Name Marty Wood | ||
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NFR 60 Greatest of All Time- Marty Wood Day 6
Martin Roy (Marty) Wood (Born June 4, 1933) is a rodeo cowboy from Bowness, Calgary, in the province of Alberta, Canada. The ProRodeo Hall of Fame inducted Wood in 1991.
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Marty was born June 4, 1933 in Carstairs, Alberta, to Dorothy and Harry Wood. His great grandfather was Henry Wise Wood, the founding president of the United Farmers of Alberta, who had settled in Carstairs in 1905. Marty's family moved to Bowness, then a small hamlet just outside Calgary, in 1940 or 1941, and he attended school there. His parents built a house and opened the Wood's Riding Academy, where Marty learned to break, ride and show horses. He took up rodeo in the early 1950s and soon specialized in Saddle broncs. He won his first professional rodeo championship in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1953.
During the fifties and sixties, Wood was Canadian Champion Saddle Bronc Rider in 1954, 1955 and 1963, World Champion in 1958, 1964 and 1966, and won the Calgary Stampede a total of five times, in 1954, 1957, 1961, 1964 and 1965. He also won at the Cheyenne, Madison Square Garden, San Francisco Cow Palace, Fort Worth, Houston, Salinas, Boston Garden, and Oklahoma City rodeos.
Wood was married to Jean Routh in the 1950s and the couple had one son, Chip. The couple divorced in the late 1960s. During his career, Wood suffered many injuries, including seven broken legs, fractures of both feet and ankles, broken ribs and a broken collarbone. Because of the cumulative effect of his injuries, he retired in 1974, going on to train American Quarter Horses and Thoroughbreds for racing and jumping. He now lives in Pendleton, Oregon.