Eugene Pro Rodeo

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quote:Eugene, Ore. --

"It's always nice to have your brother beside you when you're riding. There's a lot of times where we argue a lot but I can't imagine not riding with him."

Luke and Gabe Mckay do everything together. Rodeo together, they travel together.

"I'm a better driver than he is," Luke jokes. "He thinks he's the better driver and yeah sort of those kind of brotherly bickerings and I try and purposely get under his skin cause I know it'll bug him."

And they were adopted together.

"He knows his family over there," explains Gabe. "I mean it's kinda hard to keep track of your family in Haiti but I don't know. I've done a little bit of research on them but I haven't found anything really on them yet." Joe McKay adopted six Haitian children and brought them to Juntura, Oregon where Luke and Gabe found an affinity for Saddle Bronc riding.

"Started out steer riding...well sheep riding then steer riding and you either go to bulls or horses and we chose the horse route."

And even with long days of travel in tough rodeo seasons, Luke still holds onto that love for his older brother.

"For me it kinda came a little easier than it did for him but he works harder than I do and I feed off that from him cause if I see him after we move cows all day and he's working out I go I gotta work out too because he's doing it," Luke says. "So I'll go do it rather than go to bed and go home so it's something that I really learned from my brother and I still will learn from him."

"Mom and Dad were really supportive and we just supported each other on different things we wanted to do and rodeo was just one of those things," echoes Gabe.

Luke concludes with a similar sentiment.

"And driving a lot you either gotta love each other or gotta hate each other or else it isn't gonna work out very good so yeah our bond has stayed strong with rodeo."

A bond that has remained from Haiti, the ranches of Juntura to the bucking chutes of the Eugene Pro Rodeo.