Dick Griffith started Trick Riding and Roman Riding alongside his parents. He won the Trick Rider World Championship when he was only nine. That was the same year that he rode his pony into the Oval Office of President Harding. He also was in a command performance rodeo where he showed off his equestrian skills and his true cowboy heritage by riding a bucking calf, an ostrich, a bucking buffalo, and a bucking stag forwards while his father, Curly, rode backwards.
Three years later, his father died and Dick’s ponies were sold. He went to live with his grandparents in Denton Texas. He started sharing a horse in exchange for help with Tad Lucas, a Champion Cowgirl. Dick hoped to enter the trick riding competition at the Ft. Worth Stock Show but discovered that it was an exhibition act not a competition. To earn some income, Dick got a job riding for World Champion Trick Roper, Chester Byers in his horse catches. He also entered the bullriding, but had to send a telegram to his grandparents for permission since he was seventeen. Dick won the Bull Riding Championship at Ft. Worth Stock, riding nine out of nine bulls. He claimed, “I was just too scared to fall off”. Dick went on to win four consecutive Bull Riding Championships and three before the RCA started keeping records.
When he was twenty-one, Dick traveled to London to compete against thirty-nine other countries in a World Trick Riding Championship. After watching him practice, over half the countries withdrew from competition. Dick performed one hundred and fifty-six different tricks to win the World Championship. For as long as there were competitions held, Dick never placed lower than first.
