Career coaching from rodeo clowns
We call ourselves Marketplace, so part of our job is exploring how marketplaces work, in all their forms. David Brancaccio and the “Marketplace Morning Report” team are setting out to visit in-person places of commerce, in a world where so much buying and selling has gone remote and digital. None are financial markets in a formal sense, but all markets are financial markets in a way, right? The goal is to learn the right and the wrong moves with experts.
This week: “A Business Reporter Goes to the Rodeo.” Today: why “rodeo clown” is a serious occupation.
Barrelmen are the people with the job of protecting bull riders when they fall and things go haywire. The protective barrier used to keep rodeo rider and fierce bull apart is an aluminum barrel, like a good-sized beer keg. John Harrison is among the best in the business.
The job is above all about the personal safety and the economic security of the people who ride the bulls.
“Professional other sports, they get hurt, they go sit on the sidelines and get a check,” Harrison said. “In rodeo, they get hurt, they go home and no money. So if you can keep them safe, so they can go ride tomorrow, that’s our job.”
If you’ve never been to a rodeo, you may be picturing some kind of stern referee dressed with authority. But barrelmen dress funny, act funny and are also known as rodeo clowns. Harrison has been doing this work for decades, but just this year reached the very top of his league as he received a torch passed to him from a barrelman who became a Houston legend: Leon Coffee.
Coffee will continue to entertain rodeo crowds, but with his 70th birthday in the rearview mirror, he’s no longer going to fold himself into that barrel with bulls barreling down at him. It’s been a career where he showed early promise.
“In high school, I had an American history teacher that told me, he said, ‘Son, you can’t make a living being a clown,’ ” Coffee said. “The first time I won rodeo clown of the year, I called him up, went, ‘Nana nana na na.'”
Coffee has been goofing around yet been serious about safety here for 31 years.
“Like I’ve always said, anybody can get a job — not everybody can keep one. They changed presidents and directors of this rodeo many times, and I’m still here.”
What was Coffee looking for when he found Harrison, the clown he picked to take over in the barrel?
“You’ve got to be a very caring person and caring about putting a smile on that face,” he said. “And we are in the entertainment business. If you don’t have the best show in town, you’re not going to get the entertainment dollar.”
And if clowning is your destiny, what do you tell your parents?
“Oh, my goodness, I was that person that went to college for six years and never finished,” Harrison explained. “So … I always joked, the best way to become a rodeo clown is spend six years at a junior college, and your parents won’t care what you want to do.”
The Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association does evaluations and issues permits for barrelmen/clowns for the events it sanctions, but pros like John Harrison also do a lot of outside homework.
“You study great comedians on TV, and you don’t have to copy them, but you might pick one thing up by watching something,” Harrison said. “And you just try to adapt to be your own person, and you start trying to work your way up the ladder.”
And you don’t start with the big leagues; you earn your barreling in the minors.
“I’ve worked rodeos in Iowa where they’ve tilled up a cornfield an hour and a half before it started, and hauled bleachers in, lawn chairs on the side of a hill,” Harrison said.
As for other tricks of the trade from these pros, they hand us a useful piece of information from the world of bull:
“Everybody thinks they’re attracted to red. That’s completely fake. They’re color blind. They don’t see color. They’re attracted to movement,” Harrison said.