PUEBLO, Colo. – When Brett Custer was a little kid growing up in a rodeo family, he would watch his older brother ride roping steers.

After his brother would ride a weaker steer, his dad would let Brett get on as well, running beside him to hold onto him.

That is until a relative talked Cody into letting Brett go.

“So I got on one and they let me go,” Custer said. “It was this heifer. My brother weighed probably 75 more pounds than I did at the time, and she jumped out there and kicked over her head and spun. Threw me up in the air and I landed on the back of my head and started bawling.

“About five minutes later my brother got on another one, and I just looked at my dad, still crying, and was like, ‘I want to get on that one.’”

When your dad is the 1992 PRCA champion bull rider, a PBR co-founder and a Ring of Honor inductee, perhaps that desire is just in the blood.

The Custers are a rodeo family through and through, with four generations of Custer men competing in pro rodeo.

The cowboy values are innate.

Though National Day of the Cowboy is celebrated on the fourth Saturday of July each year, for a family like the Custers, it’s celebrated in nearly everything they do.

“Growing up being a cowboy, you won’t find any nicer people. Or mean people, if you get on their bad side,” Brett said with a laugh. “They’re just dirty, rotten tough, go out and earn a hard day’s work.

“Just having that desire to do what you love, and keep on doing it.”

Custer says he can’t imagine his family without the cowboy lifestyle, but having the same last name as a world champion hasn’t always been the easiest road to travel.

“I want to live up to what my dad did, but I don’t want to be living in his shadow,” Custer said. “One main thing he’s taught me is that I’m my own person. I’m going to be following in his footsteps, but I don’t want to be under his shadow.”

In every event he enters, Custer is announced as “second generation, son of a world champion.”

Despite all the talk and the external pressure to live up to his dad’s name, most of the pressure on him comes from himself and his own desire to make his dad proud.

“I’ve heard it for so long that now it kind of just slides off my back,” Custer said of the chatter about living up to his family name. “I’m making a name for myself and my dad’s proud of me for doing that. He always tells me I ride better than he did at my age right now.”

Custer has had an up-and-down season, slightly tearing his PCL during football season his senior year of high school.

He tore the ligament completely at a rodeo after he graduated, which kept him out for four months. He returned to the dirt in February, finishing third in his first rodeo back in action and climbed into the Top 30 in the PRCA standings this summer.

“I was home for one day in June, and before that I was gone for three weeks, and I haven’t been home since,” Custer said. “Just been out on the road, having fun, rodeoing.”

But at Cheyenne Frontier Days, after riding Beast of Burden for 84 points, the get-off broke his jaw and shattered his ear canal, putting Custer back on the sidelines until early September.

“Not being able to get on just made me realize how important it is to me, competing in this sport and being successful at it,” Custer said.

His quest to make a name for himself in the rodeo world will be put on hold, but Custer has faced his fair share of struggles before.

At one point, he had $7 in his bank account.

“Boudreaux (Campbell) owed me money and he paid my fees to get me in,” Custer said, citing his friend and rodeo travel partner. “I stayed on and that’s really when it turned around. When I hit that breaking point when I was going to have to go to work and not be able to be rodeoing. That’s just kind of when the switch flipped. I’ve got to start staying on.”

The cowboy lifestyle and rodeo world is different from other sport environments.

The riders compete in cities across the country and form something of a family. Not only has Custer had his rodeo fees paid for by Campbell, but he once had to borrow a full set of equipment after his gear bag went missing.

“Earlier this year in Reading, California, my gear bag went missing. They sent that thing to Denver,” Custer said. “So I showed up to the rodeo with nothing and had to borrow all the crap. It’s just that kind of stuff right there is why people are so close in rodeo.

“If you need a ride to a rodeo, you can go ask a team roper and they’ll let you hop in the rig with them. We’re all in this together. We’re not competing against each other. We’re competing against the animals. It’s a different sport than other sports. It’s different in the fact that we actually have a brotherhood out here.”

Custer has known that his path and passion lied in rodeo since he rode his first sheep as a kid. He tried more traditional sports, but once he won his first sheep riding buckle, the rodeo had him, hook, line and sinker.

He’s a cowboy to the bone.

“I’m proud to be able to carry on my dad’s legacy, my whole family’s for the most part,” Custer said. “My grandpa was an old dirty rotten tough cowboy, and he was the man to my dad. My dad looked up to him with everything he did. My grandpa, I’ve been around him since I was a little bitty. We’d always go to his house and rope and stuff. Just being able to carry on that legacy through me is really special to me.”