ACCIDENT SURVIVOR BEATS ODDS, ROPES IN A RODEO SCHOLARSHIP

SIKESTON -- Since his May 1994 train accident, Trey Alcorn's hospital records read like a medical journal.

Compound fractures in the left arm. Shattered right elbow. Head lacerations. Puncture wound in the left shoulder.

The list goes on.

His father's photos, taken at St. Francis Medical Center in Cape Girardeau a few days after the accident, tell the story better. In them, Alcorn's face is stoic. He is a frail, bruised heap of metal bars and stitches.

Which makes it even harder to believe he's a state-ranked team roper.

Alcorn, now 18, competes in Missouri High School Rodeo, traveling from Sikeston to various cities throughout most of the year. This week, he signed a letter of intent to attend Murray State College in Tishomingo, Okla., and compete in the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association.

The scholarship will pay Alcorn's tuition and stall fees for his horse.

Currently, he ranks second in points statewide. He held first place back in May 1994, when he was a sophomore preparing for the state finals.

Alcorn and some friends went to a party in Sherwood Forest, a rural Stoddard County subdivision and a popular teen hangout. Everyone was drinking, although eyewitnesses said Alcorn wasn't drunk when he went for a stroll on some nearby train tracks.

He was on a trestle when a train came barreling down the tracks. Alcorn tried to outrun it but tripped. A friend tried to yank him off the tracks, but didn't get him all the way off before the train hit Alcorn's left side and threw him 60 feet.

Friends drove Alcorn to Missouri Delta Medical Center in Sikeston, where he was airlifted to St. Francis to undergo four hours of surgery. He doesn't remember the next three days -- a haze of hospital walls and morphine doses -- but his father, Denny Alcorn, remembers them well.

The doctors told him his son wouldn't have any use of his left arm and might only regain limited use of his right arm.

That didn't bode well for Alcorn's planned team-roping career. The sport requires one person to rope a steer's horns and another to rope its feet. The rope is yanked so hard in the sport, competitors who get fingers and thumbs tangled usually lose them.

When Alcorn finally awoke, his first concern was his rodeo career. Thinking it was over, he refused to cooperate with physical therapists. He finally was assigned to an Australian woman who convinced him to give recovery a try.

The real change was after Alcorn returned home and watched his girlfriend, also a rodeo competitor, leave for several events.

"I felt like I let my team roping partner down, and I wanted to be able to rodeo again," he said. "Once I realized I could move my arms, I got to work."

Two months after the accident, Alcorn was practicing in his father's arena. He wasn't supposed to do any roping until November.

"The doctors were mad at first, then they were surprised," he said. "Then they said the roping would be good exercise for my arm."

His first high school rodeo competition after the accident was in August 1994, and Alcorn took first place overall with an unfamiliar partner.

This summer he plans to raise money for college by training roping horses.

He will leave for school in late August, hopefully after competition in the July national finals in Colorado. The roper wants to study agriculture and veterinary medicine during his four years of eligibility.

At some point, however, he will have to take a break and get the last of the metal bars out of his left arm.