In a game of seconds and inches, bull riding can flip in the blink of an eye. One minute, a 20-year-old kid with fiery flowing locks is headed back to his hotel room with Cold Stone ice cream in hand, enjoying life, joking with his buddies, living out the dream. The next minute, nothing but silence and dark.

Saturday night inside Delta Center was loud in the way PBR crowds always are, right up until they weren’t.

World No. 2 Clay Guiton nodded for his Round 2 out aboard Lieutenant Dan near the end of the long round, with his best friends John Crimber and Kaiden Loud still left to ride and the energy in the building climbing toward the championship round.

Then, in a split second, the noise turned into screams.

Guiton was unseated in a violent change of direction near the chutes, his head snapping to the ground with a force that looked like it shut the lights off instantly. The g-force knocked him unconscious, and the wreck kept getting worse. As he hit, he was repeatedly stepped on — shoulder, stomach and what looked like his chest — while Lieutenant Dan stormed around the fallen rider.

With each hoof strike, the arena gasped. Then people saw it: Guiton’s body convulsing on the dirt.

A grand mal seizure.

Children began to cry. Fans screamed. And in the chaos, the bullfighters went to work.

Austin Ashley, Lucas Teodoro and Cody Webster fought to pull the bull off the downed rider and clear the arena floor. Before the bull was even fully out, John came flying over the chutes landing hard on his "tender leg" and leaning in, eyes locked on the scene. Webster began urgently waving for the EMTs and sports medicine.

Then something eerie happened.

Everything went quiet.

The announcers asked the crowd to remain silent so medical staff could communicate clearly. Cowboy hats came off almost in unison, a prayer rising from every corner of the arena. Teammates and competitors stood frozen, staring at the worst-case outcomes nobody wanted to say out loud: broken ribs, punctured lungs, brain bleed, internal damage. Bull riding has seen lesser wrecks end with those results.

Near Guiton’s feet, Marco Rizzo and Ezekiel Mitchell stood watching sports medicine take control, praying while the young rider lay convulsing on the dirt.

“We all pray for protection,” Rizzo said later. “In that moment, Zeke kept telling me, ‘Just have unwavering faith.’”

As Dr. Tandy Freeman reached the rider, another danger revealed itself. During the seizure, Guiton was choking on his mouth guard — it was slipping down his throat. Freeman removed it while medical staff rushed out the backboard, even as Guiton continued seizing. The building stayed silent, the kind of silence that feels heavier than noise.

“I’ve seen some pretty bad wrecks,” Rizzo said. “But that was just the whole seizure thing. It freaked me out.”

When the backboard finally moved, Rizzo walked out of the arena beside it, holding Guiton’s vest and carrying both his own hat and Guiton’s, still praying.

He never left his side again, more loyal than a hunting lab on a duck hunt, Marco Rizzo stayed by his buddy’s side.

In the moments that followed, Guiton regained consciousness in flashes — on the backboard, then in sports medicine, then in the ambulance on the way to the emergency room. He doesn’t remember the ambulance ride at all.

Rizzo does.

In the ambulance, EMTs reached for trauma shears to cut off Guiton’s glove. Rizzo stepped in.

“They were trying to cut his glove off,” he said. “I told them, this gear is expensive. If you need me to take anything else off, just call me.”

At the hospital, the cutting continued. When Guiton woke up later, the first thing he could focus on was not a scan result or a doctor’s voice.

“I remember John came up to me and showed me my chaps had been cut off of me,” Guiton said. “I was not very happy about that.”

Bull riders might ride 1,800 pounds of twisting horsepower without flinching, but cut their gear and you have committed a personal offense. The problem? Trauma rule No. 1 is simple: full exposure of the patient. When seconds matter, shears beat snaps. Doctors are not worried about leather. They are worried about lungs. Still, that did not make it easier when Guiton woke up to find his nearly new Monster Energy chaps, earned just months earlier, sliced apart in the name of saving his life.

If the torn leather felt personal, the next 20 hours were bigger than any strap or buckle.

A grand mal (generalized tonic-clonic) seizure can happen after a hard head injury. In simple terms, when someone gets knocked out, the brain can try to “jump-start the engine” — sending a surge of electrical activity through both sides of the brain as it attempts to reconnect. That sudden electrical storm causes violent convulsions. It’s a medical emergency. In cases like Guiton’s, doctors administer sedatives to stop the seizure, protect the airway and stabilize the patient while they evaluate for internal injuries and brain trauma.

Guiton slept for nearly 18 of the 20 hours he was there, drifting in and out under the weight of a concussion and medication.

While he rested, Rizzo handled conversations with doctors and nurses. Every time Guiton cracked his eyes open, no matter how foggy he was, Rizzo leaned in with the same three steady words: “You good, bubba?”

He also called Guiton’s mom, Brandy, because he knew what a mother’s fear sounds like, especially from hundreds of miles away. Both he and Guiton have moms on the East Coast, and Rizzo said he could only imagine how his own mother would have felt if it were him in that bed. So he stayed on the phone with Brandy, giving her steady updates instead of silence.

And before the night was even over, Carolina family had already mobilized. Tiffany Davis, alongside her husband, Carolina Cowboys head coach Jerome Davis, had already prepared a flight to get Brandy to Utah if needed. Carolina is not just a team. It is a family.

The first conversation between mother and son was simple. Guiton, still groggy, answered softly, “Hey mama.” Brandy replied, “Hey buddy,” and Guiton followed with the words she needed most: “I’m all right.” Rizzo said it sounded like the weight of the world lifted off of her shoulders.

Then enter the cowboy family, through glass emergency room doors.

Photo courtesy of Bull Stock Media