Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, & Bull Riders Read online

  In: Ross Johnson, who survived the most frightening moment of the season during his wreck at the “Fort Worth Massacre.”

  Out: Eathan Graves, the waiflike 18-year-old from California who made a splash at a Humps N’Horns event in Thibodaux, Louisiana, but didn’t even come close to qualifying for a single BFTS event,much less the finals.

  In: Jody Newberry, who rushed back from his knee surgery, remained in the top 10, and dispelled the notion of a sophomore jinx.

  Out: Jim Sharp, a two-time PRCA world champion bull rider who, at age 38, came back from an injury with two-thirds of the season over and failed to win enough money.

  In: Luke Snyder, who despite his declining success still managed to qualify for his fourth straight finals.

  In: Owen Washburn, who midway through the season started living up to his nickname of Captain Consistency.

  Out: Cody Hart, the rider trampled by Jerome Davis’s bull in Greensboro and beset by injuries that included a broken arm.

  In: Corey Navarre, who broke through in Bossier City for his first victory in almost 3 years.

  Out: Cory Turnbow, who tried to ride Little Yellow Jacket with a broken bull rope at a Challenger Tour event in Bismarck and ended up with a bloody gash on his forehead.

  In: Rob Bell, who needed his chin stitched after becoming Little Yellow Jacket’s first victim of the year.

  Out: Spud Whitman, another one of Little Yellow Jacket’s early-season victims.

  In: Brent Vincent, who in Greensboro came within 2⁄10 second of capturing his first BFTS victory.

  Out: Craig Sasse, yet another victim of Little Yellow Jacket.

  In: Reuben Geleynse, whose choirboy demeanor set up the ultimate yin-yang photo op when he tied McBride for the victory in Greensboro.

  Out: Tater Porter, the 9-year veteran and former PBR standout whose inspired comeback ended short of his returning to the finals.

  In: Cory Melton, the King of Buckle Bunnies.

  Out: Bart Jackson, who dominated Drifter in Jacksonville on the first ride of the season but got cut from the BFTS late in the season.

  In: Ross Coleman, who in 2004 abdicated his throne as King of Buckle Bunnies to Melton.

  Out: Kendall Galmiche, who turned down a college baseball scholarship from Mississippi State to pursue bull riding and, while riding in front of mentor Donnie Gay in Thibodaux, broke his leg.

  In: Cody Whitney, who, when once propositioned by a buckle bunny, replied by telling the woman she should call Whitney’s wife to see if it’d be okay.

  Out: Jacob “Spook”Wiggins, whose knack for storytelling was no help in trying to make the fairy-tale leap to the BFTS.

  In: Allan Moraes, the youngest of the Moraes brothers.

  Out: Andre Moraes, the second youngest of the Moraes brothers.

  In: Guilherme Marchi, a member of the PBR’s Brazilian army.

  Out: Robby Shriver, the relentlessly upbeat rider from Georgia who, despite the power of positive thinking, failed to qualify for the BFTS.

  In: Paulo Crimber, whose dance moves after a successful ride showed he might have a post-bull-riding career on Soul Train.

  In: Brendon Clark, Troy Dunn’s understudy who broke through for his first BFTS victory in Oklahoma City.

  And yet more in: Ednei Caminhas, who’d sparked the controversy over sharp spurs; Dave Samsel, one of the American riders using a Brazilian rope; Tony Mendes, the bespectacled kid from Utah; Brian Herman, who broke through for a victory in Albuquerque while almost breaking open his head; Michael Gaffney, who in Nampa matched the PBR’s highest score ever with a 96.5-point ride on Little Yellow Jacket.

  As White exited the arena, clutching his oversize winner’s check, Cody Custer walked past and pointed at Mighty Mike.

  “Way to set the stage, dude,” Custer said.

  In two weeks, the PBR would descend on Las Vegas.

  STANDINGS

  1 Adriano Moraes 9,200 points

  2 Mike Lee 7,316.5 points

  3 Justin McBride 7,222.5 points

  4 Mike White 6,553.5 points

  5 Brendon Clark 5,842 points

  6 Ross Coleman 5,533 points

  7 Greg Potter 5,170 points

  8 Mike Collins 4,924.5 points

  9 Jody Newberry 4,900.5 points

  10 Rob Bell 4,839 points

  NINETEEN

  ADRIANO’S ARMS RACE

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  Thursday–Sunday, October 21–24, 2004

  Stepping into the lobby of the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, rookie rider Matt Bohon stopped and took in the sensory overload. The spinning wheels of the slot machines. The clink-clink-clinking of coins dropping after a payoff. The shouts and groans from people clustered around the craps tables. The men and women standing behind the blackjack tables in their crisp white shirts and tuxedo vests, dealing cards with an effortless flick of the wrist. The cocktail waitresses sashaying through the room in sequined tops, short skirts, and spiked high heels. The shouts of big winners and the sound of money being won and lost.

  Fast as he could, Bohon, a milky-faced 21-year-old from Missouri, checked in, dumped his duffel bag in the hotel room, and headed back down to the casino. Bull riders were at the blackjack tables. Groupies were gawking. The drinks were coming. And so Bohon squeezed in at one of the tables, bought $400 worth of chips, and prepared to break Mandalay Bay.

  Fifteen minutes later, Bohon’s stack of chips was gone. Then he was gone, heading back to his room and trying to figure out how he’d lost his money so fast.

  Middle-aged fans, easy to identify in their PBR shirts, hats, and jackets, seemed content pulling on the arms of the 25-cent slot machines. But others headed to the sports book, which already had posted odds for the PBR finals—Moraes was listed as the favorite at 7 to 2, Mike White at 4 to 1, Justin McBride at 9 to 2, and Mike Lee at 5 to 1, with long shots like Sean Willingham and Tony Mendes at 50 to 1.

  In a nearby corridor, giant cowboy boots hung from the high ceilings and led the way to the PBR Fan Zone, a 400,000-square-foot exhibition hall where thousands of bull riding fans who poured in snatched up everything from a bottle of PBR “8 Seconds Hot Sauce” for $6, a PBR shot glass for $8, a Little Yellow Jacket Christmas ornament for $15, a toy model Ford F-150 with the PBR logo for $30, and limited-edition leather PBR jackets for $350. Fans also had a chance to sit on a “real bull” named Buckshot. (Wink, wink. Buckshot was really a docile 3-year-old steer that showed little interest in even standing up.) Or collect autographs from the riders who showed up for daily appearances. But on Thursday, check-in day for the PBR finals,McBride was in no mood to sign autographs. Having dispensed with the crutches he’d used after breaking his right ankle in Grand Rapids, Michigan,McBride hobbled into the hotel and headed for rider registration. It was a room set aside for the riders where they picked up sponsorship patches, got a rundown on scheduled events, and signed the contestant agreement and release form. As soon as they signed the form, a PBR official handed over a $5,000 check given to each of the 45 riders making the finals.

  But McBride threatened to hold out. Unsigned contract in hand, McBride stood with fellow riders Dave Samsel and Brendon Clark in the hallway. Registration ended at four o’clock that afternoon, and the clock was ticking. None of the three riders said it directly, but the issue was obvious: The PBR had scheduled a 3-day 2005 event that conflicted with Tuff Hedeman’s Championship Challenge in Fort Worth, Texas.

  During the political fallout after Hedeman’s resignation as PBR president, McBride, Clark, and Samsel remained loyal to Hedeman, who was planning to produce not only his events in Fort Worth and Bossier City, but also a few others, with backing from the PRCA and the CBR. If the riders signed the PBR forms and rode at any of Hedeman’s 2005 events held on the same weekend as a BFTS event, they faced a 1-year suspension from the PBR. And the PBR was carefully scheduling events to overlap with Hedeman’s. Only riders who’d won the PBR championship were exempt from attending BFTS events, and no one need
ed to test the board’s willingness to enforce the rule. When rider Terry Don West failed to show for an event the week of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the PBR suspended him for a year.

  This was no ordinary week, with Major League Baseball and the NFL canceling its games, and this was no ordinary rider. West had won the PRCA bull riding championship, had ridden the feared Bodacious twice, and had earned the respect of Donnie Gay, the retired eight-time world champion, who once called West “one of the top five bull riders of all time.” But West also was the lone bull rider who missed the event, and so the PBR promptly suspended him for 1 year.

  West sued the PBR, insisting he’d called the PBR office and explained that he wouldn’t be able to make it because of travel complications. He settled out of court for $400,000, but the PBR vowed to continue enforcing the rule.

  Word quickly spread among the PBR executives in Mandalay Bay about the potential problem. The PBR refused to budge: Sign the contract or forfeit the $5,000 check and the right to ride at the finals. But this was not Terry Don West. This was McBride and Clark, the third-and fifth-ranked riders. Without them, the show would go on, but not without fans wondering about their absence—and their absence potentially leading other riders to question the competition clause. It was a stare-down.

  Now was not the time to take a stand, Sean Gleason, the PBR’s chief operating officer, told McBride, Clark, and Samsel. Now was the time to compete for the $1 million bonus and the championship, he said, while suggesting the board would be willing to discuss the issue after the finals.

  Clark and Samsel signed.McBride held out.

  Again, Adriano Moraes implored McBride to sign the contract. Randy Bernard and Ty Murray waited hopefully.

  Grudgingly, he gave in.

  Adriano Moraes had his own beef. That day, in an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he’d criticized the PBR’s new point system for the finals, up from 1,500 points available over the previous five-round competitions to 6,500 points available over the new eight-round competition. Next day’s headline on the front page of the Review-Journal sports section: “Leader Upset over Points System.”

  “It’s unfair after you worked your guts out all year long to know that if you stumble once in the finals, you might lose the title,” Moraes told the Review-Journal. “The guy who is leading before the finals should have a better chance at winning the championship.”

  Fairness was beside the point. This was about drama. Television drama. The more suspenseful the finish, the higher the Nielsen ratings. The higher the ratings, the more advertisers paid for 30-second commercial spots. The more advertisers paid, the better the deal the PBR could get from NBC and the Outdoor Life Network. And in overhauling its points system, the PBR had company.

  That year, NASCAR had introduced a radical new points system. Instead of using cumulative points from all of its races, the top 10 drivers after 26 races would qualify for a 10-race shootout, with points earned during those 10 races determining the champion. Like baseball purists who decried the introduction of wild card playoff teams and inter-league play, NASCAR purists howled in protest. Yet the system NASCAR had used since 1975,much like the PBR’s, had produced too many anticlimactic finishes. Both NASCAR and the PBR lacked the built-in drama of a postseason culminating with a World Series or Super Bowl. As the NASCAR season drew to a close, the excitement of the championship race quieted the critics. The same thing had happened on the PBR—with the notable exception of Adriano Moraes.

  With the PBR’s new point system, in addition to collecting the maximum of 100 points for a qualified ride, the rider with the round’s top score would get 400 bonus points, with bonus points dropping incrementally for those finishing second through 10th. But the biggest change came in the overall bonus. The rider with the top cumulative score at the finals would get 2,500 bonus points, with bonus points dropping incrementally for those finishing second through 10th. The points were precious, and in an attempt at greater precision, four judges worked the event. The sum of each of the four judges’ scores was divided by two, thus producing some scores with quarter points.

  What it all added up to was this: The new system gave McBride, Mike Lee, and Mike White a legitimate shot to overtake Moraes, especially with the Brazilian’s having successfully ridden just 46 percent of his bulls in the past seven BFTS events, compared with his 85 percent rate through the season’s first eight events. In recent weeks, he’d inserted a baseball-card-size rendering of St. Michael the Archangel in the inside brim of his cowboy hat, and in Las Vegas he had at his disposal not one but two priests.

  But when Moraes heard about McBride’s holding out, he put aside his own concerns. McBride’s skipping the finals would only have improved Moraes’s chances at winning the $1 million bonus and gold buckle. But Moraes couldn’t imagine the 2004 finals being held without its reserve champion and someone he admired so much. He urged McBride to sign the forms.

  McBride loved Hedeman, but not enough to give up a chance to win his first world championship and the $1 million bonus. The PBR brass suspected Hedeman was behind McBride’s threatened contract holdout. But Hedeman remained out of sight until six o’clock the next morning. That’s when he arrived at the Mandalay Bay arena with Ross Coleman and a TV crew from the local FOX affiliate.

  Bud Light, which sponsored Hedeman and Coleman, had arranged a bull riding demonstration during a live broadcast from the arena. When Bernard heard about it, he was livid—and even angrier when he found out Denise Abbott, the PBR’s vice president of public relations and marketing, was at the taping.

  “You knew?” Bernard asked Abbott about the early-morning TV shoot.

  “Yeah. I didn’t think it was a big deal,” she said.

  “Not a big deal?” Bernard asked incredulously.

  Twelve hours later, Hedeman returned to the arena and walked to the media room. He was there to pick up his press pass, Hedeman told the guy handling the credentials.

  There was none to be found.

  Empty-handed, Hedeman, no longer employed by the PBR or OLN, walked down the hall to a room serving as the PBR’s headquarters office. Catie Nemeth, a ticket coordinator, looked startled to see him.

  “Why can’t I get a credential?” Hedeman asked.

  Nemeth shrugged her shoulders and nervously walked away. Two men approached Hedeman. They were Jeff Collins, the PBR’s mammoth legal counsel, and Val Jimenez, working security for the PBR. They told Hedeman he would have to leave, and, without incident, the men escorted Hedeman out of the arena.

  The orders had come down from Bernard. If Hedeman wanted to get into the arena, he’d need a ticket—just like any other fan. It was a humbling moment for him. Despite his having been a force in founding the tour, despite his having remained the country’s most recognizable bull rider, Hedeman had lost all of his power within the PBR. As he was escorted out of the arena, the sounds of spurs being filed, ropes being rosined, and stories being swapped filled the locker room during the preparation of the world’s top 45 riders.

  Clayton Cullen, vice president of production for the PBR, came into the locker room to explain where the five top-ranked riders would stand during the opening. He began diagramming the arrangement on a sheet of paper.

  “That looks like a cock and two balls,” McBride said.

  Cullen looked up stone-faced, then continued his diagram.

  A day after his tense showdown with the PBR executives on the contestant contract, McBride was back to his old self. To one passerby, he shouted, “Hey, you little fart stick.”

  In a rare serious moment, McBride explained to Moraes what the doctors had done to repair his broken ankle: inserted two screws in the tibia, inserted another screw across the fibula, and inserted nine other screws to hold the whole thing together. The ankle would require another 6 weeks to heal, but McBride could attempt to ride, thanks to the two-piece, clamshell-shaped boot that stabilized his right ankle. He’d wear his regular size-7½ cowboy boot over his le
ft foot and wear a size-8½ cowboy boot over his right foot.

  With McBride’s crude sense of humor intact, he now had to prove he could ride as well as he could cuss. He insisted the broken ankle would be no problem. “It might affect my getaway,” he said. “But I can crawl really fast.”

  Chris Shivers looked like he wanted to crawl away and hide when he showed up outside the locker room, wearing a dark Western-style sport coat—the first time he’d ever worn one in his life. The attire elicited hoots and wisecracks from his buddy Mike White. Grinning sheepishly, Shivers left the locker room, where he so desperately wanted to be, but, relegated to the sidelines at the finals for the first time in 8 years, he went to join the OLN TV crew. Nestlen’s badgering had paid off, securing a TV gig for his top client.

  It was 30 minutes from the scheduled opening for the first of eight rounds that would be held over the next 10 days. Rider Wiley Petersen called 20 or so riders together for a pre-event prayer. They bowed their heads.

  “There are bull riders all over the world that want to be where we are now,” Petersen said. “So let’s take advantage of it.”

  Unsure about ticket demand for the first weekend of the expanded finals, the PBR scheduled the first three rounds to be held in the 11,000-seat Mandalay Bay Events Center. That night, waiting on the riders were more than 60 bulls and 7,000 fans.

  With OLN live, Paulo Crimber greeted the audience atop Stretcher, who, like a car with engine trouble, jumped, stalled, jumped, and shifted into overdrive. Crimber hung on for the first qualified ride of the night.

  The first 41 competitors would produce crowd-pleasing wrecks and rides. Zack Brown, the California surfer-turned-bull-rider, mastered Red Jacket, son of Little Yellow Jacket, for 87 points. Ross Johnson hung on as Shark launched himself off the dirt on all four hooves, the animal twisting himself 3 feet off the ground. Rubbing his backside after taking a horn to the ass on his getaway, Johnson grinned when the judges awarded him 87.25 points. Then Smooth Talker turned J.W.Hart’s first ride into a rough trip, dumping the cowboy with the broken leg and smashing him against the chutes before the bullfighters could intercede. Hart scrambled up the chutes and for several seconds just leaned over the top bar, his body hanging like wet laundry on a clothesline. Looking for his first qualified ride since February, Lee Akin held on during a nasty belly roll and tamed Happy Jack for 86 points. And Brian “Pee Wee” Herman, who had made just two qualified rides on his last 20 bulls, took yet another shot on I Wanna Be Bad. He proved to be badder than the bull, staying in perfect position during a reverse and earning an 88.75 score that moved him into the first-round lead.