[ad_1] Greg Jaklewicz Abilene Reporter-News Published 6:00 PM EST Nov 20, 2018 Angela Ganter’s Thanksgiving story is one of, yes, thanks — and sadness. It was on this holiday week that her husband, Don, died in 2004, leaving her to raise their 8-year-old daughter. Fast forward a few years, and Angela found out she had
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Angela Ganter’s Thanksgiving story is one of, yes, thanks — and sadness.
It was on this holiday week that her husband, Don, died in 2004, leaving her to raise their 8-year-old daughter.
Fast forward a few years, and Angela found out she had breast cancer.
But now Angela not only is a cancer survivor, she’s competing again in barrel racing.
“I am thankful every day,” she said.
Many know Angela Ganter, but others may remember Angela Smith, a 1983 Cooper High graduate who, at 6-foot-1 with long blonde hair, was hard to miss. She played basketball but when she wasn’t on the court or in the classroom, she was on her horse. With some training, but mostly on her own, she became comfortable and skilled in the saddle.
Enough to become a pretty darned good barrel racer.
When Angela became ill in 2010, her daughter Jackie took up the reins and began competing in the event. Type her name on an internet search and “Barrel Racing’s Next Big Star” and other headlines appear.
And now, both mother and full-time pro rodeoer daughter are competing, most often against each other.
“It goes back and forth,” Angela said of who comes out on top. “We’re both competitive.”
It was Jackie’s challenge, born of frustration with her mother, that sparked Angela Ganter’s return.
Beaten down after surgeries and treatments, Angela was only wondering about riding again when her daughter laid it out: “Mom, you’re not trying.”
And so mom went to the gym and began working her healing body back into shape. Enough that she is competing again at a high level. Before Thanksgiving, she traveled to Canada to compete. And did well.
Angela was born in Abilene and grew up here. Her folks, Dan and Jo Smith lived in the Abilene ISD so she and her brother Joe Bob, went to Cooper though she did her riding on land they had in the Wylie district.
Her dad, she said, was a “city boy” while her mom grew up on ranch land in New Mexico.
“But she never rode. She was a cheerleader and all that,” Angela said. So when Angela took an interest in riding, her parents “just stared at me. I guess it was in my blood.”
They kept three or four horses, and after school and on weekends, Angela rode. She galloped along Buffalo Gap Road, more rural in the early 1980s.
“Now you’d get killed” doing that, she said, laughing.
She had little training, other than at Indian Creek Stables near Tye. At first, she was too young and little, and “they wouldn’t let me ride.”
“I begged (owner Huey Lamb Jr.) to let me ride,” she said. She passed muster and soon “I was almost running the place.”
She honed her skills there, and also received pointers on barrels when she was 10 or 11 from barrel racer Kay Blandford, who lived then in Trent.
Angela went on to Texas A&M in College Station, boarding a horse there. She met Don Ganter and they married. For years, they owned and operated restaurants and bars, including an Aggieland favorite, Dixie Chicken, that he opened in 1974.
He was a country boy, so he was good with his wife’s passion.
They kept horses on land there, and she competed as a barrel racer on weekends.
“I didn’t pro rodeo at the time, just amateur,” she said.
Did she do well?
“I’d win,” she said.
Her horse was Cee Jay’s Bug. Today, she rides a horse named Bugs.
It wasn’t a bad life for the family of three (Jackie was born in College Station), until Don became ill. He was a diabetic and had heart problems, and was hospitalized in Abilene when he died of a heart attack Nov. 22, 2004, three days before Thanksgiving.
In April that year, the family had returned to Abilene, where Angela’s folks still lived.
Now it was time for mother and daughter to start down the next road.
She didn’t know what was five years ahead.
Life was, Angela Ganter said, “rockin’ along” until 2010.
She had started Lone Star Stables, now a sprawling spread on Iberis Road, in the Wylie area.
“It was time to get to work,” she said. Several services soon were offered, including boarding and swimming of horses as both training and injury therapy.
And then she found a lump in her armpit. She didn’t think much about it but a physician’s assistant she knew advised her to get it checked out.
Two weeks went by but she did. When the ultrasound was done, the technician’s eyes “got as big as saucers,” Angela said. She came back with a doctor.
“Is there a problem?” Angela asked. Maybe so. A biopsy was done.
A week passed.
“I’m not a worrier,” Angela said, and she kept working.
“I was swimming a horse when I got a phone call,” she said. With wet hands, she opened her flip phone.
It was the doctor, who said the report was not good. It was cancer.
Ironically, she had a recent mammogram and those detect cancer 85 percent of the time.
“I’m in the 15 percent they don’t,” Angela said.
She finished swimming the horse and considered what the doctor said to do next, but “the sooner the better,” she was advised.
She connected with a doctor she knew at Baylor Scott & White Medical Center in Temple.
And so began the ordeal.
If you want to beat cancer, you have to be a fighter. Angela Ganter was that.
Chemotherapy began, as did the routine of trips from Abilene to Temple and back every two weeks. Drive in, have four to five hours of treatment, stay the night, come home. Of course, she needed a driver and all sorts of support.
Chemo, most know, does a number on your hair.
“For girls,” she said, “that’s a big deal.”
Angela tried to save her golden locks by applying a cold cap, which is filled with gel that is super chilled to between minus-15 and minus-40 degrees, then placed on a head before a treatment.
Angela called this “excruciating” but did it. She lost most of hair in one night, anyway.
But, she joked, she wasn’t “‘Sling Blade bald.'”
Was it worth the pain?
Yes, she said, if only to be on the offensive against her cancer. The attack, in no order, included:
► 4 months of “red devil chemo”
► 9 surgeries
► 17 Herceptin chemo treatments
► More than two dozen lymph nodes removed
► 28 radiation treatments
When Angela came home, she could make it from the bed to the living room “and stayed there” until she had the energy to go back to the bedroom.
She has been taking a daily pill, Tamoxifen, for the past five years.
During this ordeal, Jackie Ganter, who was in the Wylie ISD, was growing up. As a teenager, her world narrowed because of her mother’s illness.
Jackie started with English riding, which is not exactly racing a horse around a course of barrels. However, English riding polished her horsemanship skills.
She then took on her mother’s forte.
“She kinda stepped up,” Angela said of her daughter taking on barrels at age 12. in 2012, she won barrels at the Texas State High School Rodeo Finals in Abilene.
Indeed she did.
Jackie Ganter was so good that she graduated from high school early and got her Women’s Pro Rodeo Association card at 18. She was Rookie of the Year in 2015 and has twice competed in the U.S. and also in the Canadian finals.
Helping her daughter advance in the sport was therapy for Angela.
“I’m a pretty good coach,” she said. “I taught her everything I know.”
She paused.
“She rides better. She has a better seat,” Angela said.
Jackie said they have been given a second chance.
“It has been amazing because we ran barrels together when I was very young,” Jackie said. “But that wasn’t as special as now because of everything she has overcome.
“We are having fun competing together.”
Since 2010, Angela could not ride barrels. There were obvious reasons but even when she began her recovery and could get back on a horse, she could not ride fast because she had lost her sense of balance. Chemotherapy is like a road grader, clearing everything in its path.
It let’s you live, Angela said, but it’s up to the survivor to determine how to live.
“All of that has to come back, and you can’t tell how much time it takes,” she said.
“I just rocked along with that,” Angela said.
One day in March 2017, while lamenting missing her barrel racing, Angela got push-back from Jackie.
“My own daughter looked at me and said, ‘You’re not hungry,'” Angela said. “She tells ME I’m not hungry.”
Talk about lighting a fire or, better, spurring that horse.
“The next morning I was at Firehouse Fitness,” Angela said. “I told the trainer, ‘Let’s get to work.'”
All that was missing was the “Rocky” theme playing.
Three days a week, Angela Ganter was “working as hard as I could.”
She surprised herself, too.
“I was absolutely shocked at what I could do,” she said.
Angela bought her horse back and started to ride.
In February, she acquired a faster horse, one that would make her more competitive. She began competing and won six rodeos. She also won the Grassroots Pro Rodeo Canada Final in late September in Calgary, Alberta.
More recently, she competed in the Canadian Finals Rodeo, advancing far enough to be satisfied with her comeback. She placed in the first five go-rounds, then hit a barrel in the sixth, knocking her out of the running.
“I did really good,” she said.
Jackie, she said, was her helper. Her daughter broke an ankle in late January, and was out for seven weeks and her return to form was slow. That dropped her in the WPRA standings this year (she still was in the Top 50).
So, how does an older, cancer-surviving barrel racer compare to her former self?
“I’m 10 times as good,” Angela said. The difference may be inspiration.
“I am determined to live and do things better,” she said. “I work harder.”
Not many people beat cancer but “I beat it. It got me mad,” she said.
She was the oldest contestant, male or female, to compete in Canada. Age isn’t the factor in this event that it is, say, in calf roping.
And so it’s Thanksgiving and for Jackie Ganter, missing Don Ganter is tougher.
“I am not a self-pity person,” Angela said. “The difference is that he was her dad.”
Jackie, though, has her mother.
“That’s definitely something to be thankful for. You have to look at the bright side and it’s obviously what God has planned for us,” Jackie said. “You carry on and make the best of things.
“You have to be thankful for what you have instead of what of what you don’t have.”
Joe Bob and his wife just had a baby, so it’ll be Christmas before they trek to Texas for a visit. That would makes this a small family Thanksgiving
Angela contemplated a road trip to the Canadian Western Agribition rodeo in Regina, Saskatchewan, loading Bugs and heading north if the weather was good.
That would’ve left Jackie here to run Lone Star Stables, which is quite a chore, and have Thanksgiving with her grandparents. She was OK with that but mom decided to forego the trek.
Turkey is back on the menu.
Still, no way Angela Ganter dreamed about a November rodeo road trip back in 2010.
“I have had great support,” she said, naming a longtime friend Billy Simmons, whose hobby is team roping.
And there’s one other thing that keeps Angela going: Texas A&M sports, particularly football.
“I bleed maroon,” she said. She has told her own daughter that if she’s riding and there’s a game on, “You’re on your own.”
That happened in Glen Rose, where Jackie did well with her horse, Tycoon, finishing fourth in the finals. A&M was playing the University of Alabama-Birmingham, winning big, so mom didn’t sweat it.
But if it had been a close game, the Aggies would’ve come first.
Angela, by the way, did OK but her horse — not Bugs this trip — got hurt.
But considering how she inspired her daughter to ride barrels and how her daughter got her back into the same, Angela said, “We’re a pretty good team.”
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