New York, NY (October 16, 2010) - Less than an hour before the top riders in the world were introduced Friday, Robson Palermo looked around Times Square and said, “It’s a new experience for me.”
Jeff Robinson, who provided the bulls for the event, called it unbelievable. Shane Proctor proclaimed it “a whole other experience” and said that “everything was coming at you at 100 miles an hour.”
Saying it was “exciting as all get out,” Ryan McConnel believed Friday’s experience was one of the “biggest things to ever happen in bull riding.”
The usually taciturn bullfighter Frank Newsom called it an “exciting experience,” while the typically talkative Brandon Bates admitted he was at a loss for words.
“I don’t even know how to explain it,” he said, before putting the moment into perspective. “Eighteen years ago, 20 cowboys came together in a hotel room – essentially – and decided to form the Professional Bull Riders, and now here we are in Times Square.
“To think about what must be going through their minds right now. It has to be one of the highlight moments.”
At 1 p.m. Eastern Time, 10 of the PBR’s top athletes brought bull riding to Broadway and Seventh Avenue.
“This is where they drop the ball on New Year’s Eve,” Bates said. “It’s going to look like that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
It was more than an exhibition. It was the last of the Final Five Showdowns on the Road to Vegas, giving the 10 men vying for a world title one last opportunity to earn a few more points before competing at the PBR World Finals.
The Showdown featured 10 equally tough bulls – Skyhawk Cut a Rug, Flying J Saddles, Chicken Lickin, Bird Creek, Little Mr. T, Mac Nett’s El Presidente, Bandalero, Despicable Me, Hypnotized and Hank.
From the back of the bucking chutes, Proctor said the riders could see out over some of the surrounding cross streets as “taxi cabs were flying by us as we were getting on our bulls.”
By the time the first gate was pulled open, the area around the arena was filled with people. During commercial breaks, Newsom gazed around at various skyscrapers and said afterward, “You could see in the office buildings over there that all the people were just glued to the windows.”
“When we’re on our bull it’s kind of like being in our office,” McKennon Wimberly explained. “We’re focused on our bull – that’s all we see.
“Now in the chutes and stuff I was messing around and having fun. When I slid up and nodded I looked up at McConnel and said, ‘We’re going to be famous, boys.’”
NEWS AND NOTES
TAKING A TUCK: The rain held off Friday afternoon, but the air was a little chilly. While bulls love that type of weather, it does make it more difficult for riders to get their ropes sticky. That fact, and El Presidente’s history of snatching bull ropes while jerking forward led Austin Meier to “take a tuck.”
“I said, ‘I’m going to take a tuck today,’” he recalled. “‘I’m going to make it happen.’
“Those are times when you have to put all things aside and don’t worry about your body, don’t worry about the consequences, just go do what you gotta do and make it happen.”
Meier ran his bull rope between his index and middle finger – a rider using a Brazilian rope would place it between his pinky and fourth finger.
“It’ll guarantee your hand won’t come out of that rope any earlier than you want it to,” Meier explained, “and sometimes a little longer than that.”
It’s effective, but dangerous.
Meier added, “Now three rounds after the whistle blew and I was still trying to get my hand out you start wondering, ‘Was this really a great idea?’”
GET YOUR MOTOR RUNNING: Revered as one of the finest bullfighters of all time, Frank Newsom loves getting in close with the bulls, and often can be seen smiling after being hit and run down. But he admitted Friday afternoon, “I don’t know, I guess I got a little bit more nerved or my motor was running.”
More than anything, he wanted to put on a great show for the onlookers. Newsom said he hoped everyone walked away thinking, “That was professional.”
LEAVING ON A JET PLANE: It was quite a day for Jeff Robinson. He woke up in New York, walked a block down to Times Square to meet with the driver who had hauled his bulls into Manhattan for the Showdown, and then hailed a cab and headed to LaGuardia Airport immediately after the last bull bucked.
From there he flew to Memphis, Tenn., caught a second flight to Little Rock, Ark., and arrived just in time for the “Riding in the Rock” event, which was the last Touring Pro event of 2010.
JERSEY BOY: Prior to the event, broadcaster Justin McKee was chatting with Craig Hummer and Ty Murray when some bull riders walked into the arena wearing Rangers jerseys for a cross-promotion with Madison Square Garden.
McKee, who admittedly isn’t a “big city” kind of guy, was perplexed. “That’s strange,” he said. “Aren’t the Rangers playing the Yankees [in the American League Championship Series]?”
Murray laughed and Hummer replied, “Yeah, and those are their winter jerseys.”
He then explained that they were hockey sweaters. McKee wondered, “Rangers? Are there are a lot of rangers in New York?”
HOOFING IT: In an interview broadcast throughout Times Square, Shane Proctor told Brandon Bates that he estimates he’s stepped on 20 percent of the time. That’s one in every five bulls.
WIRED: Fans can access a dozen audio interviews as well as another dozen flip cam videos from Times Square by logging on here.
LOS DE SONORA, an up-and-coming Mexican band and YouTube sensation, will perform on the Cooper Tires stage in the Fan Zone outside the Thomas & Mack Center immediately following Round 1 of the World Finals on Wednesday, Oct. 20.
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