Tobacco Wars

By Patrick Dawson/Billings

It's enough to make a cowboy spit. While the beer and liquor flowed and cigars flared in the new sky boxes of Montana State University's football stadium, local collegiate rodeo boosters were drowning their sorrows elsewhere. M.S.U., which played host to the College National Finals Rodeo for 25 years until 1997, almost had the lucrative, week-long competition back for June 1999, much to the pleasure of the Bozeman Chamber of Commerce and the Lions Club. But once it became clear that the rodeo's big-money sponsor, U.S. Tobacco, planned to hang signs in the arena and hand out free samples of that cowboy staple, Copenhagen and Skoal chewing tobacco, the American Lung Association took out full-page ads in the local newspaper in protest. This prompted M.S.U. president MIKE MALONE to invoke the new campus antitobacco rule and cancel the event, sending national organizers off to look for a tobacco-friendly site, perhaps Oklahoma City or Las Vegas. One man's vice lord, of course, can be a cowboy's benefactor--U.S. Tobacco provides significant scholarship money to college cowboy and cowgirl athletes. Meanwhile, football season has been enthusiastically greeted by Malone, despite the beery atmosphere that tends to accompany the games.

--By Patrick Dawson/Billings