My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys

I have a lot to be thankful for today because the other day I went to Florence, S.C., to the Challenger event that they have there. There were several of us who went--me, Kolt Donaldson, Michael Manes and Logan Knibbe.

We flew out there together and we were flying back Sunday morning. We went from Florence to Charlotte, had a layover and we hadn't had much sleep because it was an early flight so we were planning on getting some sleep on this plane. It was like a three-hour flight to Dallas.

We get on and it starts off like any other plane ride--you kick your seat back and you plan on waking up whenever you land.

Unfortunately, about 45 minutes after we take off I hear the stewardess come over the speaker and ask if anyone with any medical training would please ring their call button. Obviously you hear something like that and you're thinking perhaps an elderly passenger has had a heart attack or something like that. You never know what could be going on.

I lean up to look – I'm sitting at the very back of the plane – and all I can see is some commotion going on at the front. Then I see the stewardess walk by with an oxygen tank and a mask and I'm thinking, "What in the world is going on?"

After awhile I realize I'm probably not going to be able to see from where I'm sitting so I lean back in my chair and figure if something is that bad wrong they'll do something about it and take care of it.

So I'm dozing off again when the stewardess comes up to me and said, "Sir, would you mind coming to the front of the plane to sit by your friend?"

No questions asked, I said, "Yeah, absolutely."

Once I stood up I did ask, "Well, what's going on?"

And she replied, "Please just come up here. We might need your help."

I get up there and sit next to my friend, Michael, and automatically I said, "What's going on?"

He says, "Well, we might have to take this guy out."

I was like, "What are you talking about?"

And it turns out there's this guy on the plane going absolutely crazy. It was almost as if he was having seizers, but he wasn't. He starts just trying to attack the people around him and he says he can't breath, but whenever the stewardess and a doctor who was on the plane tried to give him oxygen he was saying, "They're trying to poison me."

So he would try to attack them and between these weird little spells he would have he would lay down on the floor as if he was going to go to sleep. You would never know what he was going to do--he would just randomly act all crazy.

He would start saying, "I'm going to kill you all. You're trying to kill me."

When I got on the plane it didn't appear there were any empty seats, but – naturally – whenever this guy started acting all crazy a lot of seats opened up in that area so I went to the back of the plane and I get Logan.

I was like, "Come up here. We're going to need your help too."

I never did find Kolt. Apparently he was sleeping and there was no way of waking him up. So the three of us are up there and this guy goes crazy again and was going to try and run through the aisle. Now there's women screaming and people are grabbing their kids and putting them in the seats against the window – away from everything.

We had to grab this guy, throw him on the ground and hold him there. He's trying to grab my feet so I'm kicking my feet free. Then he was trying to bite people and before we knew it he had messed his pants and thrown up.

He's screaming, "Help. Help. Help."

And I'm thinking, "You need help? We need help!"

This was no little guy we were having to hold down and he was going crazy. So the pilot decides to make an emergency landing in a different city. About the time we're landing I look up and I see Kolt finally waking up (so I guess he got his rest).

Knowing Kolt he thought we were in Dallas and we were really in Little Rock, Ark., and then the police come on and they take the guy off.

What was so funny about the whole ordeal is that I was sitting there beforehand and I asked the stewardess, I said, "I know we're making an emergency landing, but where are we at?"

She was like, "I'm sorry, but I really don't know. They haven't told me anything."

Then about the time you get to where you can start to see some buildings I looked over at her and I said, "Oh, we're in Little Rock."

She said, "How do you know that?"

And I said, "Well, if you fly as much as we do you kind of know exactly where you're at when you start to land."

We were only supposed to be in Little Rock long enough for them to get the guy off the plane and to get some more fuel, but it was only supposed to be a 10 or 15minute stop and we were there for like 45 minutes to an hour.

We were actually on our way to another bull riding that was put together by Colby Yates so once we landed I called Colby and said, "Hey man, I got this wild story and I know it's going to sound crazy, but you're going to have to hold our bulls. We're going to be about an hour late."

Yeah, it was one of those crazy things. I didn't think about it and it was one of those things anybody would have done. I mean, I think it's a lot easier to take somebody done then to have them possibly try to take your plane over.

But, it was definitely scary at the time and you don't really know what to do.

Then when we finally got off the plane people were telling us, "Thank you. We really appreciate that."

Luckily Colby held our bulls back and when we showed up to the bull riding we were only about 30 minutes late and we all got to ride.

By the time we got there everybody had heard about it and they were all like, "Dudes, what happened? You all are heroes--"