Gregg remembers that the training was pretty intensive and they were taught to ride frontwards and backwards and every which way. He was feeling pretty confident in the saddle when he decided to show off a little. "One day all six of us had just completed a training session and we were walking slowly down a trail back to the barn. I had seen the wrangler do a trick once where he was sitting on the horse and he lifted his right leg over the horse to the left side and then dropped down, hit the ground with his foot and the hopped back on," Gregg recalls. 

"Since my horse was walking along so quietly, I thought I'd just try it. After all, it looked pretty easy when he did it. So I lifted my leg over, touched it to the ground, and all of a sudden my horse took off at a full speed gallop. I had one foot in the stirrup and the other foot hanging off onto the ground. My arm was over the horses rump and I managed to get hold of the horn. There I was hanging off one side of the horse while he ran full speed ahead and everyone was watching in amazement. My heart was racing and I was in a panic," he says with his eyes growing wider with excitement. 

"I could faintly hear the wrangler yelling in the distance and it sounded like he was saying, 'Let go. Let go.' I thought to myself 'No way.' So I hung on for dear life." Luckily, Gregg says, "There was no pain whatsoever, but there was a little adrenaline rush and there was some major fear things going on, but it turned out okay. It turned out that what the wrangler was really saying was, 'Don't let go.' Had I done what I thought he said, there's no telling what kind of damage might have been done." 

The fortunate thing was that there weren't too far from the barn when all this started, and the horse was anxious to get back to his stall. "When a horse starts running for home, that's the fastest they'll ever run," Gregg laughs. "They know where they're going and they want to be home, so I just reached up, grabbed the reins and pulled the horse to a stop. The guys all said, 'Whoa, where did you learn that?!' When they found out what really happened, they never stopped teasing me and to this day we still joke about the Rainwater Dance." 

By Starz Magazine