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"We
spent our summer vacations for eight years planned around those National
Finals: Rapid City, South Dakota; Shoney, Oklahoma; Pueblo, Colorado. We
sure enjoyed it. They were great family events."
Cowboy
said at times folks would talk about the costs of all the trips and
other rodeo expenses. "Kevin went to the University of Tennessee
Martin on a full rodeo scholarship….so that probably saved me about
$80,000 right there! But it would have been worth it without that."
Kevin,
who made the college nationals for four years, now works in business and
rodeos some on the side. He and his wife have presented Cowboy and Judy
with two much-loved grandsons. Daughter Kim graduated Auburn, married,
and is now a computer maintenance engineer in Huntsville.
Cowboy,
now 65, has slowed "just slightly." He laughs that he’s
"retired" from three different jobs: worked 30 years at
Goodyear; shoed horses for about 40 years; and retired from the four
broiler houses on his property just last year.
Now
he runs 250-300 longhorn cattle, about 25 horses and raises a cross of
Ridgeback and Catahoula cattle dogs (a lineage that now includes about
200 puppies which are sold to much appreciative farm and ranch owners.)
Cowboy
had gotten "out of the service," several years ago and was
riding to work at Goodyear with a friend who was "rodeoing on the
weekends. I’d played just about every sport you can imagine except ice
hockey. I played world championship ping-pong in the service, handball,
squash. Later we played tennis. I played baseball. Then when I came out
of the service I played slow pitch softball. We went to the Slow Pitch
Softball World Series in Milwaukee.
"Then
when I was riding with Terry Willoughby, he got me interested in rodeo.
I traded a shotgun for a horse. Then I started breaking horses, too, and
doing rodeo on the weekends." (He rode a few bulls and a few broncs
but found it was calf roping that was his best skill.) "It was just
a hobby at first," Williams notes.
But
he started winning, and he started helping others. In addition to
helping form the PCA 14 or 15 years ago (to give cowboys in the
Southeast a better place to compete) and serving as the PCA’s head for
three years, he was also President of the High School Rodeo Association
for a couple of years, and Vice-President for "two or three
more."
One
of the best things about all his travels was learning about the
different areas of the country and how things are done. He says a friend
in Montana was amazed that he could run as many cattle as he does on as
"little" land, with the friend saying that where he lived, it
took at least 40 acres per cow.
Cowboy
always attends the PCA’s annual meetings (although they’ve had to be
moved from Biloxi to Philadelphia, Mississippi since Hurricane Katrina
wiped out Biloxi’s arena) but he had no idea he was up for such a big
award as the Hall of Fame this year.
At
the banquet, held in the convention room of the Four-Star Casino, one of
the PCA’s Rodeo sponsors, Cowboy was surprised with a plaque, jacket
and just the knowledge and honor that he was inducted into the PCA Hall
of Fame.
"It’s
just so important for rodeos to continue," Cowboy says. "It
goes way back to our heritage. The definition of a cowboy is somebody
doing something with a horse and a cow. We’ve got a lot of horse
people left but we don’t have a lot of true cowboys left, that really
work those cattle with their horses.
"Cowboys
put on their boots and hat, saddled their horse, and then had to rope
those calves out in the open to work them and doctor them. There weren’t
any chutes out on the range. They had to have the skill. We need to keep
that heritage alive." |
