Staying Power

Setbacks have been few this season for Cannon ||

YAKIMA, Wash. — You might say Clint Cannon is the kind of guy who, when he gets bucked off a horse, gets right back on. The old saw is appropriate. He personifies grit and resilience.

But these days there’s a twist to the adage: Clint Cannon isn’t the kind of guy who gets bucked off, period.

Ranked No. 1 in the world in the bareback riding event, Clint Cannon smiles after riding Witch Doctor at the Kitsap Stampede on Aug. 26 in Bremerton. Cannon won the event. (Jim Bryant/For the Yakima Herald-Republic)

Over a year unlike any ever had by a bareback rider in the PRCA, the 30-year-old bareback rider from Waller, Texas, has set records for most money won at a single rodeo ($59,250 at RodeoHouston in March) and regular-season earnings ($167,713). Heading into this weekend’s Ellensburg Rodeo, he leads the man whose season mark he broke, Bobby Mote of Culver, Ore., by nearly $32,000.

Pretty remarkable for a cowboy who until this year has never even qualified for the National Finals Rodeo, right?

Yeah, well, get this: He hasn’t tasted arena dirt all year. He has heard that eight-second buzzer every time out.

“One of the announcers told me the other day, ‘You haven’t been bucked off a horse or missed the horse out or had any disqualification all year,’” Cannon said Wednesday in a telephone interview. “I thought about it and I guess that’s right. I’ve got on everything they’ve run underneath me.”

Got on and stayed on, every time — a season-long feat that might be remarkable for a saddle bronc rider but for a bareback rider is almost unthinkable.

It’s also vastly different than the last two years. In 2007, he was in prime position to make it to the NFR until he was banged up in a car wreck that totaled his vehicle and ended his season. Then he missed the last 81/2 months of the 2008 season after shoulder surgery.

“When I got hurt last year, I had a lot of time to think about stuff,” Cannon said. “I came back with a different mindset and changed my task at hand, because I guessed my task at hand wasn’t working, so I kind of rotated the ball around to the other side. It’s like your pillow — you know how when you’re sleeping, the top side of the pillow is hot and when you turn it over, it’s cool and you can get back to sleep.

Clint Cannon reaches for a strap on Witch Doctor at the Kitsap County Fair and Stampede on Aug. 26 in Bremerton. (Jim Bryant/For the Yakima Herald-Republic)

“Well, it’s like that. All I did was flip my pillow over.”

Cannon found a way to succeed, something he has experience at. He was an undersized, 5-foot-9 fullback playing high school football back home in Waller, where, he recalled, “Coming out of high school I was either going to get a football scholarship or join the Marine Corps.”

But even though he was good enough as a football player — his high school coach, Jim Phillips, still remembers him as “one of the toughest son-of-a-guns I’ve ever crossed in my life” — Cannon still had to make good enough grades to qualify. And even reading a simple sentence didn’t come easy.

“I’m dyslexic,” Cannon explained. “So I had to work triple-hard, had to take the ACT a couple of times before I passed it. With the dyslexia, I couldn’t even say my alphabet until my sophomore year in high school; that’s hard on a guy. Still today when I say my alphabet I’ll get it mixed up. But I’ve learned to live with it.”

Cannon got that athletic scholarship to Stephen F. Austin State University and got that college education. “If you can set your mind right, you can accomplish it,” he said. “It wasn’t easy, but I did it.”

Neither that accomplishment nor Cannon’s PRCA-leading success this year surprises Phillips, his old coach, who still calls on Cannon to stop by to give inspirational talks to his football teams.

“He’s everything you want in a young man. He’s just a leader, and I can’t say enough about him,” Phillips said. “He’s had some tough times, he’s had some injuries. But the son of a gun never quit, never cried about it, never backed up. He just kept fighting. That’s a testament in itself, for what you want in an athlete and in a young man.”

While Cannon is happy to find time to speak to those young football players at his alma mater and at Phillips’ new school — at Greenville, at the other end of the state — he’s also quick to respond to interview requests from reporters across the country whose newspaper readers have never heard of Waller.

“If one person reads the story and is touched by it or learns from it, that’s enough. That’s the way I look at it: If I can touch one person’s life,” Cannon said. “You never know who will read it and it might change his life. I’ve had young guys come up to me and tell me they read an article or saw me talk and it changed them, or touched them.”

So Clint Cannon keeps getting back on. On a bucking horse. On the podium. On the phone. And, right now, on top of the world.