SUBURBAN COWBOY
How a kid from The Woodlands became a bareback riding champ
Richie Champion grits his teeth and sucks in one last puff of air before kicking his legs out in front of him — toes out, spurs in. He leans back until his body makes one long, straight line, raises his left hand, and tightens his right around the grip that keeps him tethered to his horse. He’s the perfect cowboy silhouette, as though he’s been copy pasted from a bumper sticker. It lasts about a second. The buzzer sounds, and Champion’s horse, the aptly named Lunatic Clown, bucks and kicks her way out of the chute. The mare hails from one of rodeo’s best-known roughstock lines. Here at Rodeo Houston, there’s always at least one of Lunatic Clown’s uncles, aunts or cousins within tobacco-spitting distance of the arena. She was bred for this.
Champion? Not so much. He slept last night at his family’s home on a quiet cul-de-sac in The Woodlands.
Lunatic Clown slams her nose into the ground, shooting her back legs up high behind her. Champion’s black cowboy hat flies away, dropping into the dust. He holds tight, his body countering the horse’s movements. It’s artful — as artful as you can be during an 8-second tornado.
Suburban kid or not, Champion knows exactly what he’s doing. Maybe even better than anyone else in the lineup during RodeoHouston’s opening night March 7.
It begs the question: How does a kid from The Woodlands become a favorite in the rough-andtumble world of bareback riding?
“It was never something that it would make sense for me to do this,” Champion says. “But it was something I wanted to do.”
Most of the 250 cowboys and cowgirls competing in RodeoHouston come from lineage similar to Lunatic Clown’s — with generations of champions in the family tree. Or they at least grew up on farms the size of Champion’s subdivision. They saddled ponies before they rode tricycles.
Yet it was Champion who earned the nickname “The Million Dollar Man” at age 21, when he became the first cowboy in history to win $1 million in a single day. Her name was Cimarron
Champion’s family moved around a lot when he was growing up. His father is the COO and president of a hotel company, and his mother’s a consultant. But Champion, who went by his birth name Richmond until he began rodeoing in his late teens and asked to be called Richie, always lived in the west.
Though he grew up more white-collar than button-down flannel, his family had some interest in horses. They’d all gather Sunday nights to watch rodeo on TV. And his mother had captained her equestrian team in college, where she’d been an ace on the hunterand-jumper circuit. But comparing the refined elegance of the English-style riding his mother grew up with to the barebackbronc riding Champion does is like comparing a spin on tumble-dry to being rattled inside a cement mixer.
Around the time Champion was 10, he began taking western lessons from a teacher in Arizona, where he lived at the time. He was good. Really good.
“He was taking some riding lessons from a girlfriend of mine, and my girlfriend was like, ‘This kid is pretty talented, and special, and he needs to do something besides just riding,’” says Annie Bianco. “At this point, I’m coaching mounted shooting, and I’m world champion mounted shooter, and my friend says she thought this would be right up this kid’s alley.”
Champion knew how to hunt. He was also a great downhill skier and a lacrosse player. He savored adrenaline rushes and wasn’t afraid of pain. A sport that combined horseback riding for speed and shooting for accuracy seemed like a perfect fit.
“So he came to my barn and started training with me,” says Bianco. “And every horse that was in my barn, including my top horses that I was winning on at that time, he was never afraid of them. He stepped up to the challenge, and I think that made him a better rider.”
One day, Bianco came home with a new American paint mare. Her name was Cimarron, and it was love at first sight. After that, Bianco couldn’t tear Champion away from the stables.
“I’ll never forget the day she came off the trailer,” says Champion’s mother, Lori. “He said, ‘Annie got a new horse today, and I want her.’ ”
She wasn’t for sale. Bianco was winning fistfuls of cash shooting on Cimarron. The mare was wild and temperamental. But also smart and fearless, like Champion.
“We always kid that she was his first love,” Lori Champion says. “He was so in love with her, and she was a nutcase.”
Eventually, Bianco sold Cimarron to Champion. He rode her in shooting competitions, and when he decided to try something new and asked to be trained in roping, Bianco sent Cimarron to an old cowboy who trained horses for the sport.
He couldn’t believe she’d let a little boy ride such a dangerous horse.
“He chewed me out for it,” Bianco says with a laugh. “But I had to tell him, ‘No, you don’t understand. They have a connection. He rides this horse amazing.’ And I think that’s what’s helped Richmond in his career. He has a good foundation of riding.”
Champion rode Cimarron throughout his teens. When his family moved to Washington state, he brought her there; when they moved to The Woodlands his junior year in high school, he and a teenage friend hauled Cimarron to Texas in a trailer.
Over the years, he sought bigger thrills. In junior high, he began bull riding. The summer before Champion’s senior year of high school, a coach gave him a funny look when he hopped on a bull. Champion rode horses every day, the coach said. So why not try bucking horses instead of a bucking bull? So Champion tried one. He went to his first rodeo as a bareback rider his senior year and got bucked off immediately.
“But he fell in love with it,” his mom remembers, “and all summer long, he got on every single horse he could get his hands on.”
Early in his senior year, he sent a tape to the rodeo coach at Tarleton State University. It’s a small school, up in Stephenville. But Tarleton has one of the biggest rodeo teams in the country. Talent and passion
“He showed me this video, and at this point he’d been on maybe 15 horses, and he was outriding kids who’d done it for years and years,” says Mark Eakin, the Tarleton head rodeo coach.
At first, Eakin carved out a small scholarship for Champion. But as Champion kept sending tapes showing his progress, Eakin looked for money. By the time Champion (and Cimarron) arrived at the school, Eakin says he’d been able to find him almost a full scholarship.
“He had national talent, and the biggest thing that drew me to him was the passion he had for it. You can’t instill that in anybody,” Eakin remembers. “And everything looked like it came natural for him.”
Champion qualified for the national finals his first year.
But he was still relatively unknown. During his junior year of college, Champion met with his old coach Bianco in Denver for a competition. She took him to meet potential sponsors.
“I told the head of Wrangler, ‘You need to sign this kid. He’s special. He’s gonna be something,’” says Bianco.
No one paid much attention.
“Good thing,” says Bianco.
About a month later, the rodeo TV powerhouse that Champion had grown up watching, RFD-TV, hosted “The American,” a brand-spanking-new rodeo at AT&T Stadium in Arlington. It boasted the biggest prize ever.
Ten of the world’s top cowboys were invited to compete. But room was saved for lesser-known cowboys. If an event’s winner was an unknown who’d risen through the qualifying rounds, he’d win the $100,000 prize for the event, plus a share of the $1 million side pot for qualifiers.
Champion rode a horse named Assault to victory. As the only qualifying competitor to win his event, he got the entire side pot, becoming the first cowboy in history to win a million bucks in a single day.
“It wasn’t even something I’d dreamed about,” says Champion.
Before The American came around in 2014, cowboys couldn’t imagine a million-dollar payday.
“It was a goal for a week,” he says. “That week working up to it. And all of a sudden, it was reality. It was insane. It changed my life. It changed my career. It changed everything.” Well, not everything. “It didn’t change Richie,” says Eakin, his Tarleton coach.
He came back to keep competing that year, and he went back to the college finals, says Eakin. “And I think that just speaks about his character.”
Becoming “The Million Dollar Man” means Champion is no longer an unknown in his field. But it’s not like he’s famous. Champion says he’s rarely recognized, even when walking around in his cowboy hat.
But every once in a while, he gets stopped.
“I was at a Getty station in New Mexico at, like, 11 o’clock at night one time, driving to Vegas for the National Finals Rodeo, and some guy just walked by and yelled out, ‘Hey, I’ve got you on my fantasy rodeo team!’ ”
Champion laughs. “It was like, ‘Wow. No pressure.’”
But really, he loves pressure. ‘You just have to react’
If his cowboy hat makes a sound when it hits the dirt halfway through his 8-second attempt on Lunatic Clown, Champion can’t hear it over the pounding of hooves. Lunatic Clown is bucking forward and back, clicking her heels behind her and jumping so high there are moments that she’s completely off the ground.
She’s a wild one. Just the way he likes it. In bareback riding, judges score cowboys on 100 possible points: 50 points for their skill and 50 for the difficulty of the ride the horse gives him. The rougher the ride, the higher the possible score — if the cowboy can hold on.
Champion’s back slams back against Lunatic Clown, then he’s rocketed upright again. It’s this kind of crash-dummy jerking that caused him to need back surgery last year at age 23. But he keeps his left hand high and his right hand gripped tight.
The clock flips forward, one-tenth of a second to the next, as the horse reverses her spin from clockwise to counterclockwise. He continues countering the horse’s movements. If he can stay on and place tonight, he’s well on his way to the semifinals — and to the finals after that. To bigger payouts, belt buckles and bragging rights.
He just has to hold on. Keep his mind blank.
“You can’t think and ride,” he explains. “You just have to react, and that’s the biggest thing, is letting yourself do that — and just be aggressive.”
Lunatic Clown crouches, heel-kicking again as the buzzer rings, marking 8 seconds — a successful ride.
“The question remains though: Will it be enough to catch that 75?” the announcer asks the crowd as Champion prepares to dismount. That’s the score he needs to place for the night.
He hops from Lunatic Clown to another horse, then exits the ring, heart beating fast, blood rushing.
“The judges love it,” the announcer crows. With a score of 83, Champion ends the evening tied for first. And through the rodeo’s first week, he also takes home a second and a tie for third prize, earning him a total of $5,083 and qualifying him for the semifinals.
He hits the road, off to Austin for a quick appearance at the rodeo there, then a flight to Florida for another competition. But the kid from The Woodlands will be back for Houston’s semifinals on Wednesday, March 22 — sleeping in his parents’ house before living out his childhood dreams.