The ride

by

For bull rider Hunter Tardiff of Batesburg-Leesville, two days of the Blythewood DOKO Rodeo have all come down to this moment. The bright lights are on. A haze of kicked-up dirt hangs in the air, which smells of livestock and funnel cakes. The crowd, whooping and hollering, stands on its feet in the metal bleachers. Under two billowing American flags, other cowboys perch like hawks atop the chute where a 1,500-pound bucking bull flares its nostrils and stomps its hooves. 

The young cowboy has waited all night—through the bucking bronc riding, the barrel racing, the calf roping, the steer wrestling, the circus acts and kids’ races—and soon he’ll climb over the chute’s rails and mount the bull. When the gate swings open, the crowd will watch in rapt attention to see if he can hold on for the next eight violent seconds.

“It’s a feeling you don’t feel doing anything else in the world,” Tardiff says just before climbing up. “It’s a feeling that nothing else can give you.”

Rodeo is a sport that evolved from the working conditions of the American West. After the Civil War, America teemed with ranch cattle that needed to be driven and branded and wild horses that needed to be tamed. When range cowboys began having competitions to show off their riding, roping, and ’rassling skills, something like the modern rodeo (Spanish for “rounding up”) was born. 

Many years later, rodeo found its way east and south to the little town of Blythewood, when, after the wind didn’t cooperate for the town’s annual balloon festival, a certain local named Buck Coggins piped up with another idea. How about a rodeo?

After all, Buck Coggins, as his name suggests, is a rodeo man. He also looks the part—tall and cowboy-handsome in his denim jeans, cowboy boots and Stetson hat—and shaking his hand, you feel the callouses. When he was a product representative for a horse-hair shampoo, his future wife, Kristi, was the University of South Carolina’s women’s golf coach. He wanted to meet the team that was using so much of his product, and when he flew down and took them out to dinner, the two fell in love. They’d both been around rodeos—Buck when he worked for a company that sponsored them, and Kristi when her mother produced them for oil companies in Texas. 

“It’s just family-friendly, kid-friendly and truly somewhat unique on the East Coast,” Kristi Coggins says. “It’s just something you don’t get to see every day.”

Now, Buck and Kristi Coggins plan, promote and execute the Blythewood rodeo with the perseverance and skills they honed in sales and coaching. During the event, they make their rounds like rodeo ambassadors between the crowd, the cowboys, the cowgirls, the vendors, the sponsors, the emcees, the journalists, the cops, the paramedics, the bullfighters and the judges. At one point, Buck Coggins gets on a tractor and levels out the rodeo ring with a plough. At another point, he introduces a stock trader to a cattle rancher who wants to sell his bull. 

“We do this for the community,” he says while “God Bless America” blares on the loudspeakers. “Obviously, they love it.”

And yes, the crowd is completely roped in. They, too, don the boots and hats and belt buckles, but instead of riding a bucking horse or wrestling a steer, they lick ice cream cones and ride mechanical bulls and hold hands with their dates. Here, the tradition of the American cowboy and cowgirl becomes a reality. 

For all the fun and games at the Blythewood DOKO Rodeo, there is still serious money on the line. Sanctioned by the International Professional Rodeo Association (IPRA), the cowboys and cowgirls who compete earn points that affect their IPRA standing, and the top competitors go on to compete in the International Finals Rodeo in Oklahoma. Winners of the night’s events can also pocket around $800 in cash.  

The first event out of the gates is saddle bronc riding. Like bull riding, the cowboy attempts to stay atop an animal bred to kick him off. These bucking broncos buck, as the emcee says, like grandma’s rocking chair. Judges rate both the horse and the rider (who can’t touch the horse with his free hand) on a scale of 1–25, says certified IPRA judge James Halpin, who’s been watching rodeos since 1978.  

“We look for how they stay in control on the rope, and with the horse riding, how they spur the horses and how far they reach out,” he says. “It’s all about timing. You see a choppy ride? It’s gonna be a choppy score.”

One of the first cowboys up is 62-year-old South Carolina native Harold Miller, who defines one of the oldest sayings in rodeo: Rodeo never gets old; only the rider gets old.  

Miller, who won the first rodeo he ever attended—in his hometown of Seneca in 1975—was at one time ranked in the top 15 in the world. These days, he cites hard work and regular prayer as the reason he’s still going despite injuries that prevent him from turning sideways. 

“Jesus has given me a good blessing to go on this far,” he says. “And it’s a great sport. It’s dangerous, but it’s a great sport. You meet a lot of good people. It’s a family-like deal.”

Miller mounts the bronc in the bucking chute, and when the gates open, his whole body moves as fluidly as a wet noodle. Somehow, in spite of the laws of time and gravity, he hangs on. The crowd goes wild.

Although roughstock events like bull riding and bronc riding get the most attention, steer wrestling might be the most athletic rodeo event. The steer wrestler (or bull-dogger) must chase a steer that usually weighs twice as much as he does, leap from his horse, wrestle the steer to the ground, and rope-tie its feet with a knot known as a “hooey.”

This is why there’s another saying in rodeo: “It’s not a matter of if you get hurt; it’s a matter of when.” And sure enough, one bull-dogger at the Blythewood rodeo jumps on top of a steer but gets his boot hung up in the stirrup, eats dirt, and then lies on the ground in obvious pain. 

“We’ve got a possible injury here,” the emcee announces as the crowd falls silent and the paramedics carry out the cowboy on a stretcher. “Lift him up in a little prayer.”

In the end, he’s OK, and one senses that most cowboys wear their injuries with a kind of pride. 

“It’s pretty intense,” admits bull rider Jacob Cashion of Cross Anchor, who recounts with a shrug a ride-gone-wrong four weeks earlier that left him with four broken ribs and a bruised lung. “It’s a gamble.”

Which is why, at rodeos, you always have bullfighters—a team of professionals whose job it is to steer away the wild animal after the cowboy is bucked off. Sometimes known as rodeo clowns because they wear face paint—a tradition that harkens back to when their job was also to entertain the crowd between rides—they protect the rodeo athlete by distracting the animal once the rider is off.  

“I should be in between the bull and the rider at all times,” says bullfighter Cody Ballard, who, like a lot of bullfighters, got into it after being a bull rider himself. “I usually just run in there and make sure that’s where I’m at, and from there, I grab a bull’s attention and then protect myself.”

Although the Blythewood rodeo has its fair share of clowning around (at one point, two clowns drive a fire-spitting mini stockcar around the ring between events), Ballard takes his job seriously. 

“What makes me really like it is after I make a save with a guy, he comes up to me and is like, ‘Hey man, I really appreciate it. If it wasn’t for you, then I would have got run over,’” Ballard says. “So that really means a lot to me. It’s an adrenaline rush. It’s intense. But I feel like once you get a taste for it and do it once, it’s just addicting after that.”

In the rough-and-tumble, male-dominated rodeo world, there are only two events for women: barrel racing and calf roping. In barrel racing, horseback riders ride in a cloverleaf pattern around three barrels. Cowgirls must make the horses turn on a dime, and the fastest time wins. In calf roping, cowboys and cowgirls throw a lariat around the calf as it runs at full speed, then they kneel on the ground and tie three of its legs together. 

Savannah Prater of Seneca came up in the sport through high school rodeo and now competes in both events around 45 weeks out of every year. 

Horseback events can be more stressful and expensive than the roughstock events, she says. For starters, you have to trailer and take care of your own horse, whereas in roughstock, all the bulls and bucking horses are brought in by a stock contractor. 

“The main thing in rodeo for us is having a good horse,” Prater says. “You have to take care of them every day. It’s not like riding a motorbike. Everything has to be in sync. It takes a lot of practice for everything to come together.”

Although it is now past most kids’ bedtimes, the final event has everybody in the crowd standing and hollering. 

For bull rider Hunter Tardiff, it’s a moment he’s waited for all night and, really, all his life.  

“My brother was a bull rider, and he passed away,” he says. “The first weekend, I got on a bull for him. And that was gonna be it. But I fell in love with the bull, and I fell in love with bull riding. All the emotions, all that darkness—the bull takes it away. It caused me to make my soul better and to make me a better man. Not just here, but in life.”

He climbs up the chute railing and mounts the bull. He places one hand on the saddle knob and with the other he adjusts his helmet. The other cowboys—their Adam’s apples clicking, their cowboy hats drawn close to their hawk-bill noses—encourage him on. Tardiff zones everything out. Technique is now muscle memory—to keep the free arm raised for balance, to lean forward when he bucks, to stay seated when he jumps, to hold on. 

The chute opens. The bull goes, as they say, buck wild. 

Tardiff flies off the bull’s back before the eight seconds required to receive a score, and the bullfighters guide the bull away from the cowboy, who slams his thigh in frustration. Still, he is undeterred. He’s already thinking about the next ride. 

“My goal is to get Rookie of the Year,” he says. “Then I’m gonna try and be a champion.”

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Get There

In 2022, the Blythewood DOKO Rodeo will take place April 22–23 and Oct. 28–29 at Community Park Arena, 311 Blythewood Road in Blythewood. For details, visit blythewoodrodeo.com or email info@blythewoodrodeo.com​.

For more rodeos around the state and region, contact:

International Professional Rodeo Association at ipra-rodeo.com or (405) 235-6540

Southern Rodeo Association at sraoffice@aol.com or (919) 795-7722

South Carolina High School Rodeo Association (SCHSRA) at schsrodeo.org.