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The following Sunday, the bullfighter was still unable to make it due to
his car not being fixed yet so Lecile stood in again on grounds that his pay
would be in the form of a free entry fee to participate in the bull riding section.
Lecile fought bulls and simultaneously rode them for the rest of that summer.
According to Lecile, that summer planted something inside him that he
couldn’t shake–something that made him want to do more within rodeo.
For the next few years, Lecile continued to ride bulls and fight them,
all the while still playing college football. A couple
years later, Lecile was given an offer
where he could move up to a higher
rodeo company as a bull fighter on
the condition that he stop riding.
“It wasn’t that hard of a decision for
me. Although I liked to ride, I wasn’t
that good at it,” said Lecile. “I was 6’5
and that’s too tall to ride bulls because
you are too top heavy. So from there I
began exclusively fighting bulls.”
About a year into exclusively
bullfighting, rodeos began gaining in
popularity and Lecile was told that he
needed to include some comedy into his
performances. Lecile, who was in a rock
n’ roll band at the time, was already
familiar with performing on stage and entertaining an audience, so
incorporating comedy into his routine was a natural transition.
“If you didn’t do comedy, you didn’t work back then as a bullfighter
because it was a requirement,” said Lecile. “We didn’t have separate bull
fighters and separate clowns; one person did it all. I learned comedy early in
my career because of that and continued to bullfight and perform comedy
inside the arenas for 36 years.”
Lecile rose in fame and became the number one bullfighter in the
international rodeo association, a position he held for nine years. However,
at one performance in Reno, Nevada, when he was 52, Lecile got badly
injured and decided it would be time for him to retire as a bullfighter.
“It was time for me to get out of bullfighting. I was 52 and that’s really
too old for a bullfighter because you aren’t as fast as some of the younger
boys,” said Lecile. “I made the switch to straight comedy and it has been one
of the best decisions I have made in my career.”
At the peak of his career, Lecile traveled extensively and worked over 150
performances a year. Although today he has slowed down a little bit and works
between 80-85 performances annually, he says he is still continually learning
in this profession and tweaking his routines to be better year after year.
“Rodeo comedy is different because so much depends on your body
language since you are typically a long ways away from the crowd so body
language is huge and everything must be exaggerated,” said Lecile. “For years
we didn’t have wireless mics so it was even harder. I was one of the first
rodeo clowns to use a wireless mic and that has been a game-changer.”
Inspired by other legends like Emmett Kelly and W.C. Fields, Lecile
has always gravitated towards
older characters.
“When I was young and
starting out, I was an 18 or
19-year-old kid who would paint
wrinkles on my face to get into
my old character,” said Lecile.
“Now I am that old person so
I don’t have to do that anymore;
these days the wrinkles are
already there and I just
follow them.”
One of the most
challenging parts of his
career over the years has
been mastering the art of
timing. According to Lecile,
a good rodeo clown should perform in such a way that the
audience in unaware of any problems or slowdowns. A way that he has
managed to master timing is to make sure he stays inside the arena during
the entire rodeo.
“When you are dealing with animals they are unpredictable, at best.
Sometimes you have a calf that doesn’t want to run out of the chute or a
horse that is being hard to handle so I make sure that, while I am in the
arena, I am always watching for those potential problems,” said Lecile.
“If I see that happening, I jump in with a comedy routine to distract the
audience so they won’t get bored; people want to be entertained they
shouldn’t have to wait for problems to get fixed. That’s the clown’s job.”
As someone who is involved in the livestock industry and has attended
the Dixie National year after year, I had never thought about the role rodeo
clowns play in developing an overall positive rodeo experience in that
light–further proof that Lecile has excelled in keeping his audiences
entertained and unaware of problems.
Today, in addition to performing, Lecile has his own rodeo each year in
Southhaven–The Rodeo of the Mid-South, which will take place this year
on January 19, 2019. The newly crowned Miss Rodeo America 2019, Taylor
McNair, earned her first crown at The Rodeo of the Mid-South. Although
he also works as a developer and manages his own sign company in
34 • January 2019