Larry Mahan, an eight-time rodeo world champion and swashbuckling showman who was as soon as known as “rodeo’s first matinee idol,” and who brokered that repute into aspect careers as a Hollywood actor, a rustic singer and a purveyor of must-have cowboy boots, died on May 7 at his house in Valley View, Texas. He was 79.
Bobby Steiner, a pal and a fellow member of the National Rodeo Hall of Fame, stated the trigger was bone most cancers.
Even with out his oft-noted rock-star swagger, Mahan (pronounced MAY-han) would have certified as a titan of the sport. Competing in bull driving, saddle bronc driving and bareback driving, he gained six World All-Around Cowboy championships in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, together with 5 in a row from 1966 to 1970.
He added one other in 1973, and he additionally gained world bull-riding championships in 1965 and 1967.
Ah, however the swagger. Mahan emerged as a new-breed competitor in the mod Sixties and the breezy Seventies.
“With his flared double-knit slacks and Cassini shirts,” The Austin American-Statesman noticed in 1971, he was “the antonym of the previous cowhand from the Rio Grande bit.”
He climbed onto bulls and broncs carrying shoulder-brushing locks, in addition to silk shirts and chaps in a rainbow of colours. Away from the area, he carried himself like the star he was — tooling round in a Jaguar, traversing the nation in his twin-engine Cessna, showing as Johnny Carson’s visitor on “The Tonight Show.” Some likened him to Elvis Presley.
“Football had Joe Namath, boxing had Muhammad Ali, and rodeo had Larry Mahan,” Steiner stated in a cellphone interview. “I do not know that anyone will ever know what ‘it’ is, however he had ‘it.’”
He additionally helped deliver mainstream visibility to what was historically a regional sport. Long earlier than Martha Stewart and the Kardashians, the flamboyant Mahan dabbled in celeb model extension; In 1967, Time journal known as him the “Grey Flannel Cowboy.”
Branching into Western put on, he developed a line of cowboy boots together with signature boots that grew to become as coveted amongst lonesome-trail varieties as prime Air Jordans are amongst sneakerheads. (Josh Brolin’s character asks for a pair of Larry Mahans in black, measurement 11, when looking for recent garments in the 2007 movie “No Country for Old Men.”)
He additionally made his matinee-idol repute at least a tad literal, learning appearing in Los Angeles and showing in “The Honkers,” a 1972 rodeo drama starring James Coburn and Slim Pickens; “Sixpack Annie,” a racy 1975 drive-in particular; and “The Good Old Boys,” a star-studded 1995 tv western directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones.
Even music beckoned — if briefly. In 1976, Mahan launched a rustic album, “King of the Rodeo,” on Warner Bros. Records. “Couldn’t sing a lick,” he recalled in an interview with the newspaper The Oklahoman. “It was a flop, however it was enjoyable.”
Perhaps his greatest mark on standard tradition got here in 1973, when he was the topic of “The Great American Cowboy,” which gained the Academy Award for finest documentary characteristic. That film, directed by Keith Merrill, chronicles his quest to reclaim the All-Around World title from Phil Lyne, a youthful Texan champion who had seized his mantle after Mahan scuffled by way of injury-marred years in 1971 and 1972. The American-Statesman known as the film “a shocking look at the least understood anachronism in trendy America — the cowboy.”
Larry Edward Mahan was born on Nov. 21, 1943, in Salem, Ore., the eldest of 4 youngsters of Ray and Reva (English) Mahan.
He grew up in the close by city of Brooks, and his dad and mom purchased him his first horse — a half Arabian, half quarter horse that value $125 — when he was 7 or 8. He entered a youngsters’s rodeo weeks later and took house a $6 prize. driving calves.
Larry continued to rack up wins in dozens of youth contests whereas a pupil at Salem High School. He joined the skilled tour in 1963. Two years later, at 21, he took house the nationwide bull-riding title and $25,000 (the equal of about $245,000 immediately). A 12 months after that, he gained his first all-around title. To the rodeo world, a legend was born.
But for all his glittering escapades, he by no means misplaced sight of the stakes — particularly when driving a 1,500-pound Brahma bull, a feat that has been known as “the most harmful eight seconds in sports activities.”
After he suffered a damaged leg at a rodeo in Ellensburg, Wash. In 1971, Sports Illustrated wrote, “Outsiders typically protest that rodeo is merciless to animals, which will need to have struck Mahan as ironic as soon as the horse stopped dragging him like a rag doll alongside the laborious floor.”
He echoed that time in an interview with the identical journal two years later: “Bulls are the meanest, rankest creatures on earth. Horses do not attempt to step on you once they throw you off. They do not need to journey. Bulls like to step on you, or whip your face into the again of their cranium and break your nostril and knock out your tooth.”
Mahan is survived by his daughters, Lisa Renee Mahan and Alli Eliza Mahan, and his sisters, Susan Stockton-Simpson, Jody Thompson and Dana Mahan Hermreck. His son, Tyrone, died in 2020, and his spouse, Julanne Read Mahan, died final 12 months. His marriages to Darlene Mahan, Robin Holtze and (*79*) McNab resulted in divorce.
Along with fame got here well-known pals, together with the nation stars Jerry Jeff Walker and Tanya Tucker and the Dallas Cowboys fullback and rodeo standout Walt Garrison. But in his social life, Mahan not often let the revelry get out of hand.
“He would not go to the cowboy bars and have a good time at night time,” Steiner stated. “Back in these days, most individuals did the ‘I’m a cowboy and I’m going to get together my butt off’ factor. But he took it severely. He needed to. He was in three occasions on daily basis. I used to be a bull rider, and that was powerful sufficient.”
Mahan, in reality, acquired his highs in different methods. “Winning is to me what alcohol is to the alcoholic, what dope is to the addict,” he stated in a 1975 interview with the New York Times sports activities columnist Red Smith. “I’ve acquired to have it.”