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With the newspapers cheering, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt chose a top-notch regiment of more than 1,250 men. They were first called Teddy's Texas Tarantulas and went through three or four other monikers until Roosevelt's Rough Riders stuck.

I got to talking to an old actor, and he had a bunch of stories about the Rough Riders.

I was a fan of westerns growing up. Every boy wanted to ride a horse and be a cowboy.

My father was a sort of John Wayne Texan who'd worked as a cowboy when he was young. He'd participated in rattlesnake round-ups and swum with copperheads.

I didn't know much about Texas when I moved there for graduate school. In my first or second semester, I took a class in life and literature of the Southwest, and that's where I first heard about these events along the border in 1915-1918, what Anglos called the Bandit Wars.

Duran is a mythological figure in Latin America. He grew up in a time of turbulence because Panama was basically occupied by the United States. So he felt obliged to fight Americans in the ring. He felt the whole pride of his country and the need for cultural and political emancipation in his hands.

There was a time when cowboys respected their horses instead of riding them to death just to show off for a crowd.

I'm a 10th-generation Texan. My ancestor - Andrew Kent - fought at the Alamo.

Castro was always using his athletes as a way of symbolically defeating the United States in the ring, and after these Cubans defeated Americans in the ring, they were turning down exorbitant sums to leave the island.

My grandpa was a big cowboy in his values and the way he lived his life. For our family, the ranch represented our family time when we got to drive down through all that desert farmland and Grandpa would wake us up at 5 A.M. to feed the horses if we wanted to earn the right to ride them later. I always had so much fun.