How does Coleman Cooney, a former UCSD student, find himself killing bulls as part of his job?
Coleman Cooney, founder of the California Academy of Tauromaquia bullfighting school, demonstrates his skills while Walter Badet, a student at the academy, utilizes his week-long training on a one-year-old cow.
Cooney wasn’t your average college student. He left UCSD for Paris in 1983 with a degree in art and European history.
“I’m actually not sure I graduated,” he admitted. “I might be three units short.”
A mere three units couldn’t keep him from Europe, however. Little did he know that his transatlantic trip would eventually become the catalyst for a lifelong passion: bullfighting.
As a native San Diegan, Cooney had plenty of experience as a bullfighting spectator during his frequent jaunts to Mexico. It wasn’t until he found himself in Spain during his postcollege European sojourn, however, that bullfighting struck an emotional chord. Under the magnetism of his reawakened interest, he procured season tickets to the San Ysidro Feria, a 30-day bullfighting fair that takes place every May in Madrid and draws over 25,000 spectators.
Smitten with the European lifestyle and bullfighting culture, Cooney decided to settle in Madrid, where he lived for seven years. There, he received training from bullfighting masters and aficionados alike.
His stint in Europe was a “defined wanderlust,” he said, and he’s still in it. Only now he makes regular pilgrimages to Mexico and Spain as part of the curriculum for the California Academy of Tauromaquia, a bullfighting school he founded in 1997.
Although the school wasn’t born overnight, the idea was.
“When I came back to the states,” Cooney said, “I noticed everyone was talking about extreme sports and adrenaline-charged activities. They seemed desperate to find thrills.”
What he didn’t bargain for was that he would have the perfect answer for such a hungry market: a bullfighting school that could teach the cerebral aspects of this daring and highly misunderstood art form.
Cooney drafted a business plan and opened the academy in May 1997. Within a matter of weeks, it was featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Maxim, Sports Illustrated, “Average Joe” and ABC News.
“I think it was serendipitous in some ways that we came out when we did,” Cooney said of his entrepreneurial venture. “We have experience in a very unusual niche.”
The California Academy of Tauromaquia is one of three bullfighting schools in the nation and the only one to offer an annual trip to Spain as well as frequent excursions to Mexico. The school is above all a mobile one, but its base is located 30 minutes east of San Diego in Alpine, where Cooney resides with his wife and two sons.
Students at the academy run the gamut from dancers, filmmakers and pop singers to architects, lawyers, students and businessmen. Some are simply thrill-seekers who want to say they’ve “been there, done that.” Others are more serious and some even have professional ambitions.
Most students start off with the weekend introductory class, where they might submit to the test of amateur bullfighting at Rancho Santa Alicia, a working bull ranch in Valle de las Palmas, situated 50 miles south of the border in Baja California.
Here they will have the opportunity to encounter a one-year-old vaca or cow (no horns) and learn some bullfighting skills in a hands-on setting called a tienta.
The antique stone ring at Rancho Santa Alicia is composed of a dirt carpet, two doors, an opening to the bullpen, and four burladeros or wooden partitions that offer shelter to on-lookers inside the ring.
Burladeros can also be used as stations from which to gauge a student’s progress or yell out direction and encouraging advice. That students are never left alone with the bovine is perhaps the most comforting aspect of the program. Given this safety net, it’s rare that anyone will sustain injuries beyond the occasional bruise.
This is not to say that one’s first encounter with a charging vaca is a walk in the park. On the contrary — it is usually an adrenaline-surging, heart-thumping, spleen-wrenching panic fest.
“Girls have broken down and cried,” Cooney said. “Honest men have shaken their heads and refused to go in.”
But for those who dare to conquer the nagging voice in their head that tells them they’re crazy for volunteering to be attacked by an untamed beast, blessings await. They are given a red cloth — a muleta — that the bullfighter (or torero) holds to the side as he or she advances.
To a “virgin” vaca, the muleta appears as part of the bullfighter’s body and the torero is able to make a neat escape when the cow charges it instead of him. This phenomenon only lasts from 15 to 20 minutes, however; after that, the vaca will begin to decipher the difference between the human and the cloth.
According to Cooney, most students have never touched a cow, let alone been charged by one. Their most overwhelming response after the experience is, “Did I do that? I can’t believe it!” Some are so enthralled that they regularly come back for more.
“A lot of people romanticize bullfighting into something completely spontaneous, but it’s not,” Cooney said. “It takes hours of discipline and training just like any other sport.”
Walter Badet, a horse trainer and one of the students at the academy, knows that the road to matador stardom is hard-paved. He knows that to become a matador you must kill a four-year-old bull and thereby pass a rigorous test called the alternativa. That’s why he doesn’t aspire to be one and said that he was only interested in bullfighting for self-exploration.
A Frenchman and current Arizona resident, Badet took a five-day, $2,000 course at the academy where he trained for six hours a day. There, he studied bullfighting videos and practiced his technique, gestures and stance before even entering the ring. For Badet, bullfighting is a new challenge and offers him a way to test his limits.
However ignorant or inexperienced you are in the arena, the California Academy of Tauromaquia will leave you changed. In a twisted sense of paradox, it will remind you of your own human ineptitude and at the same time augment your self-confidence. Who knows, it might even inspire you to pursue your dreams of becoming a full-fledged matador.
The academy offers weekend introductory courses for $400 and week-long intensive courses for $2,000 as well as trips to working bull ranches in Mexico and Spain. Cooney can be reached at (619) 709-0664 or at www.bullfightschool.com. Student discounts are available.
