In a Las Vegas hotel room, one of the world’s top- ranked bronco riders struck the lighter, heated the meth and breathed in its smoky tentacles.
“I’d always find a time and place to do it,” Chris Harris said from his home in Itasca, Texas, before he left for Denver and the National Western Stock Show and Rodeo.
At that National Finals eight years ago, he took home $72,000. He had ridden high so often that he came to believe it was the dope winning the money.
The stardom helped him ignore how his life was coming apart.
Three years later, he watched the finals from a Texas state prison.
Now, at the advanced rodeo age of 32, he is amazed to be back in the sport — after head-butting his mother, after steering a police cruiser into a tree with his feet, after all the lies he told and promises he broke.
“I screwed up pretty bad,” he said, “and I burned a lot of bridges.”
Until the cops stepped in, things had always come fast and easy, even scoring meth at rodeos in small towns and media-choked venues like Denver and Cheyenne, he said. He could always find another junkie eager to supply a rodeo superstar.
“You can put me in a room with 150 people and five of them addicts, and I’ll know every addict in 20 minutes,” he said. “I can’t explain it, but addicts know addicts.”
Harris isn’t coy about why he got hooked.
“The same way every other teenager in America gets hooked: I loved to party. I wanted everybody to think of me as the party guy. I wanted everybody to look at me.”
He rose fast in pro rodeo, ranked third in the world before his 24th birthday, but he fell even faster.
Assaulting his mother and a sheriff’s deputy weren’t even the bottom, he said.
He had argued with his wife that day in March 2003. He went to his parents’ ranch, where he and his mother got into it after she wouldn’t give him her keys. He was high, he said, and head-butted her in a rage.
When deputies arrived, Harris was handcuffed and put in the front of the cruiser, likely a courtesy to a local celebrity.
As they drove away, Harris threw his left leg into the steering wheel and steered the cruiser off the road and into a tree at 55 mph. Harris served 16 months in prison in a plea agreement.
“That was probably one of the dumbest and yet one of the smartest things I ever did,” he said. “That started me down a long, long road of trouble — you ain’t going to just get away with that — but it saved my life.”
He entered jail as a cocky, angry superstar, spending his first few months in solitary confinement.
The turning point came without warning: A guard handed him a cowboy-themed Christian pamphlet. He flipped open a page and tears overcame him.
A former friend-turned-pastor, rodeo star Todd Pierce, was pictured with his young son and a baby lamb. Pierce had tried repeatedly to reach out to Harris, to talk to him about his faith and where his life was headed.
Harris was a foul-mouthed jerk, and the two settled it with their fists.
“That’s how bad I was,” Harris remembered. “I could make a good Christian man want to beat the hell out of me.”
Slumped to both knees weeping in his prison cell for the first time, he felt God was with him, and his life began to change.
He didn’t think about rodeo until about a month and a half before his release. In his Waco halfway house, a parolee he knew only as Homer, with chiseled muscles, asked: “You going to ride them broncs again?”
Harris replied, “Look at me,” as if the flabby condition of his body said no.
For six weeks, Homer put him through grueling workouts, until his body was ready.
Counselors in his treatment program urged him not to go back to rodeo, where the demons of his wild life might pull him back under.
“Rodeo wasn’t what got me screwed up; I did that,” he said. “Rodeo was the opposite of that. Some of the best people I’ve ever known in my life were in rodeo.”
He now has returned to the National Finals the past three years, equal to the number of trips he took as a young junkie.
When Harris walked from the arena at the National Finals Rodeo on Dec. 4, eight years to the day from when he won his last round at the National Finals with a score of 84, Harris recorded an astonishing 88.5, ‘s headline reported, “Chris Harris blows up.”
Eight years had been a hellish ride on a “horrible beast,” he said.
He didn’t mean a horse.
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
