Tough’s Gonna Hurt but It Can Make You a Champion

Daniel Keeping and the Texas Rattlers Win the 2023 PBR Teams Championship.

For the most important game in the two-year history of the Texas Rattlers, Coach Cody Lambert, a man who may have seen and analyzed more bull rides than any human to walk God’s green earth, put Daniel Keeping in the closing spot.

When it came time for Keeping to crawl into the chute in the last frame of the season’s final game against the mighty Austin Gamblers, the Texas Rattlers were a bull up on the No. 1-seeded team. If Keeping could stay on for 8 seconds, the Rattlers would win the Championship.

Jose Vitor Leme waited in the chutes across a packed T-Mobile Arena. Leme claims just about every bull riding record in the books, but if Keeping made the whistle, the great Jose Vitor Leme could ride his bull standing on the animal’s thrashing back with a martini in one hand and the bull rope in the other while singing the Brazilian national anthem, and it wouldn’t matter a lick.

Keeping, the guy overlooked by everyone but Lambert, was in a position to clinch the title.

Riding under the bright lights in Las Vegas was a big deal. This was the place where his boyhood heroes like his coach along with Lane Frost and Tuff Hederman put up big scores at the big shows.

Later he’d say that “to be able to ride bulls in a championship here, it’s an energy that’s addictive, a hunger that you can’t quite get to, but you keep pushing for.”

The 24-year-old born in California to parents who were both police officers, including rough, dangerous places like Compton, was thinking of none of that in the chute.

“In high-pressure situations, you don’t do nothin’ different,” Keeping would later say. “It’s just another bull. Same drill. Coach Lambert says, ‘Keep it simple.’ Stay in the middle, ride him, and put it in God’s hands how it’ll work out.”

Keeping nodded his head on a bull called Red River. The dark chocolate bull had been rolling around in the dirt before entering the bucking chute, because when the gate rifled open, each jump and kick produced a dramatic explosion of brown smoky dust, the way a film director would have wanted to shoot the biggest ride of a young bull rider’s life.

The denouement of 8 seconds that felt like a lifetime for every Rattler fan was vintage Hollywood, too.

Keeping heard the horn, jumped off the bull, and kneeled on the dirt in a moment of deep appreciation, for the way the long, rough, difficult, amazing ride of his life turned out, which was how he always envisioned it.

And then, the first thing he could think about was to thank his teammates for putting him in a position to bring home a title for them.

Andrew Giangola

On a soupy May morning in Fort Worth, Texas, a few days ahead of PBR World Finals, Daniel Keeping, in his black Texas Rattlers riding shirt, is standing outside the host hotel double fisting cans of Mountain Dew.

“I drink the shit out of this stuff, and I tell other people to drink it, too,” he says, matter of fact.

Keeping has no endorsement deal for the caffeine-loaded citrus-flavored soda. He just loves it. Like he loves fishing, his girlfriend Shelby Baker, their little girl Saige Elizabeth, and riding bulls…not necessarily in that order.

He’s on the sidewalk not far from the First Christian Church of Fort Worth, organized by Rev. A.M. Dean, who “who with hymn book and revolver came in 1855 to the riotous six-year-old hamlet on the Trinity,” according to the plaque outside.

Wyatt Earp and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would later tear into the city’s rowdy “Hell’s Half Acre” district. With his relaxed drawl, missing front tooth, handlebar mustache, and fading greenish crescent-moon shiner, Keeping would fit in a sepia tone photo with the notorious Western gunslingers.

Now living with Baker, a former paramedic before giving birth to 15-month-old Saige, in Montague, a heavy-foot hour’s drive north of Fort Worth, Keeping has the quintessential outlaw look favored at Central Casting.

Along with being a rising star in a sport storming into the world of mainstream entertainment that craves renegade cowboys, that rough-and-tumble persona contributed to an invite a week earlier to fly to New York to promote a Fox Nation reality show Keeping starred in called Last Cowboy Standing. A mechanical bull demonstration was planned to end Fox News’ Sunday morning broadcast sadly dominated by a mass shooting in Texas. Before the anchors would scramble out to the sunny plaza on Sixth Avenue for the live hit, Keeping tried out the electric bull.

“That thing is more slippery than goose shit on ice,” he said, sounding like Gene Autry crossed with Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

This particular morning in Fort Worth, with a pen of real, rank, snot-slinging, bone-crushing bulls waiting for their cowboy opponents at nearby Dickies Arena for World Finals, the dry sidewalks are giving more reliable footing as Keeping slugs his favorite drink. He needs to be alert, for important business is at hand.

Sure, in two days he’d begin the final marathon leg of a quest to be the 2023 PBR World Champion, ranked 10th with a legitimate shot at the Gold Buckle and million-dollar bonus he’s dreamed about for as long as he has memories. But today is just as important. He and Marcus Mast, a quiet, humble bull riding cowboy who grew up Amish in Indiana and rides for the Kansas City Outlaws, are heading to visit patients at Cooks Children’s Hospital.

Keeping can relate to the plight of a sick child. Before his first birthday, he was in and out of the hospital for surgeries, staying weeks at a time.

“My pisser was all kinked up,” Keeping explains. The boy’s urethra, which carries urine from the kidney to the bladder, was in a knot. Future bull riders don’t do a good job sitting still. The urine collection bag doctors had affixed to his side kept getting knocked out. Eventually, a doctor stapled it to his body.

Keeping was too young to remember all that, but he wants to brighten the lousy days of children stuck in the hospital. The Cook’s staff has placed a brown plastic bullhead on the carpet at the bottom of a bright, airy atrium modeled like a grand castle. Keeping is teaching a 9-year-old boy named Levi the art of roping, while Mast quietly paints watercolors rainbows with a wispy blond-haired girl too sick to speak.  

Andrew Giangola

Daniel shows Levi how to loop, hold and throw the rope. Levi misses. And misses again. And again. Keeping shoots a big gap-toothed smile to the frustrated boy and exclaims, “Where’s your smile! You got all your teeth!”

His molasses drawl works well with Willie Nelson singing over the PA.

“Just lay it up there nice and easy, on his head.”

Levi is still laughing about having all his teeth. He throws the rope and hooks the bull.

“There you go! Nose to neck!” Keeping exclaims, sing-song. “I didn’t think you could do it. I knew you could do it! Next time I’m catching cows, I’m gonna call you!”

He high fives joyous Levi, who has an IV port stuck in his arm.

A weary boy in a drab hospital gown is next. Daniel holds his ice cream, which comprises most of the boy’s diet since he can’t digest solids. The kid is having trouble getting the rope to the bull. Daniel puts his arm around the tired, frustrated boy. He guides him in, closer. A fearful face softens.

“You still have the best smile,” the bull rider with the missing tooth and fading shiner tells the boy. “That’s one thing they can’t ever take away from you.”

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Andrew Giangola

Daniel Keeping’s introduction to the world’s most dangerous sport came watching on television his bull-riding heroes also including Chris Shivers, Guilherme Marchi and Justin McBride.

His family moved to Texas when he was six, and Keeping began getting on the back of animals. “I ate dirt for the first ten or 12 times,” he said. “I guess I liked the taste, because I’m still here.”

A month after Keeping’s 16th birthday, his father had a brain aneurism and died. Daniel was already accustomed to the rush of riding bulls, filling his body with wild-crazy adrenaline, his chest tingling after jumping off, knowing every ride, every day, could be the last, and living it to the fullest, fearless, David against Goliath, grabbing every chance to be a gladiator walking into the Coliseum. His fire now burned hotter. At 17, he struck out on his own for Oklahoma. He was put up by friends, finding a way to finish high school while taking work in construction and as a ranch hand, anything to make a buck while avoiding a stuffy office. Anything allowing him to keep riding bulls.

Lambert, a PBR co-founder and the sport’s long-time director of Livestock before joining as coach of the Texas Rattlers in the bull riding league that launched in 2022, had heard about a hungry kid with a reputation for getting on any bull anytime, anyplace.

For this daring predilection, Keeping was jokingly called a “crash test dummy” by a few stock contractors. One of them sent Lambert a video of Keeping riding. Lambert was intrigued by the young, raw rider, insistent on making the 8-second whistle.

Guys who never let go often get hurt. When Keeping limped onto the set of Last Cowboy Standing, an elimination-style show awarding one rider a berth on PBR’s top tour (Thiago Salgado won; Keeping finished third), Lambert, a coach, mentor and judge on the show, said, “Dan was like an old man in his early 20’s, actually the oldest 22-year-old I’d ever come across.”

Lambert meant not only physically, though a six-inch rod holds together Keeping’s femur that had been split in half, and a plate with six screws molds his shattered chin, by-products of the “jerkings and slammings” he says come with the job. The veteran coach saw uncommon desire, drive, and a purposeful maturity in a kid who had grown up fast, on his own so young and now a father trying his guts out to make a life for his family.

To build his team, Lambert scouted not only physical skills. He wanted the right mentality – heart more than technique. A few games into the Rattler’s first season, Keeping had healed from another broken leg, and Lambert recommended signing him as a free agent.

On the reality show, Lambert had seen Keeping continually fall off his practice bulls, then make the 8 when the contestants competed in front of a live paying audience. He thrived on pressure. In the PBR Team Series, Coach Lambert often puts Keeping in the crucial “closer” spot as the fifth rider in the Rattlers’ five-on-five games.

Lambert’s intuition was spot on. In the Rattlers’ first regular season, Keeping went a sizzling 9-for-12 (75%), including two 90-point rides and two game-winning walk-off rides. As the closer, he was a perfect 5-for-5.

He even found value when bucked off.

“When you win, you win,” Keeping said. “When you lose, you learn. So, you never lose.”

Keeping talks a lot about checking his ego, raising his standards, and treating every opportunity as if it’s the last one he’ll ever get.

It sounds a lot like The Gospel According to Cody Lambert. Considering Keeping’s achievements so far, which now include his first World Championship, and how he talks about his purpose as an athlete, Coach Lambert may be preaching to the choir.

“Dan has the ability to be a world champion (in the separate individual series),” Lambert said. “But a lot of guys have that ability. They’ve got to make a choice and commit to being elite. All the great bull riders have a desire and a determination that doesn’t allow them to fail. It’s almost a spiritual thing where they need it as bad as they need to breathe. Dan is one of those guys who don’t know how good they’re gonna be. As a coach, you have to let them know what’s available.”

But for how long will the coaching, mentoring, and opportunities to learn from each jaw-rattling slam into the dirt be available? Every bull ride is a head-to-head pairing of a lightweight cowboy completely mismatched against a heavyweight bull. The bigger fight is against Father Time. How many rounds will Daniel Keeping be able to go?

“Tough’s gonna hurt,” Keeping said. “I can’t use pain or injuries as an excuse. You just gotta shut your mouth, focus on your target, and no matter what, keep going. If you gotta crawl to do it, you gotta go do it. It’s champ or chump, baby. Live a hero, die a legend.”

At 24, for Rattlers fans, now calling themselves World Champion Rattlers fans, Daniel Keeping has already reached legendary status.