By Karen Gleason
A friend of Del Rio bull riding legend George Paul remembers the young Del Rioan as the ultimate competitor and athlete.
Daniel “Danny” Whiteley rodeoed with Paul and traveled with him to events across the country.
“We traveled together for quite some time before he passed, and I still think about him every day. He was a really great guy,” Whiteley told the 830 Times in a telephone interview earlier this year.
Whiteley is a career lawman who since June 2000 has served as chief of police in Poplar Bluff, Mo. He has been a law enforcement officer since 1972.
Whiteley was attending college in Texarkana, Texas, and met Paul at a rodeo in 1966 or 1967. Whiteley had participated in junior bull riding in his hometown of Poplar Bluff and decided to go to college in Texarkana because the school had an intramural rodeo team.
“In Texas, rodeoing is a thing you do, just like other places it might be football, basketball or baseball,” he said.
Whiteley competed in steer-wrestling and bareback riding. In time, he decided to try his hand at riding bulls.
What possesses a person of sound mind and body to get on a bull and try to ride it in the first place?
“I’ve been asked that question a lot over the years, and I don’t know that I have a good, definitive answer, other than you start off riding some horses, and then you see a buddy get on one of those junior bulls, and you just decide you want to try something a little more challenging, something that’s maybe a bigger adrenaline rush, and you graduate on up,” Whiteley said with a laugh.
Whiteley said he and Paul frequently traveled together to rodeos over the course of two or three years and said he often watched Paul ride.
“I’ve seen him make numerous, just unbelievable bull rides,” Whiteley said.
Whiteley said in time he came to believe that Paul had the ability – conscious or subconscious – to control the rush of adrenaline that accompanies top-level athletic performance.
“I’ve always attributed that – with no medical training, advice or expertise; it’s just what I think – when you do that second and third and fourth (bull ride), your adrenaline starts picking up. I think that George had the ability – just like Mark Maguire, you know, two strikes, three balls, bottom of the ninth, and he hits a home run. George, I think, had that same internal ability, to when it go down to the nitty-gritty, he could to an extent control, his adrenaline flow, and when it got down to where he had to do something, he was able to tap into that and make those impossible bull rides,” Whiteley said.
But George Paul also maintained an unfailingly positive outlook with an unbeatable work ethic.
“In George’s mind, there wasn’t a bull that could throw him off. He was the ultimate positive thinker, and 99 percent of the time, they didn’t throw him off, so whatever he thought, he had reason to believe, and the more he did it, the better he got and then he was totally convinced of it,” he said.
What was it like, as a fellow bull rider, to watch Paul ride?
“A number of things: I tried to watch what he did, to emulate what he did. His workout ethics were unbelievable,” Whiteley said.
“He was so competitive . . . You never got in front of George. If you were walking at a fast pace, he was one step in front of you. If you were jogging, he was one step in front of you. If you were in a dead run, he was always one step ahead of you. He had the biggest competitive spirit, I think, of anybody I’ve ever known, and that just encouraged you to do better, but he was the ultimate competitor. If he was doing something, he was going to be the lead player, so to speak,” he said.
“It was not in his mindset that anything was going to throw him off,” Whiteley added.
But Paul’s best attribute, Whiteley said, was his unwavering loyalty.
“George as a friend, there was nothing second to his friendship. If you were a friend of George’s, you were a friend for life,” Whiteley recalled.
Whiteley mourned when Paul’s life was tragically cut short, but has maintained his friendship with the Paul family and has come to Del Rio to visit.
