…Continued from the previous post.

It’s fortunate that I don’t wear a pacemaker, and that my heart is more or less sturdy. Because if I did, or if it wasn’t…well, The Bird would be on The Concorde to Paris right now, with the generous proceeds of my life insurance policy tucked under her wing.

And she’d have the Professional Bull Riders Tour to thank for the windfall.

See, I was recently sitting in the upper balcony of Las Vegas’s Thomas & Mack Center, just looking around and minding my own business when the time arrived to introduce the cowboys about to compete in the PBR World Finals.

It was not subtle.

But once I climbed out of the lap of the woman seated next to me and apologized for having landed there, I had to admit it was quite a spectacle to behold. Well, to visually behold, anyway.

For while the introductions were certainly attention-getting, the result of frenzied shouting by the emcee, a rapid-fire approach to presenting each cowboy, and a very sketchy P.A. system was that the entire ceremony was reduced to simply a wall of sparks and noise.

Right from the beginning, it was obvious to me that the sound system had been set up and tested for the benefit of those seated in the expensive lower bowl of seats. Truth be told, the lack of an effort to make the audio intelligible throughout the building was not a surprise – this is pretty standard in sports arenas throughout the country.

But here’s the thing. At sporting events like basketball and hockey games you don’t really need the benefit of commentary to enjoy the experience. The game itself is the draw, and it unfolds before you with little need for a lot of ancillary information. But as I learned over the course of two and a half garbled hours, this was different – this was a show, with significant breaks in the bull-riding given over to comedy routines and similar dialogue-intensive activities. And when you can only make out every 8^th or 9^th spoken word, the entertainment value tends to wane.  

On the other hand, the saving grace of the event was the video board. Throughout the evening, the presentation of stats for both riders and bulls was rich and nuanced, and the camera angles used for replays provided multiple views of each ride. And since the standings were updated regularly, I was pretty much able to consistently gauge what was going on, and what the consequences of each ride would be. Basically I could have been wearing earplugs and followed the action just as effectively.

And speaking of the action, it was more than a little impressive – especially on the part of the bulls. The very first rider of the evening was thrown seconds into his ride, and injured in the process. OK, you’ve got my attention.

It took me a while to pick up on this, but the video board eventually educated me on the fact that the cowboys aren’t the only ones that amass statistics – the bulls themselves are rated as well. Their success in throwing riders is assiduously tracked and monitored throughout the season, creating a handicapping “ying” to the rider’s statistical “yang”. Both cowboy and bull were introduced and profiled prior to each ride. And as the evening wore on, it was more and more obvious to me that the bulls were winning.

The format for the competition is straightforward:  (1) Cowboy and bull are released into the ring; (2) Bull bucks like crazy; and (3) Cowboy tries like hell to stay aboard. The rules limit the longest ride to “just” 8 seconds – that is the definition of success, at least from the cowboy’s standpoint. Nobody’s ever received a straight answer from the bulls on this topic.

After the 8-second mark is attained, the cowboy remains on the bull only as long as it takes to identify an opportunity to get thrown off in the least painful way possible. The vast majority of the rides do not last 8 seconds. Some are over in less than 2 seconds.

The scoring system for bull riding is also clear-cut, and akin to that of an Olympic sport in that a 10.0 is a theoretical perfect ride. The cowboy’s technique on the ride is taken into consideration, as is the handicapping provided by the bull’s rating. All in all, anything in excess of 9.0 is a big deal – and indeed there were only two rides all night that exceeded that score.

After four cowboys ride in succession, a time out was taken. This parsing out of action was somewhat similar to the way that changes in possession create breaks in a football game.

Trust me – your mind doesn’t tend to wander as you watch each of these four-ride groups.Where the mind does wander though, is in between groups. And it does more than wander – it goes outside, hails a cab and heads to the airport. For this was not as much a pure sporting event as it was an updated version of Western Vaudeville, owing no doubt to its roots in rodeo.

After the burst of adrenaline that each four-ride group injected into the atmosphere, there was an obligatory period of sponsored schtick and clowning around (literally and figuratively). Maybe these long breaks were necessary from an operational standpoint. Perhaps they were dictated by the Versus network to enable enough advertising to fill out a two-hour broadcast window. Possibly it was done to create more opportunity to highlight sponsorship programming in the arena.

Whatever the case, nobody seemed to mind. There was very little restlessness in the house – quite the opposite in fact. Many were reveling in the ancillary activities that stemmed from aggressive sponsorship activation. In other words, these people appeared delighted to be marketed to.

At one point about two-thirds of the way through the competition, an even longer break took place – the equivalent of half-time in other sports. A country duet sang a couple of numbers. Rodeo clown Flint Rasmussen did an extended routine. Air cannons firing stress balls into the crowd made their rounds. The Jack Daniels Girls appeared for a T-shirt toss. Two lucky fans took part in a Bass Pro Shops casting competition. The video board was employed to broadcast a “Stanley Stud-Finder” fan interactive…thing-y.

I took this extended opportunity to scratch my eyes out.

Here’s the point:  I absolutely loved the bull-riding – I’m not exaggerating when I say that I was transfixed by the action. In trying to determine a ratio of that action to the fluff which engulfed it though, I find it almost incalculable. But I’ll give it a shot.

There were roughly 50 riders in the competition, each of whom averaged about 4 seconds on top of a bull. This equals about 200 seconds, or 3 minutes and 20 seconds of actual action in a two-hour programming window. That’s 2.8% of the PBR “performance” given over to athletic competition.

Given that, I came to two conclusions. One, the PBR World Finals only barely qualifies as a sporting event. Two, PBR fans are the most patient people in the cosmos. Especially my peeps up there with me in the Unintelligible Audio Zone – the ones who taught me how to pronounce “Whatt’d he say…?” in a perfect Southern drawl.

Next Up:  The U.S. Masters Synchronized Swimming Championships