As our friends at the PBR reach a championship weekend, a good reminder to look at how things have evolved this winter and spring.
“This is the greatest weekend in Western sports.”
So declared Stephen Jones, Chief Operating Officer of the Dallas Cowboys, at the opening press conference to PBR’s championship weekend (May 17-18) to be held at his team’s home.
“When we were building AT&T Stadium, we envisioned having the best, biggest and greatest events. PBR fits right in there. This will be our 15th PBR event here, hosting a half million fans,” Jones said.
Spanning two venues, PBR’s championship is unique. It started last week with Eliminations at the smallest arena the tour visits – Cowtown Coliseum in the historic Fort Worth Stockyards. With the field now narrowed to the final contenders, the title will be decided this weekend, 40 minutes due east, in the biggest venue the sport plays.
When a new champion receives his gold buckle and million-dollar bonus on Sunday afternoon inside “Jerry World,” it will mark the culmination of a grueling 23-event tour that began in Tucson in mid-November 2024. Across its top two tours (Unleash The Beast and Pendleton Whisky Velocity Tour), PBR hosted 853,000 fans and sold out 44 event days, records for the organization.
PBR had its first event at Cowtown Coliseum in 1993, after 20 bull riding cowboys broke away from the rodeo to create a standalone tour featuring the final, most dangerous and popular rodeo discipline: bull riding. PBR proudly declared in its fiery openings that this is NOT a rodeo. Three decades later, they’ve come full circle as a stalwart supporter of rodeo.
Championship weekend in Texas begins on Friday night with the Kid Rock’s Rock N Rodeo – a mash up of Kid Rock concert with a team-formatted rodeo featuring six teams going head-to-head simultaneously in a visually arresting drag-racing style format on the dirt blanketing the field where the Cowboys play. Fox Nation is exclusively streaming this Western sports extravaganza, and Fox News provided ground cover with Kid Rock on Jesse Watters from the stadium on Thursday night, then on Fox & Friends Friday morning in several segments promoting the modernized rodeo.
PBR’s support of women’s rodeo reaches an apex on the penultimate day of World Finals on Saturday night. During intermission, the Women’s Rodeo World Championship (WRWC) will crown four new champions inside AT&T Stadium, paying out a record $802,000. All told, with help from PBR, the WRWC has paid out $4.5 million to female rodeo athletes since 2020, said WRWC Commissioner Linsay Rosser-Sumpter.
PBR is leaning into its leadership position across Western sports as cowboy culture explodes, a story its Comms team is leaning into heavily as seen in blow-out features in GQ, Mashable, The Paris Review, Complex, Fast Company, New York Post, Chicago Tribune and Wall Street Journal.
PBR excels at finding creative ways to introduce fans to the cowboys, their bucking bull opponents, and the men and women who raise these remarkable animal athletes, such as NBC Dallas’s beautifully shot piece heading into World Finals covering the back-to-back World Champion bull aptly named Man Hater.
With events described as a party where a bull riding breaks out, to break through, especially with Gen Z and Millennials, the good time sport doesn’t take itself too seriously, whether it’s social media posts of a highly unfortunate bull encounter and bull riders blowing off steam or turning a staffer’s accident into a funny Sports Illustrated piece “Hit by a Bus, the Question is – What Would Chase Outlaw Do?”
Bull riding is foreign to many, making compelling storytelling a critical part of its success. A guiding influence has and continues to be sports TV legend David Neal, who became Executive Producer of PBR broadcasts in 2011.
In three decades at NBC, Neal produced nine Olympics, four NBA Finals, two World Series and a Super Bowl pregame show, winning 35 Emmy Awards. After leaving NBC in 2010 to form his own production company, PBR was his first client.
Neal, who has been in television nearly 40 years, said, “One of the truisms that stays constant and that’s still the case here for PBR, too, is to give the audience a reason to care. That’s why we care so much about storytelling. We want to give the audience a reason to become attached to a rider or a bull. No matter who the person is, we want to give them a reason to get engaged.”
Neal has made a career of creating lifelong fans by painstakingly creating storylines that get distracted people – some who might believe they don’t care about a particular sport – interested and engaged. Whether it’s bulls, balls, pucks, or racecars, that’s a lesson for all of us in the sports business.
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