“You’re looking for a bull to get off his feet. The higher their front feet are off the ground the better, and you want him to kick his back legs straight back. They call that break over, when they rear in the front and kick in the back.”
Mike Miller was explaining what he expects from his bulls. Miller is a stock contractor, a person who raises, trains, and provides the bulls used in Professional Bull Riders events. PBR produces several tours running year-round, with events from Boston to Brisbane to Brasília. Millions of people go to see them live. We were in the cab of a Ram truck towing three bales and a skid steer on a gooseneck trailer down a dirt road in Linden, Pennsylvania. Linden is a town of a couple thousand, midway between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, where Miller grows hay and raises bulls. I had driven from New York at 5 a.m. to watch Miller and his son Troop feed cattle. One of Miller’s bales of dry hay weighs around one thousand pounds; a bale of wet hay weighs about five hundred pounds more. His animals eat thirty-four bales a week.
I’d met Miller at a PBR event in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a few days before, where he ran twenty bulls. Miller owns about sixty-five of the roughly seven hundred bulls that buck at PBR events. His figure is approximate because Miller is always buying and selling them: Miller had sold one the night we met for $13,000. Troop had sold two three-year-olds of unsatisfactory ability the day before to be slaughtered for beef at $1.86 a pound. (Bucking bulls don’t finish growing until they’re five, at which point they weigh at least fourteen hundred pounds.) Some of Miller’s bulls, which PBR calls “bovine athletes,” are six feet tall at the shoulder and weigh more than sixteen hundred pounds; the other athletes—riders—are ordinarily under five-foot eight and one hundred and sixty pounds.
“You want a bull that breaks over, leaps in the air, kicks really hard, and turns back. It’s got to do all of that, and it’s got to do all of it at the same time.” This static image is the PBR logo and what people imagine when they think of bull riding. The breaking over, the leaping, the kicking: a rider needs to suffer it for eight seconds. Eight seconds means a rider gets a score, based half on the bull’s performance and half on the rider’s. It’s common for riders not to stay on long enough to get a score at all; so far this year, the average ride in PBR’s top-level tour is 5.79 seconds. A typical PBR event includes thirty to forty riders trying to ride one bull each. In the PBR’s lower-division tour, called the Velocity Tour, the best rider wins a few thousand dollars. Awards for a single event in Unleash The Beast, the upper-division tour, can be ten times as much. One out of every fifteen rides results in an injury that requires medical attention.
The first breakout sport in a generation could be a frontier pastime repackaged for the enjoyment of coastal elites.
All of the rides begin the same way: a cowboy is assigned his bull in a random draw. (No woman has ever competed in PBR; the company’s media contact tells me presently there are no female prospects on PBR’s radar.) The bull walks through a gate into the bucking chute. A door shuts behind him; the chute is snug and confining but not immobilizing. Before a rider gets on, someone has to flank the bull: this is the term for fixing the cinch that the rider grabs around the bull’s midsection. This man drops the rope, the middle of which is weighted with metal bells, down the bull’s offside, then grabs the tail of the flank with a flexible hook. The tail end of the rope has been coated in rosin, a dark, resinous substance that smells faintly of pine. Cowboys have different ways of mounting the bull: JB Mauney, who has won the most money and most titles in PBR, puts his feet on the animal, then his knees, then wiggles his hips around as he sits. The toes of one’s boots are pointed parallel alongside the bull, so a foot won’t be crushed perpendicularly into the chute’s wall.
The flank man pulls the tail of the rope up so the rider can run his gloved fist along it repeatedly to heat the rosin. The warm sap is sticky and adhesive. The rider puts his riding hand through the handle, palm up, and wraps the rosin-coated tail end of the rope through before closing his hand around it. His forearm lines up with the bull’s spine; usually, his little finger is directly in the center of its back. He moves off his back pockets onto his inseams until he is nearly sitting on his fist. When the rider is ready, he signals to open the chute. His signal is often silent because a loud voice can startle the bull as he begins to exit the chute.
The rider stays on by remaining straight-backed, his upper body snapping with the bull as it bucks. It is in his interest, in terms of his score, to draw a more difficult bull: these are called “rank” bulls. He is disqualified if he touches the bull with his off hand or loses his grip on the rope. A bull rider’s most common injury is dislocation of the shoulder on his riding side.
The Buck Starts Here
PBR was founded thirty-three years ago by twenty bull riders, each of whom invested $1,000. Before, bull riding was one of many events in a rodeo, alongside various kinds of roping and roughstock riding. The PBR founders realized they were drawing most of the crowds but not an equivalent share in prize money. Their experiment in worker control paid off. Ty Murray, perhaps the most entrepreneurial of the PBR founders, broke a record by earning more than $200,000 on the national rodeo circuit two years before PBR got started, when he was twenty-eight. Thirty years later, in 2024, a rider named John Crimber made five times as much before he’d turned twenty. Crimber is one of fifty-two PBR riders who have earned more than a million. About a thousand riders have PBR cards entitling them to compete for cash: last year’s payouts totaled $16.5 million. Over its lifetime, PBR has paid out nearly $250 million.
The first PBR event I saw this year was in a nearly nine thousand-seat stadium, in a city with a population about ten times as large. PBR makes dozens of stops like these during a season that runs year-round. In addition to upper- and lower-division tours, and a concurrent season of team-based events, the five months of what would be the offseason are laden with “Challenger Series” events where new riders can earn their way into the regular-season tours. Part of the reason for the freneticism is the fact that PBR takes about a third of its revenue from ticket sales. Many, many more people are buying tickets than one might think: four hundred thousand people went to live PBR events in the first six weeks of this year. Twenty-five of them were sold out, including all three nights at Madison Square Garden, both nights in Chicago, and both in Pittsburgh, these last being PBR’s first events in that market. PBR has a deal with CBS that books twenty-five hours of broadcasts a year. The arrangement brings in a million viewers annually and will run until 2030.
The first breakout sport in a generation could be a frontier pastime repackaged for the enjoyment of coastal elites by a succession of billion-dollar companies. This means that an enormous number of spectators, and at least a plurality of the most talented of rodeo’s possible participants, are increasingly concentrated in a segment of the sport that has very little to do with the American West.
My problem with seeing bull riding live is more about overcoming the painful tediousness of watching people I dislike enjoy themselves.
The hyperliteralism of rodeo’s Americanness makes pointing it out almost useless. Cattle began being raised on the plains in the 1840s, but it took the development of railroad networks in the two decades following for the industry to become economically hegemonic. This was a time of territorial expansion after the Civil War wherein national consolidation in the Southwest—following the Gadsden Purchase and Mexico’s forced concession of Texas—could provide a unifying imperial commercial project that displaced the previously contentious one of enslavement. Natives posed a threat to the new ambulatory commodities, which could be easily stampeded or captured as scarce cowboys drove them to commercial centers. Other occupants of the land also needed to be destroyed, and at this time killing buffalo became one of the most popular activities in the world. The son of a tsar, Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich, came to America to kill buffalo; future president Theodore Roosevelt left New York to do the same. Buffalo Bill Cody, the popularizer of modern rodeo if not its inventor, claimed to have killed over four thousand buffalo. The eradication of the herds allowed for their replacement with twelve million cattle in the 1880s, mostly Texas longhorns, whose eponymous characteristic made it impossible for them to escape rudimentary frontier fences by crawling underneath them. Banks in New York, London, and Scotland began investing in ranches and cattle as rail and refrigeration technology made it possible to sell beef in the new American metropoles.
The cowboy became a myth at the same time as this commodity boom remade, and then unmade, the West. Teddy Roosevelt came to hunt the buffalo and ended up buying a ranch in North Dakota. While at Harvard, he met Owen Wister, who would invent the Western genre with his 1902 novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. (Wister was also a coastal elite; Henry James claimed his mother, Sarah Butler Wister, was one of the most fascinating women he ever met.) We owe Wister the cowboy. Brave, fair, gallant, but above all else competent. “Now back East you can be middling and get along,” Wister writes in The Virginian. “But if you go to try a thing on in this Western country, you’ve got to do it well.” The cowboy is his ability: to drive cattle, rope, ride, and shoot.
PBR developed from a tradition that began with informal competitions in the antebellum West among livestock workers using skills they needed in their jobs. Rodeo, as the sport exists today, includes seven events. The “roughstock events” are bull riding and bareback and saddle bronc riding. The “timed events” are various kinds of roping and steer wrestling. That last is also known as “bulldogging,” after its original incarnation: a man named Bill Pickett jumped from his horse onto a steer, bit its upper lip, and wrestled it to the ground. (Pickett would die after a bronc kicked him in the head.) Now cowboys aren’t expected to bite the steer and are asked to tie its legs, but the event is otherwise as it was in the beginning. All of those are men’s events; women compete in breakaway roping and barrel racing. Novelty events like goat dressing (what it sounds like) and kids’ events, like mutton busting and mini bull riding, also feature. Rodeo has professionalized, too, but within a different structure: the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association (PRCA) and its women’s counterpart, the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association, sanction individual competitions but don’t engineer them wholesale. Each competition can retain its own emphases, oddities, and character—Cheyenne’s rodeo is very different from Nacogdoches’s. But the indispensable event was and still is bronc riding. It is less organically compelling than bull riding: horse bucking patterns are less dimensional, more linear. It is also safer. Larry Mahan, arguably the first rodeo celebrity, observed in a 1972 interview with Playboy that “if a horse bucks you off, it will jump over you. But bulls will step on you, and if they get a chance to hook you with their horns, they enjoy themselves that much more.”
If bronc riding has a greater-than-gestural affinity to the actual occupation of a working cowboy—making an unrideable horse into a useful ranch tool—bull riding is abstract, metonymic, confabulated. The finest artifact of American rodeo culture as it was before is a 1974 documentary called The Great American Cowboy. During the movie, a man in a straw Resistol and a white snap-front shirt describes his work. “We are selling a violent sport. It’s a sport that puts a one-hundred-and-eighty-five-pound cowboy against a fifteen-hundred-pound bull, and if that’s not violence in action then I don’t know what is. It’s kind of what America stands for: strength itself.” Bull riding is an increasingly factitious reenactment of the decade-and-a-half of domination and defeat that ended in the closing of the frontier. The figure of the cowboy has, indisputably, a renewed purchase on our fantasy lives, somehow the only part of the “vibe shift” that still seems real: everyone I met mentioned Beyoncé, Zyn, Realtree, Yellowstone, daisy dukes. (But not Cliven Bundy, water rights, or treaty enforcement.) PBR wants the thing that defines our ideas of the cowboy to be an eight-second task that, if they’re correct, will soon be optimally performed by someone who grew up on half-pipes, not ranches; when I talked to the newly appointed head of “rider development” for PBR, he said they’re interested in recruiting BMX riders, surfers, and skateboarders.
A 2006 congressional resolution establishing the National Day of the Cowboy alleged: “The cowboy loves, lives off of, and depends on the land and its creatures.” Europa, the mythological namesake of Europe, was abducted and impregnated by Zeus in the form of a bull. Rodeo is America’s substitute myth. The frontier, something that was once defined by its inconstancy—its capacity to be pushed outward—can now be instantiated as completely in Norfolk as in Fort Worth. PBR can bring the frontier anywhere.
All Hat and No Cattle
They can even bring it fifty miles from Philly. On a Friday night in Reading, Pennsylvania, everyone was going to the Santander Arena: the modestly dressed teens, immodestly dressed teens, the Kryptek camo guys, the older and fatter Grunt Style guys, the young Mennonite woman in a sweater that said “vibes.” This was the lower-division tour, but every PBR event opens the same way and has since their first event. Men pour kerosene on the dirt to spell out PBR. This is, predictably, ignited, and the riders walk out and line up along the edge of the arena. They kneel for the announcer’s prayer in their fringed custom chaps. (There is a difference of opinion on how to pronounce this word, from the Spanish chaparajos: chaps or shaps.) The lower-division events include about thirty-five riders and an equivalent number of bulls. Riders with the best combined scores from the first round advance into a short round where they compete for the event win. It lasts about two hours, with an intermission.
I ran into a woman named Carol about two blocks from the stadium gates earlier that night. Carol had organized a protest against the event and had an armful of signs: only bullies ride bulls, blood sport (with red splatter), he bucks because he is in pain!, real men are kind to animals. In all fairness to Carol, the animal rights line on bull riding is two contentions loosely affiliated with one argument. The first contention is that the bulls buck because they are being shocked with cattle prods. This isn’t an inexplicable belief: cattle prods, usually called “hot shots,” are used at PBR to move cattle from trailers through gates and enclosures before they get to the chutes. The main American rodeo organization, the PRCA, also allows hot shots, but they and PBR both ban them from bucking chutes. The bulls aren’t bucking because they’re being shocked, but they are being shocked. (I do believe that the prods hurt. The first time I used a hot shot, I was moving cows toward a head gate for pregnancy testing. The hoof of one I zapped shot out and cracked a four-by-four fence post beside my head.) The activists’ second contention is that the bulls buck because a cinch tied around their midsections fucks with their genitals in a way that is painful. This is not true, something that can be confirmed by looking at the strap, which straightforwardly has nothing to do with their balls.
Ultimately, the advocates argue that animals should not be coerced into performing for our entertainment. That strikes me as something you either buy or don’t. Someone who works for PBR told me about a municipal inspector coming to view the conditions of the bulls at an event in Pennsylvania. The official compared their bucking to a dog’s impulse to fetch: an expression of play that looks like work. Whether one finds this report persuasive or not, it’s a remarkable index of bull riding’s indifference to violence that an acceptable answer is, essentially, “we suspect the bulls enjoy hurting people.”
“Think about how much America means to the rest of the world.”
My problem with seeing bull riding live is more about overcoming the painful tediousness of watching people I dislike enjoy themselves. One of the boxes in the stadium in Reading is, literally, a suburban bungalow perched under the roof of the Santander Arena, between sections 113 and 114. It has a porch, an unlikely number of dormer windows, a semi-detached two-car garage, vinyl siding, and it’s completely packed. Close to me in the stands was an extremely drunk woman who kept threatening to take her top off, which I had first taken as a misunderstanding about how to get on the Jumbotron; later, I observed that she continued lifting the hem of her shirt even when inside the concourse and away from the cameras.
Working against her chances were the kids everywhere: lots of teenagers, as you’d expect for any event at all in a place like Reading on a Friday night, but also tons of actual children. I am unaware of any other live event with such a high likelihood of grievous injury at which there are so many children present. This implies a consequential indifference to the violence of bull riding, which is probably the feature of the sport they encounter first: in clips of injuries on social media. I wondered if no one actually cares how violent this is, except with a kind of attenuated hedonism. The last decade’s cultural preoccupation with CTE in contact sports wasn’t solved, we just stopped talking about it.
The national anthem was accompanied by absurd troop-fucking obscenities like “Gentlemen, please remove cover.” One of the announcers began a prayer. “Thank you, God, for never taking a day off and never taking a vacation.” Guitars swelled. “God, you know, I usually just call you Dad. Daddy. Tonight, tell these people what a daddy’s love is all about.” Cheering, applause. Soon, a clown cued up the “Cha Cha Slide” and “Careless Whisper” as we watched a person in pain, afraid, with his face in the dirt. The clown, who’s really a kind of emcee, was a white guy in white face paint: tiny but with a big distended gut and an affected generic Southern accent. (His counterparts who actually protect the riders are no longer called rodeo clowns but “rodeo protection athletes” or bullfighters.) At one point, the clown gave a gift certificate to Boot Barn to a young woman about whom he remarked: “She’s hotter than a VCR in a crack house!” She did not look old enough to have firsthand experience of a VCR.
The complement to violence in PBR’s portfolio is sex, or at least a taurine facsimile. PBR licenses its intellectual property to a company that runs sixteen PBR-themed bars around the country. Combined, they gross more than $3 million a year for PBR. They’re a successfully blunt effort to cash in on the wave of cowboy-adjoining lifestyle spending PBR helped invent: each location contains a mechanical bull, which customers can ride, and varying amounts of complementary “entertainment,” like line dancing and “special military salutes.”
In practice, what PBR has done is put their name on a chain of breastaurants. (PBR’s disinhibition around sex is surprising given its perverse neuroticism about blood and death.) I visited the Philadelphia iteration, which is inside a multi-bar compound with big screens to facilitate sports betting. This whole complex is alone in the middle of enormous parking lots for three huge stadiums. There were about ten customers. Some were accepting syringes full of green liquid from an employee dressed in black pleather chaps over underwear and a low-cut PBR logo shirt that said best 8 seconds of your life on the back. A guy squirted his syringe into his buddy’s mouth.
The employees in the wipe-clean chaps are called “buckle bunnies” after the women who are said to follow PBR events in hopes of fucking the bull riders, who traditionally receive buckles as trophies. Three goths, two of whom reported enjoying the much larger and clubbier PBR Bar in Norfolk, had come down to celebrate their friend’s twenty-fourth birthday. One goth felt our mechanical bull operator “hated women” because he kept perfunctorily dumping them off the bull. Riding the mechanical bull didn’t look exactly sexy, in the sense of being erotic, even when that was clearly the intention of its rider. It looks only very approximately coital. The goths were right: the PBR Cowboy Bar is lame.
The Toughest Sport on Dirt
PBR hasn’t figured out what to do with the violence. It’s been there from the start, of course. A PBR founder, Jerome Davis, was paralyzed from his chest down during a ride. JB Mauney’s career ended when a bull broke his neck; he walked out of the arena unassisted (and later bought the bull, Arctic Assassin, and let him retire on his ranch). I asked Dr. Tandy Freeman, an orthopedic surgeon and the medical director of the PBR in his thirty-first year with the organization, what he thought about the sport’s dependence on suffering. “People don’t go to see the wrecks, but they darn sure want to be there when there is one.” Freeman has seen more than one hundred thousand rides and can still wonder at the violence and its place in the events. “There are times,” he said, “when they show a replay that I go, ‘Why? Why do you want to do that?’”
The clown started an Eddie Vedder impression.
Freeman has treated thousands of riders during his career. PBR has seen four fatalities since its inception and two men paralyzed. Freeman has witnessed only one death, the rider Glen Keeley’s, caused by 1999 Bull of the Year Promise Land. It sometimes seems remarkable that rodeo is as safe as it is. However, on average, only about twenty Americans die from encounters with cattle each year, and only ten of those deaths are caused by bulls. Fifteen percent of total injuries, by Dr. Freeman’s account, are concussions. The riskiest time for a bull rider is the dismount. The front end of the bull is, in general, more dangerous than the back. The doctor remarked that the introduction of helmets, mandatory for riders born after October 15, 1994, has reduced maxillofacial injuries significantly. The helmets are modified hockey headgear. In 1990, PBR founder Tuff Hedeman—who got his nickname when someone slammed his hand in a car door when he was five years old—broke nearly every major bone in his face when a bull named Bodacious thrust its head into his.
If someone knows Tuff for one thing, it’s his “ride for Lane”: world champion Lane Frost had died in early 1989 after he was injured dismounting from an eighty-five-point ride on a bull called Takin’ Care of Business. Tuff knew that if he rode his tenth-round draw for eight seconds, he would become the world champion. He continued riding for an additional eight seconds after the whistle, beating the animal with his hat, in a display he later said was in honor of his late friend. Cody Lambert, another PBR founder and a pallbearer at Lane’s funeral alongside Tuff, invented the protective rodeo vest that became mandatory after Lane’s death. The vests are meant to protect the riders from what happened to Lane, who died when a bull’s horn tore an artery in his side. Today’s vests are made of leather, with layers of plastic and foam, and are almost certainly inadequate.
If you look at the PBR’s official YouTube channel—since last year, PBR events have been available for free on the platform—the ten most-watched videos aren’t championship events or famous rides but wreck compilations. The most-viewed video of a ride, the legendary JB Mauney’s ninety-four-pointer on the equally famous Bruiser, has one-seventh as many views as the most popular wreck anthology. PBR’s head of rider development, a guy named Joe Ernst who’s in charge of recruiting and training riders for PBR, told me that “even after a ninety-five-point ride with a perfect dismount, nine times out of ten, the rider is limping back.” Everyone at every level understands that the violence is not incidental to bull riding. But it seems at best orthogonal to it: every time I saw a rider get hurt in the arena live, I watched the crowd turn away from the rider. They looked at the mounted cowboy in the arena trying to rope the bull, or the bullfighter’s attempts to redirect the animal, or the clown heckling the only people in the stadium who weren’t white for arriving late.
In the Velocity Tour, there is sometimes not much to pay attention to apart from the wrecks. I saw two successful rides all night in Reading: one at eighty-four points, perhaps slightly better than respectable for the lower division, and one at fifty-six, which is truly bad wherever you are. (Scoring is helpfully schoolish.) It can be difficult to separate the middling ride from the bad-but-still-qualifying ride; the best estimate I can give is that the four judges score based on the rider’s representation of control and confidence. The Velocity Tour is about persuading people who are unlikely to follow the sport to pay moderately high prices for the lower division’s uneven and frequently mediocre performances. PBR has built itself from the beginning on a celebrity model; people follow particular riders and, surprisingly often, particular bulls. Unleash The Beast, the upper division, has the top forty riders: the genuinely famous ones, returning champions, and promising rookies. It does the metropolitan and important Western and Southern stops. Running a smaller circuit, the Velocity Tour feeds the “premium” tour through an obscure mechanism. (I asked a PBR employee how this worked and got a puzzled response: “You’re asking me questions no one has ever asked me before.”) There is an observable difference in the quality of the spectacle: in the lower division, around 20 percent of riders stay on long enough to receive scores; in the top tour, 40 percent do.
0.25mL of Semen
“I could have been fucking shot,” said Colleen. Colleen was working the media desk at Total Mortgage Arena in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She was frustrated by her inability to get a response on her radio, with which she was attempting to raise my media contact. In Reading, I had bought my own seats: average ones, a little far away from the action. Tonight, I had front-row press tickets to the Velocity Tour, courtesy of PBR.
My media contact was a guy named Andrew. I liked Andrew because he was personable and took my idiot questions seriously. I had, early in my research, sent the media people at PBR some general questions that included one about figures on injuries (the riders are independent contractors, so PBR doesn’t collect them); just minutes into a phone interview, one representative explained directly that if I was writing a piece that emphasized rider welfare—in their example, exposure to concussions—PBR would become uncooperative. I was struck by their defensiveness. A big deal had just gone through the day I was in Bridgeport: Endeavor, formerly WME-IMG, sold PBR as part of a $3.25 billion deal to TKO, the organization that owns the Ultimate Fighting Championship and World Wrestling Entertainment and therefore has a virtual monopoly on commercial violence in America and, consequently, everywhere else.
This is what it takes to make those spectacular eight seconds possible: everyone in your family getting kicked in the head, over and over, for their entire lives.
PBR’s money comes, roughly equally, from tickets, media deals, and sponsorships. Some of these sponsors are inevitable. There are Tecovas and Ariat, brands of cowboy boots established by graduates of Harvard and Stanford, respectively; agricultural equipment manufacturer Kubota; and Anheuser-Busch. There is also the U.S. Army leaderboard and the U.S. Border Patrol bucking chute. “This is one of their most successful recruiting events,” Andrew said, when I asked about the Border Patrol branding. “PBR is a family thing,” he continued. “That means recruiters can talk to kids and their parents at the same time.” The USBP sponsorship was worth $2 million in 2020; I imagine it’s higher now. (Nearly half of PBR riders are on visas.) Per Andrew, “The protection theme is good branding: the ‘borders’ of the arena.” The night I was there, the USBP were advertising a $30,000 signing bonus, which was about $500 under the area’s per capita annual income.
The price of a bucking bull ranges from $50,000 to $300,000. An owner can also make money from selling shares in bulls—one stock contractor I met said he’d recently sold half a share in one of his for $75,000—or their semen, which garners $300 to $500 a straw. (For comparison, the same 0.25mL from a Jersey or Holstein goes for as low as $10.) PBR doesn’t own any bulls, instead paying the stock contractors who raise and train them to bring them to their events. Each contractor is paid the same amount per ride. There are only two ways for a contractor to earn more than his colleagues. The first is to simply run more bulls. The second is to run “ranker,” or more punishing, bulls. If there is a round with no qualified rides, the money for that round that would have been disbursed to riders is instead divided evenly among all the bulls that bucked.
Behind the bucking chutes, Andrew introduced me to Mike Miller, the stock contractor whose ranch I would visit in a few days. Miller had brought the most bulls that night, with twenty in a semi. He had also brought among the rankest: Miller had what was then the seventy-seventh-best bull in the PBR. He was on track to earn tonight. (Miller had also made some money recently renting one of his bulls, Micro Man—who has what Miller, without elaboration, called “Little Man Syndrome”—to PBR for use in some kind of advertising campaign on Wall Street, and he was pursuing a complex and ambitious deal involving a share in a highly ranked bull named Cockeye with some brothers who own a Ducati franchise in Manhattan.)
Bull names approach meaning laterally. Some are named in part after their sponsors, sires, or characteristics. Miller has Cash Goblin, Inaffit, Sig Sauer Side Piece, and Pneu-Dart’s Gold Standard. (Pneu-Dart manufactures tranquilizer guns; Miller also had the company’s name embroidered down the sleeves of his shirt.) There are bulls in PBR called UTZ BesTex Smokestack, Wino, Army Slasher, Nighttime Crime, SweetPro’s Long John, Fringe Minority, Day Thuggin, Strange Cargo, Mexican Elvis, Carhartts and Lace, Cracky Chan, and Umm. At Madison Square Garden, a bull named Daniel Penny went out on opening night; this was after Penny had been found not guilty for killing Jordan Neely, but before he was hired by Andreessen Horowitz. The bull’s name was changed to Bruised Ego by the next day. Crescent City Bulls, who owns Bruised Ego, got the National Federation of Professional Bullriders 2024 Stock Contractor of the Year Award. Half of CC Bulls is Gene Owen, who also owns Man Hater, the number one bull in the PBR standings and last year’s World Champion Bull.
I mention this because the tone is noticeably less bipartisan in Bridgeport than it was in Reading. The announcers gave a weirder speech in the interstice between the national anthem and the obligate prayer: “We know these are troubled times in America. I want to thank our police, Border Patrol, and soldiers who keep this country safe.” They continued: “I want you all to think about the history of where you are. All you have to do is drive two or three hours and you can be where the heroes who founded this country were.” It was the closest PBR got to acknowledging the myth they’re trading on. The frontier—the modern one, the one the Border Patrol is responsible for—is more concept than place; legally speaking, it’s an envelope extending one hundred miles inside the border. One could drive two or three hours north or south from Bridgeport and still be on the border. The announcer went on: “Think about how much America means to the rest of the world.”
On the fourth ride, a bull left the roughly ten-by-ten region in front of the gates where they do most of their work and flung himself in front of my seat. A thick, clear, hot rope of mucus splattered across my forearm. This is the only thing about sitting in the front row that registered as more intense than being further away; otherwise, it was easy to tell that both bull and rider are smaller and moving more predictably than you thought. The quality of the rides was much the same as in Reading. I found my attention waning even though I was right on the dirt. Of the handful of riders who register, most scored in the eighties.
It occurred to me that I could be a few feet away from someone dying, but this felt much less likely than it did in Reading. Proximity was somehow nullifying. In the upper division, the Unleash The Beast Tour, the bullfighters are called the U.S. Border Patrol bullfighters. In the Velocity Tour, they’re the Boot Barn bullfighters. They wear black cowboy hats, shirts like motocross jerseys and long, loose basketball shorts. Dr. Freeman had mentioned that bullfighters in the PRCA are 1 percent of the athletes but account for 10 percent of injuries. In Bridgeport, a rider, upper body snapping in rhythm with the bull, was thrown. As he failed to stand, a bullfighter leaned over and placed his hand on the bull’s head. The bull was still spinning, throwing its legs into the air, back bending toward ninety degrees. It looked more dangerous without a person on it. A commentator broke in, announcing the Silencer Shop Salute to Service, a sponsored encomium to cops and veterans beginning, “We think this is the greatest country in the world.” The bull was guided out. His rider was hurt, bent over and grimacing, but he walked over and dapped a bullfighter as he left the arena.
The clown started an Eddie Vedder impression. The new rider in the chute looked like he was already in pain. Someone was forcing a piece of metal, shaped like a U and perhaps eighteen inches wide and several feet long, down the side of the chute. “He’s using it to stop the bull from pressing against his leg,” said Andrew. The rider struggled to get seated on his bull and get it flanked. A timer started counting down from thirty; if it finished before the rider started his ride, he would receive a score of zero. At seven seconds he left the chute and was immediately thrown. Two men carried him away, one lifting him by the belt of his chaps. “Funky Cold Medina” started to play. As I left, I realized I still didn’t understand how PBR thinks someone can become a fan of bull riding without having been born into it in the same way people are fans of basketball or hockey: not because it’s comparatively cruel, or violent, or trashy, but because its original aesthetic armature—rodeo, ranch life—is so much more compelling than the corny, short-form packaging they’ve inflicted on it. Yet three million people went to see PBR last year, up 20 percent from ten years before and 1,000 percent from attendance in 1995.
Cardiacs Among the Cows
A few days later, I was in Linden, Pennsylvania, with the Millers. Both father and son are short and compact, the ideal size for rodeo athletes, and were wearing trashed Carhartt work clothes: a bib for Miller, a vest for Troop. Troop is a few years younger than me but has been raising, buying, and training bulls for more than half his life; he has never had another job. The ride in Miller’s truck ended outside the barn where he keeps his better rodeo stock, and I stood near a series of gates and chutes running inside. I watched Miller use the skid steer to drop a bale of hay into a feeding ring, spinning chaff into the light. There were blue, languorous hills in the background. The breeze was at my back, so it barely smelled like cow shit.
I asked Troop about Black Thunder, a bull he had mentioned earlier that had gone to the PBR Finals when Troop was twelve. “I bottle-raised him. He was an orphan, and it turned out he was really good.” I asked if anyone ever managed to stay on him for eight seconds. “Someone rode him at the Finals. I think the score was eighty-three points, and that’s the only time he was ever rode. Then I brought him home and put him out with the cows. He bred the cows, and then he had a heart attack out there with the cows.”
I scuffed my boot around in the Millers’ dirt. At PBR events, a man named Randy Spraggins is responsible for the dirt. He has special rodeo dirt secreted in twenty locations throughout the country, its composition arrived at through chemical assay at a lab in Michigan and forty years of experience. Each event requires 750 tons of dirt, also transported by Randy, and arranged by skid steer and scarifier into two layers: a firmly compacted one about five inches deep and an aerated one of about three inches. The dirt matters for the bulls’ footing, but Spraggins’s skill also helps keep a cowboy from injuring himself by dismounting onto a hard, unyielding surface.
Mike had been injured, badly, four times in a recent six-week interval, including being run over by a bull while still on crutches from the previous collision. Troop, last summer, had his face stitched up after a steer-wrestling injury: “It wasn’t that bad. I had all my teeth coming out through my bottom lip, and they ripped my top lip loose through my gums.” The night I met him, Mike’s wife called to say she’d been kicked in the head while delivering a calf. Their daughter Saige had recently been thrown across a barn while holding a cow’s tail as Troop artificially inseminated it.
“For us, we don’t even think about it. It’s normal, everyday stuff,” Mike says. “Where I come from, if you work for a ranch, say it’s the Forty-Four Bar Ranch, then they’ll call that their brand: Forty-Four Bar. So you can go to the coffee shop in the morning, and the guys will ask you, ‘What are you doing today?’ Checking fences, riding your horse. And you’ll say, ‘Just riding for the brand.’”
This is what it takes to make those spectacular eight seconds possible: everyone in your family getting kicked in the head, over and over, for their entire lives. But also hauling 750 tons of exactly the right kind of dirt, or using a hot shot, or splinting hundreds of fractures. PBR’s success depends on its ability to create facsimiles of the frontier anywhere in America. It isn’t enough to have the rides. They need a large, heavy, anagogic spectacle—it’s America, where the good guys always win. There is no way to tell a frontier story without violence, but the violence can’t overwhelm the myth. For it to work, it’s got to look like everyone is just riding for the brand.