The Grey Flannel Cowboy

It is one thing for a hockey player to pose for collar ads, for a baseball manager to turn banker, for a track star to get elected to Congress--or even for an ex-boxer to take up 32 lines in Who's Who. But when a rodeo cowboy drifts into town in his own $11,500 airplane, passes up the saloons and heads instead for Howard Johnson's--"because I like the ice cream"--well, respectability has crossed the last frontier.

Any resemblance between Larry Mahan, 23, and the bowlegged characters who worked the oldtime rodeo circuit is purely coincidental. Mahan does not even know how to roll his own cigarettes. In fact, he does not smoke, or drink hard liquor. He shaves every morning, says "Sir" and "Ma'am," and occasionally wears a suit and a tie. He owns land in Oregon and a power sweeping company in San Diego; he is a partner in businesses in Arizona and Texas. Larry could be anything but a cowboy--until he climbs on the back of a bucking stallion or a 2,000-lb. Brahma bull. Then he is the rootin'est-tootin'est cowpoke who ever buckled on chaps.

Three Skills. After competing in all three of rodeo's riding events--bareback, saddle broncs and bulls--Mahan last year became the second-youngest man ever to win the All-Around Cow boy title (rodeo's equivalent of Most Valuable Player) and the fourth-highest money winner of all time when he collected $40,358. Last week at the Phoenix Jaycee Rodeo, he won $2,138 (plus a $750 jeweled belt buckle) to run his 1967 prizes to $17,262, a full $6,134 more than his closest competitor for All-Around honors and by far the highest amount ever won by any cowboy so early in the season.

Mahan's record is all the more impressive because each of the three riding events requires different skills and tactics. In both saddle bronc and bareback riding, a cowboy must keep his balance on a bucking horse for 8 sec.--while holding on with only one hand. But a saddle bronc is outfitted with a saddle, stirrups, a halter and one rein, while the only thing a bareback rider can hang onto is a leather belt, fastened around the horse's belly. It isn't enough merely to stay on for 8 sec.; each cowboy is also rated on the quality of his ride--which means spurring the horse into frantic action. But not too frantic. On a saddle bronc, says Mahan, "you will have to spur fore and aft. If you spur him in the belly, he'll toss you into the grandstand." On a bareback ride, the idea is to "keep your body back and roll your spurs up the horse's neck."

Five Breaks. Bull riding requires no spurring. Bulls are mad enough as it is. What is needed is balance, and raw courage--the courage to climb aboard a heaving, spinning animal that outweighs you by nearly a ton, and stay there for 8 sec. Mahan readily admits to a natural distaste for bulls: "No horse, no matter how mean, will deliberately charge you after he throws you. But a Brahma bull will; he'll come right after you, hoping to do you in."

In 1961, while he was still in high school, Mahan was thrown by a bull, which then stepped on his jaw and broke it in five places. He has since had a face bone shattered, a rib broken and three vertebrae cracked. Last week in Phoenix, a bull threw him alongside a metal barrel in which a rodeo clown was hiding, then turned, charged, missed Mahan by a hair, but caught the barrel and butted its 300-lb. weight 6 ft. into the air. The clown was lucky to escape with only minor injuries. It was a close call for all concerned. "I consider myself fortunate," says Mahan. "Oh, I worry sometimes. But the thing I like most about rodeo is that it's so unpredictable."

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