NFL Hall of Fame player Terry Bradshaw is glad to be home after two weeks of whirlwind travel, putting in time as co-host of Fox NFL Sunday as he also promotes his recently released movie, "Father Figures," and television show, "Better Late than Never."
Bradshaw's wife, Tammy, made the family steel-cut oatmeal in a pressure cooker this morning and somehow Bradshaw — an admitted helpless creature when it comes to working the coffeemaker — has made some strong coffee for the visitors in his kitchen.
"I'm just tired," said the 69-year-old former Steelers quarterback. "I've been in a hotel room for over two weeks, and I'm tired. Every year, I say, 'Keep December open, open, open,' and I'm swamped every year."
"The last six weeks have been difficult. I'll maybe have 10 days to myself in December," he added. "I haven't had a Christmas off in 40 years and I haven't had Thanksgiving off in 20 years. I'm always gone."
Bradshaw shakes his head and takes a sip of his black coffee in the newly-upgraded kitchen at his Circle 12 Ranch, a 744-acre horse and cattle ranch in Thackerville, Oklahoma, which sits an exit from the WinStar World Casino and Resort on the other side of the Red River.
In the next two weeks, more members of Bradshaw's family will gather in the kitchen to spend time together for the holidays, in what could be the last at the horse and cattle ranch. That's because Bradshaw plans to put the property back on the market for $9.95 million this week.
"I'm 69 and my plans were always that I'm going to have to sell this place because it will be too much when I retire," he said. "We have nine employees and buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment to do the work. There's going to be a time I won't be able to keep it up."
Circle 12 Ranch has been on the market before for $10.8 million, but Bradshaw hasn't been anxious to sell the Red River ranch he built himself from basically nothing over nearly 20 years. Instead, he's waiting for the right owner to come along.
And so, he keeps investing in the property, putting in new paddocks and building a new brood-mare manager's house for members of his staff.
"This place may not sell for five or six more years and I can't sit still when a need arises," said Bradshaw.
"The idea is this place will be in someone else's hands when I retire from Fox, and there's a lot of people in Dallas that would love to have this — for no other reason than they want a weekend ranch," he added.
The upgrades give would-be buyers an add value proposition to Circle 12 Ranch, which sits an hour-and-a-half away from Dallas, said Bernard "Bernie," Uechtritz, founder of Icon Global Group and realtor with Dallas-based Briggs Freeman Sotheby's International Realty.
"There's a tremendous amount of value there, with more than $10 million just in the buildings alone," Uechtritz said. "The ranch has a lot of infrastructure from fences to barns to buildings and paved roads. Terry has done an amazing job of building this property over 20 years, and he's created a masterpiece."
Behind the making of Circle 12 ranch
The Circle 12 Ranch sits within walking distance of the Red River and is as close to Texas as Bradshaw could build a ranch and still live the country life he remembers as a boy.
"When I bought it, it was as ugly as you can get, but I wanted to be out in the country," said Bradshaw, who began to quickly look for a new home for his horses after acreage in Westlake he leased from the late Nelson Bunker Hunt was liquidated by the U.S. government after Hunt lost his fortune in the silver market.
The former acreage is now part of Westlake's Vaquero neighborhood. At the time, it was just too pricey for Bradshaw to make a bid on the tract, so he began to look for his next ranch venture.
He looked as far north as Weatherford, but he didn't like the dirt for the horses, so he went east to Tyler. But he would have to figure out how to make it possible to fly into Tyler each week. Nothing seemed to make sense, he said.
That's when he crossed the Red River into Oklahoma. The town of Thackerville is the first Oklahoma town a motorist will hit after leaving the Texas border.
At the time, Bradshaw drove his four-wheel drive Jeep through the property before hitting the vista where the main ranch house now sits and stood atop his Jeep looking at Texas across the Red River.
"I saw Texas right there and said, 'This is cool.' It faced the valley and I could see this would be the place to build a house," he said. "I stood there, smoking a cigar and thought about it some more."
It took Bradshaw's late father's stamp of approval before he moved forward with a deal to buy the ranch. That was nearly two decades ago.
It probably took that long to get everything about Circle 12 Ranch to Bradshaw's specifications.
“Everything on this ranch is intentionally congregated in one area so you can take everything on this ranch and drive it right to the barn,” he added. “Everything was thought out about this ranch.”
Now, Bradshaw is readying for his next, much smaller project — yet another ranch in northeast Texas.
