This Sampson Has Strength to Ride It Out

LAS VEGAS â€”  There are things you have to tell yourself never to do:

--Buy a used car from a guy wearing cowboy boots.

--Eat a potato cooked in tinfoil.

--Order stew in a roadside diner.

--Invest with a guy named Doc.

--Get on a private plane.

--And never get on an angry bull.

Charles Sampson is a guy who has lived by most of these sensible rules most of his life. All except the last.

Sampson, in a sense, rode a bull right out of the ghetto. Some guys make their escape with a basketball, a baseball, a book or a boxing glove. Charlie came out on the back of a bucking Brahma.

Charles was a city kid from the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles, where he had to make it a policy when he was growing up never to antagonize any of the members of the rival gangs, the Crips or the Pirus.

The street gangs accorded Charles special categorizing. “He rides cows,� they explained, as though that automatically disqualified him from any sane pursuits like street shootouts or dope dealing.

Sampson escaped to his own fantasy world--a stable. He loved the look, feel and even smell of one, and even though it was just a rent-a-horse corral hard by the Harbor Freeway, it was the King Ranch and the old Chisholm Trail combined to little Charlie.

“I had no interest in the dope traffic, the neighborhood feuds or the stereo ripoffs,� he says. “I just made a bee line every night after school to muck out the stalls and groom the horses and practice roping as soon as school got out.�

He even tried ditching school to get to his horsehide Shangri-La--until his bosses found out about it and told him to go back to the classroom or turn in his shovel and broom.

The guys on the corner were tolerantly amused. They just called him Wyatt or Duke or Cowboy and asked him which way Geronimo went or if he had any word from Custer yet. Or they’d jeer, “Hey, Buffalo Bill, why don’t you just ride a car like everyone else? Put horns on the hood, if it makes you feel better.�

They also called him Shorty and Pee Wee because no one expected this 5-foot 4-inch, 120-pound black kid from Compton-Watts, one of 13 brothers and sisters, to grow up to become the most famous cowboy this side of Marshal Dillon or the Sundance Kid.

Charles rode the first bull he ever saw. It was in Oklahoma and he was 13 at the time and he had gone there with his stable bosses to care for a string of ponies they were bringing back for the rodeo season.

Willie Mays probably tripled off the first curveball he saw, but Charles Sampson jumped off the first bull he saw. “I blacked out when he took two jumps out of the chute and I just slid off his back.�

Rodeo bulls, for those of you lucky enough never to have seen one up close, are 2,000 pounds of runaway malevolence. They are about the size of freight cars and trying to ride one is about like trying to stay aboard a tanker truck careening down the Grapevine with its brakes out. Except the truck won’t try to gore you when you fall off.

Sampson has become one of the best in the world at staying aboard these humped-back horrors. As if they weren’t bad-tempered enough, you’re supposed to rowel their necks. They put a bell on the rope to annoy them further.

Although the Old West was full of black cowboys, Charles Sampson is a pioneer of the mold of a Jackie Robinson in this sport. But it’s a distinction that, although it doesn’t bore him, doesn’t seem to him to have much relevance. “Bulls aren’t prejudiced,� he says. “They hate everybody, regardless of race, creed or color.�

Neither is the tanbark of the arena where Charles is competing in the National Finals Rodeo at the Thomas & Mack Center here this week. It offers broken ribs and wrists to all comers with equal indifference.

But not Sampson’s. He has not been thrown yet this week in seven “go-rounds,� the cowboys’ term for the nightly card of seven horse-and-cow events that make up the modern rodeo. Only one bull rider in the history of rodeo--Leo Brown in 1962 when there were only 8 instead of 10 bull rides--has gone through a national finals un-thrown.

Staying eight seconds on murder on the hoof, a spinning, ground-pawing, headhunting ton of hatred, can be like spending an afternoon in a washing machine. He seems boneless as he flops around on the Brahma’s blade back.

Once, he almost was. In Landover, Md., three years ago, his head came down just as the bull’s came up. Every bone in his face was shattered like an old teacup. “It broke every thing I had except my teeth,� he says.

He was in surgery for 12 hours and for a time wore a face mask in competition.

Sampson’s rides at the NFR this week have been models of consistency--a tie for first one night, two seconds, a third and at the end of seven go-rounds he was leading the competition. In his career, he has made more than $390,000 in a contest in which he is giving a 1,900-pound pull in the weights to a wild animal. Not since Nero has a human given an animal that much of a head start.

After riding a four-footed cutthroat named Puller at the arena the other night, bull rider Sampson sat talking to a newsman in the medical emergency room when suddenly an action on the closed-circuit TV caught his eye.

“Oh-oh, that man’s hurt,� he said, pointing to the screen where bullfighter-clown Rex Dunn lay in the dust, not moving. He was stretchered out of the ring several minutes later.

“How in the world did you notice that?� a reporter asked.

“With bulls, you never take your eye off them,� said Sampson. Not even on TV. With bulls, that’s not that hard to do, Sampson suggests. “They tend to keep your interest.�