Former Texas Rangers trainer kept busy keeping up with rodeo cowboys

By Edward Godfrey

Published: September 24, 2006

Rodeo trainer Bill Zeigler knows all the aches and pains of the rodeo cowboy.

The former athletic trainer for the Texas Rangers is on the road 150 days a year with the cowboys, mending them when needed. And with rodeo cowboys, there is no shortage of work.

Zeigler is one of the athletic trainers manning the Justin Sports Medicine trailer at the State Fair Rodeo in Oklahoma City this weekend.

The trailer is a training room on wheels and the services are free to the cowboys. On Friday, before the evening's bull riding performance at State Fair Arena, Zeigler was busy taping ankles and knees.

"We do a lot of taping, setting up rehab programs and things like that," Zeigler said. "So far today I have probably seen six or seven guys to tape. One guy came in and he got bucked off a bull last night and his neck was bothering him and I did some rehabbing with him.

"Hopefully, the busy time is before the rodeo because we don't want anything to go wrong during the rodeo. Sometimes we just get to be spectators. That's the nights we like. But sometimes we get real busy."

The trailer is pretty much like the training rooms found in college and professional sports, Zeigler said.

The Justin Boot Company provides three trailers and eight full-time athletic trainers, covering about 140 events each year.

"We just try to take care of the cowboys as best we can and keep them on the road," Zeigler said.

A local doctor often will volunteer to work with the trainers. Dr. Tom Flesher, an orthopedic surgeon in Oklahoma City, is assisting Zeigler and another trainer at the State Fair Rodeo, which concludes today with a performance at 2 p.m.

Flesher has been staffing rodeos since the National Finals Rodeo was held in Oklahoma City in the 1980s.

"It's a dangerous sport, so it's nice to have a doctor cover events if you can," Flesher said, who has worked the NFR in Las Vegas before at the request of the Justin Boot Company.

Some injuries a doctor may treat on site, even stitching a cowboy up, but an ambulance is required at every PRCA event in case there is a serious accident.

"People do get killed doing this," Flesher said.

Zeigler, 61, has been working the rodeos since 1982, staffing the circuits in the winter when the baseball season was over.

He quit baseball in 1991 and is now a full-time athletic trainer for the rodeo cowboys.

"The potential for injury is much more in rodeo," he said. "Ninety-eight percent of professional baseball players are great guys, but you would always have a couple who were just content to get by.

"In rodeo, if you have that attitude, you are not going to last long. There is a lot of macho in this sport. They are the toughest I have ever been around. I have never been around hockey players, but I understand they are pretty tough, too."