I wrote a Hub about "Embarrassing Dad" in which I mentioned being none too sure I knew how to be embarrassed. However, that turns out to be untrue. So untrue that...read on. You'll see.

Summer, 1961. This is not the first Hub set in that time frame and may not be the last. Maybe some of it had to do with being seventeen, or with being in transition between high school and college, or any with any number of other factors. Mostly, though, it had to do with being seventeen and as full of myself as a Thanksgiving turkey is full of stuffing.

It was impossible to make it to a whole lot of rodeos that year, mostly because my father had broken his back and it was up to me to get the season's hay crop out of the fields and into stacks. A dozen contests or so, certainly not many more than that. And as always, the most active date on the rodeo calendar was Independence Day, the 4th of July.

Garry Mentzer and I traveled together that day, first competing at Lincoln, Montana, where a small blue Brahma bull ran the length of me before my hand came loose from the bull rope. That was an afternoon show, which gave us time for the two hour drive to Hamilton, Montana's evening performance. My riding arm (my left) was so sore from being trampled that another cowboy had to help me tuck in my shirt before I crawled down on a bareback bronc.

After that (non-winning) ride, I was loosened up pretty well. Another lackluster ride on a lackluster saddle bronc won very litle cash, but it did help me qualify for the short go-round. Each saddle bronc rider had come out of the chutes on two different horses. After that, I was scoring in 4th place (on two critters). The Top Six scores earned a shot at a third saddle bronc...and the stock contractor always saved his toughest horses for that Top Six event.

Did I mention I was something of a coward in those days? The only thing that kept me going on the rodeo circuit was the greed for glory, the yearning for bragging rights that was even more powerful than fear of extreme pain.

Enter Dark Town.

Dark Town was the name of the saddle bronc I'd drawn for the short go. He was a big gelding, around 1400 pounds of solid muscle, and black as the bottom of a mine shaft at midnight. He was also terribly, terribly nervous, just as frightened as I was. He didn't want to go out into that big arena in front of all those people under those bright lights.

Besides getting settled "just so" into the saddle, every cowboy also takes hold of the soft, thick, rope rein that runs from the horse's halter back to the rider's riding fist--in my case, the left fist. Stirrups, seat, and swells are all crucial, but nothing is more important than that rein. The cowboy depends on that rope for balance. Take a grip that is too short and the bronc will yank you right out over the front of the saddle, airborne, bye-bye. Leaving too much rein between halter and grip will produce a slack chunk of rope and a saddle with a leak in it, again airborne, bye-bye.

Everything seemed as okay as it was going to get. As long as I didn't wet my pants, it might be all right after all. (No, that never did happen during my rodeo years, but the thought certainly crosssed my mind more than once!) We were good to go.

Except that Dark Town didn't go.

With the chute gate wide open, the big horse leaned against the back of the chute fence, putting much of his weight against my right leg. Several cowboys tried to encourage him to stand straight, jump out of the chute, and get on with destroying his rider, but he wouldn't listen. He wasn't being hurt or insulted in any way. He just literally had stage fright!

Some broncs are chute fighters. They will thrash around in a bucking chute, sometimes rearing up as if to go over backward and thus crush the cowboys trying to sit on them. Thankfully, Dark Town was not like that...he was just shy!

Three times cowboys opened the gate, but each time Dark Town refused to play the game. The third time, something unbelievable happened: My hand OPENED ALL BY ITSELF, DROPPING THE REIN ON THE GROUND!!

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!!?" The cowboy holding the open gate yelled, frantically shutting the gate as fast as he could. Terror had taken over. Not my entire body, not my voice, but my riding hand, yes. If Dark Town had chosen that moment to suddenly leap out of the chute, it could have meant my death.

Sure, any rough stock event can kill a cowboy. My friend Ron "Punch" Rossen of Broadus, Montana, was a World Champion, one of the best bull riders and toughest men in the history of the sport...yet he was killed in 1991 by a bull on which he had just won the event. But if that can happen when everything looks "right" and goes suddenly wrong, just how likely might it be when you start out knowing everything is wrong??

No, neither Dark Town nor I got to quit yet. We tried the open gate thing a fourth time. This time the big bronc must have figured, Oh, whatever! At any rate, he finally shot out of the chute like a 1400 pound bottle rocket, bucked me off over his left front shoulder on the second jump, and then hopped around on top of me for a while.

Not that he meant to. He was just doing his job, and I happened to be curled up on the ground in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was not trying to hurt me. Later, I would watch other cowboys try to ride him and finally understand why no one made it to the whistle: That super-athletic fellow could literally land on his front feet with his rear end directly above his own head, his hind hooves pointing so close to straight up that the difference didn't matter.

To understand what I'm saying here, just grab yourself a saddle and strap it onto a vertical fence post....then try sitting in that saddle. You can't. And a bucking horse is not exactly standing still like an old fence post, either.

Dark Town had somehow actually landed on me only once, smashing up the muscling in my left thigh something fierce. Fortunately for me, my bones were at that time made of rubber and mighty hard to break. But with the injury, followed by cursing at my friend Garry when he tried to help me out of the arena by grabbing my tail, I did the unthinkable:

I completely repressed the memory of that terrible embarrassment, that un-cowboyish terror-drop of a buck rein with the chute gate wide open.

In fact, I never would have remembered it at all...except that two months later in college, two rodeo friends who'd also decided to attend Northern began teasing me about dropping that rein. It took them a good thirty days to convince me it really had happened, that they weren't just pulling my leg.

Twice more that summer, I had drawn Dark Town in a saddle bronc riding contest. Each time I rode him a little bit longer before bucking off, but never long enough to make the whistle. At Columbia Falls, I even hung up in both stirrups and came swinging around like a cowboy pendulum, getting knocked colder than an ex-wife's shoulder when my head hit the ground at high speed.

That first winter in college, however, got me to thinking about the human mind and the way it defends itself. Nearly nine years, one rodeo career, and a tour in the U.S. Army later, I finally got around to getting a four year college degree. In psychology. What else?

My most embarrassing moment had, in the end, triggered a paradigm shift that turned a cowboy into a counselor.

Thanks for reading,

Ghost32