As soon as Flashbang had cleared the area, three cowboy-hatted medical specialists threw open a large metal gate next to the bull chute and hurried into the arena, known as the Pit, at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque. One of those men had been watching the riders from behind the gate with a coach’s trained neutrality. His features pull downward; he would look woebegone except for his mahogany eyes, which are kind and ever-alert. He wore ostrich-leather cowboy boots and a pristine gray Resistol. “Dr. Tandy Freeman,” the announcer told the audience after the doctor charged into the arena, as though he were as much a spectacle as the cowboys. Freeman is a fixture at rodeo events across the country. A Dallasbased orthopedic surgeon, he is the medical director for the Professional Bull Riders organization as well as for Justin Sportsmedicine Team, a group that has served rodeos since 1980. At 66, Freeman has been working with rodeo athletes for more than three decades. In that time he has missed fewer than twenty PBR competitions, of the more than two hundred that take place each year. He is likely the longest-practicing doctor in a field like no other. Bull riding accounts for as many as 58 percent of injuries across rodeo events, according to a review published by the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine in April. (Ranking second is bareback riding, which is responsible for up to 29 percent of injuries.) By the end of each season, almost every participant has experienced some degree of strain, sprain, or concussion. “The guy who’s at one hundred percent,” Freeman said, “is the guy who hasn’t gotten on a bull.” Serious injuries are endemic in rodeo, even more so than in other contact sports. In football, players generally behave according to rules and regulations; in bull riding, half the competitors are ungovernable 1,200- to 2,000-pound “animal athletes,” as PBR announcers refer to them. Some injuries can be catastrophically expensive. Freeman remembers when bull-riding superstar Jerome Davis, then 25 years old, became paralyzed from the chest down while competing in 1998. “He had twenty thousand dollars’ worth of coverage that was burned before he got to the intensive care unit.” Several veteran riders suggested to me that the significant payouts winning riders earn today have allowed for a stability the athletes of yore couldn’t have hoped for. In the seventies and eighties, they said, you had to either cowboy up or get another job. But even with the larger winnings, rodeo is still a “don’t compete, don’t eat” sport, Freeman explained. Out of financial necessity, bull riders often perform with injuries that might sideline someone in another sport. But though rodeo athletes may not have robust insurance coverage, they do have Freeman. “The rodeo community is scattered across the country, but it’s a small town,” he said. “I don’t know every rodeo athlete there is, but it’s still a fairly tight-knit community. People know each other. And there are guys who, if they go to the hospital and they’re like, ‘Who’s your primary doctor?’ they write my name in. For some of them, I’m the only doctor they see.”
From 1996 to 2001 Freeman at- tended PBR and other rodeo events while also serving as the team doctor for the Mavericks. When Mark Cuban bought the team from Ross Perot Jr., in 2000, Freeman anticipated that he would soon have to choose between NBA players and rodeo cowboys. “There really wasn’t a question. I’d rather do the rodeo and bull-riding stuff,” he said. He is sure that some Mavericks would recognize him if they ran into him on the street, he said, “but you’re still an outsider. The players and the coaches to some degree kind of have their own little community, and everybody else, you’re on the outside. They just pluck you in when they need you and then push you back out,” he said. “With rodeo, you’re part of it.”
Tony Marek told me in Albuquerque that Freeman is “not just the team doctor, he’s like people’s family doctor.”A rider might call him with a question about an issue his pregnant wife is experiencing or ask advice when a parent is diagnosed with cancer. A few days before our meeting at Freeman’s office, a former
rider asked him what to do about his hemorrhoids. Freeman charges most riders who solicit his advice. “My time’s gotta be worth something,” he said. But he makes exceptions for those who can’t afford care. “If you’ve got a bigger pickup than I do, you’re probably going to have to pay your bill.”
Freeman understands that “cow- boy up” is law. He knows that a bull rider can and will compete with a torn ACL. “You can ride a bull with- out an ACL,” he said. “The problem is when you get off.” He knows that many rodeo athletes are less likely to self-report symptoms when they’re surrounded by their peers, particularly when it comes to concussions. “There’s no blood, there’s no bruises, no swelling, there’s no anything. So if you say you’ve got a headache, it’s like, ‘Really? Aw, you’ve got a headache?’ ” At the PBR World Finals Eliminations at Cowtown Coliseum, in Fort Worth, Cassio Dias had been riding a bull named Norse God, who’d launched him into the air in such a way that his right arm remained stuck in the rope that encircled the bull’s torso while the animal continued to buck violently. His arm still stuck, Dias’s legs hit the ground, and Norse God’s hind legs slammed down on his lower back. The bull stomped on him again. The rider lay unmoving on the ground as the bullfighters and a pickup man mobilized. Dias left Cowtown with five spinal fractures. Still, he returned a week later for the finals, and in the third round, he rode a bull named Ricky Vaughn to attain a score of 92.5 points. After his 8 second ride, other riders leaped into the arena and lifted him up, bouncing him on their shoulders. As Freeman watched Dias celebrating, the physician explained the rider’s spinal injury with some reverence: “If you move one way, pain. If you move the other way, pain.” NFL players, he’d heard, might not play until two weeks after a single spinal fracture like those that Dias suffered. Dias had ridden again after a week, and he had five. “These athletes,” Freeman said, “deal with it in a different way.” Most medical professionals would try to keep a man with multiple spinal fractures from being bounced on his friends’ shoulders, let alone from riding a bull, but Freeman knows that his patients will ride if it’s physically possible. I asked how someone who was not raised attending rodeos, had come to devote his career to the sport. “The main thing is self-reliance,” he said. “Rodeo cowboys don’t depend on anybody. And if they can get some guidance, which is what we’re trying to provide, then they can get through any situation.”
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