The biggest day of the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo is also its last day.
Saturday is the day the Grand Champion Steer is sold at auction. It’s also the finals of the Pro Rodeo with championship titles and big money on the line.
This weekend is also the last time fans in Fort Worth will hear the voice of a legendary rodeo announcer, Bob Tallman.
He calls it his “switch over year, my swan song.”
“I’ve waited for this for about eight months, but I knew sooner or later, sooner or later that tire’s going to go flat. Well, people just keep airing me up, airing me up. Thank you,” Tallman smiled as he told NBC 5 about the conversation with Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo bosses last spring.
“And they said it’s a new era. And I said, ‘I’m an old era, but I can do everything that they do today here.’,” Tallman recalled. “Then they started telling me about what they wanted to do for me after the fact. Retirement. Severance packages. This. That. All the other stuff. I thought that was pretty good. And I sat there and cried for a couple minutes, and they cried. We all got done crying, and I said, ‘let’s go for it.’ When you have done something for 30 years, 40 years, 50 years like this, there comes a point to when you say, ‘I don’t want to step away, I want to step up.’ And that’s where I’m gonna go.”
Tallman says stepping up means spending more time improving the genetics of cows on his ranch in Parker County and serving clients in his beef and real estate businesses.
And, he wants people to know, he is not retiring from announcing. He still has 140 other rodeos around the country, with the Houston Rodeo coming up right after he leaves Fort Worth.
But Fort Worth has been a special place since 1976 when the late Bob Watt, Jr., the former president and general manager at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo, heard him in San Francisco and invited him to Cowtown.
“I said, yes. I said, yes. And life changed. When I came to Fort Worth, to the rodeo, I came with no questions, but I was enthusiastic to be in the city,” Tallman said. “I started appearing different, starched my jeans different, starched my shirts different, of which I’ve lived in starched shirts forever. And it’s an old cattleman’s thing. But coming to Texas changed my life.”
He and his wife, Kristen, moved to a ranch in Parker County and raised their daughter there.
Tallman kept a busy rodeo schedule that raised his profile, too. Along the way, he racked up awards and honors as has announced more than 23,000 rodeo performances around the world, including in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
He holds the record for announcing the National Finals Rodeo 17 times and has been named the Pro Rodeo Cowboy Association Announcer of the Year a record 12 times.
Tallman is a fifth-generation beef rancher who grew up in Nevada. He’d hoped to be a champion cowboy but discovered his true talent was in describing the actions in the arena and sharing stories about the cowboys and cowgirls.
“My father-in-law, Harris Goodrich, my wife, Kristen, convinced me that if you think you want to go do this and you miss the opportunity, my dad wanted me to stay home and work at home in Nevada, but he convinced me, if you’ve got an opportunity, step out there. What are you going to do? Fall down? You get up. And so we did,” Tallman said. “I bought a $26 Windsor microphone, four big university speakers, 50-pound drivers, and a little four-channel mix box.”
It took him on a journey that has made him one of the best, most iconic announcers in rodeo history.
Tallman will hand the reins of the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo to Anthony Lucia, a cowboy himself turned announcer and someone familiar to Fort Worth crowds.
Lucia was in the arena at the Will Rogers Coliseum when his dad entertained rodeo crowds here with Whiplash, The Cowboy Monkey.
Garrett Yerrigan will be behind the mic, too, and with Tallman on Saturday night for his last rodeo.
What will Tallman say to the Fort Worth crowd? “You know, less is more. And I think I’ll probably say, ‘See ya. I’ll be back, but not at this mic. God bless you all. God bless America.'”