EVENTS
Bull Rider, Champion, 1962
An unlikely candidate for bull riding, Warren Granger Brown was born in 1921 and raised on a potato farm in Wyoming. When he was 14, his family moved to Arizona, where he became a working cowboy called “”Freckles,”” because of the sun’s effects.
Brown rode his first bull at age 16. Thereafter, he dominated the event, sometimes riding 20 bulls in one day; he rode an estimated 5,000 during his thirty-seven-year career. Along the way he suffered so many broken bones and carried so many metal pins and screws in his bones that he often called himself “”a walking hardware store.””
Freckles Brown won his first bull-riding trophy in 1941 at Cody, and in 1962, at age 41, he captured the championship. In 1967, at Oklahoma City’s National Finals Rodeo, he became the first cowboy to go eight seconds on the infamous Tornado, a bull that had already eliminated 220 riders.
Of his nickname, he once remarked, “”I don’t have freckles anymore. I reckon those bulls shook ‘em all off.”” He retired from the circuit in 1974 and died in 1987 on his ranch at Soper, Oklahoma.
