Tucson Rodeo legend Gary Williams’ legacy endures through the lives he touched

The La Fiesta de los Vaqueros Tucson Rodeo will be wrapped up by then. Cowboys will have hitched rides to other rodeos throughout the Southwest in search of buckles and buckle bunnies. Cowgirls will have packed up with their beloved horses and be on the road to another jackpot. Vendors will have moved onto parts unknown to peddle their corndogs made of parts unknown.

The banners will be torn down, the beer kegs emptied, the smell of funnel cakes lost to the wind. It’ll be like a ghost town, Calderon says. “Very dreary.”

It’s a little jarring, really. There is so much noise for so long, and then, all of a sudden, whispers. It’s the worst part of the year for a rodeo man. Especially this year. Most of all, this year.

“It’s all going to be over,” said Calderon, the chairman of the Tucson Rodeo committee, “and then I’m going to have to sit down and relax and think about Gary.”

There’s been so much to do over this last month, so many finishing touches for the 2023 Tucson Rodeo, that Calderon hasn’t really had a chance to think about his friend, Gary Williams, the former longtime rodeo general manager. Williams died in October, with Calderon and other friends and family at his bedside, just 14 months after retiring from a position he’d held since 1995.

Calderon’s father passed just a few months prior, and another friend died recently as well, and he still hasn’t found time to process those losses, much less the loss of Williams, who was more than a friend.

“Gary was three things to me: He was my friend, he was my brother, he was my mentor,” Calderon said. “He was a walking encyclopedia of Tucson history. I never knew someone with a greater passion for anything. He was all in. Those shoes will never get filled. He is missed every day.”

What is a Tucson Rodeo without Gary Williams?

It’s almost inconceivable, like a spring without roses or a winter without snow.

The mustache, the cowboy hat, the twinkle in his eyes — they were omnipresent for nearly a half-century at the rodeo and even longer in Tucson. He was a native Tucsonan, graduating from Rincon High before attending the University of Arizona, riding bulls through and through.

After joining the Tucson Rodeo Committee in 1987 and eventually becoming the rodeo chair, Williams became the event’s first paid employee when he was named general manager in 1995. Under his stewardship, the rodeo blossomed into one of the best in the country until he retired in 2020, before the 2021 event was cancelled because of COVID, its first cancellation since World War II.

Last year, when the rodeo returned in 2022, Williams remained omnipresent even as Stacy Madigan took over as general manager.

In early October, Williams wasn’t feeling well for a few days, so he took himself to the hospital on a Thursday morning. When Calderon went to see him, he looked great and was laughing in his hospital gown, which Calderon teased him about. He figured they’d grab lunch the next day at the Silver Saddle.

“The next morning, I got a phone call that he’d taken a turn,” Calderon said. “I just could not believe it.”

Williams died on Sunday, Oct. 3, at the age of 73. Calderon was bereft.

They had met for the first time in 2006 when Calderon volunteered for the Tucson Rodeo for the first time. Most volunteers are brought in by a senior member who ropes them in like a wayward bronco. Then a passion develops. Calderon instead just decided to offer up his services — he’s a general contractor, by trade — and he showed up at the rodeo grounds looking to work.

There Calderon was, standing on the grounds, looking and feeling rather aimless, when Williams came around the corner wearing a long-sleeve Texas shirt and a Texas baseball hat. Instantly, Calderon thought, “Oh, man, this guy is someone here in Tucson rodeo.” Williams made a beeline for the new volunteer and extended a hand and a howdy.

“When I cleaned out his house, I found that Texas hat in the closet, and I now have it in my house,” Calderon said. “I remember him coming up to me in that hat. He saw something in me, and after I had that first year under my belt, I said to myself, ‘One day, I’m going to run this operation.’ I just knew it.”

Thus began a friendship forged by endless hours at the rodeo grounds and fueled by lots and lots of whiskey. Williams took Calderon under his wing. He saw the passion. He saw the love of not just rodeo, but a way of life.

“I was the new jedi, and I was getting taught by Yoda,” Calderon said. “Gary would say, ‘Quit calling me Yoda!’ and I’d say, ‘Who do you want to be, Darth Vader?’ I’d become his student.”

It was an education. In rodeo, in organization, in the smell of the right dirt, in the integrity in a man’s eye.

“I was a lump of clay in 2006, and what he’s done to me and for me — his hands, his history, his teaching — it has molded me into the person I am,” said Calderon, who is now serving as committee chair for the second time. “Every single time I got off the phone with him, I said, ‘Thanks for the education, amigo.’ I presented him an award last year, and at the bottom, I said, ‘Thanks for the education.’

“His corazón was incredible. You don’t see too much of that anymore. We’re living in a world that’s way too fast, a world that I don’t care for, to be honest with you. But he was not going to budge. The world was not going to change him. He was going to continue down his path.”

Jim Williams is getting choked up. This is hard for him, talking about his “cousin” Gary, though they did not share blood. It’s not every day you hear a cowboy cry.

“I had him on speed dial,” said Jim Williams, former chair of the Canby (Ore.) Rodeo Committee. “And I knew when his name came up, it was going to be a half-hour discussion.”

They’d talk about rodeoing, of course, but mainly about The Way of Life. They share a love of the Cowboy Way, a code of ethics written a century and a half ago, a lifestyle that is going by the wayside, if pop culture has anything to say about it. With anyone who would listen, Gary Williams would provide an education on the people, animals and places that keep rodeo alive. Rodeo is the byproduct of living with the land, not the cause of it.

When Williams talked about preserving a heritage and a history, he wasn’t talking about sports or points or buckles. He was talking about preserving a culture. He wasn’t worried about eight seconds. He was worried about 80 years.

“There are the fundamentals of life, and that’s what I think we get from the rodeo,” Jim Williams said. “We’re agriculture-based, and we see God’s glory every day. I’m looking to the west right now at the last bit of the sunset. It’s beautiful. I feel very fortunate to live this lifestyle. If I was in town, I don’t know what I would do. Keeping that tradition alive was important to Gary.”

Somehow, someway, they’d find themselves sitting next to each other at rodeo conventions and committee meetings, and they’d laugh at newcomers who talked about new fads and newfangled initiatives.

Like Calderon, Gary Williams served as a mentor to Jim, introducing him to the powers-that-be throughout the national rodeo scene.

“His common sense, what he’d learned from the past, the people he knew, the things he remembered — it was just astounding the impact he had on people and on the associations of rodeo,” Jim Williams said. “And he was a very broad-based man from a learning standpoint. Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it.

“I guess you could say he was a renaissance man.”\

Given his look and his twang, people often underestimated Gary Williams’ worldliness and intelligence. But he was as quick to talk about the state of modern technology as he was bucking broncos.

He and John Rhodes crossed paths because of the Tucson Rodeo, but they bonded over their “own little book club.” Books about rodeo, of course, but also about the Bataan Death March and Douglas MacArthur and Philippine guerilla soldiers.

Rhodes is a retired Marine and the son of Tommy Rhodes and the grandson of John Rhodes, two of the great pioneers of the Tucson Rodeo. The elder John helped start the Tucson Rodeo as we know it today — he competed in earlier rodeos in the city as early as 1919 — and between John and Tommy, they cashed in 32 of the first 35 Tucson Rodeos.

The younger Rhodes, who ain’t so young these days, desired to have his forebears honored for their contributions to the sport, and he enlisted Williams’ help. Their interests soon became reciprocal, as Williams would implore Rhodes to take him to ranches across Arizona, a true passion of his.

“It used to be that ranch cowboys and rodeo cowboys were the same guys, but very rarely do you see successful rodeo cowboys ranching anymore, and we’re talking about ranchers,” Rhodes said. “Gary’s knowledge of animals and cattle was so deep. The average guy would go out and try to talk to those ranchers, and they don’t get much conversation from them. They’re usually a quiet people. Asking a cattleman how many cattle they have is like asking them to open up their wallet, so 90% people start on the wrong foot and it’s downhill from there. But not Gary.”

They had plans this spring to go up to Pleasant Valley to a ranch that Rhodes’ family once owned. They were both really looking forward to it, the conversations, the history, the heritage, the laughs. Mainly the laughs.

“Oh boy, this is one of my favorite stories,” Rhodes says, guffawing. “We went up to the ranch I was raised on in the Galiuro mountains, and there are two gates to get to the homestead, one that runs along the river and then five miles up. We drive up to the first gate, up this steep hill. Gary’s riding shotgun and he says, ‘I’ll go open the gate,’ and the gates swing outward. Gary tries to pull the gate shut and goes to get the other gate. Gravity takes over, and the first gate swings open. I mean, it was gone. He goes to the second gate. It was gone. And after the third time of that, I finally couldn’t take it, and I got out to get it.

“I knew the secret. Gary figured it out on that second gate, though. He put it so far back by the time it swung back he was already there. He wouldn’t let me help him.”

When Williams died, his ex-wife Rhonda — they separated years ago but remained very close friends — asked Rhodes to come over and collect and sort through Williams’ books.

“I went over there, and I have a small pickup, and I filled the entire truck bed with books from Gary’s house,” Rhodes said. “We donated more than 300 to the library. We donated 50 to Jose Calderon for a rodeo museum. There were another 25 I kept myself that I knew he wanted me to read.”

One book remains very special to Rhodes.

“He was a very religious man; he was converted I don’t remember when, probably the last 10 years,” Rhodes said. “I have his cowboy bible, and I’ve got a devotional that was his. Each one of them up through the middle of the book, the part he’d read with underlined portions with notes about the devotional. He was very good about doing it. One I’m reading now says, ‘God truly loves us. We need to understand that and simply understand what God wants for us. I hope I’m worthy of God hearing my prayers.’ ”

Standing side by side, Calderon and Williams were a very curious pair.

They joked about how they looked to strangers, with their vastly different ages and skin tones. But the love between them was and is pure.

“He’d always razz me, and I’d razz him, but it was hard for me because I respected him so much,” Calderon said. “I knew what I could get away with.”

“We were in Omaha for a committee conference, and he’s one of the last guys to get on. When he climbed up, I yelled out, ‘Oooh, that rotten rabbit,’ and that bus just about tipped over on its side. Gary, he looked at me with his blue glassy eyes, wags his big finger with the ring with a saddle on it and says, ‘You’re mine now.’ ”

“I always asked him, ‘What room are you in?’ And he knew darn well I’d get in there and do something to him, so he never told me. I got in there one time. I followed him, went to the front desk, said I lost my key, then I laid on his bed with a big bag of Doritos, buck naked, just lying there. And he walked in and looked at me and walked right out. I’ll never forget that, man. He couldn’t even look me in the eyes for two weeks. I’d always tell him, ‘Want a bag of Doritos?’ And he’d just look at me dead and say, ‘Get away from me.’ ”

Those memories are what sustain Calderon. The only thing sustaining him.

“Memories after memories, man,” he said, “and I hope the man upstairs continues to give me my memories. These are things I’ve seen in rodeo that I don’t ever want to forget. I was there. I experienced it with one of the greatest people I knew. I miss him today. I think about him all the time. When we cleared out his house, I took about 15 of his shirts. I’ve lost some weight so I can wear some of his shirts, just to feel him.”

The Thanksgiving before last, the Calderon family hosted Williams. Calderon and his parents, with his gringo best friend.

“The way he treated my dad and mom, with utmost respect. There were no jokes on them,” Calderon said, swallowing hard. “He brought a bottle of whiskey, Old West, and there were a couple shots left in there, and I had everyone sign their names. I see that GW signature on there, and I know who that is.

“I have that bottle in my house, and that last shot is going to be my last shot when I lie down. I don’t care if I have tubes down my throat. ‘You pull them out, and you drown me with that whiskey.’ “