Mike Brunker Horse racing editor • Profile • E-mail

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - If ever a person was well prepared to absorb the ups, the downs and the jarring body blows that go with being a trainer of high-strung and frighteningly fragile thoroughbreds it is Carl Nafzger, who perfected his shock-absorbing ability during 12 years as a professional bull rider.

Nafzger, 65, trainer of Kentucky Derby winner Street Sense, climbed on his first bull at 16 near his boyhood home of Oilton, Texas, at the urging of several friends.

“I wasn’t worth a dime after that,” the rawboned trainer said Friday at Churchill Downs. “You couldn’t get me enough bulls. That’s all I wanted to do.”

Nafzger, who dutifully answered repetitive questions all week about Street Sense — winner of the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile in November and the morning-line 4-1 second choice — brightened noticeably when the opportunity arose to talk about his former occupation.

The allure of bull riding, he said, was a tremendous adrenaline rush.

“All bull riders are adrenaline junkies,” he said. “When you’re riding a real rank bull, it’s like slow motion. It’s like a real good batter at bat. . . . You don’t think about anything you do on a bull. . . . It’s fast, it’s powerful.”

Once he’d experienced the high, he made sure he could get his bull-riding fix no matter what else was going on in his life.

“Even when I went to my first semester in college . . .  I got permission not to be in classes Wednesday afternoons so I could drive 150 miles to Silverton, Texas, and get on three or four bulls,” he said with his distinctive nasal Texas twang.

By the early 1960s, he was traveling the grueling professional bull riding circuit, driving from rodeo to rodeo and working eleven months a year, with only a three week break before Christmas.

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His best year was 1963, when he finished the year ranked as the no. 3 bull rider in the world. He also participated in the national finals that year and the next two years.

“If I wasn’t injured, I was on the road,” he said. “It was a great life and I learned a lot rodeoing.”

There were other fringe benefits as well. Nafzger met his wife of 39 years, Wanda, while traveling the circuit.

The only negative, according to Nafzger, were the inevitable injuries.

“There’s a saying among bull riders, ‘It isn’t whether you’re going to get hurt, it’s when you’re going to get hurt,” he said. “You’re dealing with dynamite. I had seven concussions, broke my nose 4 times, got a rod in my right leg, and pins in my right ankle.

“Sometimes you’d be in the gate and you’d say, ‘Why am I doing this?’ Then you’d get off and say, ‘Where’s the next one?’”

It also was a livelihood fraught with financial uncertainty.

“If you ride good, you win,” he said. “If you don’t win, you get a ‘thank you and see you later.’”

But Nafzger loved the life and it was only the toll of the “constant pounding” that forced him to retire in 1968.

“When you’re a bull rider, you’re like this horse here, you’re like a football player,” he said. “They kept running new bulls out there and I kept running the same old body out there. And there’s a time to switch.”