While a lot of young people loved watching cowboys ride bulls at a rodeo, Ross Hill was watching the bullfighters.Age: 25
Born: Nov. 21, 1982
Hometown: Muscle Shoals, Ala.
While a lot of young people loved watching cowboys ride bulls at a rodeo, Ross Hill was watching the bullfighters.
It seemed just natural for him to jump into the fray.
“I’ve been around rodeos pretty much all my life,” Hill said. “My dad was an entrepreneur, and he did a lot of rodeos. I went with him to all the rodeos when I was a kid, and I always loved watching Rob Smets and Doug Forzani.”
Now he’s living dreams he wasn’t sure he’d even had. In his young career, Hill has twice been crowned the Salinas, Calif., Freestyle Bullfighting champion. He also won the 2005 National Finals Rodeo Bucking Stock Sale bullfighting competition and been crowned the champion at the Miller Lite Bull Blowout in Denton, Texas, the longest-running protection bullfighting competition in the world.
During the Colby Yates Challenge in Sulphur Springs, Texas, on Aug. 15-16, 2008, Hill and partner Lance McIlvain of Arlington, Texas, finished as the runner-up, falling just four points shy of defending world champions Sam Gress and Wacey Munsell.
“Protection is more like an everyday job,” he said. “Protection is like a 9-to-5 job, like shift work, just where your job requires taking a lick for the guy.
“I don’t know what I’d do otherwise. I just enjoy doing it. Once you become natural at something, it’s just what you do.”
Natural instincts help a lot, but there are also the lessons learned just by doing the work. With the Professional Bullfighters’ Daisy Protection Bullfight Tour, the lessons come through repetition and an understanding of how to do the right things.
“Just through the protection tour, it has laid down a whole rule of laws for bullfighters,” Hill said. “It’s not just what you’re supposed to do. It’s helped protection 100 percent. I know my protection has gotten that much better.”