New Yorker follows heart to new places

Bobby DelVecchio never won a world bull riding championship, but he finished second twice and third another time, and that's pretty remarkable for a guy from the Bronx. He also was the first soul possessing enough temerity to collect semen from a bucking bull for breeding purposes. That seems pretty remarkable, too, especially if one has ever tried it.

So if, for whatever reason, that guy from the Dos Equis commercial cannot perform the duties of "The Most Interesting Man in the World," then this guy DelVecchio -- the original Urban Cowboy -- would be my second choice.

Rodeo cowboys are supposed to hail from dusty cowtowns with names such as Mesquite or Dodge City or Road Forks. They generally do not hail from 182nd Street in Fordham-Bedford, a mostly Irish neighborhood steeped in grit and mettle in the West Bronx where DelVecchio and his pals would steal hot loaves of bread off delivery trucks.

He was Robert then, not Bobby. And though not exactly a criminal, he looked like one when a friend of his father's took DelVecchio to his first rodeo, the Cowtown Rodeo in rural Salem County, N.J., near where Bobby's dad, Frank, worked on a General Motors assembly line.

DelVecchio, who was among the stalwarts feted Tuesday night at the Professional Bull Riders Legends Reunion at the MGM Grand, said he remembers poking fun at "the redneck kids and their short haircuts." And then losing a junior bull riding contest to a redneck kid with a short haircut. That, in a nutshell, is what led him to drop out of Public School 135 after the seventh grade, to leave behind the tenement buildings and the delicatessens and the subway trains for this big, wind-swept place called Texas, which had a lot of cowboys, just like in the movies. Though none was called "Vinnie."

"I was at this four-way stop sign in New Jersey," DelVecchio said as cowboy hats with heads inside roamed the MGM Grand casino, "and now here I am. How did I get here?"

(I was thinking the same thing. Here I was, a guy from Chicago, chatting with a guy from the Bronx -- not about the Cubs, Yankees, graft, corruption and/or strong-arm robbery, but about bucking broncs and bull semen. At a Starbucks.)

Where Bobby DelVecchio once said "youse guys" he now says "y'all." At 54, he's still fit, still the nicest guy you'd want to meet, the first guy from the Bronx I've seen offer his chair to a woman at a Starbucks and stand so she could sit. It has been 40 years since he last stole a hubcap, but he still oozes charisma, like a giant slice of Half Moon pizza oozes cheese after being folded in two.

He was wearing a pressed shirt and pressed jeans and, of course, a black hat and a silver buckle, roughly the size of Wyoming, on his belt. It was from a rodeo in Salinas, Calif., where DelVecchio rode this bull called Oscar II -- aka Oscar Velvet, the former bucking bull of the year -- to a score of like a jillion or something.

DelVecchio doesn't recall the exact point total, only that it was higher than anybody had ever ridden that mean, ol' sumbitch before. And that's why of all the buckles he has won in all of those cowtowns, he still likes to wear that particular one.

Yes, a world championship buckle would have been nice, too, and in 1982, before the National Finals Rodeo moved to Las Vegas, he came close in losing to his pal Charlie Sampson. That was the year the world champion bull rider was an African-American from Los Angeles and the runner-up an Italian kid from the Bronx, and it makes you wonder why somebody hasn't made a movie about it by now. Perhaps somebody still will; DelVecchio said there's a screenplay sitting on a desk in Hollywood, waiting for people to peruse it over lunch with other people.

"The heart can take you places where the body doesn't want to go," DelVecchio said, and that might explain why he is getting ready to start a second go-round in the automobile business in Texas, after enjoying one in Arizona at a time when he couldn't decide if he wanted to keep chasing silver buckles or listen to his heart.

And if that doesn't pan out, well, there's always bull breeding.

In 1988, DelVecchio had this bright idea to collect semen from a bucking bull for the purpose of producing another bucking bull, like they do in horse racing. The first time, he did it himself, on a ranch in Shamrock in the Texas panhandle. There was a lot of kicking and a lot of snorting, and the bulls were pretty agitated, too.

DelVecchio said a straw full of semen from a bull called 018 Cowtown that cost $1 then would go for around $5,000 today.

As he said, "Leave it to a guy from New York to make money by selling bull semen."

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.