Bull Riding • Class of 2020 Gary William Kirby, better known as Butch, started his rodeo career at age four when he joined his brothers in a trick riding troupe led by his mother, Mildred. By 16, he had changed his specialty to bull riding. Kirby credits the agility and balance...
Bull Riding • Inducted 2019 A better nickname for Doug Brown would have been the “Comeback Kid,” but instead Shawn Davis overheard R.C. Bales ask for the “droopy-eyed” kid and “Droopy” stuck. Brown staged a phenomenal comeback in 1979, placing third in the All-Around race after having retired from the sport...
Bull Riding • Inducted 2017 Cody Custer started riding bulls at 13 years old and won Arizona high school championships in 1983 and 1984 before joining the PRCA in 1985. He qualified for the National Finals Rodeo every year from 1987 through 1992, when he won the world championship. One of his...
Bull Riding • Inducted 2016 John Quintana was one of the great rank bull riders of all time, not only claiming the 1972 world championship over fellow ProRodeo Hall of Fame inductees Phil Lyne and Larry Mahan, but breaking the world record for highest-scored bull rides twice in the 1970s. The first...
Bull Riding • Inducted 2015 Bob Wegner was one of the greatest bull riding stars in an era populated with the likes of Jim Shoulders, Harry Tompkins, Freckles Brown and Ronnie Rossen. Over an 11-year span from 1956-1966, Wegner finished among the top five bull riders in the world standings 10...
Bull Riding • Inducted 2002 Gary Leffew, the rodeo guru of positive thinking (psycho-cybernetics) born Sept. 23, 1944, in Santa Maria, Calif., was no ordinary bull rider. Instead of climbing on a bull, he could have just as easily ridden off into the sunset on a Harley. One day, he accepted...
Bull Riding • Inducted 2012 Frank Schneider always said it was “probably environment” that got him into a career in professional rodeo because his older brother, Johnie, was already a top hand when he started out riding calves. What carried him to the elite level of the sport all resided within...
Bull Riding • Inducted 2009 The PRCA Rookie of the Year in 1980, when just a year out of Manteca (Calif.) High School, Ted Nuce competed in his first National Finals Rodeo at 21 and was as consistent as any bull rider of his era. Nuce won the world championship in...
Bull Riding • Inducted 2007 Ronnie Rossen once told a reporter that “I just went out there with the idea of ‘Don’t let go’ that’s probably why I have so many scars on my face, I never let go when I should have.” Scars or no, it was Rossen’s brutal, unrelenting approach...
Bull Riding • Inducted 2006 Born October 6, 1965 in Kermit, Texas, to a rodeo family, Sharp rode his first steer at the age of nine and never looked back. In 1981, he won his first of four (1981, 1983-85) bull riding championship titles in the American Junior Rodeo Association and...
