Donnie Griggs of Hermiston has been a fixture protecting cowboys for the last decade at the area's two premier rodeos, the Pendleton Round-Up and Farm-City Pro Rodeo. Griggs is back in the arena this week in Pendleton, after recovering from an injury earlier in the year.

Most people would see 2,000 pounds of angry, horned bull charging them as a moment gone horribly wrong, but for Donnie Griggs it’s just another day at the office.

“It’s a job that you enjoy,” the Hermiston bullfighter said. “It’s an adrenaline rush on one hand, but you’ve got to be calm and mellow and cool.”

Griggs has been a fixture of the Pendleton Round-Up for eight years and the Farm-City Pro Rodeo for nine. Keeping rodeo bulls from trampling cowboys may not be for everyone, but for Griggs professional bullfighting was a natural progression from riding steers as a kid and bulls as a teenager.

Not just anybody can become a bullfighter. It takes special training. Would-be bullfighters have to go through a rigorous approval process by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association and be scouted out at conventions.

Griggs studied under Loyd Ketchum, generally considered one of the best bullfighters in the PRCA, and got his “big break” when he was invited to team up with Ketchum during the 2002 rodeo season.

The job keeps him on his toes, even more than a decade later.

“There’s never two wrecks the same,” he said.

That’s what happens when you’re working with animals as unpredictable as rodeo bulls. Certain animals get a reputation for being a handful, but Griggs said any bull can turn on a bullfighter or a cowboy.

“You try to treat all bulls the same,” he said. “There’s that one bull that you’ve seen 50 times and it’s never hooked anyone and then one day it has a cranky day.”

Most of the time everyone gets out of the way, but sometimes bull and man collide in painful ways. Griggs broke his tibia this spring at a rodeo in Lynden, Washington, and was out for six weeks. The injury was the latest in a long ledger of hospital visits, including three broken legs, broken ribs, stitches, torn-up shoulders and a punctured lung.

Griggs does what he can to keep the cowboys from the same injuries, rushing toward a bucking bull and waving his arms to distract it when a bucked-off rider needs an escape.

“I feel very responsible,” he said. “If a guy gets run over, even if it was out of my hands, I still feel responsible. It’s my job to stop the wreck before it happens.”

Griggs said every rodeo is different. Hermiston is a “really neat setting,” he said, with a great board and beautiful arena.

And it’s an honor to work at Round-Up, where “everybody who is anybody” in rodeo has performed.

In the end, though, “the job’s the same once the gate opens.”

This year marks Griggs’s 10h year living in Hermiston, after he met his wife Torrie at the Columbia River Circuit Finals and moved to be with her. He said rodeo weeks are busy — he just got back from Lewiston, Idaho, worked the PBR Monday and Tuesday and will be putting in long days the rest of Round-Up week. But at the end of the day, the schedule is worth it to keep the job he loves, working with a network of people who have become lifelong friends.

“There’s a camaraderie in rodeo, probably by far more than any other sport,” he said.

Bullfighters Donnie Griggs and Dusty Tuckness and Round-Up barrelman Justin Rumsford, will be meeting with fans and signing autographs from 10 to 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 19, at the Pendleton Walmart, 2203 S.W. Court Ave., Pendleton.