Going for a Ride

If you think this weekend's Professional Bull Riders World Finals is one of the least glamorous events in Vegas, you are correct. It is a brightly lighted arena of dudes in belt buckles and cowboy hats and caps, and polite women, and almost no sexily dressed women, and the smell is only slight and of pulled pork, peanuts and beer.

I never had been to PBR, so I stopped by during its opening weekend last Sunday at the Thomas & Mack Center, and I had one overall impression.

PBR looks like an entertainment version of a rural town with no zoning laws. That is, the event looks like it's never been revamped from scratch based on someone's big vision. Instead, it seems as if elements have been added over the years, trial and error, culminating with a somewhat entertaining hodgepodge of events, music selections and stagings.

So you see a guy ride a bull while you hear a snippet of an old classic rock song from the loud speakers. Announcers chat amiably about the bull riders -- the way announcers talk on TV.

And everywhere you look, ads are posted on walls, just like in NASCAR. There are little billboards advertising ranch equipment, cars, booze, rental cars, smokeless tobacco, boots, the Air Force, a bank, a Wii video game, beers, trailer hitches, hotels, radio stations and tires.

It's the kind of event where you hear an announcer introduce segments with commercial pitches, such as "Our friends at Jack Daniels ..."

Bull riders are tough, obviously. The announcer called out Adriano Moraes -- three-time Brazilian champ --as the "living legend." He competed even though he had a broken finger on his riding hand.

They love their nicknames. They go by "Black Mamba," "Firewater," "Homer Simpson" and all kinds of monikers. When they don't make it to eight seconds, this leads to the announcer saying things like, "Homer Simpson's going home a little early."

In between bull riding comes singing, dancing and joking from the clown-face host of sorts -- the barrelman and former bull riding champ Flint Rasmussen -- who wears a shirt covered in ads for jeans and a rental car.

Flint is on a microphone, and sometimes he tells the crowd they can buy PBR bracelets and T-shirts. He's got an array of moves in him, from Irish jigs to Michael Jackson gliding to basic hip thrusting.

Whenever a rider stays on a bull for a full eight seconds -- which takes about 10 butt-bucks of the bull -- he rockets up on the leader board, then a few confetti cannons shoot streamers into the air, and a song plays, and you're suddenly hearing, "That's the way, uh-huh, I like it."

If you think the music would be stereotypically country, you'd be wrong. Song snippets change constantly, like at women's volleyball matches at the Olympics, and it goes from pop to classic pop, rock, classic rock, and even contemporary hip-hop.

So you might see Flint dance to "Ice Ice Baby." Then, a bull rider storms out of the gate to Men At Work's "Down Under," or Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher," or Stray Cats' "Rock This Town," or Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself," or any number of familiar songs you might expect to hear in a Holiday Inn lounge in, oh say, Enterprise, Alaska.

Intermittently, people in the crowd win prizes, like a BB gun from the BB gun company cosponsoring PBR.

Perhaps the one shocking thing is the refereed instant replay, just like in the NFL. One time last Sunday, Chris "Flash" Shiver fell off his bull at the supposed 7.9 second mark. But he asked for a replay. On another look, it was determined he rode for 8 seconds. As we sat waiting for those results, we in the polite, beery crowd listened to Adam Ant's "Goody Two Shoes."

The crowd is mostly adult and lubricated, so to speak. I was interviewing a group in their 20s, when one of the guys in that group ran up to us and yelled "Yeeeeeehawww!" (literally, "Yeeeehaww"), then he talked to me super friendlylike with the most amazing beer smell emanating from his mouth.

That guy's group came in from Weatherford, Texas. Some were ranchers. They said they grew up on rodeo and easily rattled off the PBR's motto, "The Toughest Sport On Dirt."

"It's the official sport of Texas," Beth Brian, 25, told me. She kept calling me "sir," as in "yes, sir," and "no, sir." Everyone's so nice and polite.

Brian said her group could only come one weekend. They picked last weekend, because, "The bull riders aren't tired yet."

Her husband, John Brian, 26, summed up their weekend choice in a much tighter sentence:

"Good beer to drink."

Leave a tip or comment on the blog at reviewjournal.com/elfman. Doug Elfman's column appears Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Contact him at 702-383-0391 or delfman@reviewjournal.com.