Bull Spit

I am sitting in a $42, eighth row seat of a 4,000-person grandstand wearing relatively clean clothes, White’s boots, and a Mariners ball cap. I’m surrounded by folks in cheap wool felt hats with plastic turquoise bands stuffed with too many feathers and wearing too- pointy-toed plastic-lizard boots.
More than a few of them have committed what I’ve always considered to be le grande faux pas of western fashion: they’ve tucked their pants into their boots and tied a snotrag around their throat. Junior account executives have dressed themselves for this event as though they expect to buckaroo through brambles during a dust storm.
For the 98th year in a row, it is Round-up week in Pendleton, Oregon, and this is the first evening of the Professional Bull Riders tour. The ticket to this event was given to me because I did some grant writing for the folks who operate the facility. I’ve spent the last six months of Sunday nights studying the sport on television.
This isn’t my first live exposure to the sport. I’ve been in Cheyenne, Calgary and the Cow Palace, up and down the Pecos twenty-thirty times, in and out of every jail in Texas. I remember fifty years ago, in Burwell, Nebraska, when I was a wannabe rodeo fool, watching Jim Shoulders, the most famous of all bullriders, being brought to the arena by ambulance for the last go-round, riding his bull, then leaving the rodeo grounds by ambulance.
An empty beer can toss below me is the arena, surrounded by modular Powder River steel panels, with the words US BANK carefully scratched by a shovel artist into the fluffy dirt floor, each letter about ten feet tall. Across the arena, above the bucking chutes, hangs a video screen the size of a couple of sheets of plywood this is looping commercials from tonight’s corporate sponsors, including the local hospital, the smokeless tobacco industry, two cell phone companies, a casino, an insurance company and US Bank.
Between commercial episodes, the entire west half of Pendleton is flooded with “I-might-cheat-on-you-Honey-but-never-on-America” canned twang being blasted from a bank of six-foot Marshall speakers mounted beside the screen. The woman beside me tears her hamburger napkins into little spitwads and crams them in her ears, then points toward a holding pen at the east end of the chutes and asks “What in the hell is he doing?”
I recognize the scene. Two young bullriders have brought modern athletic techniques to the rodeo game and are visualizing their rides-to-occur. Holding a fist tightly clenched around a visualized bull rope directly in front of his be-Wranglered wanker, his other arm held above his head, legs spread around an invisible bull, each of them herks and jerks and spins around the pen in a dance that would elicit applause in the baths of San Francisco but surely get them arrested in the produce aisle of the Safeway down the block. Context is everything.
At eight o’clock high, the announcer asks us to stand for the invocation, during which he asks for divine protection for the contestants, the audience and, of course, our country. Then a teenage violinist whom I’ve known since kindergarten plays a technically perfect National Anthem over the megawatt speaker system. I wince at every amplification of the rasp of her fingers moving up and down the strings. Some instruments don’t translate well to locomotive scale.
Then, while we are all still standing, the arena goes dark as the inside of a cat, there is a beam of bright red from somewhere in the superstructure and the US Bank logo in the dirt bursts into diesel fueled flames. The country rock band blows chunks of patriotism while a hundred more points of laser light whiz overhead like zap rays from alien craft.
A cadre of epileptic spotlights whip back and forth through the exhaust cloud hanging over Interstate 84, take a couple of shots at the three-quarter moon, and finally settle on the bucking chutes, where a chorus line of 39 bullriders clad in every hue of shirt and chaps are standing, hands on hips, under a slew of broad brimmed black hats
The announcer introduces each of them, tonight’s gladiators. I recognize a few of the names from my home studies, including an older bullrider, who is thirty-five. These fellows average in the mid-twenties. The beefiest of them might weigh slightly more than my left leg. (Bullriders are small by design. The ideal size formula applies mass and angular momentum constants to the rapid spinning of a bull. A whirling tennis ball on a string is less likely to break the string than is a bowling ball.)
But they are all professional bull riders, specialists in this sport, who have climbed through a formal farm team system to make it to this level. This is their way of making a living.
As in any formal sport, the actual contest has specific rules, procedures, and scoring criteria. Generally speaking, the contestant climbs into a confined space, or chute, with a 1500-pound very male bovine, ties a rope with a handle around the animal just behind the front legs, holds the rope taut with either hand, straddles the bull, slides forward, nods for the gate to open while another person pulls tight a “flank strap” just south of the bull’s bullness and just north of its ballness. This, apparently, encourages the bull to buck.
For the human, the object is to stay astride the bull for eight seconds without touching it with the other hand. The animal’s goal is to dislodge the monkey on its back and the rope around its flank as quickly as possible so that it can go back to the holding pen for a late evening snack and bull session. Both the rider and the bull are scored on their performances by four guys with clipboards.
More often than not tonight the bull doesn’t have to work a full eight seconds. Some of them do lose their composure and try to squash, beslobber, gore, trample, butt, scoot, nose or roll on the cowpokes. That is why we in the audience are here, to live dangerously, but vicariously.
The real heroes of the night are the bullfighters, previously called clowns, whose jobs are to make themselves the objects of the bovine ire, to put themselves between a contestant and a ton of angry burger on the hoof until the cowboy can pull his face out of the arena floor and make it safely to the fence. The bullfighters are totally successful tonight, and no contestant is hauled away in an ambulance.
No, Virginia, there are no female bull riders in the PBR. I don’t know why, I don’t know if things will ever change, and it is not my fault. I would hope, though, that most young women have sense enough to avoid the intense testosterone-flooded maleness of all participants, human and bovine, that are involved in the sport, even if a few semi-suicidal women are lured by the $15,508 that Pim Rosa, of Sao Paulo, Brazil, hobbled away with at the end of this event.