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Outside Madison Square Garden, there’s a riot in the works. It’s not here just yet, not exactly—but it’s coming. Dozens and dozens of bulls—each of them weighing nearly a ton and relentlessly trained to be as charismatically, energetically hostile as possible to anyone and everyone with the quixotic, seemingly unfathomable idea of, you know, riding them (what, like a show pony?)—are making their way from goosenecked bull-hauling trailers into their new temporary quarters in the bowels of the Garden, snorting, stomping, stalling, and staring along the way.
Backstage at the Garden, there’s another parade happening, this one of big-hatted cowboys in starched and pressed shirts covered with sponsors’ logos and neatly creased Wranglers and Ariat jeans (Ariat is a title sponsor of the weekend’s festivities) stacked above well-worn and well-polished boots and fronted by big, shiny belt buckles. We’re a couple hours away from the premiere night of competition as the Professional Bull Riders tour stops for a long weekend in Manhattan a quarter of the way through their annual barnstorming swing across the country. (By the end of the weekend, a PBR-record 38,000 fans will take in the madness.)
The assembled cowboys and cowboy wannabes encompass everyone from the bull riders themselves—making one last social stop before disappearing into their dressing rooms and onto their massage tables and exercise bikes, before they crouch and pray for their lives—to bull trainers and owners, PBR officials, retired legends (some of them mobile and healthy, others decidedly less so), and scattered family and friends. In short, there’s XY-chromosome energy for days.
Sitting quietly but confidently amidst all of it is the person they’ve just honored as the PBR general manager of the year: Tina Battock, a wife and mother of two from the suburbs of Denver whose early work life centered around quilting, knitting, and sewing.
“I started my career with quilting and will likely head off into the sunset with bull riding,” says Battock, who’s 54. Somewhere along the way, she’s adopted the uniform here—she’s wearing a tan fringed suede jacket, jeans, and boots, and while a cowboy hat isn’t always atop her long blonde hair, it’s usually nearby. “It’s a strange world, but it’s all come quite naturally. A long time ago, someone told me: Be the water, not the rock. I’ve tried to keep that in mind.”
During last year’s inaugural PBR Team Series—essentially the second half of the PBR season, with the first focused solely on individual competition and the latter centered around eight teams in eight cities, each with five competing riders, battling each other for points, money, and glory—Battock’s Nashville Stampede team staggered into the finals in Las Vegas in last place. “And then we pulled off a Cinderella story,” Battock says, beaming. “We ended up winning the thing.”
Growing up in Littleton, Colorado, where she attended Columbine High School (before it became famous for all the wrong reasons), Battock planned to be a psychologist before she simply ran out of patience. “I wanted to get into the action, not go to more school,” she says. So she got into the media business instead, first running a series of magazines in the craft space before landing at Morris Communications in Fort Worth, which owns an array of titles, events, and businesses based around “the Western lifestyle,” as Battock and assorted others, from cowboys to bull-breeding specialists, refer to it. “My whole career since then has been a combination of intentional and opportunistic. I’m kind of in the business of saying yes to things and trying them.
“There’s been this renaissance with the Western lifestyle—there’s been a few things in the culture, Yellowstone maybe biggest among them, that have drawn on this mystique,” she continues. “I mean, the cowboy is the quintessential American icon, and that’s true whether you’re in rural Wyoming or midtown Manhattan.”
Battock heads up Morris’s media division—but when she heard about an opportunity for the company to buy into the nascent PBR Teams franchise at the ground level, she convinced Morris’s board to go for it. “My colleagues joke that the bull riding thing is my side gig. Do I have a background in sports management? Absolutely not. But I’ve run businesses, and I know that the first thing you do is hire the people who know what you need to know. So we just started building our team. There was no road map.”
Around the corner at the Garden, near the bullpens, I run into Cord McCoy, a retired pro rider turned rodeo stock contractor—he breeds, raises, trains, and sells bulls and bull “genetics” (we’ll get to that in a bit)—and three-time contestant on The Amazing Race. I ask McCoy, 42, about his belt buckle, which seems ever-so-slightly larger and shinier than the others I’ve seen here.
“That’s Riding Solo, the reigning-world-champion bull,” says McCoy in his rich Oklahoman accent. (I look closer and, yes, see the bull’s name splashed across the buckle. It’s often overlooked, but at PBR events it’s not just riders in competition but bulls as well: On each outing, the animal is scored for skill and ferocity.) “I mean, yeah,” McCoy continues with a chuckle, “I wear a belt buckle that a bull won. He’s a big pet at the ranch—my wife and my four-year-old daughter give him baths—but he knows his job, and that’s bucking cowboys off his back.” (McCoy’s wife—Sara Best-McCoy, a women’s world champion in bull riding—is competing today in Canton, Texas.)
McCoy knows of what he speaks: A rodeo competitor since the age of five, he spent a dozen or so wildly successful years riding bulls, saddle broncs, and bareback broncs; early in that stretch, he had his skull crushed by a saddle bronc and spent three days in a coma and eight months in rehab before saddling up again.
“You don’t really have to set people down and explain to them how dangerous bull riding is,” McCoy says. “You just let ’em watch it, and they can figure it out pretty quick. It’s a dance—you’re not going to be stronger than an 1,800-pound animal that’s been trained and trained to be one of the best athletes in the world. If you’re trying to anticipate his moves and you get a step ahead of him—or, God forbid, a step behind—you’re going to be in trouble.”
McCoy, who is sponsored by Ariat, is that rare cowboy deft enough to speak about “the Western way of life” and “the reach of social media” in the same sentence without batting an eye as he explains to me that while he’s paid only $600 every time one of his bulls comes storming out of a chute at the Garden with fire in his eyes and hurt in his heart, “our real income is from selling genetics.”
Say?
“We lease clones of bucking bulls with a strong pedigree to capture their genetics, and we sell embryos, we sell semen, we sell females—we’ve sold baby calves that have never been bucked for $25,000 each—half interest: You don’t get to own them, you just pay for a piece of ’em.”
While the concept might seem outlandish—I mean, whatever happened to that gol’-danged Western way of life?—it’s not so far away from the world of thoroughbred horse breeding. In a high-stakes economy staked on competition, national and international exposure, and social media impressions, players are going to play, essentially.
We step out into the Garden itself, the center of it now transformed not by a basketball court, hockey rink, or concert stage but by 750 tons of brown dirt (stored locally and brought out again annually), where we ascend a few steps to the platform from which the riders climb into the chutes and fix themselves atop a bull with the goal of staying there exactly eight seconds once the chute gates open. Nearby, McCoy’s bulls Red Mosquito and Viper look on, the former blasé, the latter seemingly ready to rumble. In the center of the ring, singer-songwriter Annie Bosko gives the national anthem a kind of dress rehearsal before performing it later that evening to a sold-out crowd.
Back in the dressing rooms, I spot the three-time world champion Silvano Alves in the hallway, dressed functionally but impeccably in a red shirt, black hat, and jeans. (“Riders are the cleanest and dirtiest people I’ve ever met,” Battock had told me earlier. “They roll around, literally, in bull shit but keep their shirts and jeans starched and pressed clean and treat their hats like the most important things in their lives.”) Like virtually every other professional bull rider, Alves—who was born in São Paulo (PBR riders mostly come from two countries, the US and Brazil, with the odd Canadian now and again) and has been riding bulls since he was 10—is polite, somewhat formal, and utterly unflappable.
“My grandpa rode bulls, my father rode bulls, and I really grew up riding bulls,” he says. “And just like all my friends who played soccer dreamed of growing up and playing soccer in Europe, I dreamed of coming to the US and riding bulls here.”
It was Battock signing Alves to the Nashville Stampede that gave her team the experience, the confidence, and the spur to turn their season around. Many of his teammates now train at his ranch in Decatur, Texas, where Alves has eight bucking bulls to practice on, along with a bucking chute and an arena—but if you’re expecting any sort of alpha-male posturing from him, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
“I just get out here and fight hard every single weekend,” he says, before politely excusing himself as he and the rest of the riders begin their final pre-event rituals and preparations before the Garden is darkened, the dirt lit on fire in a kind of pyrotechnic ballet, the crowd starts screaming, and the whole death-defying circus is cranked up again.
Back around the corner, I had one last question for Battock—you know, the obvious one: What’s it like, me and seemingly everybody else in her life wanted to know, being one of the only prominent women in a sport and a culture that, from its inception, has been raining men?
“I’ve never once thought about that,” she says, flatly but firmly. “It’s never occurred to me to qualify my performance based on the fact that I’m female—especially when what I do only requires my brain. I mean, I’ll happily defer any heavy lifting to folks that are stronger than I am,” she notes with a quick laugh. “I set out to be the best—I didn’t want to be the best female or run the best female-run team. To me, the playing field is equal. I’m probably at something of an advantage because Western culture or cowboy culture is very polite, very manners driven. Occasionally there’s some heated debate and some cursing going on, and I’ll hear something quickly afterward: ‘Pardon my language, ma’am.’ I just say, ‘Heard it!’ And then I move along.”
Then, a few minutes later—the crowd assembled, the fires lit, the anthem sung—the chutes open.
