Features

Into The Sport

 

The Rock of Tennessee

 

Rock Clark is a Southern man who takes his competition seriously and wears his heart on his sleeve.

 

There are some nicknames that just fit.  Wild Bill Hickok, for example—it’s a great handle for an Old West gunfighter. 
Same goes for Rock Clark.  He’s one tough guy.

 

Whether it’s in the Mounted Shooting arena or back at his Tennessee farm, or maybe just about any other situation you can name.  He’s no-nonsense, will tell you just what he thinks, and doesn’t suffer fools lightly. And yet there’s lots of strata underneath.

 

This same guy regularly answers questions with “Yessir” and “Nosir”.  And he frequently refers to his elders as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” He loves kids, especially his own.  He dotes on his horses. And he’s quick to grin at lighthearted moments.

 

Rock Clark is a complicated man.  And to understand what makes him one of the stars of Mounted Shooting, you have to see where he came from.  Like most of us, he’s a product of his upbringing.

 

“Little Rock”

Clark got his start about 42 years ago, in Tennessee of course.  And his nickname appeared at about the same time he did.  “My grandmother gave me that nickname,” he says.  “When I was born I weighed four pounds.  And my grandmother told ‘em I was her little rock.  And I’ve been Rock ever since.”

 

So much so, that he doesn’t like to reveal his given name.  And from the tone of his voice, I’m not going to push it.

 

Early life wasn’t easy.  His father made $80 a week, so Rock’s family lived on his grandfather’s land.  “Pawpaw gave daddy three acres to put a single-wide trailer on.  And they would ride back and forth to work,” he remembers.  “Those days are the best days of my life.  We didn’t have much but we didn’t want for nothing.  It wasn’t nothing for me or daddy to go out and kill a squirrel and have squirrel dumplings for dinner.”

 

The youngster learned to shoot—both pistol and long guns—early on.  But while there were animals around, cows and pigs mostly, horses weren’t part of the equation.  Nobody in his family rode.

 

But around the time he reached six or seven, his Uncle Bubba got him a pony, one that a farmer was about to get rid of.  The kid took to it immediately: “If I was able to get up on a stump and get the horse over there, I was going to get on him.”  Clark got his own horse when he was 16, and he hasn’t been without one since.

 

He didn’t compete in anything.  There were too many other things demanding his attention.  One of those was a Tennessee girl he met at a country music club back in 1992 (“He’s quite the dancer—he swept me right off my feet,” she says).  Rock and Terri were married the next year, settling down in Columbia.  Son Cody came along a couple of years later.

 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit.

 

“Watchin’ just ain’t in my vocabulary.”

Not long after the wedding, the Clarks began looking for a competitive sport that they could share.  Terri had been riding since her mid-teens, but like Rock, she’d only done trail riding.  They both liked that, but they wanted something more, an activity that would get the blood rushing.  They tried barrel racing off and on, but it didn’t stick.

 

In late 2000, Rock heard about Mounted Shooting.  And like he says, he wasn’t going to sit around and watch.  “It was a December, and it was cold.  I had a pair of overalls on and some tennis shoes,” he chuckles at the memory. “And we went over to [SM5] Ken Jenkins’ house.  They give me a set of guns and I was put on a horse, and that’s where my shooting career started—there in the backyard.  The balloons, they had to blow them up the night before and store them in big garbage bags.  And we shot until all the balloons were gone.”

 

His first match was at Mule Day in his hometown of Columbia the following spring.  Rock didn’t do too well on the first stage. “And Mr. (Roy) Cox came up to me and says, ‘You know, if you’ll let that horse run then you’ll shoot a whole lot better.’  And I looked at him and said, ‘Sir, I can’t shoot that fast.’  And he said, ‘Well how many balloons did you miss that time?’  And I told him, ‘Well, it was three or four.’  And I remember he looked at me and said, ‘Son, it doesn’t get much worse than that.’”

 

Now Rock Clark may be stubborn in some ways, but he knows good advice when he gets it–so he let the horse run.  He got his first win in Georgia a month or so later.   Terri picked up the sport soon after, and the Clarks were off and running.

 

Things really picked up in 2003, when Rock met a Quarter Horse Paint named Dragon.  The pair won the 2004 Easterns and World Points Championship.  They took the 2006 Nationals.  The Reserve Championship at the 2007 Westerns.  And they took more than their share of buckles for local and regional shoots.

 

It enabled Rock Clark to go from a Level 3 all the way to a Level 6—to the top of the sport.  But don’t think Mr. Clark is a one trick pony, so to speak.

 

In 2006, he picked up Joker, a registered Paint with a bit of an attitude and a lot of speed.  The horse had the potential to take Rock to a new level of success.  So when his friend and fellow Tennessean Gary Vickers kept pushing to buy Dragon, well, he finally gave in.  It was a win-win.  Vickers jumped from a Level 3 to a 5 in about a year (and by the time you read this, he may be a 6); Clark had his most successful year in the sport (see this month’s Shooting Horse for more) And it helped pay for the Clark family to travel to contests throughout the country.

 

The Family Unit.

But then you ask him about his proudest accomplishment in the sport: “My son.  To be able to raise him up and see just how well he’s doing tickles me to death.”

 

It’s pretty obvious, really.  Go to a shoot with the Clarks, and you’re likely to hear Rock whooping and hollering when Terri and Cody are competing.  And between runs, the father is often counseling the son—“Sometimes he tells me just to walk away, take a deep breath and shake it off after a bad one,” says Cody.

 

Like so many other families, the Clarks share their love of the sport in a way that brings them closer together.  They’re on the road 30-35 weekends a year.  It goes beyond that, though.  Terri and Rock commute together to their day jobs in Nashville, some 45 minutes each way.  And they drop off Cody at school en route, then pick him up as they head for home.  Mounted Shooting is a frequent topic of conversation, with dad providing advice to one and all.

 

Just ask Terri, and she’ll tell you that Rock is the, uh, rock of the family.  “He’s solid, he’s there, we can depend on him. He would do anything under his power to see that we were taken care of. He’s a real family man.  But he does have steel underneath.  He believes in what’s right and he will stand up and defend what he believes to be right to the end.”

 

And Rock Clark is strong in his dedication to being the best mounted shooter in the world.  There’s a good chance he’ll get there, too—you can almost carve that in stone.

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