; Tucker, 4; and Cutter, 1. Aside from helping to provide for that substantial family, his recent success in the PBR has afforded Robinson one other important luxury – the ability to fly to and from BFTS events, so that he can spend more time at home in North Carolina.

Ann recalls a time in the not-too-distant past when her husband would be gone on the road for days and sometimes weeks at a time.

It was hard, but Ann said it just became “part of the routine.”

“It takes everything he’s got – day and night – but he’s really good about knowing what’s going on with the kids and he knows what’s important,” she said. “He will say, ‘I want to make sure I have time for them.’”

Though he’s only four, Tucker has shown a growing interest in tagging alongside his dad while he manages a ranch that includes eight different pastures and some of the most famous bucking bulls in the world.

According to Jeff, Ann plays a big role not only in raising the family, but in helping with the administrative side of their burgeoning business.

It’s an effort that has required lots of planning and scheduling, even when it came to the birth of their two youngest children.

“It was like, ‘OK, we’re going to have this baby on this day,” she recalled, “because he’s going to have to leave to go out of town for several days. … That’s just part of it, and of course, I didn’t want him to miss it.

“It was like, ‘When can we do this? We have this timeframe, and let’s get it done.’”

She’s proud of his relentless work in developing the bull pen – “I couldn’t do it without her,” he said.

“Family is big part of it,” said Ann. “It’s doing what you love to do and having a good life.”

Coast to coast

While Jeff might miss a little league game or school function every now and then, Ann said their children, especially the older ones, “see the work, and they know how much he puts into it day-in and day-out, and I think he deserves the best that all of this can bring him.”

Ann said she thinks Jeff is “more at peace” in recent years, while he said he feels “more calm” since their wedding. Then there’s the relief of having a World Champion Bull. “I’ve won one, so the pressure’s off,” he said.

Now it’s about setting up a program that continues to churn out short-round quality bulls.

Although he still looks at the Pages as a benchmark, Robinson says that he doesn’t want to have a pen as deep as theirs. The Pages are known for raising 600 bulls at a time, and even as many as 1,100.

Instead, he focuses on comparing his pen with the top half of theirs.

One other goal for the near future, according to Robinson, “is to have some type of production sale from the genetics we bought. … We’d be happy to sell 50 bulls a year, 50 heifers a year, and I want to try and keep it to the 50 very best bulls I can for the road.”

That would be enough bulls for Robinson to maintain an East Coast pen and another pen on the West Coast for those BFTS events.

Though he’s not centrally located and has no desire to relocate his ranch, Robinson took on the added workload, because he said it’s too far to haul bulls out to Arizona, California, Oregon and Washington. And he knows that if he plans to win another Stock Contractor of Year honor, he’ll need to stay visible from one week to the next.

“It’s how I make my living,” said Robinson, who is appreciative of the opportunities provided by the PBR. “Yeah, I worked hard to get where I’m at, but this is the Cadillac of the bull riding business. For sure.”

— by Keith Ryan Cartwright