The friendship between Poplar Bluff Police Chief Danny Whiteley and Gary William “Butch” Kirby dates back five decades, to when the two cowboys were riding high as bull riders who competed in the professional rodeo circuit.
Kirby, 65, of Stephenville, Texas, arrived in Poplar Bluff recently to judge the 74 participants in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association Xtreme Bulls & Bands, held March 5 and March 6 at the Black River Coliseum. About 3,000 people attended the event, organizers said.
The two men have known each other since the 60s and 70s, when Whiteley was close friends with Kirby’s older brother, Sandy, and all three men battled one-ton beasts in rodeo rings for supremacy.
For them, there was nothing like the contest, the adrenalin rush and the crowds, and the shared experiences entangle their pasts like lasso rope.
“That was the most fun I had ever,’’ declares Whiteley unabashedly. “The rodeo cowboy fraternity, for lack of a better term, I think if not the best, is one of the best, period.”
“It varies from day to day,’’ Kirby says of bull riding. “When you win, everything’s great. When you lose, usually a bull steps on your back and walks on you. You get run over.”
This weekend was the first time the two men had seen each other in two years. The last time was when both attended the annual George Paul Memorial Xtreme Bull Riding event in Del Rio, Texas. The event is held annually in memory of Paul, the 1968 world bull riding champion who died in 1970, when a plane he was piloting crashed. He was 23 years old.
Whiteley was a close friend of Paul’s, and Kirby calls him “one of my heroes.”
“I wanted to be just like him,’’ said Kirby, who himself went on to win the bull riding world championship a decade later in 1978. “When George was killed, it devastated me.’’
Whiteley and Kirby hadn’t seen each other in nearly two decades when the two caught up in 2019.
“We just picked up our conversation like I had seen him at the Sikeston rodeo last week,’’ said the chief. “And it had been 15-18 years.”
Last weekend, in Poplar Bluff, they had another go-round of reliving old times and catching up on friends and family.
“Oh shoot, we just hung out and talked about old times and old friends and different rodeo events and happenings over the years,’’ Whiteley said. “We relived the old days.”
“I’ve known him since he was a kid,’’ said the 74-year-old police chief. “He’s still a kid compared to my age.”
The two men’s affection for each other – and their glory days as bull-riding stars – is palpable in conversation with them. Whiteley has ridden bulls “in every major rodeo in the United States,’’ including in venues like the Madison Square Garden, Houston Astrodome and Cheyenne Frontier Days. He did it until one day a bull got the best of him.
“I was 38 years old when I got on my last bull, and that was the one bull too many,’’ the chief said.
His hand got caught in the rope and he fell off the left side of the bull, resulting in a double-compound fracture that left him in a cast for 11 months. The 30 seconds that he was “hung up’’ seemed like an eternity. He steer-wrestled for a few years, a less- dangerous sport, until the early 2000s.
Kirby was 23 when he won the world championship. In those days, he was surrounded by Whiteley and his brother Sandy and other cowboys who traveled like he did – 250 days out of the year competing in rodeo bull-riding contests.
He followed his two older brothers in the field. Each graduated from the trick stunt troupe that their mother Mildred performed at rodeos in the West, primarily during the summer months. He was four years old when his mother first put him on the backs of the Shetland ponies they used in their contract performance.
“You could make more money if you went out West,’’ Kirby recounted. “We would make pretty good money back in those days. We would make our money out there and come back to New Jersey in the wintertime.”
He performed in the troupe until he was about 15, when he decided he wanted to follow his brothers into bull riding.
“I wanted to be a bull rider, which my mom did not agree with,’’ he recalled. “She said, ‘You will not be a bull rider.’ But the more she said no, the more I was hanging with Danny Whiteley and George Paul, and I guess she gave in.’’
Sandy, Kirby’s oldest brother, was Whiteley’s traveling partner to the rodeos, along with a few other cowboys. For about five or six years, they rented a Twin-Engine plane that Whiteley used to hopscotch across the Midwest to attend the rodeos.
“We were all a little skeptical about did we really want to get in an airplane with Danny Whiteley,’’ joked Kirby, who rode bulls professionally for 19 years. But a friend assured them all. “He said ‘Danny loves Danny a lot more than he loves anybody else in that airplane.’ He wasn’t going to get us into trouble.”
Kidding aside, Kirby said Whiteley was “a good pilot. It was a lot quicker getting to rodeos flying than it was getting there by car.’’
“I took my piloting very seriously,’’ Whiteley said. “And the funny thing is, when I’ve got four or five guys in the airplane with me, and I’m the only pilot, they were very interested in making sure I didn’t get crippled up or run over by a bull.”
Kirby, who will be inducted into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in 2021, won the world bull riding championship in 1978 against Donnie Gay. Gay had won the title the previous four years and the next four consecutive years.
“Me and him are friends,” Kirby said of Gay, now a television rodeo announcer. “But we have a little bit of a rub there because I was the one who messed up his streak.’’
But there are no hard feelings in the rodeo, said Whiteley.
“Rodeo is probably the only sport that I’m aware of that the people who you are competing against help you in every way they can to beat them. One, because it’s a sport. Two, because that’s just the right thing to do, and three it’s because it’s the fraternity.”
These days, Kirby is on the road 180 days out of the year judging the up-and-coming rodeo talent. He says sometimes the “old road gets a little long,’’ particularly in the summer months, which is high rodeo season. As he gets older, he says, he has begun appreciating his past and his rodeo friendships even more, particularly with Whiteley.
“The friendship will never end,’’ he said. “Sometimes you have to have something taken away from you before you appreciate something.”