Innovation in business necessarily includes the apprehension that comes with taking risks. Sometimes you feel like you’re strapped to the back of pissed-off animal much larger than you. Sometimes you actually are.
Fort Worth has a pretty good history in the innovation space. Besides achievements in the energy sector and improvisational music, the city has often broken fresh ground, so to speak, in western sports. Sometimes, as happened Friday night at Dickies Arena, those advances have come eight seconds (or less) at a time.
Cowtown pioneered indoor rodeo and bucking chutes, both of which are necessary components to staging an event like Friday’s PBR Teams show at Dickies Arena. The sport of rodeo built itself by gradually adding components like those to traditional western sports competitions. The teams concept itself has extended that model in an unprecedented direction.
The five games the circuit put on Friday night came as part of Rattler Days, named for the league’s local team, the Ariat Texas Rattlers. Every team in the PBR Teams Series competed in one game, beginning with the Florida Freedom’s win over the Nashville Stampede and concluding with the Rattlers’ narrow triumph over the Oklahoma Wildcatters. The home team for a given week always goes last, with the undercard building anticipation and the host squad getting hype videos and extra pyro.
The five-year-old teams concept itself has added a new wrinkle to a traditionally individual sport. Indeed, the Professional Bull Riders organization, currently based in Fort Worth, pushed the envelope in the 1990s by establishing a high-level rodeo competition focused on just the one western sports vertical. The organizers thought paying customers would like it and so far they’ve been right.
Innovation makes its presence felt throughout the footprint. The “shark cage” in the middle of the arena allows for a revealing low-level camera angle, but it’s not movable once in place. Its placement would not accommodate steer wrestlers or tie-down ropers, among others.
We also see helmets required for riders born on or after October 15, 1994 and replay challenges.
Then there’s the music. PBR looks to rock the place and they apparently don’t think they need a fiddle in the band.
I’m sure there are some people who don’t like it. My first brush with PBR came in the 2000s when I worked on the marketing team for the Mesquite Championship Rodeo. The MCR looked to innovate by eliminating tie-down roping, which they feared turned off kids and families. It was a controversial move and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association wouldn’t sanction the proceedings without the full roster of events. Management thus turned to the PBR to sanction the weekly rodeo’s most popular attraction. Did the change work? Maybe. It might have retained some fans while turning off others. But there was no way to know until they tried it. When the company changed hands a few years later, they returned it to the PRCA fold where it has remained.
Indeed, the PBR and PRCA have continued to co-exist. Some bull riders compete in both competitions. Josh Frost, the 2024 PRCA World Champion, rides for the Rattlers while still seeking another PRCA title. It’s not out of the question that the coaching and training infrastructure the teams provide could help bull riders become their best selves and raise the level of the entire sport.
You don’t have to like it. If you prefer your bull riding with a side of barrel racing, team roping, and traditional western orchestra, you’ll get that in Dickies Arena this winter and have plenty of options to go see it throughout the year in nearby venues. But if those happenings include more exciting qualified rides to cheer because of the PBR’s efforts, you’ll appreciate those in the long run.
There’s nothing wrong with catering to different audiences. The Rattlers celebrated Hispanic Heritage night, with special tribute paid to the contributions of Latin innovators in the sport and the western lifestyle. I loved it when they played AC/DC as Australian Rattler Qynn Andersen was about to rock on the back of Texan BO Magic Burner (the bull did a dirty deed to the rider, bucking Anderson off in less than four seconds). Brazilian rider José Vitor Leme recorded Friday evening’s top individual score, posting a 91.10 aboard Elmo for the Austin Gamblers in their win over Carolina.
Daniel Keeping of Montague, Texas gave the
Rattlers 90.25 points on a bull named Fury, the team’s only qualified ride of the night and just enough to hold off an Oklahoma team that earned 88.60 points on its only eight-second ride. Seeing the rides in person gives one an unmatched perspective on the athleticism supplied by both bulls and riders, as well as an appreciation for the risk the latter take in getting on the backs of huge animals specially bred to roughly dislodge them.
One can also appreciate the risks that come with innovation in business, especially in a category as tradition-bound as rodeo.
If you’d like to see for yourself, Rattler Days, presented by Germania Insurance, continues Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at Dickies Arena, and the team has announced the competition will return the first weekend of October next year as well.
