PUEBLO, Colo. – When Tiffany Owens saw that Tiffany Davis was calling her, she thought it must’ve been a butt dial.
But it wasn’t. It was Davis informing Owens that she’d be the 2024 recipient of the Sharon Shoulders Award – news that Owens never thought she’d receive.
“She told me that she had been trying to push me through for a little while now, and I’m like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” Owens said. “She said, ‘No!’ And I said, ‘Well, I just can’t believe it. Are you sure y’all didn’t make a mistake?’ Because I can, off the top of my head, think of so many powerful and really deserving women. And she said, ‘No, I just really think you deserve this award. We had our talk and the other women agreed, and you are our recipient for this year.’ So I was just really honored. I couldn’t believe it.”
Created in 2010, the Sharon Shoulders Award recognizes the great women of professional bull riding and Western sports whose work, partnership, and faith have been as integral to the sport as the athletes themselves.
Owens will be among the honorees at the 2024 Heroes & Legends ceremony on July 11 at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City – just 17 miles from Choctaw, where she first met her husband, former PBR competitor-turned-judge Donald Owens.
Tiffany was just 16 years old when they first met at the Owens family ranch. Fittingly, she, her mother, and her sister went there to watch some people get on bulls.
Donald asked her out, but it wasn’t as easy as “the rest is history.”
“We were not high school sweethearts, but we went out and stuff,” Tiffany said with a laugh. “But it just seemed like we kept running into each other. We did go do things together and kept spending time together. He always could make me laugh, and it would just be the most random places we would run into each other. I don’t know how to explain it other than it was meant to be.”
They dated seriously during Tiffany’s senior year of high school—despite the 10 miles between their houses necessitating long-distance phone calls—and Donald attended her graduation. But he broke up with her after that, and it wasn’t until they reconciled that it finally stuck.
The two were married in 1991. Two years later, they moved back to the Owens ranch – the very place they first met. They lived in a trailer for seven years before building a house there, where they lived until two years ago.
“I just can’t even imagine my life without him,” Tiffany said. “He’s been a bigger part of my life than he hasn’t.”
Owens was born in Edmond, Oklahoma, but her father was in the military, so she moved around quite a bit before finally settling down. While living in Colorado Springs, Colorado, she hit the rodeos hard, competing in barrel racing and pole bending. Back in Oklahoma, she focused on the local 4-H while competing in high school rodeos.
Her family was always involved in Western sports, even before she met Donald—her mother, in fact, introduced Cord McCoy’s parents to each other in college—so she knew what to expect when she became a bull rider's wife.
Well, mostly.
“I knew about him being gone a lot, and the rodeoing,” Owens said. “I was naïve, in a sense, to the injuries, I guess, because luckily, he hadn’t really been hurt seriously when we were dating.
“The one thing that I don’t know that I was really prepared for was how much he would miss it when he quit riding. He loves being a part of the bull riding world, but if he could get on one more, he would. And through therapy and all that stuff, he realized that it’s like a grieving process, because from the time he was born until he retired, that was what he always did.”
One thing in particular that she was prepared for was being an independent woman.
“My father, when my parents were married, he hunted and then had to do TDYs (temporary duty) and all that stuff,” Owens said. “So I was used to my mother and us girls just doing things. She was always very independent, so I was used to being able to just do it. Whatever needed to be done, it shouldn’t just wait for somebody else to show up.”
During Donald’s bull riding and judging career, Tiffany did it all. The pair has two daughters, Sage and Jewel – who’s now married to Brennon Eldred – and, while her husband was gone, Tiffany took the girls rodeoing, managed the house and the family’s beef cattle, and had her own career working in a dental office.
How did she manage to do it all?
“We talk about that, because… I don’t know,” she said, laughing. “Because when my oldest daughter was in high school, and Donald was judging, and he’d be gone, I would load up the trailer. And I would always make sure my Jewel had a friend with her her age. And then sometimes we would even load up one of my Sage’s friends, and then we would load up the horses, and there was always a dog. And so I was getting the house ready to go, we had the trailer ready to go, I would get home from work, and we would take off because I’d usually get off early on Fridays. We’d go to the high school rodeos, and we’d be gone over the weekend, or we’d go back and forth. Either way, I was doing this with all these kids, and I was hauling that living quarters trailer.
“And I’m like, how?! How did I do that? I don’t know! No is not an option. It’s like, ‘Let’s just go.’ And we had a lot of fun.”
While Tiffany managed to do it all without Donald at home, she certainly didn’t do it alone. She credits her strong circle of friends and local support system with always helping her out when she needed it.
“I’ve been fortunate that we have a great circle of friends here around our home, so when something would happen, I could call for help,” she said. “I have been blessed with that, to have that circle that I can call on. The Choctaw church just always preached relationships. We are built for relationships, and it just really matters. And the same thing – we’re here. Somebody calls and we’re, ‘Hey, let’s go. Someone needs us.’ It does matter because one of these days, you’re going to need that help, too. And you don’t get to schedule it. It’s not like, ‘Okay, on Wednesday evening, the highway patrol is going to call, and your donkeys are going to be on the highway.’ So it’s just very important to make yourself available as well. Community is very important.”
On July 11, Owens joins the community of bull rider wives who have received the Sharon Shoulders Award, an honor she does not take lightly. Those women and her strong faith got her through some hard times, and looking back, she’s grateful for it all.
“These things in my life, I do not regret,” Owens said. “I do not regret those things. There have been bad seasons, but that’s just life. You go through all those seasons, but I’ve had a very, very blessed life, and I’m glad I’ve had these people to share it with and my friends that I get to call my friends and share it with.”
Photo courtesy of Todd Brewer/Bull Stock Media
