Amy Jo Fields is the most unlikely of rodeo queens. Sure, she’s got the big hair, bling-and-leather wardrobe, and an American quarterhorse named Dalton, for which her parents traded a refrigerator the year before she was born.
But as a toddler growing up on a cattle ranch on the sweeping Colorado plains, Fields skittered between the barn and house, avoiding horses like a field mouse fleeing farmyard cats.
She’d been bitten two or three times by her sister’s horse. “So I was deathly scared of horses,” she says.
Her desire to follow her big sister into the Pikes Peak Rangerettes, however, required she overcome equine phobia. For eight months, she took riding lessons, then successfully tried out for the precision riding team.
Over the years, she scored fistsful of titles: El Paso County Fair Queen, Girl of the West for the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo, and, most recently, Miss Rodeo Colorado 2007.
She kicks off her reign during the National Western Stock Show. At the end of a year on the rodeo-queen circuit, she’ll head off to Las Vegas to compete at Miss Rodeo America.
One of her goals is to restore the tarnished image of rodeo royalty.
“Some people think rodeo queens are a joke,” she says. “A lot of rodeo people don’t have respect for the queens. They think we’re ditzy blonds.”
Fields is a cowgirl with a college degree, grit mixed with Grace Kelly elegance.
One winter afternoon in her office at the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association, she works – sans makeup and bouffant hair – in Wranglers and rose-pink Lucchese boots, paired with pearls, black sweater, diamond- stud earrings and pink-pleated blouse.
She’s got a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, and worked two summers at an engineering firm. But she bucked a lucrative engineering career to follow her passion back to the first place she ever worked: the legendary PRCA, a labyrinth of cubicles that smells of stale coffee, one of the last places in America where men still wear cowboy hats while working at desks.
She helps the PRCA run 640 rodeos in 12 circuits throughout the United States and Canada, including the Mountain Circuit of Colorado and Wyoming, which last year had 58 rodeos.
“Rodeo is not a fling for me,” she says. “It’s a career and a lifestyle.”
This will give her an edge at Miss Rodeo America, the most intense competition of the entire rodeo-
queen circuit, which is a world unto itself.
“It’s a subculture of Western culture,” she says. “People ask, ‘Why does your hair have to be so big? Why the arena shirts?’ It’s totally different and out there.”
It’s not just another beauty pageant, despite custom-tailored designer gowns with stratospheric prices.
Well-versed rodeo queens, according to websites like rodeoroyalty
.com, must pore over industry papers like “The ProRodeo Sports News.” Knowledge of animal science, horse diseases and things like the anatomy of a bull rope is vital. So is understanding precisely how rodeos work.
Some girls memorize the entire PRCA rulebook. “That’s ridiculous,” says Fields who, luckily, reads the rule book every day as part of her job. “What if a judge asks you the reason for a rule?”
Other aspiring queens pull up in Las Vegas with trailers jammed with regalia: sequined hats, dress boots and working boots – pristine, no scuffs allowed! – plus a rainbow of gowns: periwinkle, butterscotch, turquoise, mustang-red.
At the Miss Rodeo Colorado competition, it’s no tragedy if your boots are a shade lighter than your dress, but Miss Rodeo America requires perfection: the color of boots must exactly match the dress.
“You better be put together,” she says. “Sharp, sharp, sharp!”
Naturally, there’s a thriving market in secondhand gear.
“Cowboys and people who live on farms and ranches are not busting at the seams with finances,” says Fields, who shops online at places like The Second Go-Round, known for bargains like the $4,200 three-piece fuchsia “Guns and Roses” Rickrageous outfit previously owned by Selena Ulch, Miss Rodeo America 2005.
Rodeo-queen boot camps are also the rage, but Fields learned the old- fashioned way: mentored by her friend, Christy Spurlock, Miss Rodeo Colorado 2003.
A week before her making her grand entry with Dalton at the National Western Stock Show, however, Fields was acting like hired help, shoveling hip-deep snow from the horse stalls at the family ranch in Falcon. This is the spirit she intends to exemplify.
“Some queens act like, ‘You’re here to serve me.’ But any type of queen knows it’s totally the opposite,” she says. “You’re here to serve, not to have people kiss your feet.”
Staff writer Colleen O’Connor can be reached at 303-954-1083 or at coconnor@denverpost.com.
Grabbing reins at pageant not as easy as it looks
Even the biggest trailer packed with the most expensive leather, fringe and sparkles won’t win you the Miss Rodeo America competition.
Kelly Kraegel, a former Miss Rodeo California, gives a behind-the-scenes look at the Miss Rodeo America competition, describing the notorious 15-minute interviews by judges, which she says can “make or break you.”
In an essay on rodeoroyalty.com, she says the interviews are “worth copious amounts of points and are the moments of truth. The judges can and will ask everything and anything.
“It’s what you have to do at this level to separate the field of such evenly poised, beautiful women. We were asked about encephalitis, navicular, … where/when the first cloned baby was to be born, president of Wrangler, what sponsor is usually on the last page of the (ProRodeo Sports News), what channel will be carrying the new (Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association) bull riding tour, where is the (Women’s Professional Rodeo Association) headquarters, who was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame and where is it located?”
On the other hand, Nyla Bristow, director of Miss Rodeo Colorado, says riding skill is the biggest part of the overall score. To heighten this challenge, you must ride whatever horse they give you.
“These are not push-button horses,” says Miss Rodeo Colorado 2007 Amy Jo Fields. “They are ranch horses, the kind ridden by pick-up men and fly-girls at the National Finals Rodeo.”
For this, she has a strategy that involves endless practice between now and the Miss Rodeo America pageant in November. When she’s not working her full-time rodeo job, tending her small herd of seven cows, five calves, or crisscrossing the country in her truck, visiting schools and hospitals or appearing at rodeos – sometimes two a weekend – she will be practicing.
“I’ll ride all kinds of horses, (those of) neighbors and friends,” she says. “And I’ll make new connections to go ride other horses.”
– Colleen O’Connor
