Pro Bull Riders Rodeo

The Windy Ryon Memorial Roping is among four standout rodeo shows scheduled over the Memorial Day weekend in the Fort Worth area.

The Ryon show is scheduled Friday through Sunday at the Ryon Arena in Saginaw.

Cowtown Coliseum is the host venue for two shows. The Stockyards Championship Rodeo Winter/Spring Finals is Friday and Saturday, and the Victory for Val Super Star Calf Roping and Team Roping Matches are Sunday.

The other show is the Junior Meek Memorial Bull Bash on Saturday and Sunday at the Hood County Livestock Raisers Association Arena in Granbury.

The Ryon Roping, which begins with women's team roping at 9 a.m. Friday, features high profile roping and steer wrestling competitors such as Clay O'Brien Cooper in open team roping, which begins at noon.

The invitational calf roping event begins at 1 p.m. Saturday, and the roster of competitors includes three-time world all-around champion Trevor Brazile and former National Finals Rodeo qualifier Johnny Emmons.

On Sunday, senior steer roping begins at 8 a.m., while the invitational steer roping, featuring top Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association competitors, begins at 1 p.m. A steer wrestling match between former PRCA Texas Circuit champions Cash Myers and Bray Armes is also scheduled for Sunday.

The Stockyards Championship Rodeo finale features the top 15 in each event from the weekly Friday and Saturday night rodeos that began in January in the Fort Worth Stockyards.

Performances begin at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Trophy buckles will be awarded to season winners and finals winners in each event.

The Victory for Val Match Roping, which begins at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, will feature top competitors such as Brazile, who leads the PRCA world all-around title race. It's a fundraiser for Val Stressman, who has battled cancer for several years. She's the wife of Wrangler Jeans director of marketing Karl Stressman.

Future Pro Bull Riders is hosting the Junior Meek Memorial Bull Bash, with performances at 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Sunday.

The show is primarily for competitors ages 4 to 21 but will also feature an open bull riding competition for adults.

One of the organization's missions is to groom athletes for a career in Professional Bull Riders, which is the world's toughest league for rodeo's toughest event.

The Professional Bull Riders' second visit to Lexington will feature two former PBR world champions, numerous Built Ford Tough World Finals qualifiers and some of the world's rankest bulls.

The Virginia PBR Challenge returns to the Virginia Horse Center for two nights of action-packed excitement, Dec. 9-10 at 8 p.m. Former PBR World Champions Ednei Caminhas (2002) of Brazil and Mike Lee (2004) of Decatur, Texas, headline the contingent of 43 bull riders competing for more than $20,000

Horses and bulls anxiously fight the steel holding pens as they wait for the chance to burst from the gate to fight a cowboy from their back.

As the holding gate slams open, an animal erupts from the pen, spinning and jerking in every direction to relieve itself of the cowboys' sharp spurs. The animals grunt and snort in irritation as they perform acrobatic leaps and bound with the cowboys desperately trying to hold their grip.

The spectacle seems unreal. Massive and angry animals are performing gymnastics while men willingly climb upon their backs time and again, with hopes of hanging on for eight seconds. However, men are not the only ones going for the ride.

Melissa Phillips, 44, is a 1993 Women's Pro Rodeo Association World Champion bull rider who began a five-month tour with Longhorn Rodeo Productions last week. Each night, Phillips mounted a bull that outweighed her by 1,500 pounds and rode for eight seconds two nights out of three.

"I love it," Phillips said, as she waited for the Saturday night show to begin. "I have been around rodeo for such a long time, I heard all the stories and I learned from them."

Phillips said she has participated in barrel racing competitions since the age of six. In 1990, she rode her first bull, and by 1993, she was a WPRA world champion.

In the WPRA women's bull-riding competitions, women have the option to ride with two hands, unlike the male events, which require using only one hand to grip, Phillips said. Additionally, women are also expected to stay on the bull for six seconds instead of the men, who are required to ride for a total of eight seconds.

However, Phillips rode with one hand for the entire eight seconds on both Thursday and Friday. Riding with the same regulations as the cowboys entered in the Longhorn Bull Riding event, Phillips' scores on Thursday and Friday would have qualified her above the men's average score, giving her the lead in the men's bull-riding competition had she entered the event.

Before their turn to climb upon a living-breathing tank with horns, many cowboys prepare themselves up by yelling, slapping their legs or even hitting their own helmets. Phillips chooses to calmly prepare her gear and stretch for two events in advance before she scales the holding pen.

"I don't do that." Phillips said, shrugging. "Different athletes have different ways of going about being successful.

"I stretch a lot and spend a little bit of meditation time; I don't know how long, it just depends on what's going on," Phillips said. "Getting mentally focused is how I do my psyching up. I pray, of course, and I'm in a zone."

For many, the bull-riding event is the most anticipated event of the rodeo. The Saturday night crowd gasped and cheered as they watched cowboy and cowgirl brave the back of an animal that could easily weigh more than a ton.

On several occasions, cowboys were slammed into the metal gates surrounding the dirt arena, or jammed into the sides of the holding pens if the bull or horse was anxious to be released.

Bareback broncos and saddle broncos began the rodeo, taking the cowboys on lengthier rides around the arena than the bulls that tended to flip and twist within one area of the rink.

With each throw or pitch, the crowd held its breath, waiting for the cowboy to move. Though the steer roping and wrestling events are seemingly less dangerous, a couple of cowboys suffered from horns smashing into their arm, or cheek. The bull and bronco riders were flipped over horses' heads or thrown into gates. The rodeo's announcer was glad to announce each night that the cowboys who suffered the minor injuries were fine and would still compete.

The special vest that each rider wears is designed to disperse the impact if a horse or bull steps on a rider, Phillips explained, motioning to her own red, white and blue vest. Although Phillips climbed calmly on top of a bull each night during the Longhorn Rodeo Finals, she has sustained serious injuries during her bull-riding career.

"The worse one was when I got stepped on in Fort Worth," Phillips said. "I was wearing my vest, which is the thing that saved my life.

"He bucked me off and I fell underneath him," she said. "He stepped on me with both back feet in the chest, and he flipped me over and he got me again with his feet in my back. He broke seven ribs and punctured my lung, bruised my heart and tore my vocal cords. It was pretty serious that time."

The final night Phillips rode for only a few seconds before the bull was able to throw her off his back. Though her hand was still stuck in the strap, the two rodeo clowns immediately helped her escape before any injury occurred. Phillips smiled and threw her hands up in victory as she had done each night after her ride.

Though, the bull and bronco events were thrilling enough to keep any observer on the edge of his or her seat, the rodeo had many events that were family-oriented. The audience was entertained between events by a troop of performers who preformed acrobatic tricks on speeding horses. A cowboy took a 10-minute break to perform rope tricks resembling a Roy Rogers show, and for the first time for many rodeo observers, a female bull rider displayed her ability to stay on the back of a monstrous bull each night.

When Trevor Brazile left his home in Decatur, Texas, to become a professional cowboy, he was prepared for all the traditional rigors of the rodeo circuit: ornery steers, tumbleweed towns, tiny prize purses and the occasional busted tooth. His notion of "fame" was being asked to sign autographs at the smokeless tobacco booth.

But in the last few years, the 29-year-old has found himself square in the middle of a trend he never imagined. When he's not promoting his new line of cowboy hats or traveling the country in a complimentary 35-foot custom trailer with leather window treatments, he's eating steamed artichokes with sponsors and mingling with celebrity fans. At this weekend's Wrangler National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas, the sport's equivalent of the Super Bowl, he's been put up at the Mirage. "It all feels so foreign to me," says Brazile, a three-time national champion. "I'm a small-town guy."
So long, lonely campfires. Thanks to a convergence of factors from the recent arena-building boom to the expansion of cable sports channels to a growing number of celebrities latching on to all things Western, the manly, dusty sport of rodeo is getting an overhaul. In smaller burgs like Greeley, Colo., and more cosmopolitan cities like Chicago and Houston, rodeos are moving to bigger, fancier venues.

Some events offer $300 "chute seats" closer to the dirt and bring in tougher animals guaranteed to buck. Others host pre-rodeo wine tastings and keep masseuses on call for stressed-out spectators watching from suites. Longtime niche sponsors like Justin Boots and U.S. Smokeless Tobacco have been joined by Enterprise Rent- A-Car and Pace Picante Sauce, while the sport's two major sanctioning bodies have signed expanded television deals with several TV networks, including CBS and ESPN. It's getting so popular that some stars and business tycoons are starting to invest by purchasing some of the sport's most fearsome animals. (Jewel, the pop singer, bought a bull originally named "Midnight Confessions.")

While this red-carpet rollout has already killed off some smaller rodeos that can't keep up -- and hasn't so far done much to fatten the average cowboy's paycheck -- it is drawing more fans in urban areas. After years of flat attendance, the 650 rodeos sanctioned by the largest pro circuit, the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, drew 24 million spectators in 2004, a 9 percent increase in five years.

"We got jazzier," says Ann Bleiker, a spokeswoman for the PRCA. "And so far the good outweighs the bad."

For rodeo, a sport born on ranches in the decades after the Civil War, this is a significant departure from tradition. Rodeo has always been more of a civic enterprise than a profit center (most rodeos still take place in small Western outposts and donate their proceeds to charity). Prize purses have always been paltry -- $900 to the winner isn't unusual -- and most cowboys have long held down regular jobs to make ends meet.

But in recent years, under new management, the sport's sanctioning bodies started to worry that slickly marketed sports like NASCAR and even "extreme" sports were siphoning their audience. To fight back, both the PRCA and the other major circuit, the Professional Bull Riders, retooled their seasons to make rodeos easier to package for TV. They bypassed smaller rodeos and put their marketing muscle into tournaments in major cities where select groups of top cowboys compete for bigger payouts.

For cowboys, this move to the mainstream has been a little bemusing. Brazile, the reigning PRCA all-around champ, had one of his custom trailers featured on ESPN. Star bull rider Ty Murray, who has an agent, has appeared in a commercial for a toasted steak sandwich and posed for an upcoming issue of Esquire. Cowgirl Charmayne James, a retired barrel-racer, has her own eponymous perfume.

"It smells like fresh flowers," she says.

The riders aren't the only ones getting the star treatment: Rodeo bulls now sell at auctions for as much as $100,000, up from $4,000 a few years ago, according to stock contractors, and have their own fan memorabilia (mostly stuffed animals in their likenesses).

At 46, steer-roper Jake Barnes is one of the sport's elder statesmen. For years, he made so little money on tour (about $50,000 on average) that he had to attend 140 events a year and teach steer-roping clinics to cover costs. Nowadays, nearly all his bills are paid by patrons who spoil him with perks like courtside tickets for Phoenix Suns basketball games. More importantly, he's prolonging his career by cutting the number of rodeos he competes in by more than half and focusing on major events like RodeoHouston, where cowboys get to use a private hydrotherapy room.

"Sometimes I don't understand it," says Barnes, who's earned $88,000 in rodeos so far this year. "But now I get to be choosy."

If there's been one catalyst for the change in rodeo it's the annual 10-day PRCA finals in Las Vegas, which has become something of a phenomenon. For this year's event, which started Friday and is being broadcast on ESPN, every one of the 170,000 tickets has been sold and scalpers are charging as much as $700 for good seats. At a time when Las Vegas is traditionally sleepy, about 90 percent of the hotels on the strip are booked. Even the smaller Professional Bull Riders championship, held in the same arena in late October and early November, drew 85,000 fans, a 49 percent increase from five years ago.

One factor driving the tournament's popularity is its proximity to Hollywood. In 1999, rodeo leaped into the tabloids when Jewel started dating Murray, the bull-rider. These days, it's not unlikely to see Kiefer Sutherland and Tom Selleck jockeying with executives and casino presidents for "gold buckle" seats in the front row. And some country-music stars pay as much as $50,000 for luxury suites, the arena says.

To corporate sponsors, rodeo is a wonderful anachronism. Not only are most cowboys humble and genuine and happy to shake hands, they say, but the sport now plays in showplace arenas like Houston's Reliant Stadium, which was designed for both the rodeo and the Texans of the National Football League. It's also a cheap date. For $7,500, Houston investment banker Harry Perrin says he was able to impress 20 executives from places like Los Angeles and Chicago for a fraction of what it would have cost for the VIP treatment at a football game.

Neal Patterson, chief executive of Cerner Corp., which makes health-care information technology systems, recently became chairman of the board at Kansas City's American Royal Rodeo, a board that also includes executives from Sprint Nextel and H&R Block. Beyond the fact that cowboys "aren't a spoiled group of superathletes," Patterson says, "there's something odd but great about having your company's name on a bull chute."

Not everyone is benefiting from these changes. Though the Las Vegas finals pays out a respectable $5.2 million, cowboy compensation still lags far behind that of other professional athletes. Last year, the highest-paid rider in the PRCA made $253,000, an increase of only 16 percent from the top earnings in 1999 and less than the minimum salary for a major-league ballplayer. As the sport's focus shifts to the newer, more telegenic tournaments, as many as 50 tiny rodeos have died off in the past decade. With its winner's prize of $900, the Crazy Horse Stampede in Crazy Horse, S.D., is having trouble luring top-ranked cowboys.

Nevertheless, the sport continues to draw unlikely fans. Last month, at the invitation of a friend, Jennifer Moss, a Chicago investment banker, put on designer jeans with high heels by Michael Kors and spent an evening in Dallas watching the Interstate Batteries Texas Stampede from a luxury box with uniformed waiters.

"It had a luxurious side," says Moss, "I expected to just see a lot of dirt and animals."