Last Friday morning, getting ready to ring the New York Stock Exchange’s opening bell, the cowboys of PBR walked onto the trading floor to hoots and hollers of “Yellowstone! Yellowstone!”
That’s all right with PBR Commissioner and CEO Sean Gleason, though when comparisons of his sport’s increasing popularity are made with cable’s No. 1 drama, he points out that PBR, down at the stock exchange celebrating its 30th anniversary with three-decade partner Wrangler, has been promoting Western ways for three decades.
Whether it’s the pixie dirt that seems to be surrounding the sport of pro bull riding or the vaunted “Yellowstone Effect,” professional bull riding is on a roll: Bobby DelVecchio, a legendary rodeo cowboy from, of all places, the Bronx, rang the opening bell, and the market soared 702 points.
DelVecchio’s story is made for the big screen: 50 years ago when the rodeo came to town, he hopped the turnstiles in the Bronx for a subway to midtown to shine boots and shoes at The Garden. Bobby used the money to pay his fees for junior rodeo in New Jersey.
Twenty years later, the bull rider known as “the Concrete Cowboy,” who had finished No. 2 in the world three times, was one of 20 rodeo cowboys who kicked in $1,000 to help found the standalone bull riding sport known as Professional Bull Riders. Now he was back in NYC and the Garden to celebrate the sport’s 30 th year anniversary.
The night that DelVecchio triggered a God’s honest bull market, his sport stormed into MSG for the 16th time and over the weekend would set an organization attendance record at “The World’s Most Famous Arena,” welcoming 38,000 fans, ncluding a raucous, sold-out Saturday night.
PBR is a collision sport wrapped in a Broadway show. When Official Entertainer Flint Rasmussen pulled out his harmonica on the shark cage to perform Billy Joel’s Piano Man at “9 o’clock on a Saturday,” the entire packed arena was swaying in song. Demand was so great this weekend that the organization’s overwhelmed ticketing department was painfully slow on my own request; for the league, that’s a customer service issue to be addressed, but one I assume they’ll gladly deal with.
PBR’s growth in New York wasn’t instant, according to Gleason. He remembers 18 years ago (one year was skipped at MSG due to COVID), when he was supporting then-CEO Randy Bernard, nobody knew what the heck bull riding was, let alone coming to the event, and the two were handing out tickets on 7 th Avenue. Bernard and Gleason had ingeniously created stickers in the shape of bull heads, and they stuck them to manhole covers throughout Manhattan. The stickers were creating a lot of buzz – subterranean steam would rise from the bulls’ noses. The City got hip to it and levied a fine.
Gleason gladly paid the penalty for the publicity value; a few years later, he spent serious money to buck bulls in Times Square, drawing even more attention. That caught the eye of CBS executives and helped lead to a TV deal for PBR, which continues to this day and goes until 2028.
The new bull riding book, Love & Try, by my Fordham classmate Andrew Giangola, recounts another story showing how far PBR has come in the Big Apple. In one of the early events, the rider Pistol Robinson had a terrible wreck, breaking both his legs. Racing to the hospital, the ambulance hit every pothole imaginable, which was not pleasant for Robinson. In the emergency room, doctors asked how this accident had happened.
“Riding bulls,” Robinson said.
Nobody would believe it. There are no bulls in Manhattan! They kept asking the question. Each time the answer was the same. One nurse speculated that the guy dressed up like a cowboy must be drunk or on drugs believing it’ Halloween.
Finally, the Texan conceded: “OK, OK. I was hit by a cab. Can you fix me up?” On Sunday night, after two-time World Champion and New York winner Jose Vitor Leme hoisted the Charging Bull trophy, as fans poured from the Garden, Kosha Dillz, a hip hop musician, was rappin about bull riding on the corner of 8 th Avenue and 33rd Street.
Giangola happened to be carrying the event’s silver bull championship trophy created by the Sicilian artist Arturo di Modica, who also made the much bigger, world’s most famous bull sculpture; 7,000 pounds of brass bovine bravado that sits near the stock exchange the cowboys had visited two days earlier.
He handed the rapper the one-of-a-kind work and rolled video for PBR’s Instagram feed.
When the street rappers are onto you, it’s safe to say you’ve finally made it in New York.
