Being a cowboy is a real kick in the head

By DOUG STRUCK

Staff Writer

When his bronco exploded from the pen, Trent Reamer repeated in his head:  Just hold on. Don’t fall off.

He pulled hard with one hand strapped to the bucking horse underneath him and tried to keep his hips swiveling and his back supple.

It lasted 8 seconds, all he needed.

Reamer, 23, had put in a full day Thursday working on a cattle operation in Overbrook and then drove two hours to the Marion County Fair in Hillsboro. He would drive back late that night and be at work the next day. All for that 8 seconds.

“I love it.  It’s just how I chose to live my life,”  Reamer said of bronco riding. 

He said he will compete in about 40 rodeos in a year.  He didn’t even know what prize his first-place finish and score of 73 points at the fair would bring.

“A couple hundred dollars,” he figured “but you don’t do this for the money.  You can’t get rich.”

He looks the part: tall, lanky, with blond curly hair stuffed under a cowboy hat.  He sports a thin blonde mustache twisted upward at the ends, handle-bar style.  High school girls drew shyly around the riders after the match.

Reamer dismissed injuries of the sport, but bareback rider Ty Fiehler, 16, who followed Reamer into the arena, demonstrated the danger.

  His horse, Tombstone, threw him hard onto the ground, and for some minutes afterward the young cowboy lay motionless on the muddy field.  Finally helped to his feet, he walked groggily  toward the fence.

 “He’ll be fine,” an enthusiastic PA announcer declared, a suspicious diagnosis given Fiehler’s wobbly gait.

Later, still moving gingerly, the Meridian rider said it hadn’t been the bronco’s throw that hurt him.  Once he tumbled to the ground, the hoof of one of the pickup horses riding beside him had struck him in the head.

“I got whacked,” he said. “I would have hopped up if it hadn’t been for that,” he said.

  He planned to ride in another rodeo the next day.

 “I’m sure my body will be telling me something in the morning,” he admitted.  “And if I keep this up, it will be telling me even more in 20 years.”