When he's not traveling and teaching, which he is for the better part of the year, Brannaman lives on a ranch in Wyoming, with his wife, teenage daughter, and a bunch of dogs. And about 30 horses, too.
But these days, Brannaman, who was the real-life inspiration for Nicholas Evans' best seller, The Horse Whisperer, and served as the equine adviser on Robert Redford's film adaptation, is spending more time in airports than in stables and corrals. The star of his own movie - his life story, complete with painful tales of childhood abuse by a raging father - has been much in demand.
"I was up on the back of a horse when I was 3 years old," Brannaman said the other day from an airport lounge in Denver. "That's when I first started to ride, and that's the age, believe it or not, that I started doing rope tricks, that's when I started learning it. And by the time I was 6, we were doing it professionally, getting paid, my brother and I."
There are TV clips of the little Brannaman boys - Buck and Smokie - doing their fancy lariat moves in the film. As part of the act, Buck would do his rope tricks wearing a blindfold. That was his father's idea.
And if he didn't get it right, the boy would get lashed with a belt when they returned home. For Brannaman, who saw Meehl's completed film for the first time at the Sundance festival, recounting those experiences to others has become a way to connect.
"This isn't really the first time I've shared some of these things," says Brannaman, who published a memoir, The Faraway Horses, in 2001.
