ARCHDALE, N.C. (August 30, 2010) - Jerome Davis and his wife, Tiffany, are busy this week nailing down the final details on one of the PBR’s longest-standing events, the 12th Annual Jerome Davis PBR Touring Pro Division bull riding in Archdale, N.C.
The popularity and longevity of the event, which runs Sept. 3-4 at Davis Ranch Arena, is easily traceable to 1988, when Davis and his late father, Carson Davis, began a weekly bull riding at their home.
“It ran every Thursday from April through October,” said Davis, one of the PBR’s 20 founders. “We did that until 1998. That was the year I got hurt, so I wasn’t going to be able to help do the event every week. We decided to do one big one a year.”
(Davis, the 1995 world champion in the PRCA, suffered a spinal cord injury and was paralyzed from the chest down on March 14, 1998, in a bull riding accident. A surgery right after the accident helped Davis gain back use of his arms and he has feelings and some use of each hand.)
That first bull-riding in 1998, Davis said, was extremely successful and set the foundation for the future.
“We didn’t have enough bleachers,” Davis, 38, recalled of the inaugural event. “People were standing back in their pickups and I think we even announced some of it off a pickup. Every year we took the money made from that event and put it back into it, and today I feel like we have one of the nicest facilities as far as an outdoor event.”
The Davis’ weekly bull ridings (1988-’98) also created a buzz in the surrounding area as similar events began to pop up on a regular basis.
“It just seemed to take off,” Davis said of bull riding in the area. “From my house today, you can go to a bull riding every night of the week except Mondays. All of them have $500 added, so for a guy who is an amateur bull rider, he can make a pretty decent living. It just seems like it’s blossomed from what me and my dad started years ago.”
The sport’s popularity in that area has also helped spawn some of the sport’s great talents in J.B. Mauney of Mooresville, N.C., and Brian Canter of Archdale.
Their success, he said, is well deserved, and a testament to their desire and hard work, and they have the area “pumped up” about bull riding.
“When I was a kid that was kind of my dream … to have an atmosphere like that in this part of the country, and now it seems like it’s here.”
Davis has spent the last year traveling to Mooresville to undergo intensive therapy for people with paralysis.
The program is called “Race to Walk.”
“I’ve been going there, trying to improve my health and well-being,” he said. “It’s been good for me. My body is getting stronger as I’m just trying to stay on top of things.”
Davis said he continues to monitor research progress on spinal cord injuries domestically and worldwide.
