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The Biggest Badass Bull Rider You May Not Know: Meet Jonnie Jonckowski
Decades before Caitlin Clark, a fearless athlete blazed historic trails.
Launching nothing-but-net bombs from another zip code, bouncing seeing-eye passes through a tangle of bodies, viewing the court like a Marvel character with uber-vision, Caitlin Clark deserves all the attention she’s getting.
The mentions and stories and comments are measured in gigabytes. The Total Eclipse barely eclipsed totally awesome Caitlin Clark.
She’s like Tiger and Yellowstone and COVID. She has her own Effect.
Few may know it, but in days gone by there was another fearless female athlete whose exploits might have broken the internet had it existed.
Her name is Jonnie Jonckowski, and can you imagine the attention she would have received on social media when beating the boys in a bull riding while getting her nose virtually torn from her face?
Jonckowski would become the first woman to compete against men at the highest level in professional bull riding at the Justin World Bull Riding Championship in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1992.
The close call when her nose was nearly lopped from her face happened well before that, when she was starting out, trying her darndest for a spot in bull riding camps and schools.
Dozens had rejected her. They wouldn’t take a girl.
“It ain’t easy to slip in and be one of the guys when you’re not one of the guys,” she said.
So, next time she kept it simple, calling to enter a “Jonnie,” which on the phone sounds a lot like Johnny.
She was accepted and showed up in Fountain, Colo., to train in a school run by Chris LeDoux, a charismatic multi-hyphenate superstar who won a bareback world championship and sold more than 6 million records singing country music (and riding a mechanical between live songs during his concerts) along with former saddle bronc world champion Bobby Berger and rodeo world champion Bruce Ford.
The motley assortment of bulls didn’t quite match the pedigree of the instructors. There were some tough spinners, but it was mostly a pen of kangaroo jumpers and wild lungers gyrating without rhyme or reason.
Guys were getting dumped like trash on the Jersey turnpike extension adjacent to Bayonne.
But girl, boy, it didn’t matter. Bulls don’t recognize pronouns, and nobody was going to outmuscle them.
One rider standing tall was a strong-minded, curly haired blond, bubbly like a shaken Fresca but determined to overturn a lifetime of uninvited doubt.
Attendance in the school, which began with more than 100 would-be rodeo stars, was shrinking fast. Jonnie, playing a game of anticipation, balance, and finesse, was staying on and recording scores. One session, she got on nine bulls.
On the final day, down to 10 riders, a school champion would be determined. Jonnie drew a bull named Spotted Dog.
“I didn’t like that bull from the get-go,” she said. “He didn’t have a rhythm or any pattern. He had big horns and was built like a big ol’ yak in pioneer days pulling a cart. There was nothing about him I liked.”
Jonnie made the eight seconds, and when she pulled the tail of her rope to dismount, the bull tripped. She was ready to throw a leg over him, but Spotted Dog hooked a horn and flipped. Half sitting on the ground, she saw a hoof coming at her.
“I thought, ‘Oh God, he’s going to kick me in the face!’ My head snapped back. I didn’t feel a thing. I thought he missed me. I jumped to the side but couldn’t see well. Bobby Berger and Bruce Ford ran out and said, “Jeez, your nose is torn off!”
Then LeDoux ran out and said, “But you stayed on. You won!”
Her face looked like it had come out of a blender. Medics applied compresses and loaded her into the ambulance. The cranking motor produced a depressing sound of scraping metal – a dead battery.
They climbed into the second ambulance, sinking to one side. Flat tire.
Finally, Jonnie was rushed to the nearest hospital – 40 minutes away. Her rotten luck since being matched with Spotted Dog took a turn. A humongous, face-saving turn. A national plastic surgeon’s convention was in town.
The out-of-town specialists who were summoned were excited to see her, as Jonckowski remembers. “A bull had exploded my face apart. I was ripped from my hairline down through my eyebrows across the bridge of my nose. I was a good project for them.”
Jonnie’s rearranged face was fixed by the very best in the business. At no charge.
“They put me together for nothing. I was like a Humpty Dumpty test dummy. They were thrilled to have me,” she said with a laugh.
Staying on Spotted Dog until the whistle for a good score made her school champion. Nobody, though, would officially admit that. The school couldn’t lose face by giving the buckle to a girl.
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Dan Hubbell Photography
It was actually a serious injury in a different sport – track and field – that set Jonckowski on a path to pursue the world’s most dangerous one: bull riding.
Since she was old enough to play sports growing up in North Dakota and Montana, Jonnie had been a gifted athlete in whatever she tried.
An incorrigible tomboy withering to no challenge, she wanted to be first, the best, the highest, the strongest. Had to outrun everybody. The rougher the horseplay, the better. Jonnie’s mom made her wear jeans because she kept tearing up her dresses. (“Mom wound up wishing she hadn’t done that,” she said.)
Rambunctious little Jonnie didn’t stay small. In high school, she shot up nine inches to 5’ 8” – a lanky, rangy girl who began winning track and field events. With “the Olympics on my brain,” she was second in the country running collegiate track at Flathead Valley Community College (a small school in Kalispell, Montana that held its own against NCAA powerhouse universities) and appeared headed for the 1976 summer games in Montreal.
In the final qualifying event for the Pentathlon, however, she clipped a hurdle at full speed and went sprawling. Jonnie badly injured her back and was temporarily paralyzed. The dream was over.
She left college. For two years, she could barely walk. She was lost and despondent. One afternoon with her mom outside Billings, she saw a sign advertising an all-girls rodeo. She was no longer able to run like the wind but figured she could sit on an animal doing the work.
She went into a bar and found an experienced cowboy to teach her riding basics.
“I was so naïve, I didn’t even know to be afraid,” she said. “If others could do it and survive, how bad could it be?”
She started getting on bulls – with only one hand in the bull rope, not the two hands other women were told to use.
The more she tasted the rush of the rides, the hotter the fire burned.
“You don’t do it to get hurt,” she said. “You do it because it feels great when it goes right.”
She also began hearing that girls shouldn’t be riding bulls because strong, able men have been killed doing so.
She was 22. In 10 years, Jonnie Jonckowski would be a world champion bull rider.
Coming back to physical competition from her serious running injury helped prepare Jonckowski for a career in a sport where injuries come often.
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Jonnie Jonckowski
While recovering from Spotted Dog’s head kick, she had wondered what was next. Bull riders do a good job of rationalizing their career choice, and Jonckowski was cowboy stubborn in deciding to get back to riding bulls as soon as she could.
“My rationalization was ‘I’m too ugly to do anything else, I gotta go back!’” she said. “Besides, God wouldn’t have healed me up so fast if he didn’t want me to go out and do it again.”
Spotted Dog went and tripped before kicking her in the face. But even with better bulls, she’d likely get hurt again.
“I was a gangly, skinny kid for a long time – big knees, all elbows. I looked awfully skinny,” she explained.
She couldn’t control a one-ton animal, but she could build her body to be in a better position next time.
Feeling the power of riding on top of a veritable freight train, realizing the gravity of her decision to continue to compete, and wired to favor risk-taking over failure, Jonckowski didn’t stay skinny for long.
After deciding to ride full time, she “lived in a gym seriously building my body.” She ran herself through high-intensity cardio routines, lifted weights, and created her own exercises, like putting a basketball between her knees, turning her toes out, and jumping around. She got ripped, boasting 7 percent body fat.
“You gotta be strong through the middle to ride bulls, and my abs were ridiculous,” she said. “I was a tough son of a gun. A big part of bull riding is reflexes to counteract the bull. As an athlete, I knew that reflex doesn’t go through fat well. Other girls riding were flapping all over the place. I was in control, so I’d get the points.”
Jonckowski worked that body, and it wasn’t always on a bull. She’d show up at the cowboy’s locker room in a dress and heels wearing red nail polish.
“I didn’t want them to think I was macho. I was all woman and didn’t want any mistakes to be made by anyone,” she explained.
No errors would be made. As the other riders were getting ready, Jonnie would morph into cowboy-athlete stud mode.
“The other guys were stripping down to the buff, so I’d strip down to my panties and a sports bra to scare the sh-t out of them! And then I put on my riding gear,” she said.
The transformation jacked her confidence in a sport said to be at least 90 percent mental. “I may have shown up in a dress and everyone’s thinking, ‘She’s a joke, she’s gonna get killed.’ But when I put my boots on and pulled my hat down, it was like, ‘Yeah, I’m a bad ass. I can do this.’”
And how she did. One rank bull called Mr. T had not been ridden in 42 outs by the best riders in the top rodeo association, PRCA. (This was before 20 PRCA rodeo cowboys broke away to form PBR in 1993). Jonnie made the 8 on Mr. T in South Dakota.
Conquering a nearly impossible bull was a very big deal, helping win the grudging respect of the other riders watching her earn her stripes, like when she broke her arm in 12 places or was walloped so hard in the back of the head the blow broke orbital bones in her face, giving her kaleidoscopic vision for two months.
“I was beat up where you literally throw up all night,” she told CBS newsman Ed Bradley in the early 1990s. “If I can feel physically strong enough, I can convince my mind I can do this. If my mind believes it, it tells my body it could do it.”
Surviving the stompings and soaking in the adulatory screams became addictive.
“It’s a rush, it’s a charge, it’s the adrenaline, it’s the crowd!” she said in an interview in the late 1980’s. “Adrenaline is my drug!”
The bull riders didn’t know quite what to make of her.
“At first it was like a high school dance. I was on one side of the arena, and they were on the other side. They wouldn’t touch me with stick,” she said.
Another improbable outsider in the sport would help her in the chutes. Gary Richards, a Black cowboy known for his celebratory “funky chicken dance,” later becoming the oldest rider to win a PBR premier series event at 39, would pull her rope.
Others were stand-offish but grudgingly let her do her thing.
At one rodeo event, Bradley and Dan Rather from CBS were researching a piece on her. They pulled various riders aside for their opinion about this new gal. What did they think? Does she belong? The veteran newsmen were anticipating juicy conflict – hostile cowboys eager to show her the door. They couldn’t find the expected narrative.
“I’d been up and down the road living in a pickup, sleeping in a room with 20 other people. The guys knew I’d paid my dues and earned my stripes,” she said.
Jonckowski deftly courted attention without throwing shade on genuine rodeo stars with years of accomplishments like Tuff Hedeman and Ty Murray.
Jonckowski was honored last weekend at PBR’s premier series event in Billings
Bull Stock Media
Decades later, Murray, a 9-time world champion, admired Jonckowski’s derring-do.
“To have people telling you every day all the different ways you can’t do it, and shouldn’t do it, that just fueled her fire,” he told Montana PBS documentary director Sabrina Lee who is now developing a film, “Jonnie.” chronicling her incredible life.
Jonckowski keenly understood and leveraged her media appeal.
Appearing on David Letterman’s NBC show and CBS’s “48 Hours” she was beaming, gracious, humble cowgirl just thrilled to be part of the big show. She knew if she looked good on the bulls – don’t get dumped right out of the chutes, or worse, get thrown before the gate opened – she’d avoid being ridiculed like a crash-test dummy in a sideshow spectacle.
“At first, I was living out a small bit of fantasy in my life. But I got serious early on and put in the work, and knew I could compete,” she said. “I thought as long as I don’t look foolish out there, with my sex appeal, everyone’s gonna know who the hell I am.”
The best of intentions. Jonnie had no idea what that fame would entail.
Riding in Wyoming alongside the men in 1988, she received an urgent call from the press trailer.
“Get down here now” was the order.
The buzzing media center looked like when the Beatles had landed at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport. Rows of reporters 100 feet deep were snapping photos and screaming questions at her. Jonnie-mania had arrived at Cheyenne Frontier Days. While the lads from Liverpool could play off one another like the Marx Brothers, faced with similar doubtfully snarky questions, Jonnie only had herself.
Dozens of cameras were trained on her, in the press room and around the bucking chutes. The pressure became nearly overwhelming. “I was sick to my stomach, throwing up,” she remembered.
An important figure on the American sports scene helped her.
Prior to ubiquitous game highlights living on our smart phones, sports reporter George Michael had a popular national TV show serving those clips. Michael was a longtime fan of rodeo.
No one in mainstream media did more to legitimize rodeo than Michael, who appreciated good rides, but more than anything, loved to tell a good story. And in the mid 80’s, one of the best sports stories was a vibrant, joyful blonde from Montana taking on the big boys in a sport that could kill. “The George Michael Sports Machine” began covering Jonnie, and amid the Cheyenne media crush Michael proved to be a savior.
“George was making jokes and giving the levity I needed so much with all these cameras four feet from my face,” she recalled.
Later, athletes and celebrities were available for fan autographs. Country music legend George Strait drew a long line. Hundreds of fans patiently waited to say hello to a rising young Oklahoman influenced by Strait by the name of Garth Brooks.
Another line snaked ever farther around the iconic fairground’s pebble shrimp po boy and smoked turkey leg stands. Everyone wanted to see the famous, fearless female bull rider, the one and only Jonnie Jonckowski.
Country music superstar Lainey Wilson congratulates Jonnie on her induction into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame.
Jacquie Kittson
Similar to Billie Jean King, a household name for integrating professional tennis and pushing for equality for female athletes, Jonckowski would succeed in securing women riders a place for their league to compete at Cheyenne Frontier Days, the rodeo considered “The Daddy of them All.”
She often competed against men, while the women’s circuit she helped lead remained separate. She was okay with that. The girls were riding. The crowds were cheering. Progress was being made.
In 1986, she won her first World Championship in the now-defunct PWRA (Professional Women’s Rodeo Association) by taking her last ride with a crushed leg after being stepped on in the final round leading into the championship.
Her damaged leg had blown up like Popeye’s arm. Doctors warned that a blood clot from the injury could kill her. She didn’t need a high score, just one successful ride to win the championship. Jonnie made it to the bucking chutes on crutches and had to be hoisted onto the final bull. She rode him.
She had her gold medal.
Jonckowski would fly to New York to sit with Letterman, who commented, “You thought track was too dangerous, so you tried something safer…like bull riding.”
Support our Kickstarter for Jonnie! Jonnie Jonckowski is a Montana legend. A woman in a man’s world, Jonnie’s obsession with being the best defied expectations, challenged gender stereotypes, and earned her two bull riding world championships. -> https://t.co/RwGEVscdz3 pic.twitter.com/tUJGsFGwkO
— Montana PBS (@MontanaPBS) April 17, 2024
Earning that buckle the hard way, fair and square, allowed for good-natured joking. She didn’t want to be a martyr or recklessly stupid, just recognized as the world’s best. Jonnie wore the buckle upside down. Whenever she looked down, she wanted to see W O R L D C H A M P I O N.
She’d win another World Championship and, in 1991, was inducted into the Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. Riding her first bull in the late 1970s, she retired in 2000 at 46 years old.
“I didn’t quit it, it quit me,” she said. “My body couldn’t take it, or I’d still flippin’ be out there. To this day, I’ll see four or five of those bulls in a performance, and I say, ‘I wish I had a rope. I could ride that one!’ Probably a bad thought, but I still have it. You can’t do something for 25 years, get on 1,500 bulls when you count ‘em up, feeling and feeding off the crowd, the lights, the mud, the blood, the whole thing, limpin’ out of the arena draggin’ the rope, you can’t have that adrenaline poppin’ out and flushing though your body all that time and still not crave it.”
At 69, she has a slightly crooked smile and a scar running down her forehead that would have been a lot worse if it weren’t for a plastic surgeon confab in town on the right day. For a long time after hanging up her rope, she wondered “What was I thinking? I’d look in the mirror and say to myself ‘What have you done?’”
What she did has inspired many. And scars are nothing but tattoos with better stories, right?
Her story is about to be told on a mass scale. Along with Lee’s documentary film, a biopic called “Baby, Hold On,” written by Gigi Levangie, best known for the screenplay for the film “Stepmom,” is in development with Australian director Nash Edgerton signed on to direct.
When Jonckowski’s incredible life is brought to the silver screen, a new generation of young girls and boys will find fresh permission to do anything.
“There’s something everyone is passionate about, but they have a tremendous fear about going forward,” she said. “If you believe in yourself, and give 1,000 percent, it will happen, just like it did for me.”
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Sabrina Lee
Today, Jonckowski pours time, energy, and every extra dollar into a charity she founded, Angel Horses.
She had been working in geriatric physical therapy and decided to bring a horse to her facility.
“I got pink-slipped the next day, but I realized (equine therapy) could bring so much joy to so many, particularly older seniors who are shut-in and can feel lost, lonely and abandoned,” she said.
She created Angel Horses, using rescued horses and donkeys roaming 10 acres filled with trees and creeks to give veterans, cancer patients, and senior shut ins comfortable, compassionate therapy at no cost to them.
The organization was nearly wiped out last June when it rained for three weeks in south central Montana. A final four-inch deluge triggered floods that totaled Jonnie’s house and badly damaged the Angels Horses ranch.
Just like when riding, there was no quit in Jonnie. She lost just about everything, but with the help of generous donors, she rebuilt. Now, she’s back on her feet…even after a recent fall resulting in the kind of gruesome injury she gritted through when getting her teeth knocked out by bucking bulls.
Amid the rebuild construction, Jonnie was carrying two five gallon-buckets of water and tripped over a floorboard, ripping three muscles off her shoulder and shredding her bicep. She had surgery in March.
“The good news is, for someone your age, you have bones like marble,” the surgeon said after bringing in two more doctors to pull down the stubbornly retracted muscle and sew it back onto bone.
Angel Horses is finally back in expansion mode. Two rescued Amish Belgians, Laney and Larry, 16 and 17, recently arrived from Pennsylvania.
And there’s new recognition for Jonnie.
She was inducted into the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame this year. During a break in the action of last weekend’s PBR’s elite Unleash The Beast tour in Billings, the trailer from the documentary “Jonnie” was shown, and the pioneering rider was recognized in front of an appreciative Montana crowd.
On the arena concourse, a new merchandise line, “Jonnie x PBR” was unveiled.
Jonnie said being honored in her hometown, displaying buckles emblazoned with her name and apparel she helped design, was “an exclamation point on a life journey that got me here. This is God’s time, and God always has the right time. All of a sudden, I’m back in the limelight. I get to live this all over without the fear of getting run over, kicked, or dragged.”
Sage Kimsey and Jonnie Billings
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After the film trailer was shown, Sage Kimzey, a seven-time PRCA World Champion now riding in PBR, headed into the stands to tell Jonnie that seeing her on screen reminded him why he loves to ride.
Years after Jonckowski left it all on collegiate track fields and often rocky dirt in countless rodeo arenas, women’s sports is exploding. More people watched the 2023 women’s college basketball championship than the men’s title game.
“The Caitlin Effect” combined with Jonnie’s apparel line and new films under development should bring a wave of fresh attention to an incomparable trail blazer in the most dangerous sport any human can try, introducing the inspirational story of a one-of-a-kind American original.
“Man, I had a helluva ride. I was really blessed,” Jonnie Jonckowski said. “I didn’t plan on being different. All I knew my whole life is to be all out. It takes guts to go out there to do what your heart tells you to do at full bore. I was a bull rider, and if you’re not all or nothing, you probably won’t be a very good one.”
