PUEBLO, Colo. (September 10, 2008) - "He's home."
Betty Morrison sits on her deck and looks at The Boogerman every day out in her back pasture. She and the recently retired bull are lucky, so to speak, to have one another.
Morrison has been living on her ranch in Haines City, Fla., since she had the house built back in 1961. For nearly 50 years she’s lived in that same house. This past May she thought, perhaps, that same home was where she would die.
It was the day before Mother’s Day, and Morrison was in her kitchen when she fell and severely fractured hip. It was a bad break that went down into her leg, and she laid there for more than day.
Now she was alone, unable to move or call for help in a home that had provided so many wonderful memories through the years.
It wasn’t until 2 o’clock the next afternoon that her son Billy broke through a back door and found her lying on the floor.
“I said, ‘Get me up from here. I’m dying,’” Betty recalled. “He looked at me and said, ‘No, I’m not touching you, mom.’ And he called for the ambulance to come get me and we headed to the hospital.”
Betty was initially transported to a local hospital, but when it was discovered that her blood was too thin, she was transferred to a larger regional facility in nearby Orlando.
Betty then spent 5 weeks at a life care center where she began what has been a long rehabilitation program before finally going home in mid June.
“It’s been a long spell,” said Betty, who hopes to make it to this year’s World Finals, “but I’m not complaining. I’m gaining strength and getting along good. I’m a fighter. I don’t give up.”
What’s made her recovery all that much easier is that not long after she returned home, The Boogerman, the first bucking bull that Billy and Betty had purchased a share of, was brought to Florida from where he had been in Oklahoma.
It was a rainy afternoon in late June when Billy pulled into the yard and parked the trailer right under Betty’s kitchen window—the same window through which Betty had looked helplessly up into the sky.
“I motioned for him to come in and I said, ‘Billy, get me out. Just lift me in the wheelchair all together and take me out to see him,’” Betty said. “He said, ‘Mom, it’s raining.’ I said, ‘I don’t care. Take me out there.'
“I went out there and, oh, he was just foaming at the mouth and I took and rubbed his head and he was just the sweetest little thing you had ever seen.’ I said, ‘OK, I’m happy. You can put me back in the house now.’”
It’s been just over two months since The Boogerman arrived in Haines City, and just last week the D&H Cattle Co. said that it’s official: The Boogerman is retired, and will remain in Florida with Betty on her ranch.
That suits her just fine.
Every day, Betty, who has been confined to a wheelchair since her accident, sits on her back porch looking out over the pasture with the pride of a mother.
“It’s just so neat to sit there and watch him,” she said. “I always call him momma’s baby. Billy says, ‘He looks like a baby all right.’
“He’s the only black one out there and I say, ‘There’s momma’s baby.’ Oh, I love that bull.”
If all goes as planned, it won’t be long before Betty makes her way out into the pasture to be with her baby.
What started as a sad story involving Betty’s horrific accident and the retirement of a great American bucking bull has become an inspirational story of Betty and her baby bull thanks, in no small part, to the PBR.
“I guess in my older age I wanted to do something different,” Betty said. “I just got to liking (the PBR). I started watching it some and I thought it would be fun. It proved to be true.”
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