PUEBLO, Colo. (March 4, 2010) - Pro tennis has Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. Golf, the Masters Tournament and The British Open.
And in recent years, the Professional Bull Riders has launched its own marquee majors, including next month’s World Cup in Las Vegas.
“It’s a rallying point for fans and for everybody involved in the sport,” PBR Chief Operating Officer Sean Gleason said of the larger shows.
Several years ago, the PBR’s top organizers realized they needed to create a string of major shows that would have people talking.
“When you have majors, everybody comes together in one point in time, and you want that particular event to involve more people who weren’t following your sport on a week-in and week-out basis,” Gleason said. “The majors allow us to focus our energies to attract new viewers and audiences on a national and global level.”
When the PBR struck out to create multiple high-profile shows, its stand-out major was the World Finals in Las Vegas. Today, the association also features the World Cup, the Iron Cowboy Invitational, the Touring Pro Championship and the annual Built Ford Tough Series stop in New York.
“Pro golf has proven that it’s very successful to have major tournaments – instead of building to a climax, you have several climaxes during a season rather than just one high point,” said longtime public relations executive Jerre Todd, who has handled numerous high-profile accounts in the Fort Worth/Dallas metroplex for pro sports outlets, including the Dallas Cowboys and Fort Worth's Colonial PGA tournament.
Todd said the PBR’s decision to create majors raises the association’s profile.
“It elevates their exposure and makes them more big-time,” Todd said. “Bull riding is an exciting sport and the PBR has the best in the business, so share it. When you think big and go into large attractive venues like the PBR is doing, it’s got to be successful.”
Former PBR Chief Executive Officer Randy Bernard said the success of the major events were defining moments for the PBR’s long-term growth, but producing each of them involved huge risk-taking. He said it all was part of the PBR’s efforts toward reaching mainstream audiences.
“These type of shows bring attention away from just your traditionalists and put more perspective in the mainstream,” Bernard said. “When you talk about awarding lots of money and the toughness that a cowboy has to have to win, then people want to get out and watch.”
The PBR’s organizers presently are gearing up for the fourth annual World Cup, scheduled for April 16-18 at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas. The competition will consist of a team from each of the five counties that have organized PBR circuits. They include the United States, which won the team title the past two years, and Brazil, which won the inaugural World Cup trophy. The other three competing nations are Australia, Canada and Mexico.
The PBR conducted its inaugural World Cup in 2007 in the Gold Coast region of Australia. The next year, the World Cup went to Chihuahua, Mexico, and last year the PBR’s international showdown migrated to Barretos, Brazil.
The 2009 performances drew enormous crowds. The final show may have roped in 70,000, according to Bernard.
“The biggest thing was the passion of the Brazilian fans,” Bernard said. “They would applaud when the Americans got bucked off, but that didn’t offend the Americans because it’s expected.”
Still, Team USA received a round of applause after they clinched the title.
Gleason said the World Cup competitions help expand the PBR’s global outreach.
“The World Cup is a great event and it’s absolutely a major, but it’s much like (pro golf’s) Ryder Cup in that it’s going to travel from country to country,” Gleason said. “The people in each country that we’re operating in are going to follow the event from an attendance standpoint and from a local market standpoint. But it really is the rallying point for our worldwide operation.”
The inaugural Iron Cowboy Invitational was Feb. 20 at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The show drew more than 46,000 fans and awarded winner Valdiron de Oliveira $260,000, the PBR’s largest ever single-day winner’s payoff.
Mike Lee, the 2004 PBR World Champion, said he applauds the PBR’s efforts in creating major events.
“The PBR is trying to make the sport better, and anytime you try to improve, that’s a good thing,” Lee said. “But then, you have to go back to your roots and stay where your roots are at, and the PBR is good about not taking away from the cowboy sport. They don’t go too far by taking the cowboy out of bull riding. But they are going to try to get their fans involved and make it more exciting.”
The PBR Challenger Tour Championship, now the Touring Pro Championship, was created in 2007. At the time, PBR organizers wanted a finals that could pay big bucks to a young up-and-comer. The finale featured top competitors from the lower-tier tours and some top names on the Built Ford Tough Series. But the show mainly was designed to offer fresh-faced cowboys with few credentials in the pro ranks a shot at big money.
A young cowboy named Clayton Williams won the first two Challenger Tour Championship titles when the show was conducted in Oklahoma City. In 2007, the East Texas rider earned $215,000, and then pocketed another $525,000 after claiming the title in 2008, for a total of $740,000.
But in 2009, the PBR combined the Challenger Tour Championship with the Built Ford Tough Series. The November show at Duluth, Ga., doubled as the 2009 Challenger Tour Championship for top competitors in the lower-level tours, and served as the season opener for the 2010 Ford Series. Guilherme Marchi, the 2008 World Champion, won the Ford Series segment and pocketed $210,000. J.B. Mauney was presented with a $78,750 check when he was named the Challenger Tour Championship winner.
The New York stop in Madison Square Garden always has been billed as one of the PBR's majors because the BFTS tour stop is conducted in the world’s media capital and contracts the world’s most famous sports venue. When the PBR began campaigning in New York in 2007, no other rodeo or bull riding association had been able to conduct a great event in the renowned arena for a long, long time. But the PBR became the rare exception.
According to Bernard, the PBR came very close to selling out all three performances at the January New York show. He said the association had a 21-percent increase in overall ticket sales from 2009.
“This year, we were only 600 tickets away from selling out all three performances,” Bernard said. “When we first came to New York, everybody said that we couldn’t do it, that it was too expensive, and they pointed out that rodeo hadn’t been big in Madison Square Garden since the 1940s and 1950s. But I felt that if we were ever going to go mainstream, we were going to have to give it a run.”
