Beneath every great calf roper stands a great calf-roping horse. Dean Oliver’s horse “Mickey” was one of the most talented and hard-working roping horses to ever compete in the Ellensburg Rodeo.
Dean Oliver first bought 11 year-old Mickey in Texas in 1959, and he rode him regularly until 1965. During that time Oliver won five of his eight World Calf-Roping championships and all three of his three World All-Around buckles. “I was so lucky to have Mickey in my prime,” Dean remembers.
As noted above, Dean Oliver was born in Dodge City, Kansas in 1929 and moved with his parents Vernon and Vesper to Nampa, Idaho in the 1930s. In 1953, he joined the Rodeo Cowboys Association. During a two-decade career, from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, Oliver garnered eleven world championship buckles, winning the All-Around Championship in 1963, 1964, and 1965. His record of gross earnings stood unbroken for nearly two decades.
Rodeo historian Willard Porter noted that Dean Oliver “runs on his good horses,” and the story of Mickey is crucial to Oliver’s rise as a world champion cowboy. In the mid-1950s, Dean Oliver was an up-and-coming roper in sore need of a steady horse with a skill level equal to his own. He had first ridden a filly named “Brandy” and then rode “Buck” to his world roping title in ’55. But Buck’s knee gave out and Dean rode borrowed horses until ’57. Finishing out of the top five at the ’57 National Finals Rodeo, Dean bought “Chock” in ’58, but he too was old and crippled and Dean was left ‘afoot’ as the ’59 season approached.
In May of 1959, Dean Oliver visited Texan Lee Cockrell and together they roped a couple of jackpots and a rodeo in Shamrock, and Lubbock, Texas. As fate would have it, Dean rode Cockrell’s 11 year-old sorrel gelding, “Mickey, and he was mightily impressed. Riding Mickey to a $500 jackpot win over Glenn Franklin, the wheels inside Dean’s his head began to turn. He bought Mickey for $2500 and that year rode him to win $18,000 and a third world title. Indeed, during the next five years Mickey and Dean would win $150,000 together.
Together, Dean Oliver and Mickey became an awesome duo. Sports journalist Stan Allen noted, “Mickey gave Dean a good surge of speed coming out of the box, would slam on the brakes at a signal, and then back up and bring the calf to Dean for the throw.”
“It was such a good feeling starting out with Mickey in the trailer behind me,” Dean recalled in an Idaho newspaper interview. “I knew I could win if I got a decent draw. He always gave me 100 percent of his ability in every run.”
At the Ellensburg Rodeo, Dean Oliver and Mickey won the calf roping competitions in ‘62, ‘63, and ’64. By the end of 1964, however, Mickey had “pulled up lame” and had to be retired in 1965. For the next thirteen years, Mickey led the ‘good life’ of a retired rodeo champion; he died in 1978 at age thirty.
Dean Oliver became a Founding Inductee to the Ellensburg Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1997. It is fitting that Mickey joined Dean Oliver as a 2002 Inductee to the Ellensburg Rodeo Hall of Fame.