The most proficient storytellers in sports tend to do their best work when the stakes are highest and the lights shining the brightest.
From time to time, George Pyne, former COO of NASCAR who now runs Bruin Capital, still talks about a Friday in February more than 15 years ago when the front page of each of the four sections of USA Today showcased a different story – general news, sports, lifestyle and business – about The Daytona 500.
We like to visit with PBR (Professional Bull Riders) from time to time to observe a sport in a similar place as NASCAR was back when big-time stock car auto racing was seizing a cultural moment and seemed to be catching lighting in bottle in racing into the mainstream.
Buoyed by a renaissance for all things Western, in 2023 PBR is amid the best season in its 30-year history with 28 event sellouts and five consecutive CBS broadcasts drawing more than a million fans.
The sport continues to be a communications and storytelling model for creative news-making, evident at its marquee event at Madison Square Garden each January as well as PBR World Finals, which crowns an individual champion each year in a grueling two-weekend event that is this weekend in Fort Worth (May 12).
Heading toward the Finals, last Sunday morning as thousands of cyclists participating in Bike NYC pedaled past, two cowboys were out on Fox News plaza with a mechanical bull for a Fox and Friends Weekend segment
promoting the debut of “Last Cowboy Standing,” an elimination-style reality show giving one rider a chance to make the big show – the Unleash the Beast series concluding its season during World Finals this weekend.
Finals contender Daniel Keeping, a bull rider from central casting if there ever were one, was all smiles, sporting a fresh, gleaming shiner and broken tooth in promoting the show now streaming on Fox Nation. Asked about the black eye, Keeping, a star of the show testing the mettle of the next generation’s bull riders, said in his southern-fried draw, “All gas no breaks, baby!”
That about sums up the sport’s Comms approach of late.
On Tuesday, for the second straight year, PBR was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in a fun and informative story sharing how one of the hardest-working crew in the touring business surmounts various challenges to bring tons and tons of dirt, steel and bulls to big cities around the country, transforming hockey and basketball arenas into bull riding meccas.
(Incidentally to show the power of the press, “Last Cowboy Standing” wound up with Fox as a direct result of the 2022 Wall Street Journal cover piece on a new bull riding league PBR was launching. When the article appeared, a Fox content executive phoned the bull riding organization completely intrigued. Who knew bull riding was exploding like this? Fox had to get involved, he said. It just so happens PBR was beginning to shop a Survivor-meets-Fear Factor-meets Big Brother reality show it had shot, and the deal started to take shape.)
This week’s piece by Charles Passy, a veteran of crafting the The Journal’s quirky “A1 Hed” pieces, was full of memorable characters and anecdotes – the essential raw materials for all good story telling, which are abundant in Love & Try: Stories of Gratitude and Grit in Professional Bull Riding by my old Fordham classmate and PBR PR head Andrew Giangola (at the Rose Hill campus, we both learned from legendary sports story-teller Stan Fischler). Love & Try was recently awarded The Wrangler for best non-fiction book of 2022 at the 62nd annual Western Heritage Awards. (It feels safe to say my former classmate is the only person in Brooklyn now possessing one of these large bronze trophies of a cowboy on a horse.)
In another big score, on Thursday, USA Today exclusively ran the trailer for “The Ride,” a riveting 8-episode docuseries set to stream on Amazon Prime Video on May 30. In following star riders in the first season of the new PBR Team Series, producer Kinetic Content received the most comprehensive access ever given to an outside crew to go deep inside the world’s most dangerous organized sport like never before.
Without giving away spoiler details, there are two intense personal tragedies affecting riders on two of the league’s eight teams. “The Ride” does an admirable job of covering terrible personal losses suffered without being crass or exploitative. To the contrary, what emerges is more like a family coming together in difficult times.
If this docuseries is anything like “Drive to Survive” on Netflix has been for F1, riders like Chase Outlaw (real name), Ezekiel Mitchell, Eli Vastbinder, and Boudreaux Campbell will become household names, giving a huge lift to a sport still not in the consideration set for millions. These athlete cast members were on the red carpet Thursday night at the ACM Awards on Prime Video (synergy, baby!). The series will have its red-carpet premiere Sunday night in Fort Worth after Round 3 of World Finals.
Before that, during Rounds 1 and 2, PBR’s new brand ambassador Cole Hauser, who plays Rip Wheeler on “Yellowstone,” is shooting a new PBR brand commercial. Hauser is co-creator of the campaign, and the commercials will be filmed in part during breaks in the bull-riding event with plans to include fans. Other scenes are set to be filmed in Montana. Aligning with the most famous cowboy on television is a big awareness play that bears watching.
In moving World Finals to Fort Worth, Texas, an epicenter for surging cowboy culture, PBR aims to create a festival atmosphere that makes the sporting event a travel destination for fans, much like Vegas was for so many years. (The separate Teams Championship remains in Las Vegas in late October).
This year, that includes a “Dirty 30” bash at Billy Bob’s, the world’s largest honky honk in the Fort Worth Stockyards. In another “Yellowstone” connection, Ryan Bingham from the show who is a country music star in his own right with Grammy and Academy Award song wins, will be a headline performer.
Dirty 30 party goers will have two days to detox, and then compete in a 5K/3K run across the Historic Stockyards that requires runners in the 3K leg to wear cowboy boots. Don’t laugh. The race is sponosored by Ariat, a boot company founded 30 years ago when Reebok rejected the idea to utilize the most advanced sneaker technology to produce next-generation riding boots, because rodeo competitors are athletes, too. (When tossed off the bull, you want run FAST.)
During Finals Week, PBR will host the 2023 Team Series draft (May 17 at 6 p.m. ET, carried by Cowboy Channel and RidePass on Pluto TV) to prepare for the second season of the new team league, which now takes up the back half of the calendar year in an 11-event season that starts after the individual competition concludes at World Finals.
All of us who have had jobs in Communications and storyteling live for the big events. PBR’s lead-in this week to one of the sport’s marque events shows how doing the advance spadework to execute effective story telling brings different levels of buzz. For an up-and-coming brand still scratching to get into the mainstream, the value of that kind of attention can be immeasurable.
