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Excerpt: This is not a rodeo

PBR: The Official Guide to the Toughest Sport on Earth now available

CHICAGO (October 15, 2009) - [Last week, the PBR proudly unveiled its latest offering: PBR – The Official Guide to the Toughest Sport on Dirt, published by Triumph books. The richly illustrated 176-page book, written by PBR Editor Jeff Johnstone and Senior Writer Keith Ryan Cartwright, features 211 full-color photographs, as well as an introduction by nine-time World Champion Ty Murray.

The book is available online through www.triumphbooks.com, www.amazon.com, www.borders.com, www.barnesandnoble.comand wherever books are sold. It retails for $29.95, and will available at all PBR merchandise stands throughout the upcoming World Finals.

We have excerpted a portion here. –Eds.]

Chapter One: This Is Not a Rodeo

Listen.

In five minutes, this arena will open its doors to 15,000 strong. Amplified voices will soon pierce the air. Television lights will engulf the ring in their fire. The foundations will shake with the thunder of cheers and stomps.

But now, in the dark and the quiet, listen.

Listen for the ghosts. They are the shades of three centuries of men who lived by their own rules. Men who poured their blood and sweat into the very dirt that now lines the arena floor. Heroes who dared.

The cowboys. 

And the Professional Bull Riders is the end result of their 300-year evolution. Tonight, the greatest athletes to ever wear spurs will carry on their tradition. They will risk everything they’ve known—their homes, families, indeed, their very lives—for one eight-second ride.

They will ride for the money. They will ride for the glory.

And they will ride for the ghosts.

**********

It began as a dream.

Twenty men, $20,000, and the kind of determination only a bull rider can understand. Almost two decades ago, a group of 20 bull riders had had enough. Sure, they loved rodeo and its trappings—the flaxen-haired beauties with their flags, the horses and their magnificence that defies description, and the skill of the cowboys who explode out of a chute and wrap a rope around a speeding steer. They still love it.

But traditional rodeo, a combination of calf roping, team roping, barrel racing, saddle bronc, bareback, steer wrestling and bull riding, had its limitations for bull riders. For one, getting a good bull could be a crap shoot. In the early 1990s, there were so many rodeos in so many different places across country that the chances of getting a quality animal were slim. And in a sport where half the score is up to the animal, that’s a problem.

There was a reason why promoters always held bull riding until the end of the show. It was the same reason that the Romans packed the Coliseum: danger. Injuries are common in all Western sports—there’s certainly nothing delicate about steer wrestling—but bull riding was different. Men can be—and are—killed every year. But when it came time to hit the pay window, the pot was out of whack. The men who brought the crowds left with no more than anyone else.

“We always knew bull riding was way more dangerous than any other event in rodeo,” said Cody Lambert, a PBR founding father. “But we got paid exactly the same. We were carrying more than our share of the load, but we weren’t being rewarded any more than anyone else.”

Many of the men who sacrificed their bodies for the sport had come away with nothing. World Champions were flat broke upon retirement.

Lambert had spent his career in the traditional rodeo industry. He’d seen his own childhood heroes fade into obscurity with little more to show for it than a permanent limp and a stack of unpaid bills.

“We were looking at guys who had been champions or nearly champions—who were our heroes when we were growing up—and they ended up with nothing at the end of it all. When their bull riding career was over, they didn’t know how to do anything else.”

In 1992, 20 of the best bull riders in the world sat in a Scottsdale, Arizona, hotel room and came up with a plan.

If they could stick together and form a united front, they could forego being nickel-and-dimed by small-time rodeos. Their idea was to present the best riders in the world, on the best bulls in the world, and maybe have something to show for it. They each put down $1,000.

Michael Gaffney, the future 1997 World Champion, was there that day. He recalls, “I think it was the weekend before I dislocated my riding shoulder for the first time, after I hit the ground real bad—that was in El Paso—and I ended up getting on that bull in the short go in Scottsdale and won. I think I received a check that day for $860-some. When I called home after writing that $1,000 check and told [my wife] Robin, she said, ‘You wrote a check for what?!’ My entry fees were over $200 and we were dead, crack broke by the time I paid the IRS. We were in bad shape. And I had just won the NFR!”

But he did it. They all did. Key sponsorships were lined up, and in 1994, a 29-year-old fair promoter named Randy Bernard became Chief Executive Officer of Pro Bull Riders, Inc. The rest, as they say, is history.

The inaugural 1994 season featured eight event and a total purse of just $250,000. Today, a season features over 30 events. The total purse is over $11 million.

When the PBR made its television debut in 1995, 12 million viewers tuned in. 17 million people watched World Finals in 2008—17 million people in the People’s Republic of China, that is.

When the majority share of PBR was sold to Spire Capital partners in 2007, the $1,000 each rider had contributed in Scottsdale had grown over $4 million.

In 2009, in the midst of a worldwide recession, attendance was down across the sporting world. Even professional football and baseball saw sales slump. Smaller sports went out of business completely. But at the PBR, attendance swelled by 20 percent.

In less than two decades, the Professional Bull Riders have turned what used to be a county fair spectacle into a sparkling, massive, worldwide phenomenon.

A century from now, the world will surely be a different place. The great Western expanse that chiseled the cowboy from its own rocky heart may well be gone. Heroes may be in short supply.

But in an arena not yet built, a young man we will never meet will stand and tip his hat to a crowd that has yet to be born. And on that day, some small part of all that’s strong, and brave, and good will live on. All thanks to 20 men and a dream.