Gomes qualifies by skin of his teeth

Friday, Dec. 6, 2002 | 10:23 a.m.

At a glance

When: Today-Dec. 15

Where: Thomas & Mack Center

Purse: $4.8 million

Structure: 10 go-rounds of rodeo competition. Top 15 regular-season finishers compete for world championships in: bareback riding; saddle bronc riding; bull riding; calf roping; team roping (heading and heeling); steer wrestling; and barrel racing

Expected attendance: 170,000

TV: 10-round broadcast on ESPN and ESPN2

Mark Gomes couldn't hide the glee from under his ten-gallon hat when he walked into the Riviera Hotel with his wife, Debbie, and two young five-gallon hat-wearing sons in tow late Wednesday afternoon.

"It's my seventh time here," Gomes said. "It's electricity. It gets me ginned up, gets me excited."

His confidence is as high as it was in 1998, when he won his only bareback riding world championship at the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo at the Thomas & Mack Center.

His gait is straight and sure, thanks to the two metal plates and numerous screws that doctors needed 28 months ago to repair and heal a pelvis that was fractured in three places.

Gomes (rhymes with combs) has also thanked Lan LaJeunesse. Then, by a mere $23 in the money standings, Gomes went out and beat him recently for the 15th and final spot in the NFR.

After a bronco tossed Gomes in Tucson in October, LaJeunesse saw the hitch in Gomes' gait. Both sat atop a chute when LaJeunesse told Gomes to straighten his leg. Then he grabbed Gomes' right ankle and popped his dislocated right hip back into place.

A month later, Gomes finished the regular season with $58,733. LaJeunesse ended with $58,710.

"It would have been easy to turn and walk away," Gomes said of what transpired in Tucson. "He didn't. Thankfully, he didn't. That's the kind of friendships we have. It had happened to him a few months earlier, and I didn't know what was wrong with it when I got back on the chute.

"He grabbed my ankle and said 'push.' When I did, it popped back into place. He said he could tell by the way I was hopping. He just knew what to do. I feel really bad for Len. It's funny that the whole year boiled down to that. It's kind of amazing."

Wednesday, as a storm that brought seven inches of snow beared down on the 280-acre ranch where he has eight broad mares and 60 cows in Nickerson, Kan., Gomes and his family flew to Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, LaJeunesse, who won the world bareback championship in 1999 and 2001, is tending to his ranch in Morgan, Utah, and has been unavailable for comment.

"What could we say to each other?" Gomes said. "He said 'good luck' to me, and I said, 'Yeah, I'm sorry the way it turned out for you.' I didn't beat him. We rode all year. Lan could have done some things different, and I could have done some things differently."

Gomes, 32, had been a regular on the Turquoise Circuit since he broke into professional rodeo by earning rookie-of-the-year honors in 1994. This season, he chose to ride on the Prairie Circuit, sticking closer to home to ensure spending more time with his family.

"I kind of made my own bed," Gomes said. "I turned down a lot of rodeos I should have gone to. I missed a lot of opportunities on purpose, because I wanted to stay home. I just tried to make the best of it. It worked out for me and it didn't for him."

It was a bit poetic, too, since Gomes had been atop the money standings in 2000 when Harry Vold's bronc "Sheep Tick" smashed Gomes' pelvis against the chutes at the Cheyenne (Wyo.) Frontier Days Rodeo.

In a hospital in Colorado, a miserable Mark told his wife he wanted to consider another line of work. Rodeo had been his whole life, since he watched his father, Mark Sr., rope in Arizona and since taking part in his first junior event when he was five. But he said he'd figure it out.

Debbie told him to give that decision some time.

That first week, she hauled her husband, confined to a wheelchair, to a gym for daily upper-body workouts. A week later, he was cleared to walk. Within another week, he had turned a walk into a jog into a run on a treadmill.

"I guess I'm just a very determined person," said Debbie Gomes. "I knew he wasn't someone to sit around at home, so I thought I'd better get him going, get him active again, and just go from there. I knew in my heart he would ride again."

Two months after suffering the injury, Gomes returned to a rodeo in a competitive situation. It was too soon, though, and the pounding he took sidelined him for the rest of that season.

Only injury has kept him from the two NFRs that he has missed. With $110,527 of winnings this season, Bobby Mote of Oregon begins today's NFR as its top bareback rider.

"I'm probably a real dark horse," Gomes said. "The guy who's leading has a real shot to win it. I still have to game plan the same way, as if I were first or last. I have to win go-rounds, win each night. Take it like that. If you can conquer it like that, you will win a world title. If you don't, you won't.

"And I'm back to believing in myself again. There, for a while, I was going through the motions. I'm truly back, and that's a good feeling."

It's evident in the way he walks.