Where Have All the Young Men Gone?
By Dana Smith

Editor's note: Byron "Cowboy" Wolford died of a heart attack on May 12, 2003. In ongoing remembrance of Cowboy, Card Player will continue to publish his column, "Gamblin' With the Cowboy," which is comprised of stories from his book, "Cowboys, Gamblers & Hustlers." This column by Dana Smith is excerpted from the prologue she wrote in this book. Cowboy's stories will continue in next month's column.

Money was scarce as hens' teeth in the 1930s. Poor people who had chased the American dream only to find that it ended in a nightmare called the Great Depression were living in shanty towns called "Hoovervilles." In dusty East Texas, adventurous wildcatters and their families lived hand-to-mouth in "shotgun" houses and tents hastily erected in boomtowns like Kilgore and Longview while they tried in vain to coax liquid gold out of dry oil wells – that is, until 70-year-old "Dad" Joiner struck it rich when he brought in the gusher on the Daisy Bradford farm that stimulated the East Texas oil boom.

Byron "Cowboy" Wolford was born in one of those boomtown tents about 50 miles from Houston in 1930. When Byron was 2 years old, his father, a roughneck, was injured in the oil fields and bought a small farm near Tyler with the money he received from an insurance settlement. It took him only a few months to strike oil. Oil was selling for a dollar a barrel, with more than a million barrels a day flowing out of East Texas – so much oil, in fact, that it glutted the market and eventually fell to 15 cents a barrel.

While the young cowboy was enjoying a life of comparative ease in Tyler, a 40-year-old gambler named Titanic Thompson was plying his wizardry across Texas, laying suckers incredible odds on propositions they couldn't refuse. "There was a lot of money – Texas money – and Tyler had attracted the usual assortment of prospectors, speculators, oilmen and gamblers," Jon Bradshaw wrote in Fast Company. "It was the kind of town that Titanic knew well and felt most at home in. Where there was oil there was loose money, and loose money meant action." About the same time, a 30-something-year-old road gambler was crisscrossing the state chalking up scores at a new poker game called Texas hold'em. His name was Johnny Moss.

In later years the two legendary gamblers would sit across the same poker table with the then elementary-school student playing heads-up poker for all the marbles. Byron would become business partners with Titanic about 30 years later in Tyler, and would defeat Johnny in a heads-up duel for the deuce-to-seven championship at the $10,000 buy-in Super Bowl of Poker in Las Vegas. And they would be playing cash games together in a little joint called the Horseshoe that was owned by Benny Binion, a former Texas bootlegger who was to become a lifelong friend of the cowboy from Tyler. But destiny had to wait until the cowboy retired from his first career as a calf roper on the professional rodeo circuit.

Byron (only poker players called him "Cowboy") nursed a lifelong passion for the rodeo, living by the seat of his pants and loving it all the way from Texas to Canada to New York and Oregon. He first hit the open road in 1947, traveling with his grandfather-chaperone and a buddy in a pickup truck with a horse trailer, camping by the side of the road, cooking sumptuous repasts of bacon and beans on a Coleman stove, and dreaming of roping calves a tenth of a second faster than the best of the 200 other cowboys he competed against in the arena. During the 1950s, Byron made real money at rodeoing – as much as $20,000 a year – and his concept of luxury became "slow room service and unpressed sheets" in the hundreds of $5-a-night hotel rooms he rented on his million-mile quest for silver belt buckles and bronze trophies.

During his 15 years on the pro rodeo circuit, Byron roped calves alongside rodeo legends Dean Oliver, Casey Tibbs, and Jim Shoulders. And he became a legend of sorts himself when he set the all-time record for roping a calf at the old Madison Square Garden, a feat that was never matched until the ancient Garden fell prey to the trend of tearing down those nostalgic relics of yesteryear and building modern, sterile edifices on top of their skeletons, just as today's megacasinos in Las Vegas have risen like a flock of phoenix from the ashes of imploded history.

Comparing rodeoing and playing poker is easy. Substitute "gambler" for "cowboy" in Fred Schnell's 1971 description of a cowboy in Rodeo! The Suicide Circuit, and you'll see what I mean: "The cowboy still sets his own schedule, pays his own expenses, provides for his own future (if any), and arranges his own travel. He resists both conformity and manipulation with a fierce, if sometimes irresponsible, sense of independence and self-reliance." Johnny and Titanic and Benny and Byron – and Dean and Casey and Jim – would have defended their right, indeed their good fortune, to lead their lives unfettered by the bonds of conventionality. And therein lies the essence of their mystique.

They were young men back then – today, road gamblers are a dying breed. Where can you find players these days with the panache of Bill Smith? The splash of Kenny "Top Hat" Smith? The flair of Cowboy Wolford? The flavor of Benny Binion? Modern-day poker players are becoming homogenized, milk-fed by casino cardrooms that offer neither the flexibility nor the opportunities for exploitation that the vintage gamblers enjoyed when fading the white line across endless dusty backroads to gamble in smoky backrooms.

I say thank the poker gods for leaving us some living legends – Texas Dolly Brunson with his personal magnetism, Puggy Pearson with his flamboyant costumes, Amarillo Slim with his motor mouth. I'd rather watch (and listen to) these dudes play poker any day for any stakes than most of the milktoast chip pushers you see nowadays at tournament final tables. Television audiences would, too, I think. After all, in a game in which the plot is slow-moving and the action is sporadic, it is the cast of characters that makes the poker scene exciting enough to glue viewers to their seats.