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David Copher makes his living laughing at death.
If Hemingway wrote a book about David Copher it would be titled
Life in the Afternoon
. Copher is all about lives. Both saving and living them.
He's saved hundreds, if not thousands, of cowboys from being turned into a Jackson Pollock painting by 2,000 pounds of snorting beef. But it's the lives he's nearly lost that he remembers the most. Namely, his.
Ask the Santa Fe bullfighter, barrel man and rodeo clown for a vivid memory from his 26 years in the business and he'll tell you about Austin, Texas, 1985. Copher wanted to show off for the crowd. He wanted to tempt fate and his health insurance premium by jumping off a barrel and over a bull.
The bull had other plans.
"He stepped back and I landed right in the middle of his head," Copher says. "He flipped me in the air. I did a couple of nice flips and came down and ruined my right elbow, bent it backwards. I was able to get up but he came around and knocked me down again. I got up again, got to the fence but couldn't pull myself up and he pinned me up against the fence and just mauled me."
Chalk one up for the animal kingdom. But it's Copher who is still standing after nearly three decades of taunting ornery beasts and entertaining ornerier crowds. The Texas native has seen plenty since beginning his rodeo career as a high school bull and bronc rider. He has the scars to prove it. There are the usual bumps, bruises and abrasions. Then there's the punctured lung, the horn splinters and the broken ribs, toes and fingers.
"Things like that happen in an instant," Copher says. "Bulls can break your bones like they're nothing. They can pick you up and flick you like a booger right out of the arena."
Even if you're hunkered inside a barrel-as Copher inevitably will be during this week's Rodeo de Santa Fe-little stands between a laughing and a limping rodeo clown.
"I would say if you were sitting in that barrel and a car hit you at 15, 20 miles an hour that's how it'd feel," Copher says. "It's a jolt. I've had them throw me 20 feet without touching the ground. What sucks is that you know that you're going to stop at some point. You just don't know when."
The same could be said of Copher's rodeo career. He has seen the evolution of rodeo from a gritty fringe sport for cowboys and hayseeds to a glittering spectacle for…cowboys and hayseeds. He used to work for $20 a performance. Now he fetches around $1,000 an outing.
It used to be bull riders and bullfighters had only brass cajones and the cowboys-don't-cry mentality to protect them. Now there are helmets, flak jackets, mouth guards and rib protectors. But Copher is old-school. He works as a barrel man and rodeo clown more than a straight-up bullfighter these days, but nonetheless his only padding is usually a barrel and some knee pads. Oh, and one other piece of equipment no person tangling with angry bulls should do without.
"Always wear a cup," Copher advises. "If they hook ya, more than likely they're gonna stick a horn right between your legs. I found that out the hard way."
Ouch. But the best defense is experience.
"When you've been around long enough you get bull savvy," Copher says. "I don't fear the bulls, I respect the bulls. I understand the look in their eyes. When one raises that head up and makes eye contact with you, right then is the moment of truth. Most guys who've been doing it for a long time can tell if he's going to eat your lunch or blow right by you."
Yet the possibility of being turned into mincemeat by a raging bundle of rump roast is the least of Copher's concerns. The comedic side of his occupation is both the biggest joy and greatest bane of his existence.
"I'll get butterflies over doing comedy before I get butterflies over fighting bulls," Copher says. "I've done stand-up and it's the scariest thing there is on earth. It's scarier than a bull."
Scarier still was Copher's introduction to the Santa Fe art scene. A
self-taught artist who has been selling his work professionally since high school, Copher came to Santa Fe in the late '80s not to taunt frothing bulls but to join the region's percolating art community.
"Santa Fe is tough," Copher says. "I understand that 5,000 to 6,000 artists a year come here and fail. Maybe more. But I'm not a failure kind of guy."
Copher pulled into town with a truckload of bronze sculptures fashioned after the work of Frederic Remington. But Copher soon discovered he wasn't going to strike gold with his bronzes.
"They weren't good enough to compete with the artists in this town," Copher says. "But, rather than tuck my tail and go back to Texas, I got better. I worked harder. Pursued other methods. And kept trying."
When he isn't hamming for an audience or beefing with a bull, Copher is a painter, sculptor, poet and author. He claims modernist influences and an adoration for abstracts even though a majority of his work-including two paintings commissioned for the Rodeo Hall of Fame-deal with conventional Western themes like sweeping landscapes and portraits of horses and cowboys, bulls and clowns.
He has, however, tested the boundaries of his art like so many dyspeptic bulls. After taking up stone-carving, it took Copher three years to develop his
Out-of-the-Box
series depicting horses intricately placed in stone sculptures. His latest artistic venture is creating giclee paintings on his computer. He balks at those who suggest he stick to a single medium.
"They've tried to do that and I've always told 'em to go to hell," Copher says. "I do what I want and if it don't sell, I starve and that's OK. I'll get another rodeo."
His rodeo experience is also the impetus for yet another endeavor. Writing books. Five, in fact. One fiction novel, one account of his life's adventures and three children's books written from the perspective of animals he has used in his rodeo clown skits.
The books chronicle the adventures of Miss Fifi LaBoom the Wonder Dog-a chicken Copher trained to do dog tricks-a miniature horse named Teddy Bear and a trusty canine called Mighty Mike the Rodeo Dog.
Copher admits time and his myriad passions will eventually require him to wash off his rodeo clown makeup for good. But he's not ready to close that chapter quite yet. He tells burgeoning bullfighters the key to making it or breaking it in the rodeo arena is what a person makes of themselves after they've been broken.
"It all depends on what happens the first time they get caught and take a good mashing," Copher says. "If you can come back from that and you haven't lost your nerve you might make it in this sport. If you lose your nerve, you're done. If you're not ready to be involved in something that's exciting, dangerous and scary you need not apply. This job comes with it all."
