Doctors at a Minneapolis hospital will remove steer wrestler Clint Doll's injured right eye on Wednesday, but the young rodeo cowboy's family said he was in good spirits and hoping to head home to Buffalo on Thursday.

Doll, 21, was terribly injured while competing in steer wrestling at a Mandan, N.D., rodeo on July 4.

"He said the steer just stopped, and threw its head up to the left. The horn went in right below his right eye, tore the eye open, crushed the eye socket and pushed bone fragments into his brain," his father, Doug Doll, said Monday from Minneapolis.

Doll underwent 14 hours of successful surgery on his brain and eye socket on July 5, but doctors held out little hope for saving the eye.

"If he'd been 51, they would have taken it right then, but they thought they'd give him every chance they could to save the eye," his father said. The threat of a condition called sympathetic opthalmia, in which trauma to one eye can threaten vision in the other, required them to remove the injured eye, he said. Full recovery is expected to take three to six months and Doll will eventually be fitted with a prosthetic eye.

The former captain of the Gillette College rodeo team embarked on a professional rodeo career just this year as a steer wrestler and calf roper. He recently earned enough money to qualify for the professional rodeo circuit, something that had always been his dream.

Doll hails from a long line of rodeo competitors, but his dream - and his future in the sport - is unknown right now, his father said.

"He doesn't know," his father said. "That's his decision to make. It's a very personal decision."

The Dolls are a rodeo family, and this accident won't change that, Doug Doll said. Their daughter, Stacy, competed in the National High School Finals Rodeo in Farmington, N.M., in the midst of her brother's medical crisis. Their youngest, Katie, is a sophomore at Harding County High School who also competes in goat tying, cattle cutting and barrel racing.

"This is something we've done for a lot of years. We've always been a rodeo family and we'll continue to be one," he said.

Doug and his wife, Janet, say they'll support whatever decision their son makes about heading back into the rodeo arena.

"I'm a realist. I realize that no matter what you do, there's always a risk of getting hurt," he said. "What you do in life is what defines you, and that's a decision that everybody has to make for themselves. Still, there's no back-up plan here. You've got one eye left."

Doll called Clint's accident a "relatively freak accident."

"I've been involved in rodeoing for 25 to 30 years, and I've never seen an accident like this. This may not happen again to anybody else for another 20 years, or it may happen again tomorrow."

Clint Doll may not know yet what his professional future holds, but he's certain of the love and support that has poured forth from friends and neighbors in Buffalo and from the larger rodeo community.

"It's just been tremendous," Doug Doll said of the support the family has received. "Neighbors have showed up and taken care of everything at the ranch so I could be up here. Some drove 14 hours to be here with us. People have been willing to do anything.

"This has really, really humbled me."

Contact Mary Garrigan at 394-8424 or mary.garrigan@rapidcityjournal.com