PUEBLO, Colo. – Gary Richard knows he has a photo somewhere inside his Missouri City, Texas, house that displays a sliver of history between a bull riding patriarch and a 4-year-old boy with a dream.
It was 1967, and Richard was with his dad, Caston “Shorty” Richard, at the 35th annual Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo at the iconic Houston Astrodome.
Shorty had grown up on a Beaumont, Texas, ranch, making $240 a month taking care of cattle and handling tasks on the property. To earn additional income, Shorty wound up becoming a talented calf-roper. He would compete at various local rodeos in the Houston area in the 1940s before being drafted into the army during World War II.
Shorty would rodeo again once he returned from active duty and learned of a talented bull rider by the name of Myrtis Dightman, who famously became the first Black cowboy to compete at the National Finals Rodeo in 1964.
Only a few months after Dightman qualified for the 1966 NFR, there he was standing next to this little boy who would go on to make PBR history 35 years later by becoming the oldest bull rider (39) to win a PBR premier series event.
“I looked up to Myrtis Dightman as a kid because my dad rodeoed with him here in a Black rodeo association,” Richard recalled earlier this month in a phone interview with PBR.com. “I was almost 5 years old, and I got a picture with him inside the Astrodome. He was always giving me advice about the right things to do. Mostly stay in school, like my dad said. He was really big on education because he wasn’t able to finish school either.”
Rodeo and the Western way of life were instilled in Gary’s blood at a young age.
In fact, try two days old.
Shorty and his wife, Rose, met each other at an Easter Sunday Rodeo in Liberty, Texas, in the late 1940s, and the couple brought Gary, one of the couple’s eight children, to his first rodeo two days after he was born on April 12, 1962.
“I just come from a long list of cowboys, and every one of us in the family rodeoed,” Richard said.
Like so many other aspiring cowboys today, Gary began his journey to the pros by riding calves at 5 years old while also being able to ride a horse before he had all of his teeth. He was committed to being a cowboy, and he continued to perfect his craft through high school, eventually turning pro at 21 years old.
Gary still jokes that he made cowboy boots and cowboy hats cool at Kashmere High School in Houston, which, in the 1970s, was segregated.
“I came from an all-Black school. I brought cowboy boots and hats to Kashmere High School,” Richard said with a laugh. “They would ask me what I was doing in a white man’s game, and I said it isn’t a white man’s game. It is a cowboy’s game.”
When Richard turned pro, it was right around when another Black legend was making history in the PRCA. Charlie Sampson became the first Black World Champion bull rider when he won the PRCA title in 1982, and to this day, he is the only Black World Champion bull rider.
Richard often speaks at local schools in the Houston area, especially during Black History Month, to help raise awareness of the accomplishments of his heroes like Dightman and Sampson. He also has worked with Cleo Hearn on a video for kids to watch about the history of Black cowboys. But Richard’s own story is inspirational. He did not even accomplish his goal of riding at the highest level of the sport until he was 38 years old, an age closer to retirement than stardom for a bull rider.
Richard was beginning to compete at various events throughout the Texas region when Sampson made history in 1982, including some organized by Sampson himself. The PBR was still 12 years away from having its first season.
When the PBR launched its official premier series tour in 1994, Richard wasn’t ready to make a full-blown leap into the new organization.
Instead, family was the 32-year-old’s priority.
“I was going to mainly a lot of bull ridings and Texas rodeos,” Richard said. “I had a family. My wife and I had six kids. When I met my wife, she had three and I had three, and we were raising them all in one house. I had to stay pretty close to the house as a family man, and I had to do what I had to do.”
Richard’s path to the PBR was almost derailed after a career-threatening injury at the 1996 Super Bull event in Lubbock, Texas.
Doctors wanted to remove his eye, but Richard refused.
“I had four eye surgeries, and I still have my same eye,” Richard said. “Everything was blurry. Everybody was like, ‘Man, you gonna quit? You can’t see out of that eye!’
“I said, ‘Well, hell, I couldn’t see them half the time anyway.’”
So how did Richard end up in the PBR at 38 years old?
And how did he win the St. Louis Invitational on February 22, 2002, at 39?
Well, Richard unexpectedly became unemployed in 2000 when a school district he worked for was going through layoffs and they offered him a buyout option. He was still competing as a bull rider part-time around the area, but he had yet to dip his foot into the PBR – something he had always thought about doing.
“I wanted to go to the next level,” Richard said. “I sat down and talked with my wife (Rowena) and it was like, ‘Hey, here I am.’”
So there Richard was at 38 years old, making his premier series debut in Oklahoma City in 2000. He earned a fifth-place finish and brought his celebratory “funky chicken” dance – that he mimicked off former Houston Oilers wide receiver Billy “White Shoes” Johnson – to the PBR.
“When I joined the PBR, I was 38 years old, and I rode the rankest bull of my life until I was 42-43 years old,” Richard said.
To compete alongside the best bull riders in the world, and to fend off Father Time, Richard would do 2,000 crunches a day, jog five miles on Mondays and Wednesdays, and do weight training on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The Houston native would compete at five more events that season and make an appearance at the World Finals as an alternate.
Richard then qualified for the World Finals in back-to-back seasons in 2001 and 2002.
“You had to be in shape, and I worked out every day,” he said.
At the 2001 Finals, Little Yellow Jacket bucked Richard off in 7.1 seconds in a ride that then-PBR color commentator Donnie Gay said would have been worth 98 points.
“I was very close,” Richard said. “I wish they had that replay deal back then, and the challenge button. I think I might have had the record in history still right now.”
Before Wallace de Oliveira (41 years old) last season, Richard had held the PBR record for oldest World Finals qualifier for 18 years. But to his credit, Richard qualified as a Top 35 rider, whereas Oliveira earned a bid through the Velocity Tour Finals wild card system.
Regardless, Richard remains the oldest rider in PBR history to win a premier series event at 39, and he is not sure if that record will ever be broken.
2013 Rookie of the Year Joao Ricardo Vieira is the oldest competitor in the field this weekend in Fort Worth, Texas, at the Can-Am Invitational at 36 years old.
“It meant the world to me to win St. Louis, and thank God I had the opportunity to ride in that prestigious event and to ride in the PBR,” Richard said. “That is the biggest bull riding ever going on to this day, and it is getting larger every year. I don’t know if the record will be broken. It is going to be hard. The way the bulls are now – we had a bunch of buckers back in the day, but there is more of them now.
“They asked me before if the bulls are ranker now than ever before, and I said, ‘No, there is just more of them.’”
Follow Justin Felisko on Twitter @jfelisko
Photo courtesy of Andy Watson/Bull Stock Media