With bull-riding, the fastest-growing sport in the US, it's the possibility of blood and gore as much as the skill that hooks the fans, writes Marion McKeone
YOU DON'T walk around Oklahoma wearing turquoise leather chaps with pink appliques and purple fringes. Unless you happen to be a perilously lost member of Village People. Or Justin McBride.
In these parts - and a lot farther afield - McBride is a hero, a sporting legend with millions of devoted fans. He's a top-ranking professional bull rider, and when you tussle with two-tonne bucking bulls for a living, you can wear any colour chaps you want.
Tough, gritty, with a sense of humour that's drier than arena sawdust, McBride is the cowboy's cowboy and, at 26, a legend of the Professional Bull Riders (PBR) circuit. He's a fifth-generation bull rider; bull-riding killed his grandfather, injured his father and has taken its toll on McBride's scrawny physique. For this two-time world champion, bull-riding is not just about the eight second surges of adrenaline, the million-dollar sponsorships and the respect of his peers. Or the buckle bunnies - the amazingly predatory groupies that gather outside the cowboy locker rooms. For him, it's a way of hanging onto a fast-disappearing lifestyle. Since the mid-1980s, hundreds of thousands of small ranching families like McBride's have lost their cattle herds and their homes to the banks and the intensive farming corporations. Unlike his grandfather, McBride's millions in bull-riding cheques have ensured that no bank will be able to take his ranch.
Bull-riding may be the US's original extreme sport, but its heroes are 21st-century cowboys, with sponsorship deals, agents and the potential to make millions of dollars a year off the backs of bulls with names like Tombstone, Shock and Awe and Blackout.
The sport is as simple as it is dangerous; to qualify for a score, a rider must stay on a bucking bull for eight seconds, holding on to a strap with just one hand. If he lasts eight seconds, his points total then depends on the ferocity of the bull and how gracefully he rides. The tougher the bull, the higher the potential score. "For some riders it's a dance," Cody Lambert, vice president of the PBR says. "Others just want to fight that bull and win." Faced with a 2,000lb partner boasting a fearsome pair of horns, you'd be better off asking it to dance than to step outside, and the spectacle varies accordingly. Depending on whether a rider relies on grace and agility or just grit and determination, an eight-second ride can resemble a ballet as much as a brawl; either way, the bull always has the last word.
If there's no such thing as an atheist in the foxhole, the same is probably true of the bucking chute, the narrow pen into which bull and rider are shoehorned until the gate flies open and the bull crashes into the arena. An eight-second ride is a rollercoaster of stomach-churning vertical lurches, spinning, twisting and bucking. It's like watching a tornado with horns - all noise and fury and great clouds of swirling dust. Sometimes it teeters on comical; a laugh-out-loud, cartoon-style comeuppance for the rider. Other times, the sickening splinter of bone hushes the arena; a pin-drop silence descends when a rider is carried unconscious from the arena.
It's the danger, the possibility of a blood-and-gore spectacle as much as the skill that hooks the fans. "Of course the fans pray we won't get gored, but they pray they won't miss it if we do," McBride grins.
Bull-riding makes for an unlikely success story. Fifteen years ago, a motley collection of down-on-their-luck cowboy mavericks formed a bull-riding organisation; today the PBR presides over the fastest-growing sport in the US, drawing 1.7 million fans to its events and upwards of 100 million armchair cowboys who'd prefer to watch a goring from the safety of their living rooms. "Its about the danger, pure and simple," says Ty Murray, president of the PBR. "It's the reason guys want to do it and it's the reason people want to see it." With or without the turquoise leather chaps.
Bull Trouble, a documentary about professional bull-riding directed by Marion McKeone, will be shown on RTÉ1 on Wednesday at 12.01am