At the time, I was interested in becoming a ranch manager. Before enrolling, though, I had given some thought to the military. My mom’s dad had been an Army Air Force pilot, and for a while I thought of becoming an aviator. Then I considered becoming a Marine—I wanted to see real action. I liked the idea of fighting. I also heard a bit about special operations, and thought about joining Marine Recon, which is the Corps’ elite special warfare unit. But my family, Mom especially, wanted me to go to college. Eventually, I saw it their way: I decided I would go to school first, then join the military. Heck, the way I looked at it, doing that meant I could party for a while before getting down to business.

I was still doing rodeo, and getting fairly good at it. But my career ended abruptly around the end of my freshman year, when a bronco flipped over on me in a chute at a competition in Rendon, Texas. The guys watching me couldn’t open up the chute because of the way the horse came down, so they had to pull him back over on top of me. I still had one foot in the stirrup, and was dragged and kicked so hard I lost consciousness. I woke up in a life-flight helicopter flying to the hospital. I ended up with pins in my wrists, a dislocated shoulder, broken ribs, and a bruised lung and kidney.

Probably the worst part of the recovery was the dang pins. They were actually big screws about a quarter-inch thick. They stuck out a few inches on either side of my wrists, just like on Frankenstein’s monster. They itched and looked strange, but they held my hands together.

A few weeks after I was hurt, I decided it was time to call up a girl I’d been wanting to take out. I wasn’t about to let the pins get in the way of a good time. We were driving along and one of the long metal screws kept hitting the signal indicator as I was driving. It pissed me off so bad I ended up breaking it off at the base close to my skin. I don’t guess she was too impressed with that. The date ended early.