The Five Million Dollar Saint

It's customary in most religious traditions that a person is not elevated to sainthood until they can semi-plausibly claim to have performed a genuine miracle or two, or until they've lived a long, hard, miracle-free but nevertheless entirely meritorious life of service.

This is why the ascension of Saint Justin is such a bummer, because he hasn't performed any miracles, and my tractor is older than he is, but there he is, the stiff-lipped patron saint of bull riding, looking on on the masses and probably wishing he hadn't threatened to "kill the shit out of everything".

You know me, I don't like to complain. Not me, no! The Professional Bull Riders and the Versus network have always made a fetish out of Justin McBride, apparently according to the ancient TV dictum "winners = ratings". But their performance in the first night coverage of the Grand Rapids event exceeded their already high standards of biased reporting and backwoods hagiography - they'd have claimed he was the son of God if they thought it would help him cross that magical five million dollar threshold.

Let me explain that. As of the event televised yesterday, McBride was within a few dollars of exceeding five million dollars in total earnings. My complaint isn't that he doesn't deserve the money - as far as I'm concerned, McBride earned it all the hard way, by riding bulls. I don't personally like McBride all that much, but I'm not prepared to say he's an untalented hack, because he isn't. Nor am I irked because there's too much money in the PBR these days - though I suspect that at the rate the money is escalating, before too long we'll be sainting cowboys for exceeding ten million in lifetime earnings.

You'd think that Justin McBride was being considered for Pope the way the Versus crew carried on. Justin this, Justin that, it turned into a kind of false, saccharine hagiography that was literally nauseating. My wife left the room; I muted the sound and read a book. We never got a chance to see at least a third of the bull riders because Versus decided that we needed to hear Craig Hummer gush about Justin McBride instead. When Guilherme Marchi broke the record for the number of single-season rides, the Versus crew seemed actually started (all but Ty Murray) - "What?? You mean someone other than Justin McBride accomplished something?? No! False teachings! Heresy!"

It's really gotten ridiculous. It's gone past hero worship. It's gone past relentless promotion of a very popular commercial commodity. It's gone beyond ratings. It's hagiography, pure and simple, and it's disgusting.

I wish to make a prediction. The PBR and Versus don't like Guilherme Marchi, the man who is likely to win the world championship this year, because he isn't fluent in English and isn't likely to translate into huge ratings. He's photogenic, but he doesn't have the swashbuckling charm of Adriano Moraes or the English fluency of Mike White or Justin McBride. So they're going to find a way to get Justin McBride into a position to challenge for the world champion by whatever means necessary. You wait, they'll give him a bonus of three thousand points for "lifetime achievement" or "multiplying loaves" just so he can compete for the world title, just so they can get high ratings, just so they can make money, just so Craig Hummer can have a journalistic orgasm over the whole thing.

And I wish to make an observation: there are alternatives to the PBR, and I've never yet seen anything even remotely approaching this level of foolishness in the PRCA.