If a Rodeo Could Talk, It'd Sound Just Like Bob Tallman

From a perch overlooking the dirt-filled arena on which cowboys and cowgirls compete for prize moolah at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo stands Bob Tallman, watching it all with the same enthusiasm and anticipation as the paid customers. “I’m still a fan,” he says to me. Bob Tallman checks all the boxes of what a public address announcer is supposed to do.  He tells us the name of the competitor, where they’re from, and, of course, the identity of the cowboy’s chief rival that evening, the stock animal and who bred him to be, for example, the baddest, buckingest bull this side of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  He does it all with this rich, resonant voice that takes off across the arena the way an American Airlines jetliner shoots off into the sky for, say, Guadalajara.

“Theeeey’re ridin’ bulls in Fort Worth,” he says over the PA system as a cowboy successfully sticks a perilous eight seconds aboard the formidable frame of the beast of bull, whose rippling muscles of energy work in concert in an effort to send his unwanted human passenger to the farthest reaches. Or where the sun don’t shine. The bull doesn’t much care.

Tallman will have something to say about it, to be sure. 

Tallman’s vocation extends far past the who, what, when, and where.

He is a captivating storyteller — who will spin a yarn intermixed with a little (or a lot) of bullshit — weaving engaging and entertaining anecdotes. It’s a glorious mix of Will Rogers and Paul Harvey, wit and wisdom and all.

Ultimately, it’s a Fort Worth-kind of conversation he keeps going with the arena over the show’s two hours or so. The first time you hear him, it’s as if you’ve known him your entire life. 

“Bob Tallman is the Howard Cosell of rodeo,” says Brett Hoffman, an award-winning rodeo and Western writer. “He has this golden voice that carries you through the rodeo. Fort Worth was a long rodeo in the Will Rogers Coliseum. They had 36 performances. I used to sit by him during the rodeo. He could carry the rodeo for 36 performances; he could keep you entertained.”

Like the rodeo itself, Tallman is an institution. One of the last things W.R. Watt Sr. did before his death in 1977 was track down Tallman a year prior and ask him to become the voice of the rodeo in Fort Worth. Track down is not a misstatement. Tallman recalls working the PA at a rodeo — which one, I’m not sure — but Watt approached him and asked if he could have a word. 

Watt, of course, became the head of the Stock Show after being called to a meeting with Amon Carter. Watt said he didn’t know anything about running a stock show. 

“I didn’t call you up here to learn what you can and cannot do,” Carter said, as recalled by Watt. “I called you up here to tell you you’re going to run the stock show.” 

No such arm-twisting or coercion by force of personality or leverage of power was necessary with Tallman.

Well, hell, yes, he immediately said to Watt’s overture. This was, after all, the rodeo in Fort Worth, Texas. The Capital of Cattle in the city where the West begins. The year 2024 will mark his 48th Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo. 

“It was a big deal for me to get to go there,” Tallman says. “Fort Worth is a culture of its own that still remains the people’s rodeo stock show. From its ties to the North Side with its cultural belongings, it’s still small-town Cowtown. And it has value beyond the economic impact that it is on the city and North Texas.”

It’s a part of the fabric of the city in other words. And it’s unimaginable to think of a day he won’t be here. 

“There’s not a more recognizable voice in rodeo which has played an important role in enhancing the Stock Show’s brand to multiple generations, whether they hear him on radio, television, or in the arena,” says Brad Barnes, president of the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo.

Fort Worth is Tallman’s hometown rodeo. He and his wife, Kristen, own the 3T Ranch in Poolville, from Fort Worth about 56 miles northwest up the Jacksboro Highway and a turn south. Weatherford sits about 24 miles south. He is his family’s fifth generation rancher. 

He does about 140 shows a year these days, including the 24 here and 20 in Houston. Since 1975, he also has been the voice of the National Finals Rodeo in Oklahoma City and now Las Vegas. He maintains associations with other rodeos that span more than 40 years, including the Calgary Stampede.

“And dang it,” he somewhat feigns disappointment, “I booked two new rodeos for next year.”

Those are in Franklin, Tennessee, and Texas City down on the Gulf. He’s also confirmed for the biggest bronc riding in the world, in Pollockville, a small town in Alberta, Canada. 

“Bob Tallman’s voice is rodeo,” says Chuck Morgan, the public address voice of Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers, whose career has crossed over into the Western genre. “He is the common denominator across generations of rodeo fans.

“He knows his job; he knows what he needs to do to keep fans informed and entertained. You can tell he comes to the arena or stadium well prepared for that night’s show. And to me one of the most important things, you can tell he enjoys his job. He has that ability to make a rodeo fan comfortable.”

In all, he’s called close to 18,000 shows over a career that began in 1970. Those include rodeos throughout the U.S. and Canada, as well as Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand. I tell him that I assume he was 5 or 6 years old when he got his start.

“I was 4 1/2,” he rebuts. “And I had to take my diaper bag to the first one.”

In truth, Tallman is 76 years old today. In those days in late 1960s and early 1970s, he was actually competing in rodeo. During one on Labor Day weekend in 1970 in Fallon, Nevada, he judged the public address announcer to being inadequate that day. Rodeo performers get judged. Why not the PA announcer?

“I wasn’t happy with the stories that the rodeo announcer was telling,” he says. “So, I told the rodeo producer. He said, ‘Why don’t you go up there and help her?’ It was a lady I’d known for a long time. I said, ‘OK.’”

He put his rope and horses away and went up to the public address box. The next night, he was in the bucking horse contest.

“I thought, ‘God, let me get out of here before I get killed.’ And afterward I went up there again, and when it was over, the producer handed me $100.”

It was probably more than he made that weekend or hoped to make in a future as a contestant. The life of the West was innate. Born and raised in Winnemucca, Nevada — which sits about equal distance between San Francisco to the west and Salt Lake City to the east — he is one of these guys who thought about getting on a horse in the womb. He tried out for football in high school and “lasted three days.”

“I was 5-foot-1, 105 pounds … soaking wet. All my friends beat me to death,” he says. “I told the coach, ‘Here’s your helmet. If it fits, you know where to stick it.’”

Rodeo and ranching were what he loved anyway, but his career prospects in the sport weren’t great. He wasn’t going to be a pro football player, and he wasn’t going to be a professional rodeo performer, either. 

Tallman was raised in buckaroo country of the Great Basin, which stretches from the eastern slope of California’s Sierra Nevada to southwestern Wyoming. Its center is northern Nevada. Lots of round hats and high-heeled boots, he says. And lots of miles on a horse. “You go do what you’re going to do on horseback every day.”

Rodeo was life. 

“Oh, God, I loved them all,” he says of rodeo events he participated in growing up. “But I wasn’t going to be Jim Shoulders or Larry Mahan, you know, or Ty Murray or Trevor Brazile.”

He went to college at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to study dairy manufacturing. His family had a dairy farm started by his grandfather. He later transferred to the University of Reno and switched to ag economics. 

“I went to college for five years and never graduated,” he says. “But I had a good time.”

He’s a funny sumbitch, this Bob Tallman. 

“When I went to Cal Poly in 1966, I was surrounded by champions, champions, champions,” Tallman says. “And I wasn’t going to make a pimple on their butt because of the talent they had. So, I just started telling stories about my friends, and they’ve been paying me for it ever since.”

It gets easier to understand Tallman’s ability to communicate through a microphone when the genetics come into focus.

His grandfather was a politician. 

A.V. Tallman — Aaron Vedder Tallman — was twice an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Nevada in the 1940s. He lost the general election in 1942 to Edward P. Carville, a Democrat who was later given the opportunity to appoint someone to the unexpired term of the late James Scrugham in the U.S. Senate. He believed himself presumably to be the best qualified and appointed himself. 

The elder Tallman then lost in the Republican gubernatorial primary in 1946. His political career in Nevada included serving on both houses over a period of 12 years, including 10 years in the state senate representing Humboldt County, leaving office in 1951.

“He was quite the orator,” Tallman says of his grandfather who died in 1968. “He stood 6-foot-6.”

A.V. moved to Nevada in 1929 from Idaho where he had also been a state senator. Winnemucca, today a town of 8,600 in the northern part of the state, was his destination. A.V. had gotten a job as watermaster of the Humboldt River. In 1931, A.V. purchased the Lazy T Dairy. 

That same year, A.V. and his son John — Bob’s father — helped chart the Humboldt River from its headwaters to the Humboldt Sink in a canoe. John went on to become a businessman and rancher, including owning and operating Scott Lumber Co. for more than 44 years. 

John was an avid horseman and rodeo enthusiast and a leader in founding the Humboldt County Fair and Rodeo Association. He was also noted for his capacity to spin a tale, appreciated “as a storyteller for his insightful thoughts and colorful quotes.”

This sounds like someone I’ve gotten to know a little. 

His 2007 obituary notes: “He had appeared on national television, including a segment on CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ where he said, ‘The West was won in Nevada, and it wasn’t with a registered gun!’”

He ain’t wrong about that. 

Tallman grew up on the family ranch. He went to school in a one-room schoolhouse that featured a big pot-bellied stove and a two-holer outhouse. Nothing distinguished which was for boys and which for girls. 

He says he still has a copy of a picture of his first-grade class, whose enrollment included seven or eight kids, some Paiute Indian children — the Paiute reservation was nearby — and two Basque children. 

“And there I am in a little flat shirt with a butch haircut with a rope in my hand,” he says. “The teacher lived at the ranch with my mom and dad and all of our people. In those days, everybody lived together regardless of race, age, creed, color, it didn’t make no difference. And you did everything on horseback.”

He was raised a Catholic. While on the phone, he motions to a red-beaded Rosary his Swiss-born mother, Irene, brought with her to Ellis Island. She gave it to him, and it sits near him every day. Today, though, he’s a dues-paying Baptist. 

“I love the singing and the music in the Baptist church,” he says.

His grandmother, he recalls, would drive an old pickup to church every Sunday.

“My mother and my grandmother sat in the same pew in that Catholic church. First pew on the left, first two seats, with me all my life.”

Faith was important. So was the life of the West.

A seminal moment — perhaps the seminal moment? — occurred as a 12-year-old. 

The site was San Francisco’s iconic Cow Palace, opened in 1941. As its name suggests, the Cow Palace was built for the purpose of cattle expositions, but it’s been repurposed as a gathering place for politicos. Insert your own “bull” jokes here. The Republicans renominated Dwight Eisenhower for president in 1956 and in 1964 Barry Goldwater in a famously — an infamously — rowdy San Francisco convention. “Turn him loose, lady, turn him loose,” Rockefeller man Jackie Robinson said to an Alabama delegate who took offense to Jackie’s exhortation of “C’mon, Rocky!”

“Luckily for him he obeyed his wife,” Jackie said later of the lady who suggested her husband take the matter no further.

Anyway, it was at the Cow Palace that his parents took him to see the rodeo, Tallman’s first real taste of the indoor rodeo. The smell, watching people ride under the bright lights, the livestock shows, he says. 

The smell — repugnant to some, cologne to others — is what he misses most about Will Rogers Coliseum, which hosted the rodeo from the 1940s until the opening of Dickies Arena in 2019. 

“I told Brad Barnes and Mr. Bass one time after building Dickies Arena that I need to get a pipeline and blow the smell out of Will Rogers Coliseum over into Dickies Arena.”

His work in rodeo has also included TV, as well. He’s been a commentator on ESPN, Fox Sports, and TNN. He is in just about every rodeo hall of fame, including the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame. 

Tallman also juggles professions in the ag and ag entertainment industries, including real estate and the beef industry. In September, California-based Cattaneo Bros. acquired the Bob Tallman’s Authentic Cowboy Beef Jerky brand. The product portfolio includes Sweet Smoked, Peppered Hickory, Sagrado Hatch Chile, and Brown Sugar BBQ flavors. 

He also once was in the buck and bull breeding industry.

Tallman has not wasted his celebrity, which he has used to do good.

The Bob Tallman Charities, he says, has given close to $2 million over the past 24 years to the MD Anderson Children’s Cancer Hospital in Houston, specifically today for a school on the campus for the children under the hospital’s care. 

The day a child is admitted to the hospital, they are enrolled in class. The connection could be through Zoom, but they can go to class two hours, 10 hours, whatever they want. The important factor is the children don’t lose track of the important social touch with their family, classmates, and friends.

“They do so much better because the maintain a position in society,” Tallman says. “You don’t know what it’s like over the years of being able to go into the hospital to hold a child — 8, 10, 12 months old, 2 years old, with their big eyes, little bald-headed boogers — and then be able to see them at the age of 10, 12, or 20, and know that they came out of that program.”

It’s all part of a life as rich as the voice. 

“In 50 years, I’ve been to a lot of rodeos, and what a blessing it is to be able to say that my family has been the recipient of income from doing it,” he says, pausing briefly. “I’m the most blessed man in the world.”