A Rodeo Doctor Fixes Much More Than Broken Bones – Texas Monthly

When asked to define the two-word mantra that guides professional rodeo, cowboys generally issue a stream of synonymous directives. Be tough. Don’t quit. You ride hurt. You ride sick. If you’re not confined to bed, then you’re not really hurt. Toughen up. Don’t be a sissy. Don’t complain about it. Do your job. Get back out there. They all add up to the same thing: Cowboy up.

But right now, a cowboy is down. 

For eight seconds—the time a bull rider must remain mounted to receive a score—a 29-year-old Brazilian named Kaique Pacheco managed to stay perched atop one ton of bovine muscle, a bull named Flashbang. But then, the ride complete, Flashbang launched Pacheco off his back and into the air. The rider landed headfirst. He wore a helmet, which offered some protection to his head. Still, when he landed on the dirt, the crowd’s cheers turned to worried murmurs.

“He hit hard,” the announcer said as three bullfighters, men responsible for protecting fallen riders, leaped into action. They surrounded Flashbang and, with help from a team member on horseback, herded the bull away from Pacheco and into a chute. Meanwhile, Pacheco slowly sat up and then stood, hunched over, and took a few stumbling steps before landing on his hands and knees. As soon as Flashbang had cleared the area, three cowboy-hatted medical specialists threw open a large metal gate next to the bull chute and hurried into the arena, known as the Pit, at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque.

One of those men had been watching the riders from behind the gate with a coach’s trained neutrality. His features pull downward; he would look woebegone except for his mahogany eyes, which are kind and ever-alert. He wore ostrich-leather cowboy boots and a pristine gray Resistol. “Dr. Tandy Freeman,” the announcer told the audience after the doctor charged into the arena, as though he were as much a spectacle as the cowboys. 

Freeman is a fixture at rodeo events across the country. A Dallas-based orthopedic surgeon, he is the medical director for the Professional Bull Riders organization as well as for Justin Sportsmedicine Team, a group that has served rodeos since 1980. At 66, Freeman has been working with rodeo athletes for more than three decades. In that time he has missed fewer than twenty PBR competitions, of the more than two hundred that take place each year. He is likely the longest-practicing doctor in a field like no other.

Now he and two colleagues, Tony Marek and Rich Blyn, kneeled beside Pacheco. Once the rider was upright, Marek helped him out of the arena, first grasping him firmly by one arm and then holding him by his belt from the back. The two walked slowly up a long flight of concrete stairs. The Pit was built from a 37-foot-deep hole dug in the mesa, so the locker room and makeshift training room are located high up on the concourse level. Disappointed competitors must take an interminable walk of shame after their rides, with the cowbells they drag on bull ropes—the weight of the bell ensures the rope slips off the bull after a ride—clanging angrily against each step. Blyn followed Marek and Pacheco, and Freeman reassumed his post by the gate as the competition continued, the rider’s ordeal having passed like an eclipse.

A few minutes later Blyn returned with good news: Pacheco had appeared to be back to normal by the time he reached the top of the stairs. “Doesn’t mean he’s not concussed,” Freeman told me, before pressing a gummy-looking beige plug back into each ear—the audience at the Pit, he had warned me, is very enthusiastic and very loud. 

The 2017 suicide of a rider named Ty Pozzobon, who had suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, drew international attention to the well-being of riders and to concussions in particular. (“Athlete health and safety has always been and remains of utmost importance to the PBR, and we continually seek ways to make the sport safer,” a PBR representative wrote in an email.) That day, Marek screened Pacheco for concussion symptoms and gave him a neurological exam. The next day, after the cowboy ran up and down the stairs at the Pit, Blyn tested his cognitive function. Bull riders “aren’t known for their cardiovascular fitness,” Freeman said. “We stress them with exercise to try to bring out their symptoms, because they’ll lie to you.”

On Sunday, Pacheco passed concussion protocols and was cleared to ride again.

Bull riding accounts for as many as 58 percent of injuries across rodeo events, according to a review published by the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine in April. (Ranking second is bareback riding, which is responsible for up to 29 percent of injuries.) Most mishaps in bull riding occur when a cowboy hits the ground, but competitors can also be thrown into the sides of the arena, pushed against the walls of the chute while they wait to compete, or kicked or trampled by the bulls. These last are the injuries most likely to be fatal. By the end of each season, almost every participant has experienced some degree of strain, sprain, or concussion. “The guy who’s at one hundred percent,” Freeman said, “is the guy who hasn’t gotten on a bull.”

Injuries are not limited to competitors. The bullfighters, who remain in the arena during each ride, are frequently injured. And before the final day of the competition in Albuquerque had even begun, a man who transports the animals had gone to the hospital with several broken ribs and a possible concussion after a bull being moved from a local facility to the Pit had “hooked” him twice and trampled him. Now he’d returned, trying to keep working. “He’s out back in the truck,” a woman with long silvery blond hair told Freeman outside the training room, whose walls were constructed from upturned large black trunks used to transport the medical team’s equipment. “He needs to go back to the hotel and lay down,” Freeman said, sounding exasperated. “You go tell him that,” the woman replied doubtfully. “You know how that goes.”

Serious injuries are endemic in rodeo, even more so than in other contact sports. In football, players generally behave according to rules and regulations; in bull riding, half the competitors are ungovernable 1,200- to 2,000-pound “animal athletes,” as PBR announcers refer to them. After the conclusion of the second day of the Ty Murray Invitational in Albuquerque, the bartender at the airport Sheraton absently asked a group of rodeogoers, “How was it? Anyone get injured?” 

But even with comprehensive safety standards across rodeo organizations, athletes who do get injured have little support compared with those in other sports. Many bull riders, particularly less established competitors, do not have contracts that provide financial security in the event of an injury; their salaries are not guaranteed, as are those of National Football League players and many other professional athletes. And few rodeo athletes have full insurance coverage, instead relying on often porous contracts offered by specific events. Some injuries can be catastrophically expensive. Freeman remembers when bull-riding superstar Jerome Davis, then 25 years old, became paralyzed from the chest down while competing in 1998. “He had twenty thousand dollars’ worth of coverage that was burned before he got to the intensive care unit.”

Several veteran riders suggested to me that the significant payouts winning riders earn today—the champion of the Ty Murray Invitational, Eduardo Aparecido of Brazil, left with $111,413 that weekend in Albuquerque—have allowed for a stability the athletes of yore couldn’t have hoped for. In the seventies and eighties, they said, you had to either cowboy up or get another job. But even with the larger winnings, rodeo is still a “don’t compete, don’t eat” sport, Freeman explained. Out of financial necessity, bull riders often perform with injuries that might sideline someone in another sport.

But though rodeo athletes may not have robust insurance coverage, they do have Freeman.

While most bull riders, bullfighters, and fans talk about rodeo like a destiny—one that passes from parents to children, percolating during ranch upbringings—Freeman does not boast a childhood calling. As a teenager he occasionally attended rodeos in towns surrounding Junction, where he lived, about two hours northwest of San Antonio. He was drawn by love, but not love of the sport. A dance followed each rodeo, and these were grand opportunities for a young man with only thirty students in his graduating class. Nevertheless, he is revered by a community that has historically met medical professionals with wariness. 

“At first he was hard to get to know,” recalled Ricky Bolin, a former bull rider who until December served as president of Hatco, maker of Stetson and Resistol hats. “Here’s how I describe people like Tandy: they are so smart, and they beat to a different drum, and it just takes people like me—a typical rodeo guy—a while to figure that out.” He and Freeman now go on an annual horsepacking trip in Southern California.

A few weeks before the event in Albuquerque, I met Freeman at his office, in Dallas, where we sat in a waiting room crowded with rodeo memorabilia. He speaks in an unhurried manner with a thick, slow accent. His wife, Maureen, a flight attendant from Southern California, said that when she was dating Freeman, she and her roommate would replay the voicemails he left her, giggling at the way he said “Hey, Maur-EEN.” He often answered my questions circuitously but always with a destination in mind. He might speak for five minutes, introducing anecdotes and characters in the way a sailor introduces intricate loops and twists to a line before, with an abrupt tug, knotting them all into a tight summary.

“The rodeo community is scattered across the country, but it’s a small town,” he said. “I don’t know every rodeo athlete there is, but it’s still a fairly tight-knit community. People know each other. And there are guys who, if they go to the hospital and they’re like, ‘Who’s your primary doctor?’ they write my name in. For some of them, I’m the only doctor they see.”

He is continuing a tradition of rodeo health care begun by his mentor and predecessor at Justin Sportsmedicine, J. Pat Evans. Freeman, who earned his medical degree at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas, met Evans during a six-week rotation after graduation. Evans was then the team physician for the Dallas Cowboys and the Mavericks and held a Saturday-morning clinic for high school football players who had been injured in games the previous evening. In 1980 he had cofounded what would become the Justin Sportsmedicine Team. (In 1981, Justin Boot Company became the group’s sole sponsor.) His partner was an athletic trainer named Don Andrews. It was a free mobile sports medicine training center, staffed by local volunteers who would meet them at the rodeos to provide care to athletes. Though PBR and many other rodeo organizations now have their own medical crews—the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, for instance, has a sports medicine committee—Evans, Andrews, and the Justin group shaped the field. Freeman coveted the country-doctor familiarity Evans had with his patients. He didn’t know just their medical histories, he knew their families.

From 1996 to 2001 Freeman attended PBR and other rodeo events with Justin while also serving as the team doctor for the Mavericks. (Evans had left the post in 1992.) When Mark Cuban bought the team from Ross Perot Jr., in 2000, Freeman anticipated that he would soon have to choose between NBA players and rodeo cowboys. “There really wasn’t a question. I’d rather do the rodeo and bull-riding stuff,” he said in his office. He is sure that some Mavericks would recognize him if they ran into him on the street, he said, “but you’re still an outsider. The players and the coaches to some degree kind of have their own little community, and everybody else, you’re on the outside. They just pluck you in when they need you and then push you back out,” he said. “With rodeo, you’re part of it.”

Tony Marek told me in Albuquerque that Freeman is “not just the team doctor, he’s like people’s family doctor.” A rider might call him with a question about an issue his pregnant wife is experiencing or ask advice when a parent is diagnosed with cancer. A few days before our meeting at Freeman’s office, a former rider asked him what to do about his hemorrhoids. Years ago, Ty Murray, the nine-time Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association world champion, called Freeman when he became severely ill from a staph infection. When Freeman told him to go straight to the hospital, Murray replied, “I’m too sick to go to the hospital!” (He recovered.)

Freeman charges most riders who solicit his advice. “My time’s gotta be worth something,” he said. But he makes exceptions for those who can’t afford care. “If you’ve got a bigger pickup than I do, you’re probably going to have to pay your bill.” (His truck? An electric-blue four-door Ford F-150 XLT.)

Bolin told me he’d felt lucky to have health insurance through his wife’s employer while most cowboys got coverage only through the PRCA, which was not particularly comprehensive. Still, he said, “it isn’t a problem for Tandy, and it wasn’t a problem for Dr. Evans. If you needed a broke bone fixed, he was gonna fix ya, whether he got paid or not,” Bolin said. “It’s the way that they love the rodeo sport and the cowboys.”

By all accounts, Evans displayed a bedside manner befitting a trench medic in World War I. Alan Jones, an orthopedic surgeon at Baylor Scott & White Health in Dallas, remembered watching Evans remove a long screw from an athlete’s fractured elbow, back when Jones was a young resident physician. “He just slapped some iodine on there, not even using local [anesthetic]. He dipped the screwdriver in the iodine stuff and then just . . .” Jones made a cranking motion with his right arm, grimacing. “He puts a big dressing on there, and the rider goes, ‘Can I ride?’ ”

Evans died in 2019, but Freeman has carried on his commitment to rodeo medicine, albeit with a slightly less sawbones approach than the one practiced by his Copenhagen-dipping mentor. Freeman has “basically dedicated his practice in Evans’s honor—the way he serves the cowboys,” Maureen Freeman said. When they were younger she used to mime looking behind his ear. When he would ask her what she was looking for, she’d say, “ ‘I’m looking for the circuitry, because it doesn’t seem like you’re human.’ He would often sleep four hours a night, and the rest of the time was so productive. The amount of work that he gets done in a day is unbelievable. And it doesn’t stop.”

When I asked Tandy Freeman to speculate on why Evans had identified him as a protégé, he had a quick answer: “What he saw is that I could sit down and talk to ’em, not talk down to anybody. Not all rodeo athletes are sophisticated or educated or worldly,” he said. “Plus he saw that I wanted to know what it took for them to do what they did.”

Freeman also understood that “cowboy up” is law. He knows that a bull rider can and will compete with a torn ACL. “You can ride a bull without an ACL,” he said. “The problem is when you get off.” He knows that many rodeo athletes are less likely to self-report symptoms when they’re surrounded by their peers, particularly when it comes to concussions. “There’s no blood, there’s no bruises, no swelling, there’s no anything. So if you say you’ve got a headache, it’s like, ‘Really? Aw, you’ve got a headache?’ ” he said, though he noted that riders’ attitudes toward concussions seem to have shifted since Ty Pozzobon’s death. Freeman knows that they must keep the mood light in the training room so athletes feel comfortable spending time there. He knows that no matter how much he impresses upon riders the importance of recovery, they may still try to return to competition before they’re ready.

Andrews, who cofounded Justin Sportsmedicine Team with Evans, runs the Justin Cowboy Crisis Fund, created, in 1989, to offer support to athletes who are unable to compete after injuries. The support is meant to address two critical needs: It provides compensation to make up for the money rodeo cowboys aren’t making when they’re hurt. And perhaps more important, it disincentivizes convalescents from returning to competition before their bodies are ready. Andrews estimates the fund has provided 1,500 injured contestants with a cumulative $10 million since its founding. Still, he thinks the fund is underused: Justin markets it as “a hand up, not a handout,” but pride still keeps many from tapping it. “We had to go through the same educational difficulties with the crisis fund as we did with sports medicine,” Andrews said. “We’ve had so many situations where we allocated X number of dollars, monthly, to an injured contestant, and they’ve come back early and returned the balance.”

In May I sat in on a conversation between Freeman and a young bull rider who had suffered a shoulder injury. Freeman asked him to remove his white cowboy hat, then had him lie back on the table so he could examine the rider’s arm. He looked at MRI results, showing a torn rotator cuff, surrounded by fluid, and told the patient to find a time when surgery would be convenient. “How bad will it be?” the rider asked. He was referring to the recovery time, not the surgery itself, and Freeman told him he should prepare to be left-handed for three months. “I wanted to ask you, what about that stem cell stuff?” the man said. Freeman shook his head slowly and said, “Not gonna work.”

“Sounded really good,” the rider said bleakly.

“Yeah, it does,” Freeman replied. He and the rider looked at each other, neither speaking for a long moment. “Will I still be able to flank bulls?” he asked. (Before bull and rider are launched into the arena, another cowboy, a flankman, tightens a strap around the bull’s flank.) 

Freeman shook his head again. The rider nodded.

On the last day of the PBR World Finals at Arlington’s AT&T Stadium in May, many competitors were bucked off before the eight-second buzzer sounded, which is not unusual: both the human and the animal athletes in attendance were among the best in the nation. In the first round of the day—the third and penultimate round of the finals—a notorious bull named Man Hater, whom PBR called a “guaranteed buck-off master,” dispatched with Aparecido, who had won in Albuquerque, within just a few seconds. Aparecido landed on his knees with his chin on his chest and the top of his cowboy hat, still on his head, thrust into the dirt. (PBR requires only riders born after October 15, 1994, to wear helmets.) He walked off hunched over. Later a 25-year-old rider named Dalton Kasel, from Muleshoe, 85 miles southwest of Amarillo, shot into the arena atop a bull named Red Demon, the animal’s back half making giant, lightning-fast arcs, as if ungoverned by his front half. Kasel lasted one second and limped out of the arena.

“Hey,” Freeman hollered sharply at Kasel in the hall leading from the arena after the round was over, “what was that?” The doctor spoke quietly to the cowboy for a minute, Kasel listening intently as Freeman offered encouragement. “That bull bent at ninety degrees in midair. Nobody could have stayed on that,” Freeman said when the rider was out of earshot. In bull-riding competitions, the bovine athlete earns as many as fifty points for factors such as speed, power, and the strength of his kicks, and the human athlete earns as many as fifty points for control and style, among other criteria. Red Demon received an extraordinary 48.5 points in the round.
Freeman said he admires riders such as Kasel and Cassio Dias, a 22-year-old from Brazil, because whenever they’re given a choice they pick the wild-card bulls—the ones who haven’t been ridden much. That was, he added, the spirit in which Ty Murray and the other founders of PBR created the organization in 1992.

Though many of the bulls that competed in the finals had also participated in the competition in Albuquerque, there were far fewer injuries at AT&T Stadium. The larger arena in Arlington may make injuries less likely, Freeman said, but he doubts it—how many injuries occur in any given event has, in his experience, been subject to chance.

Earlier in the month, at the PBR World Finals Eliminations at Cowtown Coliseum, in Fort Worth, Cassio Dias was carried out of the arena and driven by ambulance to the hospital, where he was quickly seen by a doctor. The cowboy had been riding a bull named Norse God, who’d launched him into the air in such a way that his right arm remained stuck in the rope that encircled the bull’s torso while the animal continued to buck violently. 

His arm still stuck, Dias’s legs hit the ground, and Norse God’s hind legs slammed down on his lower back. The bull stomped on him again, like someone trying to dislodge a pebble stuck in the sole of his shoe. The rider lay unmoving on the ground as the bullfighters and a pickup man mobilized. Norse God ran in a mad circle and trampled Dias once more as he returned to the chute, punctuating a scene that was uncomfortable to watch. “Dead or alive, dead or alive?” a spectator can be heard saying in a video of the incident.

Dias left Cowtown with five spinal fractures. Still, he returned a week later for the finals, and in the third round on Sunday afternoon, he rode a bull named Ricky Vaughn to attain a score of 92.5 points. He and an eighteen-year-old named John Crimber, from Decatur, 36 miles northwest of Fort Worth, who earned 95 points in the third round, were now competing for the win and $1 million.

In the final round, Crimber was bucked off a bull named Hang ’em High in 2.83 seconds. Before even getting on a bull, Dias had enough of a lead to win the championship. But the crowd, and Freeman, held their celebrations as Dias situated himself in the chute atop a bull named Chiseled. After a few suspenseful moments, Chiseled vaulted into the arena. Dias whipped around on the bull for eight seconds before it threw him to the dirt, where he landed, mercifully, on his hands and knees. Other riders leaped into the arena and lifted him up, bouncing him on their shoulders. As Freeman watched Dias celebrating, the physician explained the rider’s spinal injury with some reverence: “If you move one way, pain. If you move the other way, pain.” NFL players, he’d heard, might not play until two weeks after a single spinal fracture like those that Dias suffered. Dias had ridden again after a week, and he had five. “These athletes,” Freeman said, “deal with it in a different way.”

Rodeo is not insulated from the attention on athletes’ physical and mental health that has brought positive changes to football and other sports in recent years: protective gear is more common, injuries are taken more seriously, and doctors such as Freeman have more authority to keep athletes from competing when necessary. But rodeo still presents unique challenges and frustrations for those charged with cowboys’ well-being. Most medical professionals would try to keep a man with multiple spinal fractures from being bounced on his friends’ shoulders, let alone from riding a bull, but Freeman knows that his patients will ride if it’s physically possible, as long as the organization does not prohibit it. “The sport changes,” Freeman said, “but the cowboys stay the same.”

I asked Andrews, who, like Freeman, was not raised attending rodeos, what had drawn him to devote his career to the sport. “The main thing is self-reliance,” he said. “Rodeo cowboys don’t depend on anybody. And if they can get some guidance, which is what we’re trying to provide, then they can get through any situation.”

Though the cowboy’s ethos is often at odds with the doctor’s, there are moments of validation. “Good job, Doc,” one of the trainers told Freeman as fans surrounded Dias. Freeman looked bashful. He typically withholds his applause during competitions for all but the most impressive rides. “Doesn’t mean I’m not clapping on the inside,” he told me. But now, as fans surrounded Dias, he managed some light applause.

Then he turned from the arena and headed for the training room. There were more injuries to see to.  

This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Rodeo Doctor.” Subscribe today.