Spurred West. Ian Neligh
as soon as they hit the dirt. The sooner they start moving away from the bull, the easier it becomes for him to control the animal safely away. “If you’re getting up and moving, it makes my job a heck of a lot easier than if you’re lying around pouting,” Munsell says.
During the actual bull riding competition, the bullfighters are careful to keep their distance from the animal, about ten to fifteen feet away, to avoid negatively impacting someone’s ride. “A spinning bull is always going to get you more points, so we never want to draw the attention of the bull to us while he’s spinning,” he says. At the same time the bullfighters have to be ready to launch themselves forward in the blink of an eye. Munsell admits, “It’s a very fine line to keep your distance far enough away to let the bull buck and do its thing and not distract him, but a close enough distance where we can get in the middle of a situation as quick as we can.”
Sprinting across an arena toward a charging bull, instead of away, seems a little counter-intuitive. Every fiber of his being that cares about his own safety must be screaming to turn and run the other way. “It is completely backwards,” Munsell agrees.
The art and science of bullfighting has evolved over the past fifteen years. Bullfighters endlessly view videos of their performance, critiquing their game like NFL players.
“So you train yourself to look for certain things that the rider is doing that may indicate coming off the bull,” he says. “I understand how cattle move—and good cow sense, I think, can make a good bullfighter great.”
And of course while there are competitions for bull riders, there are also competitions for bullfighters. In that arena, Munsell has won two world championships and two national championships. He describes the contests as being a big, dangerous game of tag between him and the bull, with the bull being judged essentially on its aggression and tenacity—or basically its will to kill the bullfighter.
“I’m being judged on how close I can get to the animal and executing certain moves, and getting awarded for how close I’m getting and how well I pull off the maneuvers around that bull,” Munsell says. The bullfighter cannot touch the bull and must use its own inertia against it.
“A lot of bulls are trained, and they know when they’ve done their job and they know when to leave,” he says. But some bulls learn and remember moves used by bullfighters, and can use that to surprise the next one they find themselves up against.
A Dog-Eat-Dog Industry
For Munsell, fighting bulls is a full-time job that starts in January and runs most of the year. “It’s year-round, [and] there’s a lot more indoor venues than people would think. If you’ve got a nice barn, we can have a rodeo,” Munsell says.
Things are changing in America. The Western and rural lifestyle is in a constant state of decline, but the number of rodeos held every year are actually increasing. Rodeos reached their peak in the early 1990s but decreased every year until 2006, when it reached its lowest number of 560 rodeos in the United States. But there’s still an audience, and with prize money growing ever higher, that number has begun to creep up once again. Today there are six hundred professional rodeos held across the country and approved by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. Membership in a popular organization like the Professional Bull Riders association has grown from twenty members in the early ’90s to about one thousand today.
The competition for bullfighters is steep. Being one of the top ten bullfighters in the country helps Munsell get the jobs he needs to stay competitive in the business. “It sure enough is a dog-eat-dog industry,” he says, adding there used to be a saying that bullfighters are a dime a dozen, but now it is more like a penny a dozen. “I’m very fortunate to have known a lot of really good bullfighters and they thought enough of me at a young age that I might be a good fill-in for them when they retired.”
A bullfighter can make between $100 and $500 per rodeo. “You’ve got to treat this profession as a business and not be going for cheap money, because you don’t make a very good living at it if you’re going cheap,” Munsell notes.
Healthy Respect for the Bull
Most people wouldn’t step foot anywhere near a bull, and with good reason. But with a lifetime of being around bulls and bullfighting, Munsell no longer holds any fear when he steps into the arena.
“I know how to control those nerves better than most,” he says. “People always ask me, ‘Are you scared of those bulls?’ No, not really—I’ve been around them all my life. I have more of a respect for the animal than I do a fear [of them].” Smart bullfighters keep a healthy respect for the animal and what it is capable of. Because a bull is fifteen times his size, Munsell believes it will take only one kick or one well-placed blow to the head to take someone out permanently.
“It’s not a fear. If I died fighting bulls, I’d probably die a happy guy because I went doing what I enjoyed,” he says.
Munsell has on occasion been treated as a human-sized soccer ball and is regularly flung into the air. Injuries are just a part of the job, an accepted hazard. Bullfighters often break multiple bones and worse, but they understand what they’ve signed up for.
“I’ve been very fortunate as far as injuries go, knock on wood,” he says. “And I just kind of attribute that to good fundamentals and doing things correctly. Good fundamentals get you a long way.”
Even the best training can only prevent accidents some of the time. Just a month ago, Munsell was at a rodeo in Dodge City watching a cowboy dismount from a bull when things suddenly went wrong.
The rider flew off a bull’s back just as the animal kicked up and turned, flipping the man in the air. Munsell raced to help the contestant and got hit on the head by one of the cowboy’s spurs. This was a particularly awful injury because the spurs used by the riders are dulled so as not to pierce the skin of the animal. A sharp spur might just cut Munsell, but a dull one was assured to do more tearing than cutting—and in the process cause a nastier wound.
“I’m going through the gap, he’s landing, and something just hits me in the head,” Munsell remembers. “And I didn’t think nothing of it because it wasn’t a super hard hit or anything, so I just keep going and passed around that bull, and I can see red coming down my face, and I just take my hand and check up there and I’m bleeding like a goddang stuck hog.”
After the bull was back in the pen, Munsell walked over to the athletics trainer who looked at him with a horrified expression on his face. Munsell’s injury was a nasty, deep slice just above his eye and had to get stitched up.
“It’s not scary at the time because you don’t know what’s just happened because it happened so fast,” Munsell says. “When you sit down and think about it, you’re like, ‘Son of a gun, that coulda put my eye out …’ That’s the only thing that kind of scares me, is when it is something like that.”
Another similar injury occurred at the Denver Stock Show eight years before. A bull bucked its rider off, and when Munsell raced in the animal ran him over. He fell as the rider was getting to his feet.
“I just thought I hit my head on something really hard and just kind of sat up and gathered myself, and a buddy of mine standing in the back of the chutes said, ‘Hey, you need to get yourself checked out.’ And I said, ‘Man, am I bleeding? Because I can taste blood?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, go look.’” Munsell had landed face first on the rider’s boot spur, which punctured through his cheek and knocked out a tooth.
“Same kind of thing, I just hate things happening in or around my head,” Munsell says. “You can hit me anywhere else you want—just not my head.”
Not being hurt often means getting off the ground and avoiding being stomped on by a bull, which can weigh more than a thousand pounds. Munsell wears safety gear comprising of a protective vest, and leg and knee protection designed to let striking hooves and horns slide off easily—but at some points it must feel a bit like a can of sardines being run over by a car.
A Bullfighter’s Legacy