The love affair began when Larry Mahan was a kid in Brooks, Oregon. “I think my folks bought me my first horse for about $125 when I was probably 7 years old,” he says. “She was half Arab, half quarter horse, no papers, and we had her around three or four months, five months, and she had a colt—we didn’t even know she was bred—and I was just so in love with horses and riding.”
He has loved every one of them since. Even the rankest broncs that tried to launch him into the stratosphere during 10 rounds of the National Finals Rodeo—rodeo’s version of the Super Bowl. He has driven pickups to countless rodeos, a Jaguar through Beverly Hills, and piloted his own twin-engine Cessna 310 across America—he even soloed a P-51—but the horses, he says, have carried him. To success in rodeo and other arenas.
And through the worst of times.
“It has been an interesting journey,” Mahan says. “And I’m definitely qualified to be a ‘Road’s Scholar.’” The journey includes eight world championships—six All Around and two Bull Riding—in the Rodeo Cowboys Association (which became the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association in 1975). He was the first competitor to qualify in all three roughstock events (bull riding and bareback-and saddle-bronc riding) in the NFR and set a record—that still stands—by qualifying 26 times in NFR roughstock events.
“He 1966 to 1971. “He related to people, he related to his fellow was the epitome of being a world champion,” says Bill Pierce, who chaired the Frontier Days Rodeo in Prescott, Arizona, from contestants. He was Mr. Rodeo.”
Mahan followed that with forays into acting (his favorite part was in the 1995, directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones); music (Warner Bros. released his LP in 1976); and putting his name on Western clothing, boot, and hat lines (Dorfman Milano still produces Larry Mahan Hats).
