Last Friday, when PBR stormed into Madison Square Garden for the 15th time and held its annual VIP Garden party at the Hulu Theater leading into the annual bull-riding event (back after a one-year hiatus due to Coronavirus), it was a celebration and news event like none other.
Billionaires were in the house signing the front page of the morning’s Wall Street Journal, and banners of new PBR teams – that’s right, bull riding teams – hung on the walls. There’s the Austin Gamblers. Texas Rattlers. Arizona Ridge Riders. Carolina Chaos. Kansas City Outlaws. Missouri Thunder. Nashville Stampede. Oklahoma Freedom.
You could call the new money, attention, and glitz surrounding a down-home dirty sport like bull riding “The Yellowstone Effect,” which WSJ did in breaking the news of the new teams set to compete in a season running July to November. But the truth is, PBR has been advancing and promoting the western sports and western lifestyle mantra for nearly 30 years and rodeo’s roots run centuries deep across the Americas.
Slow and steady growth – winning one fan at a time by producing consistently entertaining events, great support from CBS and now Pluto TV, and always cutting through the clutter with sharp storytelling – brought PBR to the point of announcing its biggest expansion since the sport held its first championship in 1994.
With events drawing raucous crowds coast to coast for many years, the fact is PBR has been driving a cowboy renaissance paving the way for expansion.
The PBR Team Series may not be the most exciting name but it’s a spot-on descriptor for a new league of 8 brand new bull riding teams, each based in a home city, playing home games in a 10-event regular season schedule that starts in July, culminating in a playoff and championship in Las Vegas in November.
If it took the success of “Yellowstone” to remind others to realize the enduring appeal of cowboys, so be it.
Endeavor-owned PBR is again taking the proverbial bull by the horns to make its biggest play yet in an effort to take an already exciting sport to new heights by adding professional coaches, bigger local events, and new fan rooting interests.
PBR Commissioner Gleason told the Journal that with the formation of the new league accompanying the individual Unleash The Beast tour (which will now run January to May), compensation for the average top level bull rider will double. For the punishment they take, pro bull riders are vastly underpaid. Gleason believes that money will help draw more athletes to the sport.
Uniquely, this isn’t a start up league. Team owners, including world-class technology investor Egon Durban, co-CEO of Silver Lake (whose investment portfolio includes ownership in the Manchester City Football Club and NYC FC MLS club), entertainment disruptor Thomas Tull of Teton Ridge (who has a stake in the Pittsburgh Steelers), legendary entrepreneur Johnny Morris who founded owns Bass Pro (basing his team at the spectacular Thunder Ridge Amphitheater in the Ozarks), retail impresario John Fisher of the Gap (who owns the Oakland As and San Jose Earthquakes), and legendary newsman Billy Morris of Morris Communications (with media outlets now promoting bull riding) have seized the opportunity to join an already established sport known in their teams’ cities with a growing partner base that included 10 new PBR national partners signed in 2021 alone.
“The owners are stepping into an established sport that’s now expanding with a team bull riding competition format that’s been tested in our Global Cups, the Monster Energy Team Challenge that kept us going during the summer of 2020 when other sports were shut down, and aboard the USS Lexington aircraft carrier for events raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity,” Gleason said. “At every one of these team events, the competition rose a notch and the atmosphere was even more electric.”
PBR didn’t go out and advertise teams or hire consultants to sell the team sanctions. To find the ownership groups introduced at MSG, the organization simply looked to businesspeople they knew, people who get the magic of the sport, and don’t need the weatherman to tell them the direction cultural winds are blowing.
The Journal article introducing the new cities and owners touched on the tremendous lure of the West.
There is indeed a pining for simpler times, open spaces, and more honesty and trust in our relationships (and from our societal institutions).
In our changing, often upside-down world, there’s a constant – the allure of basic cowboy values that were the bedrock of developing most of the beautiful country that spans far and wide across the river behind the owners who stood on the podium at the Hulu theater on the west side of Manhattan.
Call it the Yellowstone Effect if you must, but this summer when the new PBR Team Series launches, fans will be witnessing the next evolution of a three-decade old sport rooted in centuries old traditions that still has tremendous, unlocked potential for growth, because here, and everywhere, the world needs more cowboys.
That’s the vision. What happens next will be as fun to watch as a pissed off Beth Dutton.
