Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, and Bull Riders, by Josh Peter

By Allen M. Jones, 11-18-05

Rodeo. It’s hard to imagine a sport more freighted with American symbolism. Forget for a minute the whole cultural, Clint Eastwood romantic undercarriage. Six shooters and sunsets. That sort of thing. Instead, hold it up alongside our few other national pastimes. Like baseball, it’s a sport (arguably) born on American soil. With football, it often asks for a token sacrifice of cartilage and tendon. Next to boxing, it cultivates, in its fans, a remnant of coliseum, Christians-versus-lions schadenfreude, a screaming for blood. Unlike these sports, however, rodeo has its roots in practical hard work, in western capitalism, in utility. No lazy afternoons swinging a bat around a green diamond. No absurd eighteen holes with a crooked stick and caddy. Rodeo started out as a cowboy amusement, an exhibition of the practical work-a-day talent that allowed a guy to do his job. With the notable exception of bull riding (and maybe, on the county fair level, nanny slamming, greased pig catching, sheep riding) every aspect of rodeo seeded out from the business of raising beeves. Breaking horses, twisting steers, calf roping, it all began as an exhibition of talent, an attempt to establish bragging rights. Turn er loose, open er up, grab some leather and roll your spurs. Here’s how you do it, fellers.

But then there’s bull riding. Nothing practical here. No good, utilitarian reason in the world to strap yourself to an 1,800 pound slobber-slinging, horn-hooking, pissed off Brahma cross named Tender Kisses. No, bull riding is all about cojones, jewels, huevos. Who’s got the biggest. Being tougher’n a shelled cob. Getting hooked in the ass then buying a round, showing off your scars to a whole ‘nother set of hookers. Also, money. Making a hobo’s railcar living, sure, but with the elusive, unlikely possibility of a huge payoff at the end. It’s about entertainment. Ours more than theirs. The point could be argued, but seems like most people watch bull riding for the same reason they watch Nascar. For the wrecks.

The new book by New Orleans journalist, Josh Peter, Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, & Bull Riders: A Year Inside the Professional Bull Riders Tour, wants to show us the personalities and corporate machinations behind these wrecks (one out of every 15 rides, we’re told, results in an injury that needs treatment). It’s a skillful, often ironic glimpse behind the star spangled facade. Using the 2004 PBR tour as an armature, Peter follows a handful of last year’s most talented cowboys from church to saloon, locker room to prayer meeting, steel chute to hospital, traveling from Jacksonville to Anaheim to Las Vegas, building along the way a portfolio of fleshed out character studies that are by turns fascinating, endearing, and objectionable. These enormous, homespun personalities packed into 150 pounds of cocky, beat up muscle. Imagine McEnroe traveling town to town, sharing motel rooms with Connors. Think about Elway bellying up to the bar with Montana.

Here’s a world in which your fiercest competitor can be your best friend, in which your every success is tainted by the awareness that your buddy hasn’t made the grade. There’s two time champ, thirty-four year old Brazilian Adriano Moraes, self-proclaimed as “the greatest that ever lived." In the hunt for an unprecedented third PBR title, Moraes fights through knee surgery, a cracked eye socket and fractured jaw (courtesy of the right horn of a bull named Smokeless Wardance), and finally a ripped tendon in his bicep. There’s Mike Lee, overtly religious (on the edge of self-righteous) and reclusive. “Outside a handful of devout Christians, he rarely talked to other riders." There’s two time champ, 5' 5" Chris Shivers, “the Tiger Woods of our sport," who has been profiled in Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and USA Today. There’s Justin McBride, who was set on his first bull when he was 2 ½ years old. “His father had ridden bulls. So had his grandfather, who had been killed in the ring when a bull punctured his lung." These are the little guys who stand awkwardly introduced in civic centers and football stadiums across the country, flanked by fountains of fireworks and barraged by looping Motley Crue. Think about it like an idiosyncratic conflation of a Kiss concert and livestock sale, the superstars puffed up with the blandly arrogant personalities of your average high school wrestling coach.

Like everything else with the least dram of entertainment value, it turns out that bull riding has gone corporate. Between portraits of the riders, Peter digresses to trace the economic arc of the PBR, from the first motel meeting, in the early nineties, with rodeo legend Tuff Hedeman and a dozen other bull riders (each chipping in $1,000 to get the ball rolling), to Hedeman’s 2004 resignation. ‘“I’m a cowboy," he said. “I’m looking out for the best interests of the cowboy. I’m no politician."’ Peter also makes it a point to talk about the bull fighters, those heroic, self-sacrificing athletes whose job it is to distract the bulls after the cowboy’s bucked off. And, perhaps most interestingly, he talks to the owners of the bulls, discussing the value placed on a good bucker. There’s Little Yellow Jacket, who in 2004 was named three time “PBR Bucking Bull of the Year" (co-owned by, among others, song writer Bernie Taupin). In discussing a potential sale price, the owners placed a value on Yellow Jacket in the neighborhood of a cool mill.

The book has its weaknesses. Peter’s inexplicable emphasis on a search for a “fried twinkie" (every chapter is punctuated by a price list of food items at the various concessions stand, none of which – as it’s endlessly pointed out – includes a fried twinkie) does an enormous disservice to the subject and to the writing, trivializing both, presumably in the interests of providing a catchy title. But the book’s considerable strengths finally overshadow the occasional slip. Josh Peter is a hell of a journalist, and the access he’s been provided to his characters (he visits Moraes at his home ranch in Brazil, for instance) and his ability to semi-fictionalize certain thoughts and reflections, makes for a compelling, near-novelistic narrative. The writing is skilled and the personalities are as big as the bulls they ride. Coming out of the gate, it’s a successful mix.

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