Lottery tickets could be hazardous to your health … or good for your career.

Especially if you scratch them off while you’re in the middle of a rodeo arena during a rough stock event. You could get run over by a bucking horse or gored by a 2,000-pound Brahma bull … or worse. Or you might find fame and fortune.

So is this game of chance worth all the risk?

Ask T.C. Evans. He knows something about scratching off lottery tickets in the middle of a rodeo arena.

“I’m supposed to be scratching a lottery ticket instead of paying attention to the big angry farm animal that’s going to run me over,” Evans said during a recent photo shoot at the Columbia County Event Complex in St. Helens, where he played the starring role in an upcoming advertising campaign for what the Oregon Lottery calls “Take a Fun Break” that will make its debut in August.

The lottery people gave Evans a handful of scratch-off tickets and positioned him in a rodeo arena and told him to start scratching while a production crew made sure the lighting was just right and the expression on his face was sufficiently mischievous.

It’s good work if you can get it, according to Evans, who has done several advertising photo shoots during his career as a rodeo clown and bullfighter.

But first, you have to pay your dues so you look like a real rodeo performer. Evans, who lives in Enterprise, Oregon, has done that. He began bullfighting in 1979 and worked amateur and semi-pro rodeos for 12 years before he joined the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association in 1991 and started messing with the meanest bulls on the planet for a living.

Evans certainly looks the part of a quintessential rodeo clown with his top hat, red hair, white painted face, striped shirt, baggy pants and star-spangled boots. He also has the aches, pains and broken bones to prove that he is in fact the real deal.

“There are some parts of my body that just don’t bend anymore,” Evans said as he tried to sit cross-legged on top of a big blue plastic barrel while simultaneously performing “facial gymnastics” for lottery photographer Todd Eckelman. Rodeo bullfighters hide in these impact-resistant props to escape serious injury while gigantic beasts are bulldozing them instead of cowboys. Although the barrels afford some protection, getting butted and rolled by an infuriated bull has a way of taking its toll on human bodies.

“I can’t sit cross-legged on anything,” said Evans, who now spends most of his time working as a technician at Wallowa Memorial Hospital in Northeast Oregon.

Even after you’ve paid your dues with years of experience performing dangerous acrobatics in rodeo arenas all over the country, if you want to appear in a big lottery promotion you still have to get that fortuitous call from the lady at lottery headquarters who wants to use your likeness in posters and billboards all over the state … and is willing to pay for it.

Evans is happy for the work but is nonchalant about the prospect of showing up in a statewide advertising campaign. “It’s just part of the job,” he said.

And what about those lottery tickets the lottery people gave him to scratch off during the shootout? “I’ve already scratched them and there’s no winners,” he said.