USA TODAY International Edition
Rider loves his ‘stressful profession’
Mauney smokes the competition at 31 years old
FAIRFAX, Va. – You just don’t find many pro athletes who smoke these days. But there’s J.B. Mauney, a couple of hours before showtime, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Well, hell,” he says. “It’s a stressful profession.” Seems a fair point for someone who weighs 140 pounds and rides 1,800pound bulls for a living. Mauney smokes Marlboros. “Cowboy killers,” he calls them, flashing a crooked grin that makes the cigarette move in his mouth. Somehow a long trail of ash hangs on — precariously, like a cowboy to a bull. He’s in a makeshift locker room in the bowels of a basketball arena at George Mason University in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, getting ready for another premier series stop on the Professional Bull Riders tour. He’s a twotime world champion and PBR’s most popular cowboy, as measured by merchandise and social media. “It’s all I ever did my entire life. They put me on a sheep when I was 3.” Mauney (Mooh-nee) rode his first bull at 13 and turned pro at 18. He’s 31 now, though some days his body feels more like 81. Before the night is out, this will be another of those days. Mauney’s tattooed torso offers a jumble of sayings and symbols. “Carpe Diem” reads one. “It Is What It Is” reads another. “Born to Ride” reads the one across his shoulders. He has 16, by his count — branded, like a bull. “I did a lot of questionable things when I was younger,” he deadpans. While we’re counting things, there’s this: He’s won more than $7.2 million in prize money, most in western sports history. More difficult to count are the broken bones. “Last year I tore my right arm pretty much completely off. Put a screw with 13 anchors in my right shoulder. They said the skin was the only thing holding it on. All four rotator cuff muscles was tore off at the bone. Bicep, tendon, labrum, everything. Broke the ball in three places. They had to take pieces of the ball out.” He offers this accounting not by way of complaint so much as by way of explanation. “Part of the game. You ride these bulls for 13 years, you’re going to break a lot of (expletive).”
‘They break everything’
Mauney raises bulls of his own on his North Carolina ranch. “Some of them are mean, some of them are nice,” he says. “Just like people, I guess.” By the way, that whole thing about a stressful profession? Forget it. Just a joke. Mauney doesn’t do stress. “I don’t worry about a whole lot,” he says. “People ask me, ‘Well, how do you prepare?’ I don’t.” Doesn’t prepare strategy for his rides. Doesn’t work out at the gym. Just goes out and wings it, an old school cowboy competing against young stars who lift weights, eat right and don’t smoke. The bulls he raises, he says, “are aggravating, but I like them. They’re like having an 1,800-pound 3-year-old kid. They break everything.” That includes him. He tells a story about the week before he was going to turn pro. A bull stomped him and he broke all the ribs on his right side. Had a lacerated liver and bruised kidney, too. “They said it could have killed me. They said it would be six to eight months before I could ride again. I told them they was crazy. I was working at a ball bearings plant and that was enough to make anyone decide they were going to have hell trying to throw me off.” Bulls can throw him, sure, but not doctors, although last year he listened to one who said his arm wouldn’t heal right if he didn’t stop smoking. So he quit cold turkey for four months — and started up again the day he was cleared to ride.
Time to quit smoking?
A line of autograph seekers snakes along the concourse at Eagle Bank Arena. Ava Ours of West Virginia, who’s 8, asks Mauney to sign her cowboy hat. Rod Benton, 69, of Pennsylvania asks him to sign a dollar bill. The reason? “He’s No. 1,” Benton says. Benton’s wife, Julia, 66, gets a photo taken with Mauney, though she’s already got a photo with him on the refrigerator at home. “Not my first rodeo,” she says. Mauney doesn’t have to turn on his smile for each cellphone photo for the simple fact he hardly ever turns off that deeply dimpled grin. “He wakes up happy every day,” says his wife, Samantha Lyne Mauney, standing in a hallway near the arena floor about an hour before showtime. She has an ironclad rule for their ranch: No smoking in the house. Mauney spends most of his days outside anyway, raising cattle and riding and roping and all the rest. She figures that’s why he doesn’t need a gym: Ranch work trumps workouts. “He’ll quit smoking,” she says, “when he quits riding bulls.” Samantha, a champion barrel racer herself, comes from rodeo royalty. Phil Lyne, her father, won all-around cowboy championships at the National Finals Rodeo back in the day. The “Great American Cowboy,” a 1973 documentary about her father’s rivalry with another rodeo star, won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1974. Now she’s married to her own great American cowboy. Mauney has a 7year-old daughter, Bella, from a previous relationship. Samantha is pregnant and this time it’s a boy. They won’t name him James Burton, like his daddy, Samantha says, but they’re thinking of another combination with the initials J.B. because they have so many spurs and such inscribed with those letters. Will little J.B. be a bull rider? “If he wants to be,” Samantha says.
Time to hang up his spurs?
Mauney will be the 25th rider of the night. He paces and fidgets and gulps a swig of Pepsi in the moments before he climbs in the chute. Now he’s atop a bull named Gangster Can Do. The sound system blares “Bad to the Bone.” He sings along. Suddenly he slaps his thigh, then his face. Then the gate opens. Riders must stay on for 8 seconds to earn a score. Mauney lasts 4.3. But, wait — his left hand remains dangerously stuck. Bullfighters, there to protect the riders, move in quickly. At last they free him from the bucking bull. And Mauney, eyes glassy, walks off the dirt floor of the arena, gingerly holding his arm. He makes his way to the medical room and emerges with hand and arm iced to the elbow. Then it’s back to the makeshift locker room. Mauney lights up another Marlboro. “I was expecting him to go right,” he says of the bull. “And he went left.” Mauney had violated his own no-preparation rule by watching video before his ride. “Never should have watched it. I always do good shooting from the hip.” Mauney is having a tough season. He’s 34th in the world standings. He’s finished in the top 10 every season except his rookie year, when he was 25th, and last year, when he was 16th. He’s completed 31 percent of his rides on the premier series this season, a career low. He was at 52 percent when he won 2013’s world championship and 60 when he won 2015’s. But this season he’s fighting through an array of injuries. Some of the social media mob are telling him it’s time to hang up his spurs. “I got a few more years left in me, I think,” he says softly. The way he figures it, why should he listen to critics who’ve never been on a bull? “Once you get it in your blood, it’s there forever,” he says. “No matter how bad it gets, you never lose your love for it. Even when you’re crippled and can hardly get out of bed, boy, you’re still thinking about it.” Tonight, the bull won. All Mauney can do is tip his cowboy hat and try again tomorrow. “Stay on,” he says. “That’s the name of the game. I didn’t do my job tonight.” Mauney takes a last drag on his Marlboro, then flicks it away. It’s airborne for a fleeting moment, like a cowboy bucked off a bull.