Bring Back Justin McKee

Here’s a news flash I’m sure you don’t give a damn about: Early as it is in the academic year, the scholars of this world are working their fingers to the bone, and consequently, so am I. In the three seconds I have to myself every day, I ponder their absolutely astounding productivity with amazement, awe, and not a little fear, because it means I, too, will be working like a Trojan for the foreseeable future. Trust me, I am not complaining—too many people are out of work for me to ever feel anything less than hugely grateful that I’m as busy as I am. Scholars of the world, call on me! I will not let you down.

A side effect of all this, however, is that I haven’t really carved out time to comment on developments in the PBR for a while. In many cases, this is good, because it means I don’t snark off about every little bit of information that strikes me the wrong way, right out of the chute.

Contrary to what you might think, I am not somebody who likes being pissed off all the time. I’m just not. For one thing, it can’t possibly be good for me physically to constantly be all amped up on adrenaline and pawing the ground like an angry, er, bull. For another, if you let things sit for a bit, you usually find out they aren’t nearly as hair-raising as you first thought. But an announcement on the PBR website last week pretty much put me into orbit, and since I haven’t landed yet, I’m going to have to speak up.

And you all know what’s coming, don’t you? What on earth were the head honchos at the PBR thinking when they fired Justin McKee?

In the years that we have been gathering here, we have all seen changes come and go with the PBR, including a lot of stuff that hasn’t stuck to the wall and some that has. But this one is so out of left field, so completely counter-intuitive, that as Ruby is wont to say, I cannot even figure out which end of it to pull on.

So let’s just lay all the pieces out and take a look at them, here, before we start trying to put them together. On December 28, the PBR issued a press release with some details about the 2011 TV schedule. It extolled the virtues of the new production company, David Neal Productions, and roughly halfway down the page, it just sort of mentioned the fact that the commentators this year will be Craig Hummer, Ty Murray, Justin McBride, and J.W. Hart. Oh, and some woman named Erin who will supposedly be working with Leah Garcia. I daresay I’ll have more to say about that later.

If somebody at headquarters thought the implications of this list might go unnoticed, that person was in for a very rude awakening. It might have taken three seconds for PBR fans to discern what it meant, and then the comments board lit up like a pinball machine. The bottom line is that Michael Gaffney and Justin McKee will NOT be in the booth this year.

Now, I like Michael Gaffney well enough, as much as it’s possible to like somebody that you only see on TV every couple of weeks. He earned his stripes in the bull riding trade, and he seems like a genuinely nice guy. But NOBODY in the current lineup brings the wealth of information about the bulls to the table that McKee routinely reeled off, and NOBODY had the same, dare I say it, boyish enthusiasm for the bulls that shines out of him. When it comes to loving the bulls, and studying
up on them, the man gets up every day with his hair on fire.

What more could you possibly ask of a commentator? He filled a need in the booth that none of the rest of these guys seemed even remotely interested in, beyond the usual crap about how these are the best bulls in the world, yak yak, blah blah. McKee KNOWS WHY they are the best bulls in the world, and furthermore, he can TELL you WHY without making you wish you could tape his mouth shut. The stuff that he can reel off is absolutely astounding. I have learned more about the sport from Justin McKee than I have learned from ALL the rest of the commentators combined.

Just let me say here that I know for an absolute fact that it was not McKee's decision to leave the PBR, because the man told me so himself two days ago. Yes, I did email him at McKeeRanch.com, and he was kind enough to reply to somebody he'd never heard of.

It is often fascinating to watch the machinations of private organizations, precisely because such outfits are not obliged to be transparent. I don’t know whether this decision was made by some outside consultant, by some insider who has had it in for McKee for a while (and believe me, that shit happens everywhere, most frequently, in my experience, in companies that describe themselves as “families”), or by Jeffrey Pollack himself. But I am weighing in here, and I hope to hell somebody will hear me AND every other fan who has been wanting to lose his/her shoes in the PBR board’s collectives asses since this was announced.

This decision is a huge mistake.

Bring back Justin McKee.