The first time Chad Bedell looked down from atop a running horse onto the tail section of a fleeing bulldogging steer, he chose not to make that dangerous leap. "You have to resign yourself to the fact you have to let go of the saddlehorn and grab hold of his horns," says Bedell. "I rode by the first steer. I caught the second one," he says, thinking back on the day when he went from being a Uintah High School wrestler to a steer wrestler.
That decision made halfway through high school shaped Bedell's life, sending him on to Utah State University's rodeo team and a USU degree in agriculture economics and then into the world of the professional rodeo cowboy.It wasn't necessarily his dream job, says Bedell, and he adds he doesn't know if he's just lucky at it or talented, but bulldogging's paid the bills the last several years.
A decision Bedell made two years ago in Reno took him from a near-unknown rodeo cowboy to the position he holds today - No. 1 bulldogger in the world, according to PRCA earnings for 1996. He's been the leading PRCA steer wrestling moneymaker since February with more than $48,500 made and about a $15,000 lead over No. 2.
St. George's Brock Andrus has also been in the steer wrestling top 10 over the past month.
Bedell's share of cash made Friday night at the West Jordan Stampede should keep him No. 1 going into this week's Dinosaur Roundup in Vernal - his hometown rodeo. Born 30 years ago in Steamboat Springs, Colo., Bedell's lived most of his life in tiny Jensen, just outside Vernal.
"It's always fun to go home, but it puts a little added pressure on you," he says.
That's OK. Even if he doesn't win the Dinosaur Roundup, "I can still go home and Mom will still feed me," Bedell says.
Bedell is scheduled to perform in theDinosaur Roundup (Thursday through Saturday at Vernal's West Park Complex) in the Thursday morning slack and hopes to trade for a second Thursday-night performance there.) He'll also perform at the Cheyenne (Wyo.) Frontier Days and on July 18 at the Days of '47 Rodeo (July 17-24) in Salt Lake City's Delta Center.
On this hot Saturday morning in between Friday's appearance at West Jordan and Saturday's competition at the Oakley rodeo, Bedell and his hazer, Tim Parker, and sometimes-traveling partner, T.W. Parker, the 1994 national prep champion, are practicing bulldogging skills in an arena behind Ross Parker's residence overlooking the Murray Parkway Golf Course. Bedell is working this day with his future horse, a 7-year-old dark bay named Edico, while his current mount, a 13-year-old sorrel named BCR Key's Fat Cat, is tied to a nearby fence.
Bedell is saying he's in mid-life crisis already because he can no longer do some of the rowdy stuff he did in college, and he's saying he doesn't feel much different being No. 1 in the world. "No, I still go home and Dad makes me shoe horses and build fences," he says. Along with a family guide/
outfitting service in Steamboat Springs, those are the jobs Bedell does when rodeoing isn't paying the bills, and that's what he'll return to four or five years down the line when rodeo retirement is necessary.
Ever since Reno two years ago, though, rodeoing's been good for Bedell.
He went into 1994's late-June Reno Rodeo, the country's sixth-largest, at a crossroads: Make money or stay home and shoe horses for the summer. "I won $12,000, and after that, I stayed on the road almost every weekend and qualified for the National Finals Rodeo," Bedell says. He performs about 90 times in about 60 rodeos a year now. After Reno, he took third at Cheyenne in '94. "That told the tale right there; I felt certain I'd make it (NFR) from there," he says.
A winning cowboy breaks about even between expenses and earnings until December's NFR in Las Vegas, where the PRCA's top 15 money-winners compete in a 10-performance rodeo for big cash. Bedell was second at the 1994 NFR, earning nearly $23,000 in his first appearance there. He won nearly $37,000 finishing sixth at the NFR in 1995. In yearly earnings, Bedell took eighth ($68,900) in the PRCA in '94, fifth ($82,300) in '95. In 10 PRCA years, he's totaled a little over $300,000. He's well-enough known now that he's beginning to get sponsorship money, having recently signed with a new bootmaker, Ariat, to wear its logo.
Halfway through the '95 NFR, Bedell says, he got on a winning roll that hasn't ended yet, "drawing awful good steers and getting lucky breaks." Should it continue to the '96 NFR, he could become Utah's first PRCA world champion since Lewis Feild's last all-around title in 1987.