City Slickers

While Caught Looking tends to concentrate primarily on mainstream American team sports - baseball, basketball, football and hockey - there's always room to mix in a more obscure athletic spectacle from time to time.  I spent my last evening in Manhattan (before I head back to California, that is) at Madison Square Garden, watching the season opener for the Professional Bull Riding (PBR) tour.  Years ago I went to a smaller-scale rodeo in Fort Worth, Texas, but had only seen bull riding on television before Friday night.  Though the MSG version of the PBR tour might not be completely reflective of what the circuit is all about, the event certainly brought some country-style fun to the typically urban Garden atmosphere.

Professional Bull Riding drew a very unique crowd to MSG.  While some of the people in attendance were legitimate bull riding fans - most likely transplants from other parts of the country now residing in New York City - more (like me) were there just to see what the event was all about.  Of the "non-fans," many appeared to be recent college graduates still stuck in the frat party mindset who saw the PRB tour event as an opportunity to throw on a cowboy hat, a short denim skirt and a pair of cheap cowboy boots and drink large quantities of overpriced beer.  There was a lot of excessive drinking (much more so than at a typical Knicks or Rangers game at the Garden), a lot of obnoxious twenty-somethings and a lot of valley girl accents all around us.

Once I got past the rather unsavory spectators in my section, though, I started to enjoy the event.  Unless you're some sort of animal rights activist, I'd bet you'd find the PBR tour extremely entertaining.  The bulls are giant, the riders are fearless and the rodeo clowns are humorous - usually unintentionally, but amusing nonetheless.  The PBR puts on a much more professional event than I anticipated, too - while the "playing surface" itself it little more than a ring of dirt, the riding area is surrounded by ad-covered fencing and is backed by a giant video board and a host of other bull riding-related advertising.  Though companies like Dewalt tools, Cooper Tires and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer don't normally secure advertising inventory inside the world's most famous arena, they seemed right at home plastered around the bull riding ring.  At the same time, the PBR did seem to try to appeal to a more modern, urban crowd by replacing traditional country background music with mostly hip-hop.

The PBR tour involves a lot more infrastructure than a simple ring of dirt.

The biggest negative about going to a PBR tour event is the lack of explanation as to what's going on.  When you go to a Knicks game at MSG, you likely don't think about the fact that it would be virtually impossible to follow all of the action had you never seen a basketball game before.  During the bull riding, the announcers don't say much other than the score given to the rider after each ride - you quickly realize what it would be like to watch your first baseball or football game.  After watching a few rides, I was able to pick up the basics - the rider gets points based on how long he stays on the bull and how violent the ride was, and the bulls are scored similarly but in reverse - but couldn't really follow exactly how the scoring worked and wasn't able to distinguish a challenging ride from a tamer one.  Though the PBR tour might hope that spectators can follow the action alone, perhaps in future years they should do a better job anticipating a less-savvy-than-usual crowd when they head to New York City.