LITTLE ROCK — Justin Koon is riding high right now, which is good because his ride is an irritated rodeo bull that weighs around a ton and tries to throw
Koon off and run him down.
The 28-year-old Grant County native is ranked eighth in the professional bull-riding world and first in the power rankings issued by Professional Bull Riding Inc., a major rodeo circuit that features only bull riding, the most popular, and most dangerous, of the cowboy events.
This season, Koon has had six top-10 finishes, including five in the top five. According to statistics from PBR, he has stayed on 13 bulls for the full eight-second ride, almost twice as many full rides as he rode all last season.
“I’m really amazed and
beside myself,” Koon said
on his way back home from
an event in Arizona. “I re
ally haven’t grasped what
is going on with the stand
ings night now. If I just keep riding, I won’t have to worryabout the standings. I have to keep thinking, ‘Just ride this one.’” Born in Grapevine, Koon said he was “raised on a horse” and rode his first bull at the Grant County Fair in 1993, when he was
10 years old.
“I was at the fair and made some comment
like, ‘I could do that,’ and before I had a chance to talk my way out of it, Dad had me entered,” Koon said. “I stayed on pretty good, and it just went from there.” Soon after his first ride, he attended a bullriding school and entered junior rodeo events around the state.
“A guy used to give me a ride up to the prac
tice pens in Sulphur Springs,” Koon said. “I
was never good at sports. I was too little for football and too short for basketball, but I was built to be a bull rider.”
Only two years after his first ride, Koon won the Ozark Teenage Rodeo Association championship. Later, he was involved in rodeo at Sheridan High School.
On June 12, 1999, he qualified for the championship round at the Arkansas High School Rodeo Finals. Koon will always remember that date.
During the ride, his head went down as the bull’s head went up, and they crashed, fracturing Koon’s skull “like a shattered windshield,” as he was later told. Koon was in a coma for two weeks and remained in Arkansas Children’s Hospital for more than four weeks longer after he woke up in intensive care.
“I remember waking up with the ventilator down my throat,” he said. “I had to go to therapy to learn how to swallow again without aspirating.”
Koon also needed therapy to learn to walk and talk again.
“I can remember trying to form words, and it would just come out gibberish,” he said.
It was two years later that he rode his first bull again, but only after his father, Randal, made Koon promise he wouldn’t tell his mother, Denise, for a while. He said she finally came around and has always supported his career, but it has not been easy.
When he returned to riding, he wore a helmet, but he had more injuries, including a broken leg, ribs and jaw, along with a liver laceration.
Koon took more time off, working as a carpenter for two years, not only to heal, but to decide if he really wanted to continue climbing into the chute and wrapping his hand with a rope that was also around a bull.
In 2004, Koon returned to the arena and won an amateur rodeo association championship and turned professional. He has made his living as a bull rider, although sometimes just barely, he said, for six years and in 2011 began to ride exclusively for PBR.
However, his rookie year at the sport’s highest level was not without problems. Once again, the injuries came often. According to information from PBR, Koon broke several ribs and had a collapsed lung on July 4 at an event in Texas and was out for a month. He also had two concussions later in the year.
Even with the injuries, Koon qualified for the 2011 PBR World Finals in Las Vegas and finished 14th.
While climbing to the top levels of bull riding, Koon met his wife, Elyse, in Sheridan. They were married in 2010.
“I worked at the dry cleanersand did his nasty laundry before I even knew who he was,” she said.
Elyse said her boss got the two of them together.
“I think I was the only person in Sheridan who didn’t know who Justin Koon was, but we went out on a date, and wehave been together ever since,” she said.
They now live in Atkins while Elyse attends nursing school at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville.
Justin laughed when he was asked if his profession influenced his wife’s chosen field.
“Well, she did start out as an education major,” he said, “but the longer we were together, the more appeal it had to be married to a nurse.”
Elyse agrees being a nurse would be helpful since her husband is in such a dangerous profession.
“Being a nurse was something I had always wanted to do,” she said. “But if I am going to have to take care of him, I should know what I’m doing.”
When Elyse finishes schoolin December, Justin said, they will return to Sheridan where he wants to raise cattle and become a real cowboy when his bull-riding days are over.
Last weekend, Justin appeared at the PBR event in Albuquerque, N.M. This week he’ll go to Kansas City, Mo., for an event that will start Saturday night.
Staff writer Wayne Bryan can be reached at (501) 244-4460 or wbryan@arkansasonline.com.
Tri-Lakes, Pages 51 on 03/29/2012