Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, & Bull Riders Read online

  Rating a bull, Dennis Lee called it. By any name, it was one of the hardest things to master.

  That night in Atlanta, during the championship round of the 1-night event, Moraes climbed aboard Slider, unridden in 18 attempts. Moraes needed at least 88 points that night in Atlanta to overtake Coleman. He settled into position and pushed down on the front of his black cowboy hat while Slider wriggled in the chutes.

  “It’s not going to work,” Moraes silently told the bull. “It doesn’t matter how much pressure you put on me. You’re not going to scare me. I got you. This is your last day as an unridden bull. You’re going to get conquered today.”

  Moraes called for the gate. When it opened, Slider took two jumps and turned hard to the left—the exact point where he’d thrown off most of the previous 18 riders. The motion rocked Moraes to the right, but he recentered himself and continued his silent talk with Slider.

  “You stupid bull, you’re not going to put me onto the ground today. I’m stronger than you are.”

  Whirling and bucking, Slider launched himself high enough for a man to limbo underneath him. But Moraes spurred the bull with his right foot and kept spurring until the buzzer sounded.

  Moraes dismounted, triumphant. In came the score: 91 points!

  Moraes had done it again, overtaking Coleman by 1.5 points and capturing his second victory of the season. When the event ended, someone handed him a cell phone. On the other end of the line was a PBR employee, back at the headquarters in Colorado Springs, waiting to write a story about the Atlanta Classic.

  “Guess who won again!” Moraes crowed.

  Walking by as Moraes savored the details of his victory as he relayed them by phone, Canadian rider Reuben Geleynse said, “He’s going to be hard to beat.”

  But as Moraes limped back into the sports medicine room, where trainers wrapped ice around his left knee, a question begged to be asked: Could the body of a man who would turn 34 in April hold up during the PBR’s 10-month marathon?

  Later that night Moraes limped into the Marriott’s restaurant with a small wall separating the dining area and the bar. He sat down at a table with Freeman and three other people and ordered chicken strips, fries, and a glass of wine. On the other side of the wall, McBride, Coleman, and a handful of others drank beer and whiskey. Moraes and McBride, one and two in the standings, acknowledged each other with a friendly wave. But neither showed any intention of joining the other.

  Between bites, Moraes talked about his love for bull riding and about how in Brazil he’d once won a half dozen cars and finally got around to selling them when the bank called to say his account was overdrawn. These days his bank accounts were in better shape, his having amassed $86,000 in winnings over the past 7 weeks to go along with the more than $1 million he’d earned during his career. But it wasn’t just about the money and the $1 million bonus, Moraes said. That’s not the sole reason he endured the pain and risked serious injury. It was about his goal to be considered the best bull rider—in the history of the sport.

  For Moraes to be considered the undisputed best would require that he win an unprecedented third PBR championship—the one he was suddenly favored to win even with 19 events left before the finals in Las Vegas.

  STANDINGS

  1 Adriano Moraes 3,098 points

  2 Justin McBride 2,446 points

  3 Mike Lee 2,426.5 points

  4 Mike White 2,202.5 points

  5 Jody Newberry 1,756 points

  6 Reuben Geleynse 1,666 points

  7 Dan Henricks 1,565.5 points

  8 Dave Samsel 1,383 points

  9 Brian Herman 1,357.5 points

  10 Troy Dunn 1,184.5 points

  SIX

  TWO IS THE UGLIEST NUMBER

  Anaheim, California

  Saturday & Sunday, February 14 & 15, 2004

  Cowboy hats, cowboy boots, spaghetti-strap tops. On the PBR tour, it could be hard to distinguish one crowd from the next, but Anaheim had its own flavor—a taste of Hollywood. Bo Derek watched the action from a catwalk over the chutes while fans watched Derek in her snug jeans and fringed brown suede jacket. The other celebrity guests were Jeff Probst, host of the TV show Survivor, and Tommy Lasorda, former manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

  Randy Bernard, the PBR’s CEO, made sure the PA announcer called attention to the celebrity guests—just as he’d make sure to remind sponsors about the thousands of fans the tour had drawn that night to Arrowhead Pond. Out to prove the PBR had more than regional appeal, Bernard had taken the show to places like New York City, Philadelphia, and Anaheim. Bright lights and big cities meant potentially more money from sponsors, and Bernard tried to cash in on the glitz by parading out Derek, Lasorda, and Probst.

  Derek and Probst seemed content to watch from a distance, but Lasorda wanted to meet some of the riders. Before the first-round action began, Bernard pulled aside Justin McBride. “Justin, I want you to meet Tommy Lasorda,” Bernard said. “Tommy, this is Justin McBride, our reserve world champion.”

  The pudgy, white-haired man needed no introduction. McBride knew all about Lasorda, who had guided the Dodgers to four National League pennants and two World Series championships. ButMcBride figured Lasorda didn’t know a damn thing about him. Which was beside the point.

  Within seconds of their meeting, Lasorda launched into a profane pep talk, urging McBride to shed the label of reserve world champion, designated by his “back number”—the number that corresponds with a rider’s finish the previous season and the number that stays on the back of his riding vest until the end of the following season. For 10 months, a rider has to wear that number. And there was no number McBride despised more than the two on his back.

  With his Dodgers having lost the World Series twice, Lasorda knew McBride’s frustration. “When I see you next year,” he barked, “I don’t want to see that goddamn two on your back. I want to see number one.”

  McBride shook Lasorda’s hand and marched toward the chutes.

  At 5 feet 8 inches tall and 140 pounds, McBride relied on his athleticism and balance. Some riders pull their bull ropes so tight, it appears they’re trying to strangle the bulls. McBride kept his so loose that he looked like he was getting ready to ride a merry-go-round.

  His father had ridden bulls. So had his grandfather, who had been killed in the ring when a bull punctured his lung. Even McBride’s mother, Lori, had ridden a few bulls. So Justin felt it was something he not only wanted to do but had been born to do.

  He rode his first bull when he was only 2½ years old. It was a red and white mutant that weighed about 100 pounds. McBride’s father, Jim, lifted Justin onto the bull, gave him a mini bull rope, and set the two loose on the front yard grass as family members watched the spectacle.

  “Good God, they died laughing,” Jim McBride said. “He’d just ride the hair off that bull.”

  Growing up in Mullen, Nebraska (population 492), McBride gained attention as a bareback rider. But he dreamed of winning the world bull riding championship. He taped posters of the star riders like Hedeman, Jim “Razor” Sharp, and Ted Nuce onto his bedroom wall and watched his heroes every year during the televised National Finals Rodeo (NFR)—rodeo’s equivalent of the Super Bowl. Boasting that he could ride better than some of the pros, McBride headed outside, flipped on the headlights of the family truck, and rode a metal bucking barrel hanging between two trees.

  As a high school senior, he won the 1997 national high school bareback championship and landed a rodeo scholarship to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Though McBride competed in bareback riding during his freshman year of college, he emerged as one of the team’s top bull riders and a world-class cutup. One day, McBride and his rodeo teammates were lounging in their physical education class while the rest of the students were going through gymnastic exercises. The instructor, fed up with the cowboys, wondered aloud if any of them had the ability to perform the exercises. With that, McBride went into a handstand, circled the gym mat, and p
opped back onto his feet. His teammates howled, and McBride flashed a shit-eating grin.

  That year in Las Vegas, he developed a taste for Jack Daniel’s, and casino blackjack, and a willingness to bet on his talent. The big gamble came after his freshman year. Bored with school, McBride dropped out, bought his PBR card, and hit the minor-league circuit. At an event in Fresno, California, McBride got knocked unconscious. At an event in Weatherford, Oklahoma, he got kicked in the side of the head and needed a dozen stitches to close the gash. He went broke within a few months and headed to Fort Collins, Colorado, where he moved in with a pal from Mullen, got a job working at a gravel pit, and crushed rock 8 hours a day for about $7.50 an hour.

  By January 1999, having saved up just enough money to get to a minor-league PBR event in Knoxville, Tennessee, McBride bet on himself again. He finished third, won $4,000, and that day thought to himself, Wow, I’m not going back to the gravel pit. Instead he went to Bakersfield, California, where he finished fourth at another minor-league event and, thanks to another $10,000 in winnings, cracked the PBR’s top 45. From there it was on to Odessa, Texas, and his first big-league bull riding event, where he rode Panhandle Slim and Hollywood—two of the PBR’s most ferocious bulls—won the event, and pocketed a check for $25,747. The little fart stick was on his way.

  Earning almost $90,000 that year, McBride followed up by raking in more than $145,000 in 2000 and finishing ninth in the overall standings. Late in the 2001 season, he was in contention for the championship along with two veteran star riders—Moraes and Ty Murray. But his hopes for the championship ended in a bar fight, when McBride punched somebody in the face and broke his own right hand, the one he used to grip his bull rope.

  He finished third that season and in 2002 finished fifth. Having won more than $500,000, McBride enjoyed the money but desperately wanted to win a championship. His single-minded obsession with being number one stood in stark contrast to the wonderment of two new arrivals on the BFTS.

  The photographer focused his lens, then lowered the camera.

  “You might want to take out the chew,” he said.

  Rookies.

  Paul Gavin reached into his mouth with his index finger and scooped out the plug of Copenhagen, deposited it into a Styrofoam cup, straightened his shoulders, and smiled for his official PBR photo. Gavin, a clean-cut 21-year-old from Monmouth, Illinois, looked like he should’ve been chewing bubble gum instead of tobacco. He was among more than 200 riders who had started the year in the minor leagues and the first of two rookies to make it to the big leagues of bull riding.

  Eight events into the season, the PBR made its first cut, dropping the BFTS’s bottom-ranked five riders and calling up the five top-ranked riders from the minor leagues. Occasionally the new group of riders included a rookie. This time it included two. Waiting to take his photo was James White, a 28-year-old black rider from Houston and an understudy of Gary “Grandpa”Richard who was now thinking less about the PBR’s glamour than what he’d have to do to stay there. The call-up guaranteed him a spot in the next four events, but White still had to pay his own way. To buy his plane ticket to Anaheim, he had had to clear out his bank account. Some of the riders wanted money. White needed it. As with every PBR event, there were a few ways to cash in: Riders finishing in the top eight of every preliminary round and in the top eight of the championship round earned checks from a pool of $7,800 per round, and the riders with the 10 best cumulative scores at the end of the event earned checks from a pool of more than $50,000, with $24,500 going to the event winner. That was in addition to several bonuses, starting with the Mossy Oak Shootout—a chance for the first-round leader to ride a bull for a minimum of $5,000, with the money rolling over like a lottery jackpot every time a rider failed to cash in and increasing up to $100,000. But there were no guaranteed payouts on the BFTS other than the riders’ 2-day event appearance fee of $400, of which the PBR withheld $146 to cover every rider’s $20,000 insurance policy at each event.

  In the first round, White rode Matrix for 86.5 points, which was tied for the seventh-best score of the round and earned him a check for $195. But he’d need more than that to comfortably afford to stay on tour. So that next night, he arrived with a look of intense focus. So did rider B. J. Kramps.

  Kramps, the Canadian wise guy, kept the jokes to a minimum. Kramps had fallen off six of his last seven bulls, and that day he’d drawn Double Bogey, who in the first round had bucked off veteran rider Gilbert Carrillo. All day, Kramps replayed the ride in his head and visualized what he’d have to do to stay on the bull. It was a practice unique to bull riding: spending hours, sometimes days, thinking about a ride that optimally would last 8 seconds and oftentimes less.

  The hours of mental preparation paid off. Kramps made the buzzer; but while the judges were totaling their scores, he was still on the bull. Though he’d visualized the ride perfectly, he’d forgotten to plan the last step: the dismount. In general, the technique is straightforward: For right-handed riders, yank the tail of the bull rope, freeing the riding hand; bail out to the right; fall onto hands and knees; speed-crawl before standing and running for safety. For left-handed riders like Kramps, it was the same technique, only in the opposite direction. When the 8-second buzzer sounded on Kramps’s ride that night, he slipped off the right side of Double Bogey and got hung up.

  Kramps tried to get to his feet and shake loose, but to no avail. The agitated bull picked up speed, and Kramps bounced across the dirt like tin cans tied to the back of a newlywed’s car.

  Todd Pierce, bareback-rider-turned-pastor, was standing on the outside of the chutes, preparing to help Mike Lee tighten his bull rope, when Double Bogey and the bouncing Canadian rider sped past. As if mistaking the bull for a purse snatcher, Pierce jumped off the chutes and lunged. He missed the bull and hit the dirt. He scrambled back onto his feet, chased Double Bogey into the corner, and leapt on the bull’s head. A wise move? Uh-uh. But it did slow down the bull long enough for bullfighter Greg Crabtree to snatch the tail of Kramps’s rope and unhook him.

  But Double Bogey was within goring distance of all three men, and Kramps was facedown in the dirt. Pierce covered Kramps with his own body as the bull leapt over the men and ran for the center gate and into the exit alley. A muffled voice stunned Pierce.

  “Uh, I’m okay, Todd.”

  It was Kramps, in his signature deadpan, smothered under the pastor.

  “Oh, sorry, B.J.”

  Kramps had suffered only a mild concussion, and Pierce suffered only a moderate tongue-lashing from the pissed-off bullfighters. It was their job to save the riders, they told Pierce, not the pastor’s. Tied for 16th after two rounds, Kramps just missed qualifying for the championship round. So did Adriano Moraes, missing the short-go for only the third time in eight events. Just as surprising as who failed to qualify was someone who did qualify—James White. While fellow rookie Paul Gavin got bucked off both of his bulls in Anaheim, White followed up his first-round ride on Matrix with an 85.5-point ride on Geronimo, leaving him matched up with Ugly in the championship round. It was Ugly, all right. White hung on for 5 seconds before getting thrown off. Standing up and dusting himself off, he left the arena unsure if he’d made enough money to get to the next week’s event in St. Louis. But while White was hoping for a few hundred dollars, others were dreaming of the $1 million.

  With Lasorda watching and a chance to gain ground on Moraes, McBride boarded Hot Water Dip. The buzzer never sounded so cruel, coming 4⁄10 second after McBride fell off the bull. It was exactly the type of ride that could keep him forever Justin McBridesmaid.

  But Mike Lee seized the opportunity with his third straight top-five finish, which moved him past McBride and back into second place in the standings.

  Greg Potter, a veteran Australian rider, won the Anaheim Open and collected a check for $29,245. But he smiled no more than James White, who finished 10th in his first BFTS performance and earned $625—a paltry sum compared with Potter’s haul, but
enough money to keep the dream alive. Twelve hours later, Randy Bernard was dealing with a nightmare.

  That season, eight PBR events were scheduled to be broadcast on NBC, and Bernard considered none bigger than the tape-delayed coverage of the Anaheim Open. The telecast would follow NBC’s live coverage of the Daytona 500 and provide an opportunity for the PBR to tap into a huge national audience and convert NASCAR fans into bull riding fans. “We feel that the two audiences are compatible,” Jon Miller, NBC’s senior vice president for sports programming said in advance of bull riding’s big day. “And we are thrilled to showcase a hot young sport like the PBR.” Bernard had touted the scheduled telecast as “one more stepping-stone toward increasing exposure for PBR athletes.”

  But inclement weather made the Daytona 500 and its scheduled finish time as unpredictable as a bull ride. Rain delayed the race, which forced NBC to slash its 90-minute PBR telecast to about 20 minutes. Furious hard-core bull riding fans bombarded the PBR with e-mails and phone calls. The strategic placement of a bull riding broadcast behind NASCAR’s biggest race meant nothing to the PBR faithful, especially in light of NBC’s truncated coverage of the Anaheim Open. Bernard posted an apology on the PBR Web site and, with the fumes of the Daytona 500 debacle in the air, understood more than ever that the tour’s loyal fans cared about just one race—the race for $1 million and the prized gold buckle.

  STANDINGS

  1 Adriano Moraes 3,235.5 points

  2 Mike Lee 2,971 points

  3 Justin McBride 2,815.5 points

  4 Mike White 2,202.5 points

  5 Brian Herman 1,877 points