We Are Not Lost

The last time Buck Brannaman was scared was in 1981. He was 18 or 19, riding 30 miles each day through sagebrush grasslands—the kind of rugged Montana country that can make big men feel small. This was the stuff of his dreams. Growing up, all he’d ever wanted was to be a cowboy. Now he was one, and he loved it. But every third day, Brannaman woke up with a pit in his stomach—the kind of rising fear that compelled him to call on a higher power. In those moments, he spoke earnestly to God, begging for help. Just let me live through one more day, and I’ll never ask for anything again, he’d pray. Then, like clockwork, he’d make the same request three days later. 

The problem was a horse in his string named Roni, a wild animal that bucked—not just occasionally, but incessantly. He bucked for 101 days straight, a fact that Brannaman can recall 43 years later. Roni bucked with such fury that Brannaman could feel his own brain rattling in his skull; each time, he would get off the horse feeling as if he’d just had a seizure. In the mornings after a day with Roni, he’d struggle to get out of bed, hobbling around like a man three times his age.

“He was my absolute maximum,” Brannaman tells me on a late-spring day, gentle light slanting through the windows of his Wyoming ranch home. “And he didn’t know it. If he had just gone two or three more jumps, he’d have had me dead.”

Whether it was dumb luck, force of will or spiritual intervention, we’ll never know. But for 101 days, Brannaman stayed on his horse.

I’m telling you this for two reasons. First, to let you know that Buck Brannaman is a tough son of a bitch, the genuine article, the type of person who blurs the line between principled determination and sheer stubbornness. Brannaman, you see, doesn’t give up. The second—and arguably more important—reason is that this is the horse he was riding when he met his mentor, Ray Hunt. According to Brannaman, Hunt was the type of horseman who comes around only once every 500 years—a man with a preternatural, almost mystical talent for understanding another animal. He was born with a clubfoot and grew up as a bit of an outcast. Unable and unwilling to break horses with brute force as was custom, Hunt learned how to talk to them.

The abridged story goes like this: Hunt met Brannaman, and Roni stopped bucking—almost immediately. (The horse eventually grew so docile that he was sold to be ridden by an elderly man.) The problem, Hunt said, wasn’t the animal, but Brannaman and the other cowboys. The riders couldn’t control his hind legs, and Roni, sensing their ignorance and fear, refused to relax. He couldn’t trust the men who didn’t understand him.

The moment was revelatory for Brannaman. He began to understand that true horsemanship wasn’t the product of a show of force or dominion. It was an unspoken relationship, a transfer of unseen energy, a dance—one that Brannaman has dedicated the rest of his life to trying to master. The pursuit has taken him around the world dozens of times over and landed him in unexpected places, like David Letterman’s guest chair. Brannaman didn’t just learn the dance; he became a mythical figure of his own, a gentle force of nature who, inexplicably, could mount horses long ago deemed lost causes. He’d earn the moniker “The Horse Whisperer” and inspire a wildly popular book and movie of the same name. Robert Redford would play the fictionalized version of him in the 1998 film, with Brannaman acting as Redford’s trainer and double. Later, Brannaman would write his own best-selling book.

“He was built to fit a horse,” one of Brannaman’s friends said in a 2011 documentary about his life, suggesting that there is something almost divine about his gift. “God had him in mind when he made a cowboy.”

This is all to say that Brannaman is the best in the world at what he does—the product of grueling work, raw talent and a gentle, hard-earned confidence that seems to radiate out from him. He has professed publicly that he likes to live firmly in the present and that he has no fear in his heart before addressing 1,000-pound muscled animals that could, in an instant, kill a lesser-skilled rider. At his clinics, he is part instructor, part entertainer and part life coach to the people who bring him troubled stallions. To watch him work is to understand why he’s known as the “Zen master of the horse world.”

And yet, standing over a nervy short-sided wedge shot here under the expansive blue Wyoming sky, I could swear that, for just one second, I saw the whites of Buck Brannaman’s eyes. 

It turns out the Horse Whisperer is also a golf sicko. I realize the inherent novelty here: A cowboy finding a home on the other type of range has the makings of a mid-tier dad joke. But I’m not on the golf course with Brannaman for the irony. My reasons are more selfish. I want to know if the man who can tame the wilds of nature can do the same to a golf course. Brannaman is a person whose legendary calm, patience and focus earns him the trust of creatures with whom he shares no language, which makes him a worthy case study in a sport that demands a serene and confident mind. I am here to see what Brannaman, a man who emerged from the darkness of an abusive childhood with a tender heart and gentle spirit, can teach me—us—about resilience from the safety of the middle of the fairway. I am here to see why a man who has all but mastered one lifelong dance of body and mind now seeks refuge in another pursuit where perfection is elusive.

It’s mid-May, which means three things in Sheridan, Wyoming. One, the weather is erratic, swinging between the highs of summer and lows of winter in a matter of hours. Two, the rivers and creeks are engorged, the rushing water just teasing the tops of the stream banks as the snow in the Bighorn Mountains softens. And three, Brannaman’s short game is coming out of hibernation, he claims, and still weeks from rounding into form.

We’re at the Powder Horn, a 27-hole private club that meanders through a lush valley and offers a jaw-dropping glimpse of pure, uncut Mountain West firmament around just about every corner. (For the uninitiated, that means big mountains and bigger sky.) It just so happens we’ve caught a perfect day: no humidity, few clouds and the temperature just sniffing a high of 80 degrees. Brannaman has exchanged his straight-brim cowboy hat for a yellow cap from Wine Valley Golf Club out in Walla Walla, Washington. When I recognize the logo, he lights up—my first sign that he isn’t merely a weekend hacker, but an obsessive. On our way to the first tee, he announces his only two plans for the day: to make a dinner reservation with his wife back in town and to play as many holes of golf as humanly possible before that. “One of us,” I jot into my phone.

Until about 13 years ago, Brannaman hated golf, despite never having picked up a club. He had the usual prejudices: It looked dopey, unathletic and elitist. To Brannaman, country club culture and cowboy culture felt not just aesthetically and socially different, but spiritually at odds (though he still professes a distaste for haughty golf snobbishness). Golf was just artificial outdoorsmanship for uppity assholes. But Brannaman’s job teaching colt-starting workshops and horse clinics around the globe put him on the road hauling a horse trailer for 40-odd weeks a year, which is a long enough time away from the comfort of home to drive any lonely man to make a bad decision. Thankfully, Brannaman’s temptation came in the form of a Tin Cup–looking driving range he described to me as “skanky.” For reasons he can’t fully explain, he rented a few clubs and decided to bang a few balls. Let’s call this his second revelatory moment.

“I’m the cliché,” he says to me after pureing a driver into the cloudless sky. “I hit one good one that day, and I’ve been chasing it ever since.” If it isn’t clear by now, let me assure you: Buck Brannaman does not half-ass his hobbies. He’s cut back on his time on the road in recent years, but the clubs come with him to every clinic. Like the PGA Tour, Brannaman has his annual West Coast and Florida swings, as well as stints in Texas and the Pacific Northwest. And when he plays, he plays. It’s not unusual for him to get 36, 54, even 72 holes in a day, sometimes to the chagrin of his less-obsessed playing partners. When his friends object to another nine or 18, Brannaman shakes his head and gives them hell. “You can always tell the ones who’ve never dug fence posts or worked a back-breaking job,” he says, sporting a wry smile, “by the ones who want to call it quits out here early.”

Brannaman remembers well the labor of building fences. He easily recalls wrapping his small hands carefully around the barbed wire on his first day with his foster family—the folks who rescued him and his brother from the father who’d holler and beat them. The father, they mused as little boys, who might very well kill them someday. Brannaman’s memories remain clear, including those of his second Christmas and exactly where each of his toys lay under the tree. He remembers when his father, a cowboy worshipper, told him and his brother that they were going to become trick ropers. He remembers the exacting, grueling practice, the endless rehearsal of rodeo routines and the sear of the whip when they would mess up. He remembers becoming a professional roper at age 6 and getting whisked away to Manhattan, staring at buildings taller than the mountains back home and doing rope tricks on What’s My Line? The jealousy from the kids at school in Montana when he and his brother were cast in a TV commercial for Kellogg’s Sugar Pops. The nurse who sat next to his mother’s bed after she fell into a diabetic coma. That woman telling an 11-year-old Brannaman that his mother passed away peacefully just moments after his commercial had come on the TV in the corner of the hospital room. He remembers never saying goodbye. And that the beatings from his father increased. He remembers when his PE teacher saw his horrifyingly abused backside shortly after that and refused to let him go home. He’ll never forget that first night away from his dad—the first time in his life when he trusted that he could drift off to sleep without being awoken violently.

“It was relief,” Brannaman says. “To this day, it was the greatest feeling ever, though I wouldn’t recommend the experience for others. But to remember what that felt like, I wouldn’t give that up.”

Peace didn’t come immediately; his father would send birthday cards to their foster home promising the boys he’d kill them when they turned 18. But it’s clear now that some form of resolution did emerge. Brannaman doesn’t delve into his tortured past in a bid for sympathy. His upbringing is, in part, an explanation for his life’s work. There is a reason he uses the phrase “starting” a colt: His career stands in opposition to the term “breaking.” When Brannaman met Hunt, it wasn’t the control he exerted over the horses that stunned him; it was Hunt’s gentle touch. “The way some people approach the animals, well, it feels like life and death to the horses,” Brannaman tells me. “I grew up in violence, and so I guess I knew what that felt like.” 

That feeling manifests in remarkable ways. There is a haunting moment near the end of Buck, the documentary about his life, when a woman brings her troubled stallion to Brannaman’s clinic. He’d nearly died at birth and was likely oxygen deprived, she tells him. At the clinic, the animal’s dangerous, aggressive. During instruction, he charges and injures one of Brannaman’s trainers. Soon it becomes clear that he must be put down, and when it’s time to guide him back into his trailer, he resists. Everyone is afraid to get in the pen. Only Brannaman, who waits patiently and wordlessly, can coax the terrified stallion back in. As he does, it becomes clear that we, the audience, are witnessing a funeral. When the horse is safely in the trailer, Brannaman walks away without a word. The next day, at the same clinic, a woman asks him how he was able to maintain his composure in the face of such a mean, stubborn and ultimately doomed animal.

He thinks about the question for a moment and then speaks softly: “To have contempt for the horse never would even occur to me.” 

I’m standing with Brannaman on a tee box, struggling to calculate just how much I need to club down to account for the 3,744 feet of elevation, when he begins explaining the Tao of horsemanship. There are three confidences, Brannaman says, that a good rider needs to cultivate in his animal. The first is environmental. You have to teach the horse, often through sheer patience, to feel safe and secure in its surroundings, to trust that there aren’t monsters behind every rock. Next, you have to teach it to be confident in you, the human who wishes to climb on its back. When the horse is worried, Brannaman notes, you have to be able to convince it: “Listen, if you go where I say to go, you will find that you’re safe, that I’ll protect you. As long as you and I are going together, whatever you thought was going to end your life, it won’t.”

When Brannaman gets to the third component, his voice naturally softens. It’s the part that some people never achieve with their horse—the spiritual part. “Through experience, the horse becomes confident in himself,” he explains, “to the point where he doesn’t even need that support because he feels good within himself.”

He smiles, because at this point we both know he’s not just talking about horses. These are just a few of the similarities that Brannaman sees between his craft and his still-newfound golf passion. “On those days when everything’s clicking, even for amateurs like us, the game can be easy,” he says. “The difference is, we might get that feel once in a while, for a few fleeting holes. But we can’t nail it down. It’s like trying to catch a puff of smoke. You don’t become a golfer like the ones we admire until it transcends thought and mechanics altogether—until you develop that elusive confidence, in your environment and in yourself.” This mix of intuition, understanding, experience and rote mechanical precision, Brannaman argues, is the true definition of what many of us casually refer to as feel.

When Brannaman became a professional trick roper at 6 years old, his quest to find feel was coerced under the threat of punishment. But it didn’t mar the satisfaction he got from the slow, steady art of improvement. Out of high school, Brannaman grew obsessed with the idea of perfection. His deft touch with a rope—the way he managed to waltz it around his body—dazzled spectators, but each time he was close to a flawless routine, he would falter, often in ways unnoticeable to the untrained eye. In his early days cowboying, Brannaman would finish supper, wash up and head to the barn for more practice. He remembers being there for hours one Christmas Eve, walking through each step of his routine, drilling it over and over until it was perfect. Then doing it again, only to stumble on the stage.

One day, Tom Dorrance—Ray Hunt’s mentor and the true elder statesman of horsemanship—recommended a book to Brannaman called Psycho-Cybernetics, an early self-help tome. The book’s message hit him hard. Physical prowess alone was not enough to achieve mastery, the book argued. Once the mechanics are in place, the hard mental work can begin. And perfection is attainable only if you can visualize every step of the process with crystal-clear focus. Brannaman devoured the book. His next 30 routines were absolutely perfect.

Brannaman’s trick was to play the whole routine, each movement linked together, in his head. “But there’d be one movement I couldn’t see happening perfectly,” he recalls. “So I threw it out. I went for weeks without a bobble.”

There is something that happens to the atmosphere in a room when a person with immense talent explains what it’s like to do what they do best. It’s what I imagine it must feel like to be in the eye of a hurricane. It’s quiet and calm, but palpably intense. What Brannaman describes—the focus, the precision, the joy of surging past each mental checkpoint, of hitting all the right notes at the exact right time—has many names. Flow state. Being in the zone. Living in the moment. Zen. When the greats really lock into what makes them special, you can almost feel what it must be like to be that dialed. It’s a whiff—an amuse-bouche—of perfection. For most of us, it’s the closest we’ll get.

But I can tell you that Buck Brannaman, at least in the confines of a golf course, is gloriously, unabashedly, delightfully human. In the span of a few holes, I watch him block a drive, get up and down from jail, quote the movie Dumb and Dumber, chunk a touchy wedge around the collar, hit a 3-wood so hard that I’m pretty sure I hear the clubface scream, and call himself an asshole under his breath. On a tricky dogleg-left par 5, I ask him for his advice for the safest layup play off the tee. His reply: “God hates a coward, Charlie.” (I hit driver.)

Brannaman is a skilled player with a smooth, self-taught swing. He keeps a low-single-digit handicap and is hardly in trouble off the tee; his short game is, with only a rare exception in 27 holes, immaculate. But the Zen master of the horse world is also one of us—not immune to a double bogey or exclaiming “Ah, shit!” after a bad break. Though he professes that he once was quite shy, Brannaman is now the consummate host, telling stories and talking trash. Which is to say that, on the course, he’s not the Dalai Lama; he’s a dude trying to hold the reins of a game with endless avenues for frustrating its players.

After nine holes, I muster the courage to ask him if he’s able to bring the part of his brain that can focus for hours at a time during one-on-one horse training—all that calm, serenity and attentiveness—to the course. “You claim to live in the present,” I say, parroting old interview quotes back to him. “Do you play golf that way?” He is unequivocal: No, sir. 

“As much as I love golf, I haven’t put in the time physically to be able to make my swing work like I did with my trick roping,” he tells me. “I’m not disappointed if I don’t play great, because I’m like, ‘Well, Buck, you’re not even close to being there mechanically, because you haven’t put in the time.’”

I’m struck by the sense of optimism buried in this explanation. For Brannaman, there’s a kind of grace in this realization of his own limitations—a freedom born of constraints. He goes back to his visualizations. If he can’t picture himself hitting the shot, then he most often won’t. He’ll back off, start again and try to find confidence by playing within his abilities. “The success rate of a bad thought is damn near 100%,” he says with a smirk. “And not just in golf.”

That’s why in the winter, when the winds howl through Sheridan County, piling snow drifts and rattling fence lines with subzero gusts, Brannaman can be found in his barn—the one Redford helped him build during The Horse Whisperer—riding and working. After more than 40 years, one of the best to ever do it is still studying, picking up something new each day—a movement that soothes his animal unexpectedly or the realization of a subtle mistake he’s been making for years. After each session, he walks a few yards to his tack room, a wood-paneled antechamber where he can be alone. It’s not exactly homey, under fluorescent lights and next to a wheelbarrow of what appears to be horseshit. But this is where he keeps his prized saddle collection—the meticulous leatherwork that tells the story of his life.

It’s here where Brannaman sits down in his big Yeti camp chair for 40 minutes at a time and plays back every move, searing the lessons into his brain. Above this chair, just over the door, is a framed quote from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Citizenship in a Republic” speech, which reads, in part, “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”

I take a picture of the quote with my phone and turn to ask him about those words—words I figure might as well be tattooed on his forearm—but Brannaman cuts me off to identify an area of the barn where he’s considering building a golf simulator. Point made. The pursuit never stops.

Roping a cow, it turns out, has a fair bit in common with the golf swing. “If I was teaching you,” Brannaman says to me out on his ranch one Saturday afternoon, “I would be able to tell if you are going to catch or not catch that thing before the rope ever leaves your hand. I can sit back and watch your swing, the plane of your loop and all the angles. If your swing is right, all you have to do is open your hand and you’ve got something caught.”

He pauses and lifts a finger in the air. “Only sometimes you’ll make a terrible swing—a nasty, skanky one—and you’ll accidentally catch and think, ‘Damn, I’m good.’”

What he loves about golf is that, like roping or even starting a colt, there are flashes of brilliance, even for beginners, that you can luck into. There are little moments when a door to a universe of possibilities opens just wide enough for you to peek inside. And right before you make heads or tails of what you’re seeing, it closes again. The art lies in putting in the time to know the difference between dumb luck and skill.

In preparation to meet Brannaman, I watched hours of footage of him leading and riding horses, and it’s true what they say: The man simply glides, like a duck across a pond. There’s clearly a lot going on beneath the surface, but if there’s any hint of effort, I can’t see it. I made a note to ask him about this—about his even keel, his complete mastery. After a tumultuous, terrifying childhood, is Brannaman’s pursuit of perfection just about wresting back a tiny bit of control from the universe?

That’s not how he sees it. “There are times,” he says, moving forward in his chair a bit, “with enough experience and enough study and knowledge, when you feel like you and the horse are like one mind and one body, absolutely synchronized together. And that is the most euphoric feeling—to know that he believes in you and you believe in him. There’s no longer the issue of fear. There’s no anxiety. You’re just involved in this amazing dance, and the two of you know what the other is thinking. That is about the coolest feeling ever. And I’ve been chasing it my whole life. And I’ll never, ever fully get there.”

Part of what drew me to Brannaman’s story—beyond the fact that people like him who are born into violence and manage to turn their darkness into something beautiful don’t come around often—is the desire to understand what golf has to offer those who are already masters in other realms of life. The sport is universal, yet it seems to have an especially strong pull for those who’ve tasted greatness elsewhere. Athletes, politicians, titans of industry—all the real strivers and obsessives seem to flock to golf when they’ve run out of worlds to conquer.

The answer, at least in Brannaman’s case, revolves around what can only be described as an addiction. Not to control, but to feel. He offers me up a quote, something he heard Hunt say not long after the pair met all those years ago. I get the sense that it’s become Brannaman’s credo—a mission statement for the lifelong tango with his obsessions, whether they concern wild animals or paspalum grass: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m not lost.”

As I left Brannaman’s ranch, the Bighorns disappearing in my rear view, I kept turning Hunt’s words over in my head. With each replay, they began to feel like a skeleton key. We play golf to bond with others and to be alone. We play to know ourselves and to step outside ourselves. We play to escape from everything else and to tap into something bigger. We play to experience joy, and, by teeing it up, we commit to a lifetime of frustration. Whatever our reasons, and however contradictory they might seem, one thing remains: We are chasing something. A number. A lifestyle. A competitor. An ambition. A feel. We’ll get there, but we’ll never fully get there. We don’t know where we are going, but we are not lost.