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Michael McLeod
Still going through my old clips, assembling a scrapbook for my kids and my own sentimental bemusement.
This story is so dang out there I thought you'd all enjoy it.
You'd think I would remember writing it, but I don't.
it was privilege to have a job that involved talking to people you never in a million years thought you'd wind up talking to. I was as surprised as any other cityfied midwesterner might be when I first got down here and realized there were ranches and cowboys in the central reaches of the sunshine state. This is a story involving one such ranch -- and by golly I got a chance to check in with some real-life cowfolk.
By Michael Mcleod | Orlando Sentinel
UPDATED: October 25, 2018 at 2:16 PM EDT
Once it gets south of Kissimmee, Canoe Creek Road doesn’t take long to straighten out into two straight, flat, open-country lanes, cutting through miles of scruffy cattle grasslands and cypress domes. Nothing much to keep you company out here unless you count the eagles gliding overhead and the buzzards convening on the berm for the latest freshly runover snack.
Just before Kenansville, there’s a barn, a corral, and a fence line across the grassland that slopes toward the shore of Lake Marian. This place is a wildlife sanctuary, of sorts. Nothing endangered or exotic here. Just distant clumps of horses and bulls — wild ones, all.
The 1,600-acre spread, an old ranch owned by the Silver Spurs Rodeo, serves as the year-round home for the rodeo’s “rough stock.” They are the animals used in bull riding, bareback riding and saddle bronc riding competition — always the highlights of the rodeo, which is going on this weekend in Kissimmee.
Most rodeos get their bucking animals from stock contractors, who bring the bulls and horses in from miles away. But ever since its first go-round 59 years ago, Silver Spurs has been a self-contained, volunteer operation.
That includes the rough stock. The rodeo maintains its own herd of bucking animals, roughly 40 bulls and as many horses. Most of them are owned outright by the rodeo, but a few others are on loan, having been “discovered” by Central Florida cattlemen who saw a promising spiritedness in one of their own animals and volunteered it for a life in the rodeo.
Animals are unpredictable, and the vast majority of rodeo recruits, no matter how much fussing and kicking they did around the barn, are a flop in the arena, bucking half-heartedly, or not at all.
But every now and then a superstar comes along. Such is the case with Cold Cold Heart.
Cold Cold Heart is an 1,800-pound, chocolate brown, 7-year-old, crossbred Brahman bucking bull owned by prominent Osceola cattleman Doug Partin, 64, one of the descendants of the venerable Osceola County ranching clan. Its scion, “Geech” Partin, was a founding member of the riding club that helped start up the rodeo 59 years ago. For the past 30 years, Partin has been a key rodeo volunteer, taking care of the rough stock and scouting for promising buckers to add to the Silver Spurs herd.
“He’s come up with some doozies,” says fellow volunteer and rough stock manager Kevin Whaley.
Cold Cold Heart is a doozie.
The bull has yet to be ridden for a full eight seconds, the time a rider must cling to a bull to score points. Dozens have tried, and dozens have failed. The longest any cowboy has stayed on Cold Cold Heart is four seconds.
But it’s more than his unbeaten record that makes Cold Cold Heart a local livestock favorite. It’s the ostentatious nature of his debut.
Three years ago, Cold Cold Heart did something that a bull is not supposed to do, something that local rodeo enthusiasts regard as a freakish athletic accomplishment along the lines of Wilt Chamberlain scoring 100 points in a game or Don Larsen’s World Series no-hitter.
In a rodeo that was held at the Kissimmee Silver Spurs Arena 2000, Cold Cold Heart bolted out of the chute, bucked off a rider with one arching jump, ran 50 yards across the arena, gathered himself just before reaching a 6-foot tall fence, and jumped over it like a thoroughbred horse clearing a hurdle.
“It was entertaining,” says Osceola rancher and Silver Spurs committee member George Kemfer, in a typical measure of contrified understatement.
Bulls are not sleek and angular and mobile in the way that horses are. Horses are quarterbacks and wide receivers. Bulls are offensive linemen. Horses are sculpted out of wood. Bulls are poured from cement, powerful in a pile-driver sort of way, big square compressed slabs of muscle that can corkscrew and shimmy and plunge.
Next time out, Cold Cold Heart did the same thing. Rider — gone. Fence — cleared. He also charged straight through a chain-link fence outside the arena and narrowly avoided steamrolling over a rodeo hand and a spectator or two as he tried to circle back to the holding pen to rejoin his fellow bulls.
Handlers finally broke the bull of his steeplechase ambitions by clustering a few of Cold Cold Heart’s fellow bulls together inside the arena and in front of the fence whenever he jumped, so he wouldn’t feel the need to go looking for his friends.
But he remains a formidable animal.
“He’s just a kicker. He jumps awful high. He’s got a lot of drop to him,” says Partin.
Raising good bucking bulls has become a big business in some parts of the country. Some bulls sell for tens of thousands of dollars. But Partin won’t get much of anything besides bragging rights out of whatever success Cold Cold Heart might have. All Silver Spurs rodeo proceeds go to charity.
Partin watches over the rough stock for the love of it. He is encyclopedic in his knowledge, serving as the one-man, institutional memory of the herd, ticking off where each colt came from, which bull just came up lame, how that mare always favors her right hind leg.
You do not generally expect people to be sentimental about a big, mean animal with horns and hooves. Partin has cause to be particularly attached to Cold Cold Heart.
The animal was picked out when it was young by Partin’s only son, Chris. Chris was killed in 1995 when his pickup truck caught the shoulder, spun out of control, and flipped over on one of those lonely stretches of Canoe Creek Road.
It’s partly because of that attachment, says Doug Partin, that he wants to see Cold Cold Heart succeed.
But in the bucking business, there is a fine line between good and too good. Cowboys like to have an aggressive bull to ride because the harder it bucks, the more likely they are to get a high score if they can ride the bull for the full eight seconds.
On the other hand, as Cold Cold Heart’s notoriety has spread, more and more cowboys have refused to ride the bull, assuming that it’s a waste of their time to even try. Partin lent Cold Cold Heart out to a Louisiana stock contractor, James Harper, in the hopes that Harper could get the animal in a rodeo somewhere where an ambitious cowboy could stay aboard for the duration.
Still no luck.
“That bull needs to be ridden,” says Partin.
We shall see. The next cowboy to give it a go will be Chad Lovern, of Philadelphia, Mo., who drew Cold Cold Heart in the first set of bull rides scheduled for Sunday afternoon.
Originally Published: February 15, 2003 at 12:00 AM EST
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