SPECIAL FEATURE
HOW TO SAVE A LIFE NCHA $3 million rider credits his life to the quick response from cutters in the right place, at the right time, leads to change across all NCHA affiliates. BY ANNA LAURENT
PHOTO BY ANNA LAURENT
T
he events that transpired at a cutting horse show in Paradise, Texas, on October 2, 2021, were nothing short of a miracle. Everything NCHA Open Riders Hall of Famer, Jason Clark, of Weatherford, Texas, knows about the events that occurred on this day comes from second-hand accounts. “I don’t remember anything,” Clark said. “I don’t remember working horses that morning or even a couple of months before that. The doctors say I may never remember any of that; it’s totally normal.” By all accounts, Clark would have never made it out of the arena that day if things had not lined up perfectly. “Mine was the perfect scenario,” Clark said. “It just wasn’t my time, and it was a miracle that I made it. Everything just lined up.” From what he has been told, it was just a normal show day when he started his morning at 2 a.m. “We worked a handful of show horses and some three-year-olds, then off to the show we went,” Clark said. “I had my wife and my son helping me, Becky and Cooper.” Clark’s first horse to show that day was one of his own, a six-year-old gelding called Shorty Katz.
“I did really good,” Clark said. “I marked a 74 and then there was someone after me, and then I showed again.” Cooper told Clark that he remembers seeing him lean on the fence with his arm by his head after he finished showing his first horse, which seemed out of the ordinary at the time. Afterward, Becky brought Clark his next horse to show. He proceeded to mark a score of 75, which put him in first and second place. After the buzzer went off, Clark’s life would change forever. “My head went all the way back to the horse’s tail; everyone thought I was joking around, because I had just marked two good scores,” Clark said. Everyone, that is, except Becky. By the time his wife made it to him and the horse, Clark was already blue. “Everyone was just frozen; nobody knew what to do,” Clark said. “Becky grabbed the horse. John Wold, Josh Townsend, and Rick Hayes were helping me. She hollered to
them, ‘Help me get him off,’ you know?” Luckily for Clark, Kadee Belle Hall, the daughter of Shannon Hall, one of Clark’s good friends, was also at the show. Kadee Belle had just been CPR certified the week prior, but she had never performed CPR on anything other than the class Manikin, a type of mannequin used in the healthcare industry, designed to simulate the human body during various healthcare scenarios. “I had just given her a hug like 20 minutes ago, you know?” Clark said. “Her mom screamed, ‘Kadee Belle, Kadee Belle!’ She runs up, and it’s me - a lifelong friend of the family. It had to be a God thing, because Kadee Belle was not even going to come [to the cutting that day]. Her younger sister, Jo, had just started showing, and Kadee just thought at the last minute, ‘You know, I’m going to go support my sister and surprise her.’” As Clark lay on the arena floor and Kadee Belle performed CPR, Sara Allstadt, a small animal veterinarian and fellow NCHA SUMMER 2022 • CUTTING HORSE CHATTER
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