A cowboy in more ways than one, the former Dallas fullback and PRCA steer wrestler Walt Garrison passed away at age 79 on Oct. 11.
Garrison played for the Cowboys from 1966-1974 and won a Super Bowl in 1972, which he described as his greatest athletic thrill. Second place was placing in the Average in Cheyenne.
A ProRodeo and Texas Cowboy Hall of Famer, he lived it through and through. His first contract with the Dallas Cowboys included a two-horse trailer and he would steer wrestle the night before home games his rookie season, until coach Tom Landry put an end to that.
Garrison grew up in Lewisville, Texas and worked the bareback riding, bull riding, calf roping and steer wrestling. He often admitted he liked rodeo more than football.
“If you could have made the money – and I didn’t make a lot of money playing football, but the money was better in football than it was in rodeo....Yeah, that was my first love. I’d been doing that a lot longer than I’d been playing football. And I still do it. I still ride horses and I still do a little team roping,” he once said, according to DallasCowboys.com.
In fact, he loved rodeo so much, it’s what ultimately ended his football career.
“Nine years as a running back is a long time in the NFL, but I did tear my knee up bulldogging at a college rodeo. I did a match bulldogging against one of the college kids and I tore my knee up,” he said. “That’s probably one of the best things that happened to me because it gave me the opportunity to go work for another company and to start a new career, rather than hold on for another year in a career that would have lasted one more year at best. So it turned out to be a good thing.”
In addition to his success on the football and in the arena, he also raised more than $4 million for multiple sclerosis through his All Star Rodeos and served on the board of the Justin Cowboy Crisis Fund for more than two decades.