Fast Times in Indiana

My dear friends, I had hoped to wax eloquent about the PBR World Finals that ended on Sunday, and I may still get to that, but the march of time has brought us a new development that deserves our attention. The Divine Pearl de Vere, relentless bloodhound that she is, sent the Stockyard Queen a link yesterday to a story in Autoweek. Take a look and try not, as Miss Ruby would say, drop your teeth. And don't miss the comments, which is where the feathers really start to fly.

This is all very interesting, given the current sad state of the PBR and its witless CEO, Jim Haworth. We haven't heard much out of Jim since he famously stated that all female fans are buckle bunnies and then issued a non-apology about it. One of my correspondents lovingly referred to Haworth as a "meathead." I can't say his behavior has suggested anything much different.

Please, let us at the Stockyard know what you think about this. Should the PBR make a change at the top? Do we need to revise our clarion call to "Bring back Justin McKee AND Randy Bernard!"?

I Really Must Say

Friends and neighbors, as is usually the case, the PBR World Finals are a veritable feast of possible subjects for the studious blogger, and I can hardly decide which dish to offer up for your lasting pleasure (or indigestion) first. But since tonight’s festivities will doubtless produce yet another embarrassment of riches, I must talk for a minute about that nasty situation last night with Austin Meier.

And we might as well just flop it out on the table. What on earth possessed the producers to let the cameras keep rolling as Austin writhed in anguish on the floor behind the chutes? Can this possibly be the same PBR that whisks the wounded (walking and otherwise) off the main stage and into the wings and from there straight into the backwoods, never to be heard from again?

It’s all very well for Austin to show us he has a sense of humor with those droll ads about his encounter with the massage therapist (although I have to wonder if anybody at PBR headquarters realizes that you have to be NEKKID to have a massage). It’s quite another to stand around gawking while the man moans and gasps for breath after being thoroughly banged around in the chutes.

I really have to wonder what Austin himself thought about it. Certainly he showed us what he’s made of when he crawled back over the fence and onto the back of the bull. But Austin's face really shows it when he’s in pain--more than just about any other bull rider I can think of. When Leah Garcia was interviewing him after his ride, he looked like he’d been dragged through a rat hole backwards. 

Here’s hoping that he’s feeling better tonight. Mostly, though, here’s hoping that somebody who works for the PBR (dare we say David Alan?) has the good sense not to repeat such an atrocity. I for one do not ever want to see anything like that ever again. Just fucking forget it.

I Must Say

Bulls were beyond awesome last night!

Looking to the Future

An excerpt from a much longer discussion between two of the three wranglers of this blog about the upcoming events this weekend:

"Did you see that Hummer won't be there this weekend?!?!?!?!?"

"Really?"

"Yeah, they are subbing in Brandon Bates one day and Clint Adkins the next.

"I guess we'll see if they can keep their sexism in check, but I have to hope they'll be less dopey than Hummer."

"I wouldn't bet on it--the 'color' is provided by J.W. 'Flapping Piehole' Hart, so anything could happen."

Some Very Disturbing News

Folks, Pearl and I just stumbled upon a news story that ran in the Weatherford, Texas, Democrat last Wednesday (June 22). It reports that McKennon Wimberly was arrested  that afternoon for allegedly shooting a hitchhiker.

Of course, we don't know the whole story yet, but nothing about this sounds good to the Stockyard Queen. Let's hope the justice system in Weatherford gets this sorted out as quickly as possible. 

Boneheaded and Bullheaded

So Pearl de Vere and the Stockyard Queen were sitting around last week, drinking beer and moaning about the sad state of the PBR and alternately accusing one another of being lazy bitches because neither of us has posted a thing on Turn Him Out! in weeks. Then practically in the same breath, we both confessed that we have been daunted by the fact that every time we start writing a post, we also start ranting because there is so much wrong with the way this season has been managed that we feel like screaming our heads off about ALL of it, straight off.

So the Stockyard Queen, being a masterful negotiator and pourer of oil on troubled waters, suggested that instead of trying to wrestle the whole bull pen of stampeding issues to the ground in one mega-session, we should try for a series of posts that deal with only one matter. And since the Stockyard Queen opened this Stockyard, and Pearl is to some degree just an innocent bystander who got dragged into the stompings, the Queen volunteered to go first. In the end, though, it took both of us to write this post, but at least that gives us both plausible deniability.

The Stockyard Queen, being nothing if not diplomatic, posits that two words will sum up her discontents with the PBR: boneheaded and bullheaded. It seems like that outfit repeatedly makes stupid moves and then compounds the carnage by insisting that 1) they were the right moves and 2) they aren't going to talk about it anymore and 3) furthermore, nobody else better talk about it either, OR ELSE. On top of that, Pearl and the Queen agree that every time they think the Powers That Be (whoever the hell they are--does anybody really know?) have pulled a stunt so outrageous that they cannot possibly top it, they outdo themselves, sometimes within a few hours or days so the last atrocity. 

SQ has already bitched about the sorry state of the broadcast schedule, and we know because we have heard it from the horse's mouth that many of our readers have lost interest in the PBR entirely because of it. 

Nevertheless, one thing you can always, always count on the PBR to do is to hide the fishhook in the pecan pie. It would be naïve to read a PBR press release and not suspect that when they announce something wonderful, they are usually covering up something horrible. We have to give them full points for trying to spin their bad news, but unfortunately, once people figure out that it really is bad news, the PBR folks would rather face a firing squad than admit it. The one exception we can think of, the extraordinarily defensive post in which they finally explained that they had been caught with their pants down when NBC Sports bought Versus and gave the PBR the boot, just proves the point. And oh, never mind that they had a whole year to think about what might happen. That's the boneheaded part.

Then the plot thickened--the PBR announced its new fan club, Posse, and of course they insisted that Posse would be the greatest thing since sliced bread, and we should all just line up and shell out. It took roughly five seconds for the Divine Pearl to deduce that whatever good things Posse was offering members with one hand, it was taking away from the fanbase at large with the other, and we are just pretty damned sure that there are more fans than there are fan club members. 

So the story about Posse goes on forever, and there are a few new and improved features, but the big change for the rest of us who don't feel like shelling out for a membership is that the Live Event Center, which once was where you could go to find out what was happening during the events that weren't broadcast (in other words, most of them), now will only show scores and the leaderboard for free (although you do have to register to gain access). To see the video, hear the audio, see the Bull Stock Media photos, or even view the detailed scoring, you have to be at least a Tough member. This means that for all the events not shown on TV, you would have to pay at least $29.95 to have crappy streaming of Flint doing his same crappy stuff, or anything useful beyond the very basics of who scored and who is winning.

Basically, the LEC video is like being at an event, although they sometimes do interviews and other features. It's Clint and Brandon and Flint miked in, and a few cameras showing the rides. Some replays are shown, but not too much that requires post-editing. If you have a slow Internet connection, you're probably going to have a problem. It's not great resolution, so enlarging it makes it pixelated and icky, especially when you have something like a fast-spinning bull.

The detailed scoring breaks down the scores per judge for bull and rider. You won't know this with the basic scoring, which just shows rider and bull score.

Sometimes Bull Stock Media is the only way to know what's going on when the video crashes, since they usually post a photo of each ride and what the result of the ride was. You won't have this, either, unless you are a paying member.

Another fine new feature is that the LEC will now have a live chat board. Pearl and the Stockyard Queen frankly have no inkling about what the chat is, but we also can't imagine why anyone would want it. Will they moderate it? Can you imagine the fights if they don't? Can you imagine how useless it will be if they do?

So, just to overstate our point, we have less TV coverage, which nobody is happy about and which the folks in Pueblo must certainly have figured out by now. And yet they compound the problem because now we have to pay if we want to watch live streaming. Granted, some of it is stuff that we wouldn't have seen in past years (the first day of a three-day event), but some of it is stuff we would have seen before.

We are mystified as to how the Powers That Be think they can grow the sport when we suspect that most of the fanbase has Hughesnet, which can barely support streaming, and people would have to shell out for a higher TV package and for the ability to even try to see the video or anything useful on the LEC. And how many looky-loos are going to bother to register, and of those who do, how many will want to stick around to see basic scoring, the leaderboard, and some freaky chat?

This mess with the LEC is the bullheaded part. (We of course mean no offense to SQ's favorite players, the bulls themselves. When they use their heads, the outcome is nearly always spectacular, and sometimes terrifying.)

Or, to put it another way, friends and neighbors, if you want to see the definition of insanity acted out with unfailing regularity, just follow the PBR. We guarantee that you will see a bunch of fine folks doing the same (boneheaded and bullheaded) things over and over, and expecting the results to be different. We can pretty much guarantee it.

It's the End of the World as We Know It

Friends, I write to tell you of a decision that Montana Barn Cat and I, with great sorrow, arrived at perhaps three weeks ago. We had been debating the matter since January, really, when the new PBR season began and it immediately became apparent that bad things were happening with our favorite sport. As each succeeding month arrived, our debates became more urgent, although certainly they were never heated. We were in accord about our disdain for the amateurish way the broadcast schedule were being handled, thoroughly horrified by the fact that Justin McKee is still missing in action from the programs, and incensed by the way the PBR handles serious injuries, which reared its ugly head as soon as the season started at Madison Square Garden and Pistol Robinson crawled out of the arena on two broken legs. I don't have to remind any of you that's pretty much the last we've heard about that child, except for the occasional non-informational update. Finally, one day as we were driving home after work, I looked at the Barn Cat, he looked at me, and we said in unison: "We are not going to the PBR in Billings this year." That's right. For the first time in the five years that we have been back in Montana, we will not making that lovely two-hour drive to Billings in the spring of the year. The sweet ladies at the turnstiles will not see our smiling faces beneath our cowboy hats. We will be tuning in from home instead, assuming we can stand it. We would like to think that we are staying home because we are so high-minded that we cannot stand to support an outfit with managers so inept over the smallest things, like making sure they actually have a broadcast contract in place and that they keep the fans in the loop about the condition of injured riders, but the truth is, it all came down to money. When we go to the PBR in Billings, we go on Friday night and come back on Sunday afternoon. We stay at the host hotel (the Crowne Plaza downtown, except for one year when the Crowne was being remodeled and we were stuck out on the edge of town in some truly grungy dump with peeling wallpaper and dirty ceilings), we visit friends, we eat a couple of nice dinners, and we go to the event on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. We have endured Flint's spiel so many times that I swear either of us could recite it to you verbatim ("We all know that the true, die-hard fans come out on Sunday"). We have seen riders, some of whom we had high hopes for, come and go, and we have seen bulls come and go, and now we are seeing ourselves go, quite possibly from the live events for good. The cold hard facts are that the total expense of two nights at the Crowne in a reasonably nice room plus two good meals plus drinks in the bar after the event on Saturday (and a couple of rounds bought for nice lawyers who were riding their Harleys down from Calgary to Sturgis last year) and the gasoline to get over there and back is still less than the cost of four tickets to the two events. And I am not talking all-access, back-of-the-chutes tickets, either. I'm talking about the tickets in the lower tier of seats in the second section over from the chutes (because the view from the second section is way better than from the first), where you don’t have to look past Flint being creepy to see all the action. Believe me—we can go a lot of places that will cost us less than $1,000 for two days. I have to wonder how people with fewer resources than we have can afford to attend, either. Certainly a person has to make attending a priority, and in this economy, many other things have to take precedence over two nights of entertainment, even if it is the PBR. So when the doors open at the Metra this year, we will be missing in action. We will spend the weekend pulling weeds, doing laundry, and trying to figure out when the hell the event will be broadcast and on which network. Perhaps that's for the best. The truth is that we, like our good friends Jean and William, fell in love with the sport because we saw it on television. Perhaps being compelled to comply with religious practices that we don't agree with and to endure a heapin' helpin' of Republican politics and rampant militarism will fade some from our memories, and we will joyfully pull on our spurs and saddle up for the drive next year. I hope we will. It would be very sad if our enthusiasm for the sport ended not with a bang, but with a whimper.