A female bullfighter who defied convention

During the 1950s, when young women from West Texas were typically expected to take care of the home, Patricia McCormick bucked social convention, and a long male tradition, by entering the bullfighting ring.

By all accounts, she was the first woman in North America to become a professional bullfighter. For more than a decade, beginning in 1951, she performed in hundreds of bullfights, receiving top billing in stadiums from Mexico to South America. She drew thousands of

“The bull carried me around the ring for a minute, impaled on his horns.”

PATRICIA MCCORMICK

fans and became an international celebrity, capturing the attention of the U.S. press.

Time, Sports Illustrated and Look magazines all wrote profiles of her. The bullfighting critic Rafael Solana once called McCormick, who died March 26 at 83, “the most courageous woman I have ever seen.”

In the mid-20th century, however, the bullring, too, had a glass ceiling. McCormick could never shake the title of novillera, or apprentice fighter. Elevation to the highest rank required a special ceremony and sponsorship by a matador, and no matador would do such a thing for a woman.

Still, her male counterparts marvelled at the artistry of her cape work. “Had she not been born a woman,” one of Mexico’s elite matadors told Sports Illustrated in 1963, “she might have been better than any of us.”

McCormick demanded to fight on equal terms with men. She fought large bulls and always on foot rather than on horseback. Over the years, she was gored six times. The worst episode was in September 1954 in Ciudad Acuna, the Mexican sister city of Del Rio, Texas, across the Rio Grande. Newspaper accounts say she turned her back while she was performing a pass and the bull caught her in the thigh.

“The horn went right up my stomach,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “The bull carried me around the ring for a minute, impaled on his horns.”

“They gave me the last rites there,” she recalled. “The doctor said, ‘Carry her across the border and let her die in her own country.’ ”

As it happened, after living in California for more than 40 years and then moving back to Texas, she did die in Del Rio, in a nursing home, said a cousin, Brent McCormick.

That was just one circle completed, though. In her last years, she was saved from penniless-ness through a chain of events that could be traced to that day in 1954 when a bull almost killed her.

Returning to Texas in the early 2000s, she settled in Midland. It was there, according to friends, that she fell into financial trouble. Then Gary Humphreys, the owner of a Del Rio gun shop, intervened.

Humphreys, it turned out, had a distant personal connection to McCormick. His mother’s best friend had been her nurse at the Del Rio hospital where she was taken after the near-fatal goring in 1954. He was 9 years old at the time and a fan of hers, he said.

Decades later, after seeing an old poster of McCormick in Ciudad Acuna, Humphreys spent eight months searching for her. “Here was this legend who’d made such an impression on my childhood,” he said, “and she was about to go live in her car.”

Humphreys helped her financially and encouraged her to take advantage of her fame, but he also drew her mistrust. McCormick eventually sued Humphreys, accusing him of trying to benefit financially from her name. Humphreys settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.