Native Sun News Today: Lakota cowboy makes his mark on the rodeo circuit

Monday, February 11, 2019  

Shane O’Connell is making his mark at bareback riding
By James Giago Davies
Native Sun News Today Correspondent
nativesunnews.today

RAPID CITY— Bareback riding forced Shane O’Connell to wear many hats. He had to be more than an athlete, had to do more than survive eight quality seconds on a powerful animal determined to send him flying into the dirt. He had to learn to manage his time and finances, drive great distances, compete in almost a hundred rodeos a year, stay functionally healthy, assess the quality of the stock, and always have a head for the business of being a professional bareback rider— and he had to figure out how to accomplish all of that by the time he was 21.

“There’s no guaranteed check,” Shane said. “You can make the greatest bareback ride you ever made in your life and not win a dime. Bareback riding is probably one of the hardest events to succeed in because it so hard on people and so hard on the body. If you aren’t extremely good at riding bareback horses, you’re either gonna quit or you’re gonna get hurt and not be able to do it anymore.”

A 2014 graduate of Rapid City Central, Shane was a wrestler who placed third at state in his senior year, and he also played some football.

“I was a middle linebacker and a running back until I broke my hand one day rodeoing,” Shane said. “I showed up at practice next day, didn’t want to tell coach I was trying to hide it, and I couldn’t hold on to that football. I never played another down of offense again, I was just a mean old linebacker. I played varsity since I was a sophomore. I loved playing football. I miss playing football.”

There came a time, Shane had to make a decision. He had the talent to wrestle and play football at the collegiate level, but then there was the bareback riding, with no secure future, no scholarship, no guaranteed income, plus, for some odd reason, climbing on the back of rank rodeo stock five times your size, tended to be extremely difficult and dangerous.

“I been hurt riding bucking horses,” Shane said, “but once I quit wrestling and playing football, it kind of got a little easier on me. I been a brutal athlete my whole life. Nothing’s been easy for me, ever. Somethin’s been keeping me alive, though, it’s gotta be the big man upstairs. I’m a wrestler and a football player, and I ride bucking horses. I got a dirty mean attitude on me, nothings gonna stop me, nothings gonna slow me down, if I’m goin’, I’m gonna win, or I ain’t goin’.”

Bareback riding demands its own training regimen. What made for success in wrestling and football, mostly doesn’t work for bareback: “I honestly don’t think I’ve been in great shape since I wrestled. I’m in bareback riding shape, which is a little different. I don’t go for big runs. The only things I do at home is, I’ll do push-ups and I’ll do sit-ups, and I have a twenty-pound dumbbell that I rehab my shoulders with, and that is all I do.”

There is an elemental link between Shane’s inner workings and his pursuit of bareback riding excellence. The allure of wrestling, and even his love for football, stood no chance of keeping him from it. Shane and his dad have a ranch straight north of Wall, where they run a couple hundred head. Nowadays, Shane is immersed in a cowboy world, it is a unique subculture, and last Thursday night (January 31) it filled the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center in Rapid City.

The entire facility was transformed into a demographic most in West River never bother to notice or participate in. It is a world of sweeping prairies and isolated ranch operations, with a signature style of dress and talk, having as much in common with the 19th Century as the 21st. The men of that world are wedded to a mentality of grit and “try,” and their lives are about being sensible, dependable, and no strangers to hard work and sacrifice.

You might think that kind of world would produce stolid, stoic people with little humor or tolerance, but far more of those types are produced in cities and towns, where people don’t wave to each other when they pass on the road, where they can live in a neighborhood of total strangers. That kind of impersonal reality is not the reality in the world Shane O’Connell comes from. His heartfelt participation in that world began at a young age.

“When I was about five years old I entered my first rodeo,” Shane said. “It was back in the day. We didn’t ride with a vest or helmet or nothing, it was old school, as when your old man put you on something, you hung on. I got kicked in the head or stepped on or something. They had to come get me, I didn’t even know I was bleeding on the side of my head. That’s the first time I ever got stitches, first time I ever entered a rodeo.”

Shane started as a bull rider, but it did not take him long to figure out his true calling: “I was a little more naturally talented in the bareback riding. It just kind of clicked more for me. I just knew it was my callin’, man, I just knew that was what I was meant to do.”

Success started coming his way: “I won the Little Britches finals in the bareback riding five times, and the all-around once. That’s youth rodeo, from when I was 11 to probably 16 years old. And then I started getting into amateur rodeos and doing really good there.”

James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe. He can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com

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