Cowgirl Up! (21 page)

Sponsors are rare in the sport—usually only the top national champions are sponsored for money. “Most sponsors, if any, are for trade.” Theresa explained that she trades publicity with a local barn for the use of the barn and feed.

Theresa is friends with Rachael Myllymaki and has also gleaned inspiration from Montana cowgirls' rich rodeo history. She said her grandfather was friends with the Greenoughs, and she has participated in rodeos with Deb Greenough, a champion bronc rider of her generation. “Anything about rodeo has always intrigued me,” Theresa said. “I just love it.”

A breeze swirled mini dust devils as horses whinnied, calves bawled, and bulls kicked the slats in the pens. Chuck Henson jiggled his twenty-month-old nephew, Quinn, on his hip while the child's dad, Deb Greenough, rode, much as Chuck's own mother, Margie Greenough Henson, did when he was a baby.

The rodeo tradition still continues in the Greenough clan. Granddaughter Nancy Jane Henson Dorenkamp became a champion barrel racer, team roper, and rodeo producer in Arizona, and granddaughter Leigh Ann Henson Billingsley is also a barrel racer and team, calf, and breakaway roper in Arizona and New Mexico. Margie and Alice's nephew Deb Greenough (their brother Bill's son) won the bareback title at the 1993 NFR in Las Vegas and qualified for twelve consecutive NFRs during his career. And now Quinn, a teenager, participates in high school rodeos, qualifying last year for the Nationals.

While Margie Greenough was still alive, the Greenough family held a mini family reunion at the annual Tucson Rodeo in 1996. As Leigh Ann rode toward the arena of the Tucson Rodeo grounds, she left her father, Chuck Henson, a National Cowboy Hall of Fame rodeo clown, at the chutes with Quinn, while her second cousin Deb took his turn bareback riding.

Just outside the arena to greet her after her barrel run was her mother, Nancy, secretary of rodeos with the PRCA, and her older sister, Nancy Jane, who also performed in the barrel races.

Finally, in the stands was Billingsley's grandmother, Margie Greenough Henson.

“It's definitely a family affair,” Leigh Ann, who is married to saddle bronc rider Erick Billingsley, told a reporter from the
Tucson Citizen
. “It's always neat because we all get together here. It's always like a little reunion.”

Leigh Ann and Nancy Jane, and Leigh Ann's daughters in turn, are definitely keeping the Greenough family rodeo tradition alive. “We totally grew up around it and traveled all over,” Leigh Ann said in an interview from her home in Tucson. “I started barrel racing when I was age ten in the Arizona Junior Rodeo Association,” winning her first buckle by age twelve and her first saddle by the time she was in college. “We had fun traveling and it was always a good time together as a family. All summer long we would go with our dad to the rodeos. He would pick us up on the last day of school and drive north,” she said.

With a trailer loaded down with a mule, a dog, and props and his two daughters in tow, Chuck made the rodeo rounds, entertaining crowds with his act.

“We are like any family,” Leigh Ann said. “If you grow up with race cars, you do racing. We grew up with horses, so we do rodeos.”

“That's the way we were raised. It was a way of life,” Nancy Jane added. “Mom rode the barrels and Dad was the clown.” She didn't think it was that unusual until her fourth-grade teacher told her how fortunate she was to travel like that. “You've done more already than most people do in their entire lives,” the teacher told her.

“I've come to appreciate it more the older I get,” Nancy Jane said.

Forty-six-year-old Leigh Ann is still competing in barrel racing and roping. In 2006 she garnered the All-Around World Women WPRA Championship as well as the Breakaway Roping Championship. In 2007 she won the Women's Breakaway Championship in the Senior Pro Rodeo event, and in 2002 she won the Barrel Racing Championship and All-Around Championship for the New Mexico Association.

Her daughters—fifteen-year-old Kaylee and ten-year-old Rayna—also compete in barrel racing, pole bending, goat tying, and team roping—“any event offered.”

Nancy Jane, fifty-two, says she never rodeoed full-time, but she team ropes with Leigh Ann and her daughters. She won Rookie of the Year in the WPRA Turquoise Circuit (Arizona and New Mexico) about twelve years ago and the top heeling award in team roping on the circuit.

She and her husband, Jerry, own the Salt River Rodeo Company and provide stock for rodeos in Arizona, California, and other Southwestern states (something her great-aunt Alice also did). She works as an accountant during the week, but on weekends she is involved in taking stock to rodeos, and she competes with her sister and nieces about eight times a year.

Alice and Margie were “awesome, classy ladies,” Leigh Ann said. “They were always dressed up, whether they were competing or when they were older and going out. Everybody respected them. To me, they were just fun.”

Nancy Jane echoed that sentiment. “They were always a class act. They enjoyed visiting and people always flocked around them. We did a lot of things together—our family is very close. They influenced us in their mannerisms and class and showed they could be bronc riders and still be ladies.”

Leigh Ann did try riding a saddle bronc once in Sante Fe. “I thought,
My grandma did it, I can too
. I stayed on him five seconds.” Leigh Ann used her husband's saddle with stirrups set farther forward for men's competition. “The way men ride is completely different, and you need more strength in your thighs. My grandmother used lower-set stirrups, and I think I could've lasted if I had those. But I thought I'd try it once.”

Unbeknownst to her at the time, her daughter Kayla rode a steer with a bronc saddle after a high school rodeo one time. “And she rode farther than all the boys,” Nancy Jane said. This is now an event at the high school rodeos, she added.

Leigh Ann attributes the demise of women's rough-stock riding in the WPRA partly to the “economy, which pushed everybody out of traveling,” and the few competitors. She said:

There weren't enough girls to make it worthwhile. They [WPRA] had to put up the money for the stock and then have only one or two show up.

It's a different life now, not like it used to be when we were growing up. There are so many rodeos, it's such a race now. Competitors fly back and forth, compete, and are gone in a few hours. I don't know if I would've enjoyed that as a kid. When my grandmother and great-aunt were doing it, they'd stay for the entire rodeo and go from one to another as a group.

Leigh Ann and Nancy Jane did have the opportunity to stay for entire rodeos, since their dad was the rodeo clown.

“Women's rough stock will come back around,” Nancy Jane predicted. She sees the future of women's rodeo “growing by leaps and bounds when you have the right kind of women involved. People still want to see the classy ladies of the old days. That's the way women's rodeo is going to progress.”

Almost twenty years ago women's rodeo in Arizona was nearly extinct. At the time, most women's events were held outside of the state. One day Leigh Ann and Nancy Jane got together with several other women and decided to organize their own rodeo in Arizona.

Every year since, the sisters have been coordinators of the Cactus Series Rodeo in Payson and Cave Creek Fiesta Days in Arizona. The all-women events are normally held before another PRCA-sanctioned rodeo and are co-sanctioned by the WPRA. These events include breakaway roping, barrel racing, and sometimes calf roping.

Since the arena is already set to go and a stock contractor selected, Leigh Ann said they only have to organize riders and judges and get sponsors.

Chuck Henson, now eighty-two, has retired from rodeo, but he and Leigh Ann are also carrying on the Greenough sisters' tradition of working on movie sets in Tucson as stock wranglers and drivers for the actors, crew, and camera trucks.

Nancy Jane said her dad and mother, Nancy, eighty, are still active and often come help her and her husband out on the ranch. “They have always made sure anything we did was enjoyable,” Nancy Jane said.

“Success comes to those who are willing to risk more than other people feel is safe.”

—J
ONNIE
J
ONCKOWSKI

T
he sign on the chute in Pendleton, Oregon, read M
EN
O
NLY
.

Lynn “Jonnie” Jonckowski walked up to the sign, slapped it, and said, “Take that!” Then she strode to the chute to mount a snorting, kicking Brahma bull. It was 1991 and the first time a woman had ridden rough stock at the Pendleton Roundup since Bonnie McCarroll was killed in 1929.

Sixty-two years. It had been a long road, both for women's competition and for Jonnie.

From Billings, Montana, Jonnie had a “huge competitive spirit” from an early age. She started competitive swimming when she was five and had dreams of becoming a world-class swimmer, but at age nine an ear problem changed that. Then she ran high school track and as a senior was a contender for a state title, but a quirk in the rules disqualified her. “My dream of a state title in anything was gone,” she said.

Jonnie continued to train in junior college, competing in the pentathlon, ranking second in the United States and third in the world. The 1967 Olympics were coming up, and she had a chance to qualify. But at Nationals she fell while running hurdles and ruptured a disk. The injury sidelined her, and she was replaced on the team.

“I would be lying if I didn't say that I felt lost and alone. I once had a goal. I once had a team cheering for me, a support system. . . . Now what?”

While healing from the injury, she got a job working as a zoning inspector. “It was a good job . . . but I still felt empty,” Jonnie said. She tried bodybuilding, played competitive softball, and ran triathlons, “but nothing seemed to fill the void I was feeling.”

But she would not give up. “I had to be the best in the world at something before I died,” she said. “I don't know where the competition comes from, but it just burns a hole in you.”

One day she was having coffee with her mother at a Billings restaurant and spotted a poster advertising an all-girl rodeo in Red Lodge. “I looked at my mom and said, ‘I should enter that.' And she said, ‘Fine, whatever.'”

Jonnie didn't grow up with rodeo, but she'd always loved horses and riding. When she was fourteen and working on a dude ranch, her boss, Don, told her about the Greenough sisters, how tough they were, but how ladylike they were, even sewing their own clothes. They became Jonnie's idols.

Thinking about the rodeo, “I figured if girls could do this, how hard could it be?” she said. “I would show Don I was just as tough as the Greenough gals.”

Jonnie went to a cowboy bar and asked some patrons to teach her to ride a bareback bronc. They may have looked at her like she was crazy, but someone took pity on her and shared his knowledge and equipment.

Two weeks later “I went to the rodeo, wearing a hat about eight sizes too big and with borrowed rigging.” Jonnie hung on and scored fifty-two. “The horse scored fifty and I scored two,” she laughed. “But I felt the pageantry of the cowgirl riding the rough stuff.” She wasn't hooked on rodeo yet, however, and went back to softball and triathlon training.

Then the same cowboy who had helped her prepare for the all-girl rodeo called and asked if she'd like to try riding a bull. She'd never seen bull riding—“It wasn't big on TV in the '70s. But I didn't know enough to be afraid. I was pretty tough. How hard could it be?” she said. “I lasted four seconds.

“It was one big dance and a huge adrenaline rush,” she continued. Now Jonnie was hooked. She had her eye on the prize again—a silver medal in the form of a world champion belt buckle.

She looked for a bull-riding school. “I don't know how many I called—at least a hundred—before I found one [in Colorado] that would let me in. They were all too scared to take on the liability for a woman.”

Jonnie was the only female student among 105 men, but she stuck it out, riding one-handed like they did. (Women were allowed to ride two-handed in WPRA events.) At the end of the course, she was in the top ten “ride-off ” for the school buckle.

She drew a bull named Spotted Dog, “a big gangly, longhorn-looking critter. I hated him. He didn't look good.” By this time the contest was down to two riders, and Jonnie was one of them. The prize dangled just in front of her. “If I could ride Spotted Dog, I could very well win.”

Jonnie mounted, and the bull charged out of the chute, kicking and twisting. Then he tripped, hooked a horn in the ground, and flipped over. As he got up, he kicked Jonnie in the face, right between the eyes, splitting the skin from her hairline through her left eyebrow, over the bridge of her nose and then into her right cheek.

“That was my first major reconstructive surgery,” she said. It left her with a crooked smile and, as one reporter put it, “talking out of the side of her mouth like a gangster.”

While she recuperated in the hospital, she learned she'd come in second. “I was told they just didn't have the guts to give it to me. They couldn't have a girl win it.”

But it was a huge stepping-stone for Jonnie. She began riding rodeos on the weekend—“a weekend warrior. I felt I had the advantage over other girls [in the WPRA] because . . . I knew how to train, I schooled and competed with men so I was used to bulls that bucked much harder. I could now once again see a world-class athlete inside myself.

“I thought I'd win a world championship in a year.” She laughed. “I was pretty cocky.”