The Professional Bull Riders tour is no stranger to New York City; it’s been through Gotham at least 18 times, including last week’s gloriously titled Monster Energy Buck Off. Just because its most recent visit to Madison Square Garden isn’t a maiden voyage doesn’t make it any less of an opportunity for a keen-eyed writer. Case in point: Jasper Nathaniel’s wry and rollicking account of the three-day competition. Pieces like this can easily shade into arm’s-length anthropology, but Nathaniel weathers the bucks and jolts like a pro.
We went to the locker room to meet their riders. They have names like Sage Steele Kimzey, Kaiden Loud, Cort McFadden. They’re built like whipcord and hover around five foot six. Most hail from the American West or Southwest or Brazil, whose riders have dominated the sport with four championships in the past five years. “Bigger, stronger bulls have bred a different type of rider,” one Brazilian fan told me, implying that the Brazilians are tougher. (The best explanation I could extract from the PBR was that Brazil has a cowboy culture with an abundance of cattle.) Some are tragically handsome, others just tragic, with hoof-shaped dents in their cheekbones. Most are in their late teens or twenties. Rap music played while men worked rosin into their ropes; the American teens scrolled through TikTok. Everybody was very polite, all “sirs” and “ma’ams,” and they seemed to like one another—many were friends from the road, traveling the PBR circuit together each week, provided their rankings held. One rider said “Bonjour” when I told him I was writing for The Paris Review. A twenty-five-year-old Texan named Daniel Keeping, who is missing several important teeth, crushed my hand when I reached out and said hello. A door forbidden to media swung open, and I glimpsed the writing on a whiteboard: “Pussies don’t win!!!”
More picks from The Paris Review
Building an AI Data Center in Pine Island, Minnesota
“I learned about the data center as soon as the scrappy sign was erected. I was thrilled to see something new; my drive hasn’t changed much in three years. I was less thrilled for Pine Island, which has, like many rural Midwestern towns, become an unlikely microcosm of the AI debate.”
All My Dad’s Sons
“At a very young age, I learned a lot about how life can go wrong. It put things into perspective, even if that perspective was a little warped.”
Balthazar, 1997
“The noise between the world in which we had known each other and the world I occupied now went silent, or maybe only hushed.”
Homeward Bound: On Pigeon Racing
“They flap their wings as fast as they can until they disappear over the horizon—all heading toward Chicago, all heading home.”
Car Talk
“I’d kept up my license, but now I needed a car. What kind of car? As in the usual run of things—a congenital tilt towards irreality, an obdurate wistfulness—I pined for something that did not exist: the car at the end of the mind.”
The Man in the New Boots
“Maybe it’s that it’s goddamned insane to ride a bull, and America is full of crazy people who for no earthly reason see that sort of thing and want to try it themselves.”
