ROCKY CARROLL: BOTUS (BOOT MAKER OF THE UNITED STATES)
There are stars, superstars, legends – and then there was Rocky, who defied convention, labels, and the laws of motion that the rest of us pay attention to. Rocky could sell anything, but he sold nothing so well as himself.
As The New York Times wrote, “Nobody made boots like Rocky, and nobody embodied Texas eccentricity and individualism like Rocky.”
A bootmaker to the power elite and seven US presidents, Rocky Carroll styled himself BOTUS – Bootmaker Of The United States. His customer book included Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Princess Diana, Elvis, Oprah Winfrey, Willie Nelson, George Strait, Clint Black, Rogers Clemens, Pope John Paul II, Kenny Chesney, Vladimir Putin, Johnny Cash, Larry Gatlin & the Gatlin Brothers, Susan Anton, A.J. Foyt, Chuck Norris, George Jones, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Reba McEntire, Lee Greenwood, Peyton Manning, The Judds, Jack Nicholson, Larry Hagman and Dolly Parton, to name a few. He made $40,000 cowboy boots for Liz Taylor, inlaid with nine carats of diamonds, for the launch of her White Diamonds perfume line. Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to walk in space, has a pair — complete with the NASA logo and Maple Leaf. His biggest order (literally)? Boots for the NFL Denver Broncos – all size 15 to 19s.
He was a boot maker’s child who made his first pair of boots at 6 years old, and kept right on going for 73 years, dying at his shop in 2017 and breaking all our hearts.
He flew on Air Force One. He slept in the governor’s mansion. He took calls from Tony Blair and Peyton Manning. Twenty-seven pairs of the boots he made for former President George H.W. Bush are kept at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station. But he remained unpretentious, unapologetically himself, looking like a cross between Waylon Jennings and a pirate temporarily stranded on land, cursing a blue streak and gnawing on toothpicks, in his dusty little shop across from a Jiffy Lube.
His acts of kindness were legendary. He gave a friend and her husband a tour of Air Force One, just for the hell of it. And when her husband, serving in Iraq, had a problem on base, she called Rocky. She recalls, “The next thing I know, he calls back and is cackling and he’s going, ‘Is Joint Chiefs of Staff high enough for you?’ Coincidence or not, the issue was fixed. Promptly.”
Rocky was a lawman with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office for more than three decades. He worked narcotics, vice and the helicopter squad, and for a time was making boots in his shop during the day while fighting crime at night. He carried his detective’s shield in his wallet, long after he gave up crime-fighting for boot-making full time. But his boot-making led to crime-fighting one last time.
One summer day in 2002, Rocky arrived at his shop at dawn as usual, with a brown paper bag of donuts for the police officers who liked to stop by during the day. A truck full of would-be robbers, thinking it was a bag of cash, were lying in wait to ambush him. They fired twice at him with a shotgun. Rocky grabbed his .380-caliber pistol out of his boot, and returned fire. “The ones that lived, they got 45 and 105 years in prison,” he said.
Rocky was rushed to the hospital with a broken pelvis. “When I was in the hospital, George W. called the hospital,” Rocky said. “The nurse in I.C.U. she says, ‘Some damn joker called and said the president was calling. We hung up on him.’ They called back and said, ‘This is the Air Force One communication officer. Don’t hang up. President Bush wants to talk to Rocky.’ And then Rick Perry, the governor, called me and said, ‘Throw that .380 away. I’m going to give you a Sig Sauer .45 for Christmas.’ ”
Rocky lived his life on a mission to defy any superlatives a person could think of. Rocky’s boots were as good as any boots could ever hope to be. But Rocky – the man, the bootmaker, the teller of stories and collector of moments – was better.