Durfey fights through chronic ailment to return to rodeo glory

Tyson Durfey had no idea what was going on.

Full-body rashes, chronic fatigue, pounding headaches and vertigo were some of the symptoms he experienced. There were days he couldn’t get out of bed.

“My body was trying to tell me, ‘Hey, there’s something wrong,’ but I wasn’t smart enough to listen to it,” said Durfey, a Cinch endorsee and the 2016 world champion tie-down roper from Brock, Texas. “I thought, ‘Just toughen up.’

“It all hit me one day when I was carrying a water pump on the ranch. As I got to the top of the hill, I couldn’t breathe and had severe chest pain. The walls were closing in. I go to my truck and sat there a minute, then I just got up and went back to work.”

It started happening more often. His concerns grew. He talked to his wife, Shea, and explained that he thought he was having heart issues. He went to doctors and had multiple procedures to find out what was wrong. Blood tests revealed nothing but good health, but a cardiologist found something.

“He hooks me up to the EKG,” Durfey said of an electrocardiogram, a test that records the electrical activity of the heart. “He asks, ‘How do you feel right now?’ I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve got some chest pain, but it’s not severe.

“He said, ‘I’m not trying to scare you, but I think you’re having a heart attack right now. I need to get you in to do a heart catheterization.’ ”

The procedure is where surgeons insert a thin, flexible tube into the heart through an artery or vein. It wasn’t a heart attack after all. The doctor found a fragment on the outer layer of Durfey’s heart. It was a leftover from a small incident that occurred in his youth. The relief of no major heart issues was evident, but he still wasn’t feeling well. In fact, he was getting worse.

“I had no energy, and I didn’t even want to play with my kids,” he said. “I did what cowboys typically do and wait until you’re literally dying before you tell somebody you need help. I called my best friend and said, ‘Hey, man, this might be it. I’m in really bad shape.’ ”

While maybe a last-ditch effort to reconnect, it was the perfect timing. Bart Miller recommended calling Dr. Jason West, a friend of Durfey’s who runs the West Clinic in Pocatello, Idaho. The clinic has been around for more than a century and boasts of natural healing from chronic disease. Miller called West twice late on a Saturday night so the doctor understood the immediacy of the situation. A Zoom call between West and Durfey happened minutes later – West actually excused himself from a convention in Las Vegas to visit with Durfey.

As the cowboy read his blood panels and food-toxicology report to West, the doctor had an idea.

“He said, ‘I think you have a chronic viral infection,’ ” Durfey said of the interaction. “He said, ‘If you will fly to my clinic, we’ll do a live blood analysis, and we will tell you based on what your blood panel looks like, and I will actually look at the cell itself.’

“I thought it was outstanding, because when you’re at the bottom, you’ll do anything to get better. You could literally see the virus in my blood, and my blood cells were dead or dying or basically zombie cells, and they were globbing together. It was so thick my heart couldn’t pump it through.”

Through treatments, he got better. His drive resurfaced. His will to win resurfaced. Durfey had slowed his rodeo career down, focusing his attention toward Shea and the kids, Praise, 9; Risyn, 6; and Tyen, 4. But with his health improving, his hunger for the game returned.

“When I went to the health clinic the first time, I thought, ‘When I get healthy, I want to rodeo,’ ” Durfey said. “I flew from the health clinic the day of my 10th treatment to a ranch in Nebraska and bought a horse. I decided I was going to rodeo. I started to get my health back, exercising, roping a ton. Since then, I’ve bought more horses, and we are where we are now.”

That place is back toward the top of the tie-down roping standings. A 14-time National Finals Rodeo qualifier, he last played on the sport’s biggest stage in 2020, the year the championship took place in a Texas baseball stadium because of COVID restrictions. In a span from 2007-2020, he’d missed the NFR just one time.

Now, though, he’s itching to get back to it. He gave it a run this season, winning three of the longest-running rodeos in the world: the World’s Oldest Rodeo in Prescott, Arizona; the West of the Pecos Rodeo in Texas; and, of course, the Cheyenne (Wyoming) Frontier Days Rodeo. He first attended Cheyenne as a toddler, tagging along with his dad, Roy Durfey, a calf roper that has trained many cowboys and tie-down roping horses. Nearly four decades later, Tyson Durfey won “The Daddy of ’Em All” for the first time.

“It means a lot to win it,” he said. “I’m very thankful after I dropped the ball three years ago when I was just going to a few rodeos. I came back high man, the last guy out in the short round with the best calf. I messed up. I never thought I would have the chance to win it again. It means a lot to come back at this stage of my life to win it.”

A day after his big, Wyoming victory, Durfey bid adieu to his wife and children, who had spent the summer with him. They went back to Texas, and he went to work.

“The worst part of rodeo is to say goodbye to your family,” he said. “When you’re in your 20s and 30s and don’t have kids, it’s not so hard, but when you have kids, it gets harder. You have to push that out of your brain. I call it compartmentalization. It’s almost similar to the fact of maybe missing at five rodeos in a row and showing up at the sixth one expecting to win.

“You have to block out any noise to go compete and go win. As much as I love rodeoing, and I think it’s great, I love winning more. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t chew. I don’t take drugs. Winning is what drives me. Winning is the best thing.”

It’s the high that will never be beaten. At 41 and after four years on the sidelines, Durfey is back climbing rodeo’s mountaintop. He owns a gold buckle and all the trinkets that come with being a champion, but that rush that comes with being triumphant inspires him.

The pathway to his addiction is through a sport he’s been involved in since Day 1. Raised by a calf roper near the northwest Missouri community of Savannah, this is what has propelled him to do some amazing things in his lifetime. He’s a businessman, an entrepreneur and a motivational speaker, but it all comes from winning.

“I’m going to do this until my body says I’m done or I’ve decided I’ve just had enough. This is a huge investment,” Durfey said. “These horses cost six figures now, and the truck … it doesn’t take anything to invest a half million dollars to get back in, and that’s not including fees. I’ve committed to this year and next year, 100 percent all in, and then we’ll probably just see after that.”

Champions oftentimes are a different breed. They know what it takes to win, and the victories make the competition worthwhile.