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Student getting NFR education

With a click of a mouse, I crushed Tim O’Connell’s dream.

He figured that if you began searching the names of cities across the United States, it would be near impossible to find one deeper in the alphabet than Zwingle, the dot-on-a-map whistle-stop he calls home.

“I can’t believe there is something past a city that starts ‘ZWI,’” O’Connell said.

He would be smart not to debate the subject with the good people of Zwolle, La.

Zwingle is in the Dubuque and Jackson counties of Iowa, and as of the 2010 census boasted a population of 91. O’Connell says the number of souls is more like 150, and that he knows most of them.

There is a restaurant and a post office situated within the city’s total area of 0.16 square miles.

There might be a stop sign. Maybe.

“If you pass us on the highway and aren’t paying attention, you miss us,” O’Connell said.

Zwolle has a population of 1,800, a booming metropolis compared to Zwingle.

But it isn’t represented by a talented, young bareback rider making his first appearance at the National Finals Rodeo, where O’Connell is learning firsthand that with the bright lights of the Thomas &Mack Center over 10 nights in December also comes this reality: It’s a tough, physical, painful run.

He is 23 and competing because of his skills on a horse and those he has learned in pursuing a degree in public relations, which paid off with the folks at Missouri Valley College, a six-hour drive from Zwingle and where O’Connell is a senior.

It’s finals week back in Marshall, Mo., a farming community located between Kansas City and St. Louis, back where the university president made a little deal with one of her prized rodeo students.

O’Connell would take the majority of his finals before Thanksgiving and the remainder upon returning from the NFR, all for the small price of wearing his school’s name and logo on his vest while competing in Las Vegas.

His fall semester went like this: Attend class Monday, do a week’s worth of homework that night, hand it all in Tuesday, hit the road for another rodeo Wednesday, return late Sunday and start all over again.

“When I told them how much money I could potentially make, my teachers understood how important making the (NFR) was to me,” O’Connell said.

His father, Ray, is a pickup man for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, which has a lot more to do with removing riders safely from bucking horses and livestock from the arena than flirting with cowgirls over a few cold ones. His older brother Will rides bulls and raises bucking horses with Dad.

Their lives growing up were that of many cowboys, traveling from one rodeo to the next with their parents, seeing the country pass before them from sunrise to sunset. O’Connell never took much to roping events, so he gave bulls a try. He eventually fell in love with bareback riding.

The horse is just easier to predict.

“Bulls are very smart,” O’Connell said. “You really have to rely on your hips on a bull, and that animal can fake you out all the time by changing direction and looking one way and spinning the other. A horse is much faster, but you’re using your feet and, for the most part, whichever way the horse’s head is, that’s the direction it’s going. You’re pretty much just chasing the horse the entire ride. Horses aren’t going to fake you out. They’re like a blinker on your car. With a bull, you never know what might happen.”

He wasn’t faked out earlier in the NFR.

More like put down a few times.

O’Connell suffered a torn hamstring during the second go-round and was tossed again the following night, when he drew one of the best bucking horses (Full Baggage) in history. But he continued to get treatment on his injury and then cashed on the fourth go-round, tying four-time world champion Bobby Mote and earning just over $17,000.

He added to that total Wednesday night, finishing third in the seventh go-round and making $11,340.

He now stands fifth in world earnings with $131,240.31 for the year, more than $77,000 behind leader Kaycee Feild.

“This being my first (NFR), I was expecting 10 straight nights to be physical but didn’t expect to get hurt right away,” O’Connell said. “I feel that I belong here. I have really high expectations for myself. This is everything I thought it would be, the Super Bowl of rodeo, the place everyone dreams of reaching. I knew it wouldn’t be easy on the body. It’s a slugfest. I expected to be sore. But every night, it still gives you chills down your spine. It has been a blessed year.”

The pride of Zwingle and Missouri Valley College has spoken.

Take that, Zwolle, La.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be heard from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on “Gridlock,” ESPN 1100 and 100.9 FM. Follow him on Twitter: @edgraney.

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