ProRodeo Sports News - April 15, 2022

The 5-foot-8, 155-pound cowboy was full of grit and try, and beloved by seemingly everyone in the rodeo world. Brown’s most famous ride was in Round 1 of the 1967 NFR when he drew the famed Jim Shoulders bull Tornado, a bull that had never been ridden in 200-plus attempts. Eight seconds on Tornado was just a dream for cowboys. Brown, just short of his 47th birthday, made it a reality at JimNorick Arena in Oklahoma City, Okla. Brown made the ride of his life – and maybe the biggest single ride ever in the history of professional rodeo. He won the round with a 73-point ride, and it was a moment Brown would never forget. “It was the greatest experience of my life,” Brown said. “He came out of the chute and started kicking and bucking. I couldn’t hear nothing. I just held on. When I got off, I heard the crowd hollering, and they wouldn’t let up. “When I walked off, I looked up at (announcer) Clem McSpadden and he mentioned for me to go back out. They started up again. They just wouldn’t stop.” The standing ovation lasted five minutes. For good reason. The unsinkable Freckles Brown at age 46, tamed unrideable Tornado. Brown and Tornado were inducted into the inaugural 1979 class of the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, Colo. The magnitude of Brown’s ride wasn’t lost on McSpadden, who was inducted into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in 1990. “It was the greatest match,” McSpadden said in a July 28 article in the ProRodeo Sports News. “An old timer, who had won the world title in 1962 and everybody loved, against Tornado, who everybody had heard about. “It was the greatest thing that ever happened to the business.” Brown’s ride shook the rafters in Norick Arena and a couple of days later – this obviously was pre-internet – his ride was national news. “The following Monday, (renowned radio broadcaster) Paul Harvey did one of the greatest three-minute presentations he’d ever done,” McSpadden said. “That ride made Freckles a national hero.” Brown was born Jan. 18, 1921, inWheatland, Wyo., one of 10 children of a Wyoming farmer. The family moved to Tucson, Ariz., when he was 14 and Brown, who quit school after eighth grade, took a job at the local dairy, where the boss nicknamed him “Freckles.” Two years later, he was spending summers in Wyoming working as a wrangler and beginning a rodeo career. He enlisted in the Army in 1942, was moved to the Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA) and made four combat parachute jumps into China, where he staged a rodeo using Army mules and native cattle and won the all-around championship. After the war, Brown bought a small ranch in Oklahoma and competed in bull riding, saddle bronc riding, bareback riding, and bulldogging. After qualifying for the first NFR in 1959, he concentrated on bull riding and finished third in the world in 1966 and ’68 and fifth in ’67. He finally retired in 1974. Legendary sportswriter Red Smith never got tired of praising Brown. “This is utterly, entirely, fantastically impossible, and true,” Smith said about Brown when he qualified for the 1966 NFR. The only thing that has weathered the test of time better than Brown himself are the memories he created. Brown, died March 20, 1987, at the age of 66.

After being injured in the fall of 1962, Freckles Brown, in the middle, flanked by his family, accepted his Rodeo Cowboys Association world championship saddle in January of 1963 in Denver. Bull rider Lane Frost,

shares a light moment with Freckles Brown. Brown was one of Frost’s idols. Both won PRCA Bull Riding World champ- ionships.

ProRodeo Sports News 4/15/2022

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