Taking Stock

The Stockyard Queen is walking the battlefield—picture George C. Scott in Patton, blithely strolling past the burned bodies and intoning, “War. God help me, but I love it so.” Well, the Stockyard Queen loves the war between the boys and the bulls, but she just can’t be quite that blasé about the mess we had this past weekend in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Let’s survey the ruined landscape and see what’s what:

1) The brilliant, acerbic, and wickedly funny Jean, one of my most devoted readers and avid PBR fans, LEFT THE ROOM on Saturday during the broadcast, unable any longer to stomach any more of the endless worship of Justin McBride that Craig Hummer, Justin McKee, and Ty Murray spewed as McBride approached the $5 million mark in career winnings.

2) William, her compatriot, TURNED OFF THE SOUND and read a book while watching the rest of the show.

3) Guilherme Marchi BROKE A RECORD FOR THE NUMBER OF RIDES IN A SINGLE SEASON and was acknowledged with barely a languidly raised hand.

4) You heard it here first, folks—I predicted this would happen a week ago and it’s obvious now that I AM PSYCHIC. Justin McBride FELL OFF HIS BULL at 7.9 seconds in the Xantrex Instanta-Shot Grudge Match and STILL GOT A SCORE. Ty Murray even stooped to say that Justin cheated fate (or the judges cheated everybody) that time. I have to confess, though, that I didn’t expect to see it happen so soon. Maybe I should challenge superhero McBride to a contest. He can try to overcome me with his super powers, and I will defeat him by predicting what he plans to do and cleaning his clock first.

4) The divine Shannon, a fairly recent convert to the PBR, is so tired of the hosannas in Justin’s honor that she posted a pointed, though also pointedly polite, objection to all the hoopla on Keith Cartwright’s blog. She also fast-forwarded through her recording of the broadcast on Sunday, so at least she didn’t have to hear most of the blather.

5) William posted an eloquent discussion of the injustice of it all on his blog. He is advocating a move to the PRCA, which I’m not prepared to do yet, for reasons that are even dumber than my usual ones.

6) Several of us who did manage to stick the broadcast out without tossing our cookies are now worried stiff that Guilherme is in a slump and may lose the world title to Valdiron or even J.B. Mauney.

7) Reese Cates, poor thing, was robbed of his first BFTS win when Mauney got a 93 in the last ride of the night and collected the big check. A 93! What is the world coming to when you can get a 93 while your ass is hanging off the side of the bull? Oh, excuse me, I seem to recall a similar atrocity a few years back at the finals involving—wait a minute—it’s coming to me—Justin McBride! I guess I should be glad that Mauney managed to ride so we were spared the sight of him throwing stuff and kicking the walls as he stormed back to the locker room, but I feel bad for Reese. And you all know Reese hasn’t always been in my good graces.

8) Worst of all, every time McBride climbs into the chute now, I find myself hoping he’ll get face planted instantly. This might not seem like news to any of you, because you all know I nearly always root for the bulls, but the fact is, up until Saturday night, the list of boys I can’t stand to see ride has been short (actually there’s only one on it, and he’s in the “for his own good” column), and that rider was not McBride. I don’t want to start feeling like that about any rider, or at least not about any more riders. It’s not good for me, but furthermore, it’s not good for the sport when folks start to feel like the judges are favoring one rider over all the others, particularly when one of the un-favored is riding better than 70 percent of his bulls, and start hoping for bad outcomes as a result.

It’s clear, though, that if Justin McBride doesn’t just flat-out FALL OFF at, oh, say, 7 seconds or less, he’s going to get a score, even if the bull ambles out to Flint’s barrel and back. On second thought, make that 6 seconds. I’m wondering if he wouldn’t have gotten a score on Stick and Stones, that bull in the PBR commercial who stalls in the chute, finally comes out and looks around, and then goes right back in, with Adriano along for the trip.

I guess in hindsight, we should have expected the weekend to start off like it did, since the most recent issue of PBR magazine features a long-ass story in which Ty Murray and Cody Lambert compare notes about how great Justin McBride is. When the PBR posted a news release about how McBride was getting close to the $5 million mark, we should have known we would hear about it till we wanted to stick our fingers in our ears and sing, “LA LA LA LA LA!” at the top of our lungs. But I am still dumbfounded by how long the praising and backslapping and genuflecting went on. It really only stopped (and most probably only temporarily) when Homer Simpson (oh, the irony!) definitively threw McBride during his last ride of the second round, which Justin McKee described as going “from the penthouse to the outhouse” in a single day.

The only good news about any of this is that it's pretty much statistically impossible for McBride to take a third world title this year, unless the unthinkable happens and Marchi falls off every single bull for the rest of the season, and McBride rides everything he climbs aboard. Oh, I guess we don't have to worry about the latter because obviously he's going to get a score regardless, but we do have to worry about Marchi, who hasn't looked very good since at least the World Cup in Chihuahua.

I hope that I haven’t already reached the point that SoCal Jay was predicting for me a few weeks ago, when he observed that when we wide-eyed rookies start to follow any sport, we are breathlessly willing to watch anything so we can learn all about it. In the end, we are worn-out and jaded, turning the tv off because “they’re playing like pussies,” as he says of Southern California University’s football team. But I may have gotten to the point where I can’t listen to the commentators anymore, which will result in at least one casualty—The Stockyard Queen’s Hoof in Mouth Award. I just don’t know how much more of this crap I can take, and clearly, I’m not alone.