Bull!

Guilherme Marchi

We went to the Professional Bull Riders "Glendale Invitational" last night. I enjoy bull riding, even though I don't seem to have much in common with the bull riders themselves or the vast majority of bull riding fans. And the PBR itself is changing in ways that I'm not exactly in favor of. But I still enjoy the events, even if I sometimes feel a certain amused skepticism about the whole thing.

The first part of all the PBR events I've been to are really patriotic pep rallies - last night's event featured a film about the US Air Force and the swearing-in of a bunch of new recruits, and the combination of loud music, pyrotechnics, and promiscuous brandishing of patriotic symbols seems to make the crowd feel better about things. "Yeah, maybe the invasion of Iraq was a costly mistake, and maybe we can't find Osama bin Laden, and maybe the devastating firepower of the US military doesn't translate into anything meaningful in a confusing and complex world, but DAMN I feel better!"

Then, after enough beers have been consumed, the atmosphere changes from one of patriotic fervor to plain old likkered-up hooting, which I find easier to roll with. I was born in Flagstaff Arizona, and I grew up in rural parts of the state, and beer-fueled rural shenanigans are part of my cultural heritage. I don't personally indulge in beer-fueled rural shenanigans and I'm more likely to spend my time splitting infinitives than spitting tabakky juice, but at least I'm familiar with rural shenanigans.

I don't really have any favorites in the PBR. There are certain riders whose intellectual and philosophical outlooks irk me, and I tend to root for the bulls when they're in the chutes. And I do have a sort of soft spot for Guilherme Marchi, who seems impossibly decent, and for Dustin Elliot, who has an actual sense of humor.

The PBR started out as a kind of foreshortened rodeo. Someone realized that the most popular events at any given rodeo were the so-called "rough stock" events, and that the bull riding was the most popular of the rough stock events. So they pared away all the other rodeo stuff - the team roping, the barrel racing, the steer wrestling - and kept just the bull riding. But up until a few years ago, it was possible to squint at the PBR and still see it as a rodeo. It wasn't the PRCA, but it sort of looked like the PRCA.

But now it seems that the PBR is trying to sever all of its old cultural links with the world of rodeo. They're trying to turn it into an Xtreme Sport, or perhaps a variant of NASCAR, leading to an ever-widening gap betwee PBR fans on the one hand, and old-guard fans of the PRCA on the other. Since television revenue is the manna that fuels pretty much everything in America, the PBR is destined to prevail over the PRCA on the basis of better television deals.

Is that good? I don't know. And the PBR is visibly struggling with certain inherent problems, such as the fact that from the perspective of TV sports in general, most bull riders aren't very telegenic. Americans seem to enjoy their sports heroes most when they're bold, brassy, even flagrantly narcissistic. But a great many bull riders don't seem capable of striking the kind of elitist, arrogant stance that seems to come so naturally to the NFL and which Americans seem to demand. Especially the old guard, the riders who would probably claim that they live by the "Code of the West", one of whose stipulations is that One Does Not Talk Much About One's Self (the actual stipulation is "One Does Not Talk Much". The rest follows logically). So for the PBR to really penetrate the mainstream sports market, they're going to have to find (or create) mainstream-looking sports heroes, or at least ones that don't live by the Code of the West and are willing to be arrogant on-camera. And I think that'll be a depressing day, myself.

Another problem the PBR has to deal with is the considerable success of Brazilian riders. On the one hand, the PBR likes to advance them as ideals - they're men who came from meager circumstances and became successes by dint of toughness and hard work, the American Dream incarnate. On the other hand, not all PBR fans are comfortable with the success of foreign riders and see it is a kind of sell-out to political correctness, as though bull riding is somehow a uniquely American undertaking and these Brazilian riders are about as welcome as Juan Pablo Montoya was in NASCAR. So they have to figure out how they're going to spin that.

And the PBR (and the rodeo world from which is sprang) has to come to grips with women competitors someday. Rodeos are very much a male enclave, but rodeo fans tell themselves they're being inclusive by having barrel racing, which is a "girl's event". But I think that's kind of odious. If boys want to barrel race, why not? And if girls want to ride bulls, why not? The problem of women competitors isn't unique to the PBR, but there are certain facts about the sport that make it a bigger problem in the PBR than in, say, the NFL. In the NFL, it's fairly easy to see why there aren't many woman in the game, simply because there aren't many 6-foot-6 350-pound women defensive tackles in the world. The sheer size and strength of the average NFL player makes it difficult for women to compete.

But this isn't the case in bull riding. One of the PBR's founding members, Ty Murray, is often quoted saying that bull riding isn't a matter of strength, but of balance and timing. In fact, he's on record saying that size is actually a detriment; that it's the smaller cowboys who are best suited for the sport. Well then, since size is a detriment, and strength isn't an issue, what does the PBR propose to do with women, considering that there are probably a lot of girls who could ride bulls effectively if they chose to do so? (Hell, there are probably a lot of girls who could beat up Brian Canter is a bar fight, if you want to get right down to it.)

I didn't mean to go so far afield. But I often do.