At Confession Time, we preferred Pam to Sissy in Urban Cowboy.
It's Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo time again in Houston, which means most of us will be avoiding the South Loop and the Astrodome area like Jonah Goldberg avoids enlisting. I've attended the rodeo quite a few times in the past, mostly to catch a musical act (nothing says initmate, fan-friendly venue like sitting on the front row and still being 100 yards from the band) or crash a friend's BBQ tent. Sometimes, just sometimes, I would head in and check out the actual events.
Not being from Texas originally, I never fancied myself the cowboy type. My friends and I played at it occasionally as kids, but were more prone to emulate our favorite TV cops (I was Hutch) until Star Wars came along and made us fight over who got to be Han. Still, I had come curiosity about the ins and outs of calf-roping and bronco busting, so in I'd go. Most of the events left me pretty cold, except one: bull riding.
I love bull riding. I'll even watch Country Music Television to catch it, and not because I have any kind of admiration for these guys who mount a pissed off animal of that size and then try to stay on, it's because I root for the bulls.
Face it, most events in the rodeo have some kind of antecedent in the Old West. Cowboys had to break horses by riding them, calves had to be roped and bulldogged to be branded. You can argue about the need for this kind of activity to be performed in an air conditioned stadium for entertainment, but at least they all have a certain historical legitimacy.
Not bull riding. I'd like to see these guys from the Professional Bull Riders Association go back in time to the 1880s and tell some trailhand, "Hey Zeke, we need you to climb up on the back of this 2,000 pound bull and try to stay on after we annoy it with cattle prods*. It's not to break him to the saddle or anything, but just because we think it looks cool." He'd spit chaw on your foot, at the very least.
Bull riders get what's coming to them, as far as I'm concerned. The only reason the sport even exists is because saddle-bronc riding wasn't "extreme" enough. Well, nothing's more extreme than a colapsed lung and a crushed femur or two. Ride 'em cowboys.
And no diatribe about bull riding would be complete without this passage from the PBR's own web site about one of their "top bulls:"
At the end of 2004, Little Yellow Jacket had been ridden only 11 times in 76 BFTS attempts to an average score of 93 points. PBR Livestock Superintendant and Vice President Cody Lambert described Little Yellow Jacket as, "a once-in-a-lifetime bull. He has the kind of heart, desire, and athletic ability that true champions in any walk of life possess. If they're athletes, once they leave their sport, it nevers seems the same."
I wish we had ESPN back when whaling was still practiced by this country. Imagine the "athlete's profiles" they cook up of giant sea mammals being stuck with harpoons.
* For purposes of this entry, we'll assume you won't have to explain electricity to him
I'd like to see these guys from the Professional Bull Riders Association go back in time to the 1880s and tell some trailhand, "Hey Zeke, we need you to climb up on the back of this 2,000 pound bull and try to stay on after we annoy it with cattle prods*.
I thought they annoyed the bulls by, um, tying up their testicles. Am I wrong?