Rodeo Roots

Rodeo funnyman and trick rider has legendary family ties

Lindsey Morehead

Soper, Oklahoma, doesn’t have many claims to fame.

But it does have Freckles Brown.

Nearly 50 years after Brown rode Tornado, “the unrideable bull,” and captured a world world-champion title, the town’s faded welcome sign still reads, “Home of Freckles Brown, World Champion Bull Rider, 1962: A legend in his own time.”

“’Round here you ask who Freckles Brown is and everybody knows,” John Harrison, Brown’s grandson, explains.
“His legend still lives. If you rodeo and you bull ride, he’s a hero to you.”

But nobody knows John Harrison.

A five-time nominee for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association’s “comedy act of the year,” and a three-time performer at the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas, Harrison lives quietly at the end of a narrow country road in the modest cabin Brown bought in the early 1960s and lived in until his death in 1987.

“Nobody around here knows what I do,” Harrison says, laughing.

Harrison, 31, isn’t just the grandson of a rodeo legend, ; he’s one of the sport’s top entertainers. He and his family: —wife, Carla; , two-year-old daughter, Addison; and six-month-old son, Caz, —travel nine months a year, performing at professional rodeos across North America. 

A trick roper and rider who started his career Roman riding and jumping cars on horseback, Harrison today has embraced the microphone, adding comedy to his repertoire. As a clown, he does the “walk and talk” between events and keeps the crowd entertained with specialty shows, like the satirical Miss Rodeo Universe act—which he performs in drag—and a comedy trick trick-riding routine where everything goes awry.

“My job,” Harrison explains, “is to go out from the beginning of the rodeo until the very end and entertain the crowd.”

After 10 years on the road, Harrison still loves what he does.

“I wouldn’t trade it for nothing,” Harrison says. “You get people all the time who ask how you do it… . How do you stay gone for two or three months? I’m like, ‘How do you sit in a cubicle with no windows in your office? In 35 years you spent your entire life there. You’re retired now, but I’m doing all of my traveling when I’m young.”

RAISED WITH RODEO

Situated on Interstate 70 about 10 miles west of Hugo in Choctaw Electric territory, Soper is a  a dusty bump in the road chiefly characterized by a café, a small service station and a handful of churches. 

“Rodeo is part of the culture here,” Harrison says. “Ernie Taylor, who is a world world-champion calf roper, is from here. Todd Whatley, who rodeoed in the 1940s and ’50s and was a world world-champion cowboy, he was originally from here and the reason my grandfather moved here. B.J. Schumacher, he moved here.”

And, of course, there’s Freckles Brown, an inductee into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame and the Jim Thorpe Association’s Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame.

Raised in red dirt just up the hill from Brown on the family’s 700-acre ranch, Harrison spent a lot of time hanging around his grandfather’s place. 

“The stories that were told around this table right here,” Harrison says, patting the table still sitting in his kitchen, “some of the famous cowboys, they’d come down here and tell stories until 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. Jim Shoulders to Lane [Frost]—everybody sat at this table right here.”

Surrounded by rodeo royalty, it didn’t take Harrison long to decide he wanted to rodeo, too.

AN OLD FAMILY TRADITION

As the daughter of a top bull rider, Donna Brown Harrison knows more about rodeo than most. 

“Up until ’61, we traveled a lot,” Donna recalls. “In ’62, [Brown] decided he wanted to win the world and he stayed on the road. We had a stack of plane tickets probably six or eight inches thick. People would say, ‘Do you know where your dad is?’ and I’d say, ‘No, he could be one of three places’.”

Donna, who married Wiley Harrison and dabbled in barrel racing, tried to prepare her son for the complexity of the rodeo lifestyle. On one hand, she said, rodeo people are honorable and good. On the other, it is an expensive and dangerous sport.

When Harrison came to her as a child and said he wanted to follow his grandfather into bull riding, she decided “it was high time he find out what the ground feels like.”

 “I wanted him to know the reality, not just the glamour,” she says, “and if he wanted it, we would support him with 110 percent.”

“My mom stuck me on a pretty good-sized calf when I was about six years old,” Harrison remembers. “I got thumped pretty hard. I thought I was dying. It knocked the breath out of me and I couldn’t get it back. I was like,

‘Why would anyone want to do this.’ I just kind of went the other way, where if I fall off, I’m still going to get paid.”

Today, Donna admits she didn’t want her son to become a bull rider.

“I didn’t want to see him laid up in a cast,” she says. “Dad broke his neck twice, his leg seven or eight times and that doesn’t have anything to do with the dislocated shoulders or mashed up ankles.”

Harrison found his calling after meeting Leon Adams, a celebrated trick rider from Stuart.

“I was in awe,” he says, “I thought, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to be a performer’.’”

Although Harrison says his schoolteachers encouraged him to come up with a more realistic goal, his parents supported him wholeheartedly.

“He started out riding a pony with a soft pony pad,” Donna recalls. “All we put on there was a cinch all the way around the horse and a little bitty handhold probably no bigger than your finger. That’s how he started. The next thing I knew, he was standing on the horse and doing a vault.”

HONORING FRECKLES

“Me being young, I didn’t know my grandpa as a rodeo person,” Harrison recalls. “He was just grandpa Grandpa to me... . We were always packing up and going to sale barns. We went to Durant for a sale one day. There are these cards and they would write down the numbers [of the cattle] they bought, then they’d wave it in the air.

“Well, my grandpa needed a cup of coffee, so he lays the little card down. I pick the card up, and, boy, I go to town. I’m buying cattle and they’re the worst. They’re killer cows going to be processed; they’re worth nothing. A guy went up and told him, ‘Your grandson is up there buying a bunch of cattle,’ thinking my grandpa is going to come up there and give me a whooping, but he just laughed. He bought those cattle, loaded them up and I think he took them back the very next weekend.”

Naïve in his youth, Harrison is now keenly aware of Brown’s legacy. Every October, Harrison honors his grandfather’s memory by producing the Freckles Brown Memorial Bull Ride. This year, the contest will be held Saturday, Oct. 9, at the Todd Whatley-Lige Hammock Rodeo Arena in Hugo.

“We take the most popular event and turn it into an entire show,” Harrison explains. “We’ll have 35 guys come from all over, from Brazil to Canada, to Hugo. It’s one night of bull riding in honor of Freckles.”
Harrison also strives to honor his grandfather while he’s on the road.

“I hear stories all the time from people—announcers and some of the older people that still rodeo – —about how good of a guy he was,” Harrison says. “They say it didn’t matter if it was some kid on the side of the fence, he’d stop on his way back to the chutes and give an autograph.”

“That drives me to be a better person out on the road,” he continued. “You’re in an autograph line and the line is around the corner. [You think] ‘I really need to get out of here,’ then you think, ‘Everybody tells stories about my grandfather being there until the last person in the line is through,’ so I never get up and leave.”

Ten years after going pro, Harrison has no plans to leave rodeo. As a trick rider, he guesses he only has three or four more years before injuries force him to retire—he has already had knee and shoulder reconstructions and is due for one on his hip—but his comedy career and new barrelman hobby have no expiration dates. One way or another, Harrison is committed to building a legacy of his own.

One day, Donna hopes he’ll pull back into town to find his name under his grandfather’s on the Soper welcome sign.

“John has already earned his right,” she said. “But I don’t dare put his name up, he’d hang me.”

Someday, she’s certain, everyone will know John Harrison.