Sports books written by league executives can be interesting and illuminating but also risk being safe, watered down, and predictable.
The exec who oversees PR for PBR (Professional Bull Riders) from an Endeavor office in New York, Andrew Giangola, has just released a new book that bucks the inherent challenges of sanitized prose, offering a vivid, often surprising insider’s take on the sport he helps promote.
Love & Try: Stories of Gratitude and Grit from Professional Bull Riding is an entertaining and at times poetic dive into a 29-year-old sport that will expand next month from strictly individual competition to add a new bull riding team league taking place July to November.
The book is as much about “Western values” as the beautiful yet brutal sport of bull riding. PBR is a traveling circus of sorts, and Giangola, a former Fordham classmate who I have called one of the best storytellers in sports, takes us on a fast-moving trip with a colorful cast of characters, portrayed as a pioneering family who were first to face down the daunting challenge of successfully holding live events when we’re supposed to be avoiding crowds.
Here’s more about an ambitious labor of love that manages to be both reverent and irreverent on the same pages.
Why did you write this book?
I’m a New Yorker who rides a subway instead of a horse. I’m the least qualified person to write about bull riding, but maybe a good choice for casting fresh eyes on a very colorful and unfamiliar scene.
In my PR role with PBR, I found myself surrounded by horned cattle and guys named Cody and Chase, taking it all in, wide eyed and curious, filling notebooks with cowboy quotes and wild anecdotes. Since I began serving the sport in 2015 after Endeavor acquired PBR, I’ve been the proverbial kid in the candy store, itching to figure out a bull riding book.
There are so many worthy characters in the sport – hard-working, plain-spoken men and women with a refreshing, gritty, can-do attitude that’s driving the popularity of shows like “Yellowstone.” And in the background is constant, palpable danger. These courageous people deserve a moment in the sun.
A book can also be part of the repertoire of any PR professional in the influence business. In our jobs of promoting and protecting brands, sometimes we’re fighting disinformation and correcting false narratives. For PBR, that’s the false allegation that the bulls are mistreated. Nothing could be further from the truth, and those falsehoods are corrected. The bulls are magnificent athletes bred to buck; they’re the true rockstars of the sport.
How do you “correct falsehoods” without sounding defensive?
Through telling the stories of the men and women who raise and care for their beloved animal athletes. Once I had an assortment of stories across the sport, it was clear that the bulls and their handlers were the place to start, which is why Tiffany and Jerome Davis are up front. Consider their love affair: 22-year-old Tiffany is in the hospital waiting for word on her just-paralyzed bull rider fiancé. An insensitive, condescending doctor says she would be leaving Jerome because that’s what all the girlfriends do in her situation. And here they are decades later, raising bulls they treat like their children to compete in a sport that’s grown leaps and bounds since Jerome was hurt. They’re the heart and soul of Love & Try.
Is that love for the bulls what you mean by “Love & Try”?
It is central to that, along with the love and passion the people working in the sport have for what they do.
“Try” is something I heard in the first athlete interview I sat in on, which happened to be with two-time World Champion J. B. Mauney. When J. B. is the initial bull rider you work with, it’s like meeting your first painter, who happens to be Rembrandt. Asked to explain his profession, J.B. Mauney said, “You hold onto that bull rope until your head hits the ground. This sport is nothing but try.”
I started hearing others talk about “try” in different ways. Mauney says in his Foreword that try is the ingredient for success in anything in life. He’s right. (Ask any marriage counselor.)
It feels like Mauney is a foil popping up with blunt, straight-to-the-gut, funny commentary throughout.
Investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller was covering head injuries for a Fusion documentary, and she spent a lot of time with J.B. She would say that of all the famous, world champion athletes she’s interviewed, including the biggest stars in soccer, boxing, and Formula 1, no one is as charismatic and intriguing as J.B. Mauney. He is absolutely fearless. The man completely liveson his terms.
And he has a way of cutting right to the core. The first time I worked in a J.B. witticism, it felt like we had a good thing going. Why stop?
As Mauney says in the Foreword, this book will help bull riders?
Yes. Author and PBR proceeds will be donated to the Western Sports Foundation to help pay the medical bills of injured riders.
Why did you decide to do that?
I sit behind a keyboard and occasionally battle a hang nail. These guys put everything on the line every time they nod their heads in the bucking chute. Western Sports Foundation is a great organization helping riders who get hurt.
Towards the middle of the book, you tell the story of how PBR led the sports world back to competition following the COVID-19 shut down. Why is that important?
During the height of the pandemic, PBR was the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Charting a course to keep the business going during a scary time of complete uncertainty, could have been a book in itself. It was a quintessential example of love and try…and fitting that a group of cowboys — the rugged, self-reliant people who overcame challenges to settle the West — were the ones who figured out a way to get back to business during this invisible scourge.
I’ve been very fortunate to serve accomplished brands and executives. I can’t imagine ever being prouder than in playing a small part in showing a way to live with danger responsibly during a global pandemic.
Does telling that story risk producing as a “corporate” read like an extended press release?
Najiah Knight during the Miniature Bull Riding Finals – PBR Finals week in Las Vegas, NV – 11.9.2019 Photo by Christopher Thompson
It’s only one of a few dozen stories, but to your point, clearly, I’m a cheerleader for bull riding and the organization’s values. I quickly grew to love this sport and its people and make no apologies for proudly publicizing it, them and what we did. At the same time, nobody wants to read fluff. I tried to balance home-team boosterism with honestly looking at different parts of the sport, including serious, sometimes catastrophic injuries inevitable when a 150-pound cowboy gets on the back of an 1,800-pound bull bred to buck with nothing but a bull rope in his hand. There’s a chapter on PBR’s doctor. We go through a terrible tragedy at a rider’s funeral.
Your NASCAR book, The Weekend Starts on Wednesday, started with you sleeping with the fans…in their buses in the infield for research purposes. How much of this new book is your first-person voice and experiences versus just reporting on the sport?
I struggled with that; in the grand scheme, I’m nobody with fans. They want Chase Outlaw (real name, by the way) not me. Even so, understanding how easy it is to veer into naked self-indulgence, in a few instances, I couldn’t help but to jump into the action to add context, particularly when working closely to promote athletes like Najiah Knight, then a 13-year-old riding mini bulls as she tries to become the first girl to make it to the PBR, or Bonner Bolton, who broke his neck on an ill-timed dismount, was temporarily paralyzed, signed by IMG Models then competed on “Dancing with the Stars.”
Or, as you wrote about the bad get-off that nearly killed that rider: “Bolton was launched like a midlife-crisis billionaire’s rocket”.
Yes. No offense, of course, to any billionaires building rockets who may read this.
Is Love & Try a lot like your NASCAR book?
They’re both full of character-driven profiles united by a theme. The Weekend Starts on Wednesday explored stock car racing through the eyes of its most passionate and remarkable fans. There are fan stories in Love & Try, but the focus is the athletes and people behind the scenes — from the bull handlers and the doctor operating a makeshift emergency room in the bowels of the arena to the official entertainer making politically incorrect jokes between rides and wrecks, the CBS play-by-play voice, and the dirt man, a soil savant who lays down the best bucking surface.
What do you hope to accomplish with Love & Try?
A lot of people come to a bull riding believing it’s not for them, but they’ll check it out. And they wind up loving it and becoming fans. How great if a book from the perspective of an awed newcomer to the culture can bring people to a new place they’d never even considered. Hopefully, we can educate those interested in learning about bull riding, put smiles on faces, bring new fans into the tent, and raise money for injured bull riders.
Love & Try: Stories of Gratitude and Grit from Professional Bull Riding (Cedar Gate Publishing) is available on PBRShop.com and amazon.com with proceeds helping pay injured bull riders medical bills.
