Fear and Gloating at the New York Rodeo
A cousin is a wonderful thing to be, and a thing even more wonderful to have, especially when, brought up in the same brand of madness you were, they turn out more than a little different. Then, this fuzzy reflection of yourself, who is also your friend (which, absent the bond of blood, they would in all likelihood not be), will make a habit of bearing in on your ordered little life from what might as well be a parallel universe. So it turned out a couple of months ago that my cousin had gotten his hands on some cheap tickets to see Professional Bull Riding at Madison Square Garden, and I said hell yeah, let’s go.
There were five of us total, three cousins and two uncles, all of us coastal elites ready to be guys being dudes at the rodeo. Outside the arena, PETA protestors were being heckled by thirty-somethings in denim and cowboy hats hiding bald spots leading bemused blondes by the hand. “Get a job!” they yelled over and over with the sort of breathless glee people typically reserve for situations where they’re definitely not owned. As we got swept up in the throng of bull riding enthusiasts, I noticed that almost everybody was kitted out in cowboy kitsch. Where did all these people come from?
We found our seats at the back of the top bowl and immediately set about making bad puns. On the floor of the Garden was a dirt enclosure not quite the size of the court or the rink I was used to seeing there, flanked by (actual) bullpens and a stage on our righthand side and dining tables for VIPs to our left. In the middle of the enclosure was a round raised stage for the arena entertainer, who, if I’m not mistaken, is to be distinguished from the rodeo clowns. During the event, camerapeople would peek through the windows cut out of the side of the stage like sentries guarding a pillbox. Above us, the screen read: “PBR. Monster Energy. Buck Off at the Garden. Sponsored by Ariat: IT’S BULL TIME.”
After a while the lights went down, and the screens played an audiovisual hype medley, surprisingly promiscuous in genre choice, more rap and classic rock than country by far. At the climax of the hype video, the pyrotechnics went off, bursts of flame bathing the Garden in a red glow. Flames slithered through the dirt in mirrored patterns on each side of the enclosure, etching the letters “PBR,” with a horizontal stroke across the top of the letters made to resemble bull horns. I had to scratch my head at this. If they were going to epically set the letters “PBR” on fire while blasting Led Zeppelin, why on earth was their beer sponsor Michelob Ultra? For that matter, why Monster Energy instead of Red Bull?
But history marches on, and it was almost bull time. As the letters burned, the announcer introduced the forty-odd riders one by one. While many of them were, as I expected, white men from rural America, clad in stupendous names like Sage Steele Kimzey, Daylon Swearingen, John Crimber, and Cort McFadden, not every rider conformed to my prejudicial expectations. Among those to toe the line above the flaming PBR were the black Texan Kaiden Loud, the Navajo Utahn Keyshawn Whitehorse, a handful of Canadians and Australians, and about a dozen Brazilians who, buck-for-buck, were probably the best riders in the event. Since the doors were clearly open to South American cowboys, I wondered where all the Argentinians were.
When all the riders had lined up along the still-flaming letters, smoke clouds from the pyrotechnics thinning and drifting over the enclosure, it was time for the opening prayer. The riders removed their cowboy hats and bent their heads. “Bless us, o Lord,” went the reverential drawl, “and watch over our riders and our livestock. And Lord, protect the brave men and women serving in our armed forces and our first responders. And Lord, we pray that you will guide our elected officials as they seek to lead this country through difficult times.”
Oh shit, I realized. This is going to be a victory lap for the winners of history.
With Amens said, they launched into the National Anthem, and I conspicuously put my hand over my dang ol’ heart, and when the singer got to “land of the free” you bet I clapped real hard.
The riders returned to the bullpens, and the announcer introduced the bullfighters, who I’m pretty sure are the ones that traditionally you would call rodeo clowns. Three of them worked on foot, the main line of defense between a fallen rider and a raging bull. Their job was to calm the bull down and guide it safely back to the pen. There was also a bullfighter with a lasso on a big dun horse who looked insanely cool. The bullfighters wore cowboy hats and green-and-yellow jerseys that sort of resembled hockey uniforms and read: “PROTECTED BY U.S. BORDER PATROL.” I don’t even want to get into the psychopolitical implications of metaphorically associating the Border Patrol with a team of skilled professionals tasked with protecting a vulnerable yet valiant cowboy from a big dark angry beast with horns; I will leave the full elaboration of the Freudian Border Patrol as an exercise for the reader. After all, at long last, it was bull time.
The way Professional Bull Riding works (at least per my simplified understanding), is that before the event each rider is randomly assigned a bull to ride, and each rider gets one ride per day over the course of the three-day contest. At the outset, the rider will spend a couple minutes atop the bull in the pen, cinching straps and the like. To get the bull riled up and bucking, a flank strap is tightened over the bull’s underbelly, which it has been trained to find uncomfortable and agitating. Once the bull bursts from the chute, the timer starts. In order to register a score, the rider has to hold onto the bull for at least eight seconds. The rider can only hold the bull with one hand, and the free hand can’t touch the bull at all, or else the ride is disqualified. Half of the score is the bull’s score (more on this later), as each bull receives points for the level of difficulty it presents to the rider. The other half is the rider’s score, which seems to me to follow a similar principle to the scoring of Olympic diving: the more graceful and the less “noisy” the ride, the more points scored. To give you a sense of how difficult this all is: out of the 45 rides the day I went, only 13 even qualified for a score.
Bull riders, like horseback riders, tend to be short kings. And this is not at all to condescend to them: they are shockingly impressive athletes. Those bulls come bursting out the chute bringing forth a force I can’t comprehend anyone withstanding. About a quarter of the riders fell off more or less immediately, launched into the air by an upwards thrust of the rump or, once or twice, pressed with a sickening thwack against the fence. These riders would hobble away to safety, to resounding applause, while the bullfighters surrounded the rearing bull.
Other riders would stay on long enough to let you appreciate the multivariate physics problem a bucking bull presents. Not only would it jerk up and down, much like the mechanical bull at some honkytonk bar of our imagination, but it rotates all the while as if it were being cooked on a too-fast microwave tray, coiling and uncoiling and snapping out its hind legs. The rider’s job is to anticipate each eruptive buck and adjust his weight accordingly. The standard technique seems to be to lean back and raise your free hand from your hip high above your head, like an eager pupil, every time the bull jerks upward. The whole thing reminded me of those buildings in San Francisco we learned about in science class, which are built to sway with the tremors of an earthquake rather than rigidly resist them and snap at the foundations. The athletic display was thrilling and mesmerizing. When you’re watching a short king try to hang onto a bucking bull with one hand, eight seconds can feel like an eternity. Every time the judges confirmed that a rider had qualified for a score, the arena erupted in applause, and I couldn’t help but join them.
My favorites were the riders who found themselves nearly bested by a particularly ferocious buck, but managed to hang on off the side of the bull for another full rotation or two. The strength it must have taken to stay off the ground while completely horizontal was, to me, literally unbelievable. Yet several of the riders pulled off this feat, and in a couple of cases they even managed to clock in at eight seconds (though here the judges’ criterion of “maintaining control over the bull” didn’t seem quite to apply). I was repeatedly disappointed to find that their scores had taken a hit from their recourse to horizontality since I found them far more impressive than the riders who had managed to remain upright.
The most heartbreaking was the rider who dipped off the side toward the end of his eight seconds, yet seemed to have held on for just long enough. The judges reviewed the ride in the instant replay booth and ultimately determined that the rider had maintained control over the bull for exactly 7.96 seconds. Let none say that Professional Bull Riding hands out participation trophies.
As another rider strapped in, the announcers remarked that he was going into his ride with a severely injured leg. He got tossed high in the air after a rotation or two, and he landed badly. He hobbled back to the chute amid a standing ovation from the crowd, and I wondered at his dumb yet absolutely winning bravery.
One thing you could say about the crowd: they did not discriminate between the blue-blooded American riders and all the other participants. This predominantly conservative audience respected virtue and ability above considerations of identity, and I think this tendency generally holds true throughout Trump’s coalition, despite a vocal and influential minority of out-and-out racists. What seems to matter most in red America, at least on the level of civil society, is conformity to a culture and its mores. So long as you pray like them, there’s a decent chance they’ll leave you alone, or even bring you into the fold.
This benevolence only goes so far, though. Nonwhite people playing a white man’s game are always on thin ice. You could say it’s like trying to ride a bull while it’s calm. The moment things start going wrong for the whites – even within their own rules – they’ll know who to take their anger and resentment out on. I have no idea whether PBR’s Brazilian riders or its nonwhite American riders ever think this way, but I do have a pretty good guess what would happen if the white riders from the South and the Plains started to slide ever further down the leaderboards…
The entertainer that evening, a boyish North Carolinian wearing a cowboy hat, face paint, a red-white-and-blue long sleeve jersey, and shorts, exemplified for me the young Trump voter. His role at the event is what used to be called the barrelman, and his predecessors really did wear protective barrels around their torsos. The pillbox-like stage at the center of the enclosure was his, and throughout the event, he teased the bullfighters and the announcer, hyped up the audience, danced, and made jokes. He was likeable and mostly unobjectionable. He was certainly no Ron Swanson type, gamely doing the Baby Shark dance between rides and swaying his hips suggestively to a Lady Gaga song. At one point he tried out location-specific patter, telling the crowd he didn’t think he had ever seen so many cowboy hats in New York City. (“He could check out some clubs in the West Village if he wants to see more,” I muttered to my uncle.)
But his winning streak wasn’t made to last, and eventually the conservative comedy brainworms showed themselves. “You know these riders are the most incredible athletes in the world,” he said as a fallen rider scrambled back into the chute. “The only thing more dangerous than what they do is riding the subway in New York.”
Ayooooooooo!!!!!!!!!
Half an hour later, he tried the same opening again, but that time the punchline was, “The only place more dangerous than this enclosure is Times Square on New Year’s Eve.” What did he even mean by that one?
I really vibed with the barrelman, though, because at one point a particularly nasty bull came out, and I remember saying “Damn, that bull is big!” A moment later the barrelman put in, “Holy cow, that is one big bull!”
The bulls were big. Even from the nosebleeds I could tell that. They were the great mystery of the night. They came out of the chute mean, and even after they’d tossed off their rider (or after a successful rider had tactically evacuated), they would stamp and snort and take victory laps around the enclosure. At this point the bullfighters would try to surround the bull and calm it down. All the bulls inevitably did calm down, and how it happened completely escaped me. Maybe the bullfighters managed to loosen the flank strap with a dexterity indiscernible from my distance, maybe it was something else. But every time, suddenly and inadvertently, it would be as if a switch flipped in the bull. It would stop rearing, turn toward the pens, and almost prance docilely back into the chute and disappear.
The bulls had reputations among PBR savants – practically whole careers unto themselves. Before every ride, the screen would tell you how well the rider had fared on his assigned bull in the past. Some of the bulls were so mean, they started bucking their rider while they were still in the pen. The top-scoring bull of the night, meaning the bull that gave its rider the nastiest, rootin’-tootinest ride, was named Snuggles. The other top scorers were Bangarang, Big Chili, Red Mosquito, and Whiskey Trip. The lowest scorer was named The Undertaker. Other notables included Punchy Pete, Spunky Energy, Ridin’ Salty, Pneu-Dart’s Chief Wahoo (seemingly an homage to the Cleveland Guardians’ erstwhile and disgraced mascot by a company that manufactures sniper rifles for cattle medicine), Cash Goblin, Mr. Koolie, Simon, Mike’s Motive, Dark Thoughts, Knucklehead, and…Daniel Penny.
The night closed with a team competition, something relatively new in Professional Bull Riding. We actually had a home team to root for, the New York Mavericks, who would be squaring off against the Florida Freedom. The announcer explained the rules in exhausting detail; essentially “whoever has the most points wins.” The announcer said that one of New York’s riders was from around Albany – a local boy, by the standards of bull riding in the big city – but I couldn’t independently confirm that. For the most part, as with other professional sports, where the team played had little to do with where the players came from. My cousins, uncles, and I were all straining our irony faculties to enthusiastically back our hometown team. But guess what: we won, once again proving that New York City is the greatest city in the world.
After the anticlimax, the Garden cleared out quickly. As we walked back toward 6th Avenue, I wondered if any of our fellow bull riding enthusiasts would have the courage to ride the subway home. I didn’t see any cowboy hats ducking into the station. My cousin had been oddly quiet all the way to the Q train. After some time, shifting his weight to oppose the rocking of the train, he said, “Where on the island of Manhattan are forty-five bulls supposed to sleep?”