Jewel News

When leg injuries forced Jewel to drop out of this season's Dancing With the Stars, she promised she would be back one day.

But from the sound of it, her husband, fellow DWTS competitor Ty Murray, would like to start a family first.

"We'll see what the future holds, but it'll be hard to do [DWTS] if her belly is out to here," Murray says while stretching out his arms and hands to outline a big baby bump.

I caught up with the world champion rodeo cowboy yesterday at a West Hollywood dance studio, where he and pro partner Chelsie Hightower were practicing the Lindy Hop. Read on for more about Ty and Jewel's family plans, his new appreciation for musicals and his heartfelt message to the sports world.

"I think two," Murray says when asked about how many kids he wants. "In a perfect world, it would be great to have a little boy and a little girl, but you don't get to do it like that…We're trying not to focus on it too much. We're just trying to live our life and go about our life. When it should happen, it will happen."

For now, Murray is concentrating on learning his dance steps. It's something he never thought he'd be interested in. "I grew up watching John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Robert De Niro and that sort of stuff," Murray says. "If ever I was watching TV and a musical broke out, I'd change the channel, but now I am seeing that with a complete different set of eyes."

And he's hoping his appearance on DWTS will open up a lot more eyes to the cowboy world. He not only agreed to compete this time around (producers had already asked two times) because it was something he could do with Jewel, but also, "It's a huge amount of exposure for the cowboy" and the Professional Bull Riders, an international organization that he cofounded and co-owns.

"For me, cowboys never get treated like viable athletes," he says, "and that's a hard thing to take when you dedicate yourself to a sport that is so difficult, is so technical and is so dangerous. The ESPY Awards don't even consider bull riding. I feel [professional cowboys] have every right to be amongst the greatest athletes in the world. So I feel like Dancing With the Stars is a chance to go represent the cowboys in a way that they're not normally represented."

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