Arnoldsville, GA
While Jake Willcox’s journey as a rodeo clown might seem surprising to some, it was destined to be a part of his life from the very beginning. Born and raised in the Athens area, the rodeo culture runs deep in Jake’s family. Growing up, he watched his father dazzle the crowd with his performances, so naturally, Jake wanted to follow in his footsteps.
“I grew up wanting to be a cowboy and we went and caught cows. People have cows get loose. My dad was the guy they called; he was the cow nine-one-one, so we’d go catch cows, we’d do this and cowboying and all that stuff,” says Jake Wilcox.
But Jake’s path to becoming a professional rodeo clown was full of twists and turns. Initially, he considered riding bulls himself, like some of his college rodeo team friends at UGA. However, he soon realized that his true talent was bringing laughter to the arena, rather than facing off against ferocious beasts or riding their back’s while holding on for dear life.
“You have to have a certain mentality to be a bullfighter, to be willing to just run in there with reckless abandon and try to save somebody that made a conscious decision to get on a bull. I was always cutting up and always having a good time, and never bashful about getting in front of people and doing stuff. You know, I auctioneer’d from the time I was a little kid, so getting a microphone and putting it in my face wasn’t something I was afraid of,” says Jake.
At one point in his career, Jake traveled the country nearly every weekend, and quickly rose to prominence as one of the most popular rodeo clowns on the circuit. With a knack for modern humor, and a bag full of tricks, he effortlessly keeps the audience entertained, no matter the circumstances.
Make no mistake about it, everything Jake does inside that arena serves a purpose and is carefully thought out long before the rodeo ever begins. But occasionally things happen. And over the course of his career, Jake has had to sacrifice himself in order to save a rider from serious injury.
“Yeah, we had some stuff like that. Now, did I get any big broken bones in hospital stays and all this stuff? No. Was there a few times that, you know, you wiped off a little blood and talked about you, you know that you might be hearing bells for a few days? Yeah, it happens,” says Jake.
“There might have been a handful of times where I wished he wouldn’t have done something, or I think that bull’s a little rank or he is a little hot and he’s hunting for the barrel and the he hits the barrel, and Jake’s inside of it and he’s hitting it and he’s hitting that barrel is rolling and rolling. There’s been a couple times that Jake doesn’t just pop up outta the barrel, but at the end of the day, he always pops up. He always makes a joke about it. It can be dangerous, but Jake is smart and I always tell him, I’m like, ‘please be careful. Please be smart. It’s not worth it, you know?’ At the end of the day, he’s smart. He pays attention. He knows what he is doing, and he helps the bullfighters, he helps the bull riders, but he also keeps himself safe, because at the end of the day, being my husband and being the father of our children is the number one most important thing at the end of the day,” says Lauren, Jake’s wife.
Words of wisdom from the lady Jake say’s is the love of his life, his wife Lauren – and the two share an incredible bond. Lauren is also a UGA grad and a competitive roper when she’s not serving as a Special Education Teacher in Ogelthorpe County. Love blossomed between the two when they were students in Athens, and they quickly became inseparable. With their shared passion for rodeo, they traversed the country together, creating cherished memories both in and out of the arena. However, life changes, and so too did Jake and Lauren’s. The arrival of their three young kids, including twin boys, altered their perspective. The once incessant forty-five-weeks-a-year travel schedule; well that now takes a backseat to family life.
“I hope that they have something to do with horses or something to do with farming. Riley’s kind of getting into wanting to buy her own cows. Her daddy has taught her how to invest her money in cows, how much it costs a month, how much they can weigh, how much you have do this for them, and then you can turn around and sell them for a profit. So she might go that route and be more of a farmer, a cattle farmer versus a rodeo queen,” says Lauren.
“My granddad managed a ten-thousand acre cattle farm in Montezuma, Georgia, and that’s where my dad grew up. They had to get up every day and get on a horse and go do something with cattle. It’s not necessarily that I have to get up every day and get on a horse and go tend to a cow to make a living, but we’ve gotten to go to a lot of places because of horses and cows and taken that lifestyle into a more urban setting and, and showing it to people. It’s almost more of an educational thing. A lot of people don’t look at rodeo that way. They look at it as entertainment, but really part of the thing that’s been some of my drive is that it is educational that people can see that way of life,” says Jake.
Although Jake has cut back on his extensive travel, he didn’t bid farewell to his beloved rodeo clown career. He now selectively attends rodeos, focusing on events close to home where he can spend time with the family while still doing what he loves.
“We still do the Athens Rodeo. I still go bail out some of my stock contractor buddies when they call me and say, ‘hey, I had somebody got sick, or this guy broke his leg and he can’t come’, but as far as being full-time rodeo clowning, we’ve had to back off that. There’s some rodeo clowns that have pretty long careers up into their sixties, seventies. I’d say when the kids get a little older, we’ll go back to doing a few more, but as far as full-time, forty-five weekends a year, we don’t do that much anymore,” says Jake.
By: Ray D’Alessio