An extraordinary bond

Sam Morris

Professional rodeo cowboy Mike Johnson has qualified for 23 consecutive National Finals Rodeos, nine of them with his horse Levi. They’re still pursuing the gold buckle.

By Ron Kantowski (contact)

Saturday, Dec. 13, 2008 | 2 a.m.

The bond between a man and his dog is so strong that Thomas Mann, the German Nobel laureate, wrote a novella about it.

The bond between a man and his horse is even more intense, National Finals Rodeo cowboy Mike Johnson says.

Johnson, 44, has qualified for 23 consecutive NFRs in the tie-down roping event. He has never won the gold buckle. Been close a bunch of times. Never won. Doesn’t talk about it much.

Levi, 14, has qualified for nine consecutive NFRs in tie-down roping. He has never won the gold buckle, either. Talks about it even less.

Levi is Mike Johnson’s horse.

They’re like Roy Rogers and Trigger, the Lone Ranger and Silver, Wilbur Post and Mister Ed. They’re virtually inseparable, except when traveling on the circuit. Then Levi’s in the back of the trailer and Mike’s up front, behind the wheel.

“He’s the biggest part of the team,” Johnson said as a docile Levi looked over his shoulder during our interview at the NFR stables, aka the UNLV intramural fields.

“You yourself have to practice and get focused and do all the things that other sports people do. But then you are totally dependent on your horse. He’s 70 or 80 percent of everything you do. He can make or break you.”

Levi has mostly made Johnson, who in September became the 14th contestant in Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association history to top $2 million in career earnings. Levi got an apple and a bale of hay, but that’s only because tie-down roping horses don’t care much for steak, because it probably hits a little too close to home.

Training a child to play classical piano takes slightly less time than training a horse to go tie-down roping. Johnson said a horse in his event must learn how to stand perfectly still, then explode like Secretariat when the calf is released from the narrow chute. That’s not easy. Then the horse must learn to track the calf before jamming on the brakes like Jeff Gordon, so the guy who feeds him apples and hay can jump off his back and tie down the calf. Then he must back up ... and stand perfectly still again. That takes a couple of years to master.

Then he must learn how to quietly travel in the back of a trailer while standing up. That usually takes a minimum of two more years.

When Mike Johnson retires from the rodeo, he should run a day care center. While I have yet to see a preschooler sleep while standing up, parents would pay good money for the standing-perfectly-still part of the training.

Having recently turned 14, Levi probably has five good years of rodeo left in him. Johnson probably does, too. He recently purchased a 50-acre spread just off Interstate 40 on the outskirts of Henryetta, Okla., where he grew up. If that town sounds familiar, it’s probably because one of its 6,000 residents once was Troy Aikman, the former Cowboys quarterback, whom Johnson has known since they were teenagers.

There are two Henryetta exits off the Indian Nation Turnpike. To get to Johnson’s place, you take the Super 8 Motel one. From there, you can follow the church steeple or the smell of pork barbecuing at Huckleberry’s Pig-Out Palace. Johnson’s wife, SherryLynn, a three-time NFR qualifier in barrel racing, says you can eat, sleep and go to church all at the same exit. That’s Oklahoma, she says with an engaging smile.

But if you see a big guy with a friendly face wearing stylish eyeglasses with red frames — “The first ones he wore were Prada. Mike thought it was a fish,”

SherryLynn says of the glasses her husband has worn since suffering a detached retina in a roping accident — wish him well in his pursuit of the elusive gold buckle.

“That’s the one thing I’ve been chasing,” Johnson said.

Levi, too. Even if he talks less about it than his owner.

“I have some young horses that will help out next year,” Johnson says. “But the big rodeos, the special situations, he’s the one.”

In Texas, you dance with the one that brung ya,’ especially during football season.

In Oklahoma, you ride him.

That’s just the way it is between a man and his horse.