Olaf Growald
Cory Melton spends every day caring for the same kind of animals that broke his face. Those are his words: “Sumbitch hit me just right and broke my face.” The tall, muscular, 39-year-old Texan with a cinematic drawl was about a year into a burgeoning bull-riding career when, mid-buck, a bullhorn hit his face just right.
“Usually, if a horn hits you, guys just get black eyes or a broken nose or lose a few teeth,” he says with way too much nonchalance. “But this one got me square. You couldn’t have hit me harder if you had a baseball bat.”
Melton, then 20, managed to pick himself up from the ground and stumble out of the arena, but judging by the sheer amount of blood caking his face, he could tell something was off. When his friend “turned white as a ghost” just from staring at Melton, the young rider knew this wasn’t your typical horn-to-the-head injury. Then they called a helicopter.
“When they bring in CareFlite to take your ass to the hospital, that’s when you know you done got hurt worse than usual.”
That may have been his lone trip in a helicopter (so far), but it certainly wasn’t the only time he got hurt. As a bull rider, he explains, you have to get used to a life of “constant” pain.
On another occasion, Melton woke up in the hospital with a collapsed lung and a chest full of broken ribs. Yet another time, a bull bucked him so hard he dislocated his shoulder. The tiny Texas town in which this particular injury occurred had a single small hospital, and at the time of the injury, it was closed. Thus, Melton had to drive to a neighboring town to get his shoulder inspected and popped back into place, ultimately spending six hours with his arm dangling by a thread.
“If you can imagine being tortured,” he says, “that’s pretty much what it felt like.”
At this point, you are probably wondering, why do it? Why put your mind, body, and spirit through all of the pain professional bull riding entails? Don’t worry; we’ll get to that. But what is just as interesting as Melton’s decade in bull riding is his current occupation: bull-raiser.
As the owner and operator of Melton Bull Co., this former top rider now raises the same sort of hellions that nearly killed him. Every morning, he wakes up to feed, nourish, and cultivate a stable of thousand-pound bucking bull babies, his eye always on the lookout for the next champion. In other words, his goal is to raise a bull who gets really, really good at throwing cowboys off its back.
Olaf Growald
Cory Melton
A champion bull can net you millions bucking cowboys across the country, and thanks to the growing popularity of the rodeo industry, there are plenty of competition opportunities for Melton and his bulls. In fact, listening to Melton rattle off the acronyms for each event can be a little dizzying. There’s the ABBI (American Bucking Bull, Inc.), the classic PBR (Professional Bull Riders), and the PRCA (Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association). Melton does them all, often hauling a dozen bulls across the country to buck the riders brave enough to get on the back of an animal that can crush your skull with a single kick.
“I used to joke that, since I started raising bulls, my days of going to the hospital are over,” Melton says. “Then that next week, they ran me over and broke my ribs.”
His life expectancy has certainly improved, but raising bulls is tough work. Early mornings, late nights, and months on the road are all part of the deal. Plus, to be truly successful, you have to combine a shrewd businessman’s eye for the deal with an in-depth understanding of bull genetics. A solid understanding of bull semen is also a plus. That’s how Melton has built a name for himself in the 10 years since he founded Melton Bull Co. Nowadays, people are just as likely to know Melton, the bull-raiser, as they are Melton the rider.
“I’m kind of a broker or a consultant or whatever you wanna call me,” he says. “I’ll buy bulls; people will send me bulls; I’ll help people find the bulls they need. They’ll call me up asking, ‘Hey, do you know where I can buy this bull? Can you raise this bull?’ You have to be multifaceted in this business, and you have to put in the work, every single day. The day you stop trying to get better is the day you start to lose.”
That brings us back to the questions that philosophers and bull-fearing folk like me have been asking since the beginning of time: Why? What’s the point? There are probably easier ways to make money (I’m a journalist, so don’t ask me how), and there are plenty of jobs that don’t involve as much potential harm to your face, nose, ribs, and lungs. So, why raise bulls, let alone ride them?
It’s partly the money, of course. And Melton, the son of a rider, was also born into this world. It’s quite literally in his blood, and in many ways, it’s all he’s ever really known. But there’s another reason that novice fans (including me) may not expect: People like Melton really love animals.
“I don’t know anyone who is good at this that doesn’t have a love for the bulls,” he says. “They’ll hurt you, they’ll humble you, they’ll break your heart. But you gotta love ‘em.”
As for riding?
“Nothing compares to that thrill you get when you’re riding,” he says, his camera-ready stoicism briefly giving way to a hint of a smile. “Nothing can beat that.”
Olaf Growald
Born to Buck According to Jay Daugherty, a rodeo veteran and the president of the ABBI, there are a few misconceptions about bucking bulls and those who raise them. The first and most glaring is that people like Melton mistreat their stock.
“You can find plenty of pictures where bulls have their balls clamped,” Daugherty tells me over the phone from Colorado. “But the people who know what they’re doing would never do that. You wouldn’t move if someone did that to you, so why would anyone do that to a bull?”
It’s a good point, and one that Melton echoes. Guys who raise bulls treat their animals like royalty, he says. And if they’re hurt from, say, a testicle clamp, they’re not going to go to work. They’re certainly not going to net you glory or cash.
According to Daugherty and Melton, a bucking bull’s prime years are ages 1 through 4. That’s when they have the most potential, and guys like Melton spend much of their time making sure they eat well, stay healthy, stay warm or cool (depending on the season), and learn how to buck the hell out of a cowboy. They’re trained, but they’re also pampered. The training part is where the “dummies” come into play.
Before a bull is ever ridden by a human, guys like Melton attach small metal boxes to their bulls’ backs. By throwing off the box, bulls learn what it’s like to catapult a cowboy through the air. Likewise, bull-raisers like Melton get to learn how high the bull kicks and how much it twists. The box doesn’t hurt them, he adds; they’re just bred to buck whatever happens to be on their back.
The breeding side of the business is where things get even more interesting. As the prez of the ABBI, Daugherty oversees a registry of more than 300,000 bulls. He and his team can trace a bull’s lineage back five generations, and in doing so, they help bull-raisers breed the most successful bulls possible.
“Our goal is to provide enough opportunities for bulls to make money,” Daugherty says. Still, a championship lineage alone isn’t enough to guarantee a premier bucking bull. The training and treatment provided by pros like Melton can make a big difference, hence all the pampering.
“Some of these guys treat their bulls better than they treat themselves,” Daugherty adds. And, as mentioned above, the real pros have read up on genetics.
“You have to study the genetics and look at the percentages of how many of a bull’s offspring became a bucking bull and how many times a cow produced a bucking bull,” Kaycee Simpson, the former executive of the ABBI, told American Cattleman magazine. “Realistically, stock contractors need to be in this for the long haul. It takes time and years of education to breed their lines and develop their programs. And even if they don’t get the next Bodacious or Bushwacker, they still have the opportunity to earn $2,500 on a heifer that someone else can use in their breeding program, which is way more than the $500 to $700 they’d get for a Black Angus heifer used for commercial meat products.”
Bodacious and Bushwacker are both legendary bucking bulls. Think Leo Messi or Michael Jordan; that’s how famous they are in certain circles. Daugherty told me he once heard a story about Bushwacker’s owner turning down $1 million for the bull. He just couldn’t part with it.
“Do you think it’s true?” I asked.
“Probably,” Daugherty replied. As it turns out, stories like that are pretty common.
Bulls become de facto members of the family, and long after their bucking days are done, they’re still living a life of luxury on some remote ranch in Texas or Nevada. Sometimes bulls are buried on that ranch, right next to grandpa or grandma.
“I’ve had a few that I couldn’t bear to part with,” Melton tells me. “When you love something for years and years, you just can’t send it to the slaughterhouse. So, I keep ‘em at the house, and if I need to, I’ll put ‘em down myself when it’s time.”
All that training, care, and genetic acumen have created an interesting problem for the rodeo business: The bulls are getting better than the humans.
Over the last 10 years, the audience for bull riding has continued to grow — as has the prize money for both bulls and riders. There’s a rodeo in Fort Worth every weekend, but there’s also a full list of events happening throughout the year. The PBR circuit usually kicks off at Madison Square Garden, and when he was interviewed for this story, Daugherty had just awarded $4 million in prize money at a competition in Duncan, Oklahoma. There’s practically no off-season, but there is a dearth of riders.
Twenty years ago, Daugherty says, there were roughly 1,000 riders registered with the PBR alone. In recent years, that number has slipped to about 400. It’s a steady 400, Daugherty clarifies, but it’s still proof of a diminished interest in the life of a rider.
“In my opinion, American kids are just a little softer than they used to be,” Daugherty says. Meanwhile, he notes, Brazil continues to produce excellent riders. There are still plenty of American superstars, of course, including the famous J.B. Mauney. In 2019, Mauney, now 34, famously broke Bushwacker’s streak of 40 tossed riders in a row. But even he admits the bull-raising industry is quickly outpacing that of the riders.
“If they keep breeding better bulls,” he told The New York Times, “they’re going to have to start breeding better bull riders.”
Daugherty may be right about kids getting softer, but it’s easy to see why young’uns are shying away from this deadly sport. Melton tells me that around 10 or 12 riders die from injuries each year, including at least one “high-profile” guy. One time, at a rodeo competition, Melton saw a cowboy fall under a bucking bull.
“I turned my head away just in time,” he says. “And I heard the crowd go silent, like someone just died.”
As it turns out, no one did — at least that day. But the bull did remove the cowboy’s jaw just by stepping on him, and according to Melton, the man never rode again.
That’s the kind of power Melton deals with every day. And just like some of the talented, fearsome bulls he calls his own, Melton was born into this.
Olaf Growald
“You Gonna Ride One Tonight?” I first met Melton on a cold November day at the Fort Worth Stockyards. The famed Cowtown Coliseum held its first rodeo in 1918, and in the century since, it’s become a must-see destination for millions of fans and curious tourists who make the trip to North Texas each year. On this particular day, I meet a pair of French tourists who wonder why I’m wearing basketball shorts and a Mumford & Sons T-shirt, which, despite a lifetime in Texas, is the most “country” thing I can find in my closet. Next to Melton, who sports a wide-brimmed hat, some dusty boots, and a buckle as big as my fist, I’m the epitome of dumb Yankee.
Luckily, he’s too kind to say anything.
After arriving at the Stockyards, I wait to meet the veteran cowboy in the area right behind Billy Bob’s. The air is redolent with the smell of manure, and I get a few sideways glances from seasoned rodeo fans who are snaking their way behind buildings en route to the cattle call. Then: He arrives.
Riding in a big truck emblazoned with his company’s logo, Melton backs into the tight Billy Bob’s alley with 10 bulls in tow. One of them is Astro, a descendant of a famous bucking bull named Asteroid.
“Only the special ones get names,” Melton says.
He got here a little early to talk to me, so after he unloads his bulls into the holding pen for the night’s rodeo, he and I stand around chatting in the crisp, late fall air. He just came from Sulphur Springs, he says, where he caught the Rodeo Hall of Fame induction of one of his friends. Shortly after this, he’ll have to head to Vegas for about a month. But tonight, he’ll enjoy the weekly event hosted by Stockyards Pro Rodeo and his good friend CK Reid, who runs the show at the Stockyards.
“You pretty much get to know everybody in this business,” Melton says. “It’s kinda like a family.”
Melton’s biological family is full of rodeo folk. His grandfather owned land and plenty of animals, and his dad was a rider. For that reason, he never wanted his son on top of a bull. He didn’t stop the teenage Melton from dreaming of life as a cowboy, but he tried discouraging the life whenever he could. After a while, he gave up.
“When it’s all you dream about as a kid coming up into a teenager, it sorta becomes unstoppable,” Melton says. “It’s hard to explain, but I knew I was gonna ride.”
Melton’s career officially began when he was 19. He had some early success, but the face-breaking accident happened just as he was climbing the national rankings.
After his ride in the helicopter, Melton took eight weeks to recover. He ultimately missed the National Finals Rodeo, which is essentially the Super Bowl. (Only this time, the cowboys actually make it.) It was a major setback, to be sure, but it was also a key motivator for the young Melton.
“When I came back, in 2003, I was pretty pissed off,” he recalls. “I was ready to kick everybody’s ass. [Injuries] motivate you when you’re young; when you’re older, it does just the opposite.”
Melton stayed in the game for nine more years, winning lots of money and plenty of fame. If you search “Cory Melton Bull Rider” on YouTube, you can find plenty of videos of him staying on a bull’s back for an impossibly long eight seconds. That’s the goal, at least, and if you can make it eight seconds, you’re golden. (Not many people can make it to eight seconds.)
In one video from 2003 (the year Melton admits he was really “pissed off”) you can watch as the inarguably handsome young rider mounts a bull aptly named “Wild Side.”
“This bull, he’s a handful,” says the TV commentator as Melton takes his final, pre-ride breaths. “Real fast, has a lot of action, might do anything and everything.”
What happens next is violently beautiful: The cowboys open the chute and Wild Side shoots out, twisting and turning at literal breakneck speed. Melton, one hand on a flank strap and the other in the air, stays upright for what must have felt like an hour. At exactly eight seconds, he lets go of the strap and flies into the air, landing softly on the sand below. Here’s the coolest, most John Wayne-esque part: His cowboy hat stays on the whole time. It’s only when he knows he’s bested Wild Side that Melton launches his hat into the crowd and raises his arms in the air.
But it couldn’t last. Nothing beautiful does.
By the time you turn 25 or 26 and the injuries and surgeries start piling up, you start to think about the “r” word: retirement. And that can be lethal.
“Bull riding is too dangerous a sport to know you’re gonna quit,” Melton says. “That’s the worst distraction there is. You have to push down those feelings. So, when I quit riding bulls, it wasn’t planned. I knew it wasn’t gonna work that way. I woke up one day and said, ‘I’m done.’ That’s the only way you can do it.”
Yet he had no intention of leaving the bull business. By that point, he had already realized you could make a career raising the very bulls he used to buck. The only thing left was to figure out how to do it.
“I didn’t know if it was gonna work, but that’s what I was gonna do,” he says. “Over time, there have been opportunities, and I’ve figured it out. It’s not easy, but if you’re willing to get out and work, you can make some money.”
Founded in 2012, Melton Bull Co. has always specialized in competition bulls, and it’s helped that the competition industry seems to have gained in popularity each year Melton has been in business. Events are now broadcast on The Cowboy Channel, and true to form, Melton has handled whatever the bull business has thrown his way.
“In the rodeo business, there’s a lot of side deals, a lot of ways to make money,” he says. For instance, people always seem to be in the market for cows, and the semen game is lucrative if you have a couple stud bulls on your hands.
On this particular night, the one in which I’m embarrassingly underdressed at the Stockyards, Melton is taking the opportunity to do the same thing he does in California, Vegas, and Wyoming: Show off his stock. There are buyers and brokers in the crowd, and Melton brought some of his veteran bulls alongside some up-and-comers.
He started working with CK Reid and Stockyards Pro Rodeo in 2019, and since then, each event has become a regular hangout for him and his friends in the bull biz. When Reid arrives, Melton, ever the gentleman, takes a moment to introduce me before he and his pal talk shop.
“You gonna ride one tonight?” Reid asks me.
Yes, I technically have that option. You see, one thing you might now know about the rodeo is that anyone can walk up to the Stockyards and ride a bull. The French tourists could do it. I could do it. A-ny-one can do it. And sometimes, they do.
Melton has plenty of stories about guys who get one or two beers in them and start thinking they can ride a bull. Oftentimes, their friends make it worse by encouraging them. Melton may try to talk them down, but according to him, it’s against the rules to actually prohibit anyone from riding. Thus far, he’s never seen any amateur get hurt riding a bull on a lark. Or, as he puts it, “The dumbasses are always OK.”
So, yes, I could technically ride one tonight. But I politely decline.
“Maybe next time,” I tell Reid, faking a smile. “Hell no,” I say in my head.
After some chit chat with Reid and Reid’s 80-year-old bull-raising father Claude, it’s time for the show to start. Melton shows me around the arena, then says goodbye for the night. As is their ritual, he and Reid are going to grab a couple of beers before the rodeo. We talk about meeting up later at his big house in Tolar, but he’s so busy that we’re not sure when we’ll meet again. Thus, the last time I see the former rider, he’s shaking my hand in front of Cowtown Coliseum and looking around at the typical hustle, bustle, and musical activity that precedes the rodeo.
“There are worse places to be on a Saturday night,” he says. And with that, the cowboy smiles.
He mentioned earlier that he had lost some teeth after breaking his face, but from where I stood, you’d never know.
