Cowgirl Up! (22 page)

For the next several years, Jonnie pursued that dream. There were no women competitors in Montana, so she entered national WPRA events. Bull riding for Jonnie was an addiction. “There was a time I'd do anything, I'd sell anything, just to ride another bull.”

She quit her job so she could ride more, and she was placing first consistently, getting better venues and better stock. But as she began her tenth year of riding, still without a title, the hard life in “crappy arenas and a wreck waiting to happen” began to take its toll.

“It was physically and financially difficult. When I'd win—maybe $120—I'd be able to eat and I would weigh 140, but when I lost, I quickly went down to 130,” the five-foot, nine-inch Jonnie said.

“We were mostly vagabonds,” she continued. Traveling from rodeo to rodeo, she and fellow riders would get on the CB radio to find someone who had a motel room but perhaps didn't have enough money to pay for it. “They'd say, stop in, take a shower, leave a buck on the bed.” Or sometimes they would put bricks under the bed's legs to raise it up and “sleep three under the bed.”

And relationships were hard to develop. “My personal life suffered,” Jonnie related. “When my boyfriend tried to hug me, I'd wince from the pain.” He didn't stick around to see her through.

“My family didn't understand. My friends saw me go from businesswoman to a broken-down bull rider who couldn't buy a cup of coffee. ‘You're crazy,' they'd tell me. Rather than argue, I walked away.”

Jonnie did wonder why she was doing this to herself. “The struggle was hard. It was embarrassing. But if I quit without finishing, I would never know whether I had what it took. And it is easy to see where you finish when you quit . . . LAST. That wasn't in my vocabulary. I had given up so much, I couldn't walk away.”

Unable to afford health club dues, Jonnie improvised her training, running twelve miles a day, skipping rope, and adopting “Rocky-style” techniques: doing chin-ups in the barn and lifting paint cans full of sand for weights. She taped notes to her mirror: “I am a winner and I have done all that I can, and I deserve to win.”

As the World Championship Finals approached in 1986, Jonnie had no idea how she was going to get there. She was trying to refinance her house to lower the payments, she'd burned the last of the cedar siding a friend had stripped from his house, she had no coffee for the morning, and her two dogs' ribs were beginning to show.

“I closed my eyes and prayed,” she said. “When I looked out, the sun was shining.” Jonnie called her dogs and went for a run. “I felt light and strong and my confidence began to rise.”

On her way back she stopped by the mailbox, hesitating in dread of the daily stack of bills. But she opened it and took out a window envelope.
Another bill
, she thought, then looked closer. It read, “Paid to the order of . . .” It was an escrow refund for the exact amount needed to pay entry fees, airfare, and meals for the Finals.

“I looked up to the heavens and dropped to my knees, thanked God and began to sob. . . . The long battle with loss of security, home, food, friends, and a feeling that my God had abandoned me was gone.”

Two weeks later she was in Guthrie, Oklahoma, hearing the announcer shout, “Jonnie Jonckowski in chute number five, all the way from Billings, Montana! Let's all cheer the cowgirl on!”

“I nodded, and the bull came flying from the chute. He ducked and dove, but I hung right in there, jump for jump.”

The buzzer sounded. She had made it!

Just as she was getting off, the bull suddenly changed directions and his hoof hit the back of her leg. “I thought it had been severed from my body, the pain was so gut wrenching.”

Jonnie made it out of the arena with help, but she sat there looking at her calf that had swollen so badly it had split her pant leg. After learning she'd placed second and needed only one more qualified ride from the two rounds left to go, she went to the hospital. The doctor told her blood was flowing into the leg, but not out, and that she was at risk of a clot. He told her she would never ride again and would probably drag her leg for the rest of her life. Jonnie said he actually demonstrated the dragging leg.

It was devastating news. “I thought my dream was getting away again,” she said. “The pain was unbearable, but I thought,
I would rather die than not do this now
.” She wrapped the leg, elevated and iced it that night, and fought a high fever and convulsions. The next afternoon, since she was far enough ahead in the point standings, the judges let her simply stand in the chute while they released the bull.

Jonnie would have to make her third ride that evening, however. She talked to the stock contractor to get information on the bull she'd drawn, and he told her he thought it could be ridden with just upper body strength. “He said I was probably the only one who could ride him that way.”

After a quick prayer in the ladies' room, Jonnie went out to meet the huge brindle bull named B12. “He had foot-and-a-half horns that stuck straight out to the side.” Four people hoisted her up to the chutes and helped her move her dead-weight leg over the top of the bull's back.

“I was sweating, but I felt good,” she said. “My heart pounded and my confidence soared at an all-time high.”

“You ready, Jonnie?” the chute boss yelled.

She nodded, and the gate flung open. “The bull jumped clean and straight. I was right in the middle of him, and I could hear the crowd erupt into cheers.” Jonnie hung on for dear life, and when the six-second buzzer sounded, she was still straddling the bull.

Tears of joy streamed down her face. “My God! I made it! My God, I made it!”

The rodeo clowns helped her off safely, and she sat behind the chutes while the other riders congratulated her.

Jonnie Jonckowski had her championship buckle.

She won again in 1988, but there still were bull-riding chutes where women were not welcome. Cheyenne Frontier Days was one of them. Her idol, Alice Greenough, had ridden there in the 1940s, but no woman had been allowed to compete since. Jonnie had been working to change that for several years, and finally, after her second championship in 1988, she got the chance.

She recalled:

It was really tough to convince those Cheyenne boys to let us ride. Their fear was that we were going to get bucked off and scream and cry. Being a woman in rough stock, you don't even have the luxury of getting hurt. If a man gets hurt, there'll be ten guys out there helping him, but if a woman gets hurt she'd better wave to the crowd and hop out of there under her own power. Then collapse in private.

In Cheyenne, two women were scheduled to ride bareback and two women signed up for bull riding. When Jonnie pulled in, “it was miles of press.” Women riding rough stock was a novelty act that drew attention. By the time she was ready to get on her first bull, “I was wearing sixteen microphones under my shirt. History was being made. Everyone wanted to know, ‘What does she think? What is she saying?'

“I wanted everything the men had. I didn't want to get my head kicked in anymore for eighty bucks.”

Jonnie continued to campaign for the next five years, and finally Pendleton gave the nod sixty-two years after Bonnie McCarroll died. Jonnie had overcome so many obstacles herself, and in doing so, succeeded in eliminating barriers for the women who followed her. “It didn't take guts for me to ride bulls. It took guts to buck the people who didn't want me to do it. But it was well worth the battle.

“I know there are girls out there like me who crave that adrenaline. That's why I campaigned so hard,” she said.

After this recognition Jonnie began to command better pay and appearance fees for her exhibition rides. From sleeping in horse trailers and under beds and wondering where her next meal was coming from, she was at the point where “I could demand the limo, the ‘Taj Mahal,' the royal treatment.”

Jonnie liked this new life a lot, and for a time she hung up her spurs to play under the dazzling lights of Hollywood. She was offered a role in
American Gladiators
, participated in the game show
To Tell the Truth
, and then played Chance, an outlaw on the TV series
Wild West Showdown
.

“It was pretty fun and a bit surreal, wearing a cowboy suit, riding down the street where all the movies were filmed, with my plastic gun drawn,” she laughed. “Chance was a cattle rustling, horse stealing son of a gun.”

Although Jonnie was a bodybuilder, had toughed it out on the back of dangerous bulls, and described herself as a “country lady jock,” she said, “I'm not a ‘chewer-spitter,' not hard-core macho. There's a preconceived idea of what a gal who rides bulls should look like. I love wearing dresses and heels. I like being a lady. The Greenough sisters did the same kind of thing, with femininity.”

Jonnie enjoyed her days hanging out with movie stars in Los Angeles, feeling like she owned the world. She got to meet her hero, Alice Greenough (“I was so in awe of them.”); Dan Haggerty of
Grizzly Adams
(“still a great friend”); the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who wrote a song for her, “The Bullrider Is a Lady”; and singer Neil Diamond.

“I found out he was actually a fan of mine,” she said. He called her when he came to Billings, and she met him at Harley-Davidson. Uncharacteristically, Jonnie was tongue-tied. “I stammered, ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr. Diamond' and then cringed.” Jonnie was a bull rider from Montana, and he was a mega-hit star, “but we just clicked.”

She lived with him for a while, which became tabloid fodder. “He's a great guy, a really sweet man,” she said, “but that lifestyle just didn't work for me. The ‘star thing'—I was past that.”

When filming was over, Jonnie learned her mother's cancer was terminal and went home to spend time with her family. “It was an unbelievable emotional drain,” she recalled.

Jonnie then went to work as a personal trainer and physical therapist assistant. “From the glitzy life, I went home to my simple A-frame and four acres,” she said.

While working at a nursing home, she made the acquaintance of a ninety-nine-year-old woman. “Ruby had osteoarthritis. She was bedridden, in terrible pain, and struggled. All she wanted for her birthday was an Indian pony.” Jonnie had a black-and-white paint, so she enlisted the help of staff to move furniture around and brought Buddy right into Ruby's room. “I handed her a grain bucket and said ‘Happy Birthday' and right on cue, Buddy whinnied.”

Despite being fired for that incident, Jonnie realized she had brought joy to her patient, and that gave her a sense of satisfaction. She thought about how easy it had been to make someone happy. She began to train her own dogs as therapy animals, and in 1998 she started Angel Horses to reach out to the elderly and disabled. Jonnie and other volunteers use rescued animals such as horses, donkeys, dogs, and cats. “My dream is to have sixty acres and a cowboy town,” she said.