Rankin119web

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 Tennessee,
Lecile plans to continue performing as long as he can because, according to
him, he loves it now just as much as he did 63 years ago.
20 • February 2019