This Ain’t Rodeo

Rockets scream from the rafters, fireballs rise into the darkness and tremendous explosions rattle the New Orleans Arena. Brent Vincent sits on a railing wearing a bulletproof vest.

He’s paying no attention to the thunder and flames. The vest is not to protect him from fireworks. He’s watching a 2,000-pound bull named High Tide smash its horned head into the corral below.

Another bull about the same size left Vincent, 26, with a broken ankle just two months before. Another one left him with a dislocated shoulder, another with a separated shoulder, two others knocked him unconscious and yet another gave him that scar beneath his blond hair.

Several other bulls, however, helped him earn $64,277 in prize money last year, with sponsors paying him thousands more.

“High Tide, he’s a rank bull,” Vincent says with a grin. “Rank.”

That means wild, nasty, hard to hang on to. A rank bull is precisely what every cowboy hopes to draw when he competes in this new, fast-growing quirk of an age-old sport.

The sport is not rodeo. There’s no calf-roping, no steer-wrestling or barrel racing. There is not even broncobusting. “No sissy events,” as one rider put it. The sport is bull riding, all bull riding, all mayhem all the time.

As soon as one rider is helped from the New Orleans Arena a short time later, blood trickling from behind his ear after a bull gored him in the head, the next bursts from the chute atop another bull, only to be thrown in 4.3 seconds, head-butted and left in the dirt clutching ribs that have been broken before and feel like they are again.

The rider picks up his hat and hurries out of the arena. Another launches from a different chute.

“Ride that bull!” the announcer cries.

Six thousand fans howl. It will continue like this for 2 1/2 hours

Ten years ago, a small group of professional bull riders gathered in Scottsdale, Ariz. They had the most dangerous job in the rodeo business, lured the bulk of every crowd, but were not being fairly paid, they felt.

They decided to break away from the rodeo circuit, trade in its country-fair feel for explosions, spotlights and sponsors, and see if they couldn’t drag bull riding into the present. Twenty riders put up $1,000 apiece in seed money.

The first season, 1994, consisted of eight events with $250,000 in prize money from sponsors. An average of just 1.5 million watched each of the events on cable television. No one expected the tour to last.

Eight years later, there are 29 events, most held in urban centers from Anaheim to Baltimore, and $9.5 million up for grabs. Last season the Professional Bull Riders tour, or PBR, drew 90 million cable viewers, enough to prompt the networks to tap in. CBS, NBC and Spanish-language Telemundo are all broadcasting events this season, some slated to follow NFL games or NASCAR events.

The first network broadcast in one market drew more viewers than several other sports that weekend, including a PGA tournament, an NHL match and a college basketball game. The market: New York City.

Along the way, a new type of celebrity has emerged, niche stars for certain, but ones whose fans know if they ride right-handed or left, who know the names and bucking styles of the bulls, and how their favorite rider scored last weekend.

“Chris Shivers rode Hammer, right?” said attorney and bull riding fan Greg Balmer, who had watched on television at home in Chicago. “Well, actually he didn’t ride Hammer. Nobody has. That’s a nasty bull.”

With very few exceptions, the riders are young cowboys from tiny towns who neither dreamed of nor sought celebrity. They grew up hopping on, and getting bucked off, goats and calves around the farm, graduating to steers, then big bulls.

This year the top rider will earn more than $1 million, and tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars more from sponsors such as U.S. Smokeless Tobacco, Ford trucks, Resistol hats. If you don’t stay on, though, you don’t get paid, and many riders will spend more on airfare and meals than they win.

But everyone gets to watch himself on network television. Many are semi-famous. To make a living having such giddy, dangerous fun is more than most ever hoped for.

“You know, I ain’t never had a job,” says 20-year-old rookie Craig Sasse of St. Peter, Ill.

“I made $10,000 riding bulls when I was 14. Made about $67,000 in the PBR. I never wanted to do anything else, but I thought I’d have to. This is great.”

Vincent thinks so too. When he made a promotional appearance at a Bourbon Street bar, the disc jockey announced that the first woman to remove her top would receive his intimately placed autograph. The tops flew. The next day the cowboy from Sulphur, La., was the star attraction at a children’s hospital. That night, at another watering hole, he was clearly happy to be the center of attention again.

“Hi, ladies,” he called as three women and a man strode in. He ignored the man.

“Hello,” the women said in unison.

*

The PBR has marketed itself carefully and tirelessly, and from the beginning eschewed the “Happy Trails” nostalgia of rodeos in favor of speed, noise, patriotism and dramatics. The big-screen TV overhead plays a video showing U.S. soldiers at attention, then bull riders in front of a flag, then more soldiers, then more riders.

The rockets fired from the scaffolding have slammed into the dirt arena, igniting crystallized chemicals. A massive “USA” sizzles in the soil.

The announcer introduces the riders. One by one, they step from a cloud of artificial smoke wearing chaps that are pink and green, bright yellow, in Vincent’s case black and gold, and emerge into a storm of swirling spotlights.

High-volume music pumps from a giant sound system, and it isn’t country and western. It’s all rock ‘n’ roll, heavy songs from AC/DC, KISS, Van Halen.

The riders return to the chutes. Vincent eyes the bulls, eyes the crowd -- searching for pretty women, his friends say -- and wonders if on-the-road roommate Wiley Petersen is going to make it. Petersen, 23, was delayed at airports trying to make his way from his home in Fort Hall, Idaho.

Cody Custer, who is part Choctaw Indian and occasionally meets Native American children named after him, starts things off on a bull called Hiawatha. When the buzzer sounds at eight seconds, he’s still on.

With only minutes to go before his ride, Petersen arrives in a cab. He suits up, sprinkles rosin on his bull rope and pulls his gloved hand rapidly down the flat rope, melting the rosin and helping glue the two together.

He launches on Blackjack, but the bull is not in the mood, and all but sits in the dirt. Petersen is awarded a ride on another bull. This one, Pork Chop, bucks hard, spins left, right, then left again. Petersen starts to slide precariously and Pork Chop just keeps bucking and spinning. Finally the buzzer sounds. He’s awarded a respectable 86 points before he’s sent flying.

Despite the theater of modern professional bull riding, the essential drama is what it has always been: a slightly schizophrenic sport in which a man tries to hang on with one hand to a bucking bull for eight seconds, even as he spurs the bull to make it buck harder. During a long, successful career, a rider will spend only 10 or 15 minutes on the backs of bulls.

A hundred points is a perfect score, with a possible 50 points going to the bull and 50 to the rider. A meek bull, then, is a bad bull. What every rider wants is to draw a nasty, angry but barely ridable bull -- a rank bull.

Despite its growth -- 2.6 million will watch the event the next day on NBC -- the PBR does not generate enough money to give riders contracts. Staying relatively free of serious injuries, then, is at once crucial and difficult in a sport with this kind of conventional wisdom: You’ll get hurt on every ride, the question is how badly.

Kevlar vests have become as essential as boots and spurs. Riders with head or facial injuries trade their hats for a black helmet with a full facemask. They look like hockey goalies.

(After the event, five riders sat down to dinner. Custer had a broken ankle that wasn’t healing; two were awaiting knee surgery; two had sore riding arms after surgery to reattach bicep muscles that had torn loose at the elbow and curled up into small, hard balls. “Nothing really bad,” one said and all agreed.)

Most events cover two days, each cowboy riding one bull the first day, another the second, with the top 15 riding a third bull in the finals. This, however, is a one-day event, and each rider goes just once before the finalists are chosen to ride a second time.

This is only the second event of the season, but Vincent hasn’t stayed on a bull yet. He needs this one, and grows nervous as he lowers himself onto the back of High Tide. He forgets about the lights and the women and his broken ankle, and wraps and re-wraps the bull rope around his hand as High Tide bangs around in the chute.

Out of the gate, the bull bucks twice and Vincent is off, lying in the dirt. The New Orleans Open, for him, lasts 3.2 seconds.

In the finals, his buddy Petersen draws a bull called Mossy Oak Mudslinger. Its name is Mudslinger; Mossy Oak is a manufacturer of outdoor and hunting gear. Even the bulls have sponsors.

Petersen rides the bull brilliantly, scoring a 93.5. He wins.

Vincent has been here three days, making appearances at bars, hospitals, a Knicks-Hornets NBA game. He’s been paying for his hotel room and his food, as well as the bill for the cell phone that seldom stops ringing (“A girl I know.”). His ride is over so quickly there’s nothing to remember. “I just fell off. Embarrassing.”

Petersen, on the other hand, arrived half an hour after the event began, worked for 16 seconds, and earned $29,055 -- more than he made all last season.

Vincent gives his pal a hug.

“You’re not competing against each other,” he explains. “Your only competition is the bull.”

*

The wives, the girlfriends and “the girls” began to gather backstage during the final round. They will have to wait a bit.

Ever vigilant in promoting itself, the tour fines any rider $500 if he refuses to sign autographs after an event. Wanting to just go home after his poor performance, Vincent nonetheless joins the others as they make their way around the arena signing programs and straw cowboy hats for hundreds, including a police officer, a rancher, a homemaker, a 7-year-old named Trevor Clay.

Trevor likes his autographs on his cowboy hat. When his first one was covered in signatures his mom bought him another. It’s covered now too.

When the lights finally go down and the crews come in to remove the tons of dirt and reinstall the basketball court, Vincent heads for the parking lot. He’s spent a bunch of money, “fell off, just plain fell off” his bull, and dropped to 32nd out of 45 in the standings.

About six times a year the tour kicks the five lowest-ranked riders down to its minor-league Challenger Tour, and calls up that tour’s best five riders. Vincent knows he must have some good rides at the next event, in Minneapolis on Dec. 28.

He tosses his hat into his pickup and cracks a smile. Things aren’t so bad. He’s off to visit a woman in Florida.

“She’s not my girl. I mean, we’re just hanging out,” Vincent says. “But she’s prettier than a supermodel.”

Petersen, who likes to say he’s “riding for Jesus,” and four other staunchly Christian riders head for the heart of the Big Easy on a Saturday night and find a bar that is still serving food. The place is nearly empty and the waitress is delighted to see a bunch of men in cowboy hats looking thirsty. Then everybody orders iced tea. The waitress rolls her eyes. She doesn’t make big tips on iced tea.

Some of the riders hang around the arena and chat with the women. Ross Coleman, 23 -- a tall, squared-jawed favorite of many female fans -- talks to a couple of blond women in tight-fitting Wranglers.

“I could have done roping, I could have ridden horses, I could have done all that,” he says. “But bull riding is the coolest.”