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GILLETTE, Wyo. — Eight seconds out the gate. A perfect ride on a not-so-perfect bronco.

That’s life. That’s rodeo. There are some things a cowboy can control — and plenty more he can’t.

And on Thursday morning, in the second round of the National High School Finals Rodeo, Lex Ju couldn’t do anything more than ride the horse he was given. Within striking distance of the lead after the first round of bareback riding, the South Utah County High School Rodeo club cowboy strapped into his rig, took a hard lean out the chute, rode out two tough bucks and a couple of softer ones, and bounded off after the eight-second horn, fist pumping before he even hit the ground.

He’d done his part. The horse hadn’t. The judges scored a 59.

Ju didn’t like the number. He thought the bronco had bucked harder than that.

“But the judge’s didn’t like that horse, so that’s that,” he said.

He did a quick calculation. He’d ridden well on the first day. The second score wouldn’t kill his chances to move into the final round, but it wouldn’t guarantee it, either.

So he exercised an option to ride again.

Minutes later, he was back in the chute. Another eight seconds. Another perfect ride.

And another imperfect performance by the horse.

This time even the headstrong 17-year-old couldn’t disagree with the judge’s verdict. He knew it. Everyone in the arena knew it.

“The second horse just ran,” Ju said. “That’s just how it is on some days. There’s nothing you can do about that.”

It’s unusual for a bareback rider to take three shots at a score. Though the bulls cause more injuries, riders generally agree that bareback riding puts the most physical strain on a cowboy’s body. And even bad horses buck off good riders — so most folks don’t get to the horn on two attempts in a row, let alone opt to re-ride for a third.

There weren’t enough horses for Ju to take an immediate third ride, though, so he bid his time behind the chutes through a late-morning round of goat tying. He grabbed a drink. He re-taped his arm. He watched the cowgirls drag down a few animals. And he tried to put the first two runs out of his mind.

Finally it was time. But from the start, the third horse felt like trouble. He was thin around the shoulders. Ju’s assistants pulled his rig in as tight as they could, but the young cowboy worried the ropes would slip.

The gate flew open. The horse bolted into the arena. One jump. And another. Ju held fast.

And then it happened. The bronco rolled his shoulders forward. The rig slid.

Ju could hear the eight-second horn as he flipped over the bronco’s neck and slipped between its front legs.

The horse collapsed. Ju disappeared into an explosion of dirt and flailing hooves, curling into a ball against the bronco’s belly.

Four pickup men raced to the cowboy’s aid, wrestling the boy from the beast — though not before Ju took a glancing hoof strike to his left temple.

The crowd fell silent as Ju rolled away and the horse picked itself off the ground and bounded off.

In Section C of the grandstands, Ju’s mother gripped tightly onto her camcorder.

“I always record him,” Rockzann Ju said. “When I watch what’s happening through the camera’s video screen, I can trick myself into thinking that I’m watching it on TV.”

Lex Ju knows about his mother’s trick. He also knows there’s only a small window in which she can suspend reality. In all his years of riding, he’d never stayed on the ground for more than a few moments — “and that was the time I was knocked out cold,” he said.

He lifted himself from the dirt and stumbled away. The crowd erupted into cheers for the rider and his rescuers.

“Watch that replay,” one of the pickup men told Ju, pointing the jumbo screen. Ju tried to stop the spinning world so that he could focus on the video, but everything was moving so quickly.

Ju staggered to his father, who was standing near the chutes. “What did they score me?” he asked.

“They didn’t,” his father replied.

The screen flashed his time.

Seven-point-nine seconds. 

And with that, he was out of the bareback competition.

Hours later, sitting in the shade of a tree at a nearby park, a baseball cap covering the PacMan-shaped pink welt on the side of his head, Ju was still fuming over the things he couldn’t control. The judges. The horses. The tenth of a second that separated him from a shot in the final round.

But that’s life. That’s rodeo. And Ju’s already thinking about the future.

“Everything happens for a reason, right?” he said. “Maybe next year this will all make me come back more driven to win.”

He’ll go home. He’ll practice harder. And he’ll do everything he can to come back here.

That is, after all,  something he can control.

 

∫ Matthew D. LaPlante is an assistant professor of journalism at Utah State University.

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