Photograph by Austin Aughinbaugh. Courtesy of Studio Augie.
A 1,650-pound American bucking bull named Man Hater paused at the entrance to the Madison Square Garden floor and fixed me with his dark, soulful eyes. “Hi, puppy,” I said.
A bearded wrangler scoffed. “That’s no puppy.”
Before opening night of the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden, on January 3—the eighteenth annual such event and first to sell out all three days—a small press corps had gathered by the tunnel to watch the athletes arrive. Not the human athletes but their bovine counterparts, which plodded up the corridor, chased by a mounted cowboy chanting in a low voice. The bulls advanced with the sheepish dignity of prizefighters in ill-fitting suits.
In a few hours, these animals would try to buck their riders, who would try desperately to stay on for eight seconds—the basic drama of a rodeo. A popular myth claims rodeo bulls are compelled to buck by a strap wrapped around their testicles, but as any spectator can observe, these are clearly swinging free. “Take a rope, tie it around yours, and pull it up tight—and see how high you can jump,” says Chad Berger, a livestock contractor, in a Professional Bull Riders (PBR) promotional video meant to dispel this misconception. The real instigator is a strap wrapped around the bull’s flank—an annoyance that provokes an animalistic urgency to get it off, a response I know well, having once attempted to put pants on my dog for Halloween. “It’s basically like if I tickle your armpits—that’s about what it does to them bulls,” Berger says. Madison Square Garden’s three-day Monster Energy Buck Off, I learned, would be fueled by a tickling of the bulls.
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!!!”
***
A pyrotechnic explosion kicked off the event: The dirt erupted in flames, lighting up the otherwise dark arena, and thick clouds of artificial smoke billowed up to the rafters. The crowd was jolted into a frenzy—one can only imagine how the bulls felt. As the unmistakable thrum of jock jams began to pulse through the floor, the announcer screamed something incomprehensible. Thirty-five bull riders emerged from the darkness and walked straight through the fire—how, I don’t know—taking their places near the Monster Energy girls, tipping their caps as they were introduced. The announcer called for prayer, and a hush quickly spread through the crowd.
“Heavenly Father, we come to you tonight, thankful, first and foremost, simply for the gift of life that you’ve given each and every one of us here tonight.”
The cowboys bowed their heads—some wept—as the announcer beseeched God to keep them safe. John Crimber, the nineteen-year-old Texan prodigy, pressed his hat to his chest over his fresh tattoo that read “Psalm 23”—the prayer he whispers before every ride: “I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.”
The announcer finished with a call for forgiveness from the Lord “because we know every breath we take on this earth, we fall short of the glory of your name.”
Photograph by Austin Aughinbaugh. Courtesy of Studio Augie.
Behind the gates waited the Undertaker, Ram Rod, Bangarang, and at least forty other bulls, each weighing up to two thousand pounds. Sometime between the printing of the day sheet and the start of the event, a bull was renamed from Daniel Penny—the name of the former marine who became a conservative folk hero after strangling Jordan Neely on a New York City subway—to Bruised Ego. Just two months earlier, Trump held a rally at MSG that became instantly notorious after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe had delivered a set full of racist jokes. I expected this event might be a victory lap, but I spotted only one MAGA hat in the sea of Stetsons. The crowd, which skewed male, seemed to be a mix of real cowboys from the tri-state area, families on a day out, New Yorkers test-driving their cowboy-core outfits, and the Garden regulars whom you’d see at any Knicks or Rangers game. Jemima Kirke was in the crowd in a pink vest and rhinestone earrings. The cowboys were undeniably sexy, she told me, but she vacillated between erotic attraction and motherly concern. She said, “Somebody needs to send these boys home to their mommies.”
Bull riding, like many other sports, is about guys hanging out. One by one, the men mounted their lottery-drawn bulls waiting in their steel chutes. The other cowboys—some aides-de-camp, others pre- or post-ride—gathered around the rider, pulling on ropes, prodding the bull, rubbing the rider’s shoulders, whispering in his ear, until the gate swung open.
The contest goes like this: If a rider stays on for eight seconds, judges award up to a hundred points—fifty for the cowboy’s control and another fifty based on the difficulty of the bull’s performance. (The bulls, like their riders, maintain rankings throughout the year.) If the riders fall short of eight seconds—and most do—they receive no score and no money. Over three nights, each rider gets three rides, with the top twelve advancing to a championship round. The winner takes home $46,000 from a $143,549 total purse. Last year, the PBR distributed $17 million in prizes across 1,080 competitors—roughly $16,000 per rider, though the elite athletes at the top took home the lion’s share.
The riders are independent contractors—like Uber drivers, except they get paid for a fraction of their rides, and a typical workday involves a collision that could kill them. Andrew Giangola, the PBR’s head of communications, told me that money comes second to rider camaraderie—in the joyful post-event locker room, you’d never guess who had earned and who was leaving empty-handed. It’s an especially American paradox: a ruthlessly meritocratic system where men nonetheless live to pull each other up by their bootstraps.
The riding itself involves less thinking, Crimber told me. It’s just like “brushing your teeth,” he said. “I just go out there with a clear mind, just kind of trusting my body that I’ve prepared for that situation.” I agreed with him that this is what brushing your teeth is like but asked what advice he’d give me if I were going to ride a bull. “Just go out there and have fun,” he said, which seemed like terrible advice.
Crimber is wholesome and cute in the way the Walmart yodeling boy was wholesome and cute. But his newfound celebrity seems to be nurturing a budding swagger: He had just bought a Rolex, and a girls’ volleyball championship team recently recognized him at the airport. Under his right eye, a purple divot marks where a horn shattered his eye socket in 2023—a week after the injury and before reconstructive surgery, he rode half-blind.
The riders’ strategy is generally to become rag dolls—a word that appears in the PBR’s promotional material—going limp while swiveling their hips with the bull’s motion, trying to maintain their center of gravity while absorbing multiple forces: violent upward jackrabbit kicks, sudden directional changes, dizzying spins, and gravity. One hand waves in the air like a debutante’s; the other grips a braided rope around the bull’s girth. Every wrap of the bull rope is a calculated gamble: Too loose sends you straight to the dirt, too tight and you might get dragged by your trapped hand beneath the bull’s pounding hooves. In 2013, the PBR began requiring all riders born after October 15, 1994, to wear helmets with face masks, but several older riders at MSG stuck with the traditional cowboy hat.
After each ride, four lunatics known as “bullfighters” must intercept the bull before it can gore or stomp the fallen rider. These protectors wear shirts emblazoned with “U.S. BORDER PATROL”—the PBR’s official federal law enforcement sponsor, which had set up recruitment stations around the arena. “Thematically, it’s on point,” Giangola told me. “The agents in the Border Patrol are essentially protecting Americans, and the bullfighters out on the dirt are putting their bodies in harm’s way to protect the bull riders.” It’s an unusual brand to see promoted in New York City, but the whole event had the quality of a Monster Energy truck idling beside a halal cart.
The rodeo clown—more of a rodeo Juggalo whose mesh shorts reach his ankles—serves as the emcee and entertainer between rides, offering light color commentary and ham-fisted crowd work. On this night, his signature moves consisted primarily of crip walking around the arena, suggestively undulating his hips, and rudely whipping his hat like a frisbee at the bulls’ heads when the bullfighters struggled to corral them.
There was a famous person in the dirt, and, boy, were people excited. Neal McDonough. Sharp-angled, silver-haired, and blue-eyed, he looks every bit the cowboy, but the fifty-eight-year-old, originally from Massachusetts, earned his Western credentials playing moneyed villains in Justified, Tulsa King, and Yellowstone. In these circles, that makes him an A-lister; he’d take a photo with anyone who asked and even those who didn’t. He and his family were the event’s guests of honor, there to promote McDonough’s new film, The Last Rodeo, about an aging bull rider who lost his wife to cancer (made in partnership with the PBR).
McDonough held court in the media pit, telling and retelling a story that would be repeated throughout MSG for three days. A decade ago, he was fired from a TV show for refusing to perform a kissing scene. “These lips are meant for one woman!” he said, to his wife Ruvé’s delight as she stood by his side. Hollywood blacklisted him—the actor who wouldn’t kiss, no small cross to bear—until he lost everything: the beautiful house, the fancy car, even his “coolness.” “There wasn’t any booze that I didn’t like,” he said. “I just drank and drank and drank.” After two years, he broke down sobbing, asking God, “Why have you forgotten about me?” At that moment, he realized he hadn’t been living for God. Then, he said, the phone rang with a job offer. More work followed, and now, with The Last Rodeo, came his shot at absolution. He’d cast Ruvé—who has not worked as an actor before—to play his deceased wife, meaning the film would feature, during a flashback in which the aging bull rider dances with his dying wife, Neal McDonough’s First On-Screen Kiss.
Appearing on the Jumbotron for a live interview later, McDonough would promote his new film and his love for his wife. “I milked it for as much as I could,” he said of the kissing scene, relaying to the crowd that he’d insisted on take after take despite on-set pleas to stop. “No,” he’d said. “I’m going to kiss her a lot. And we did, and it was awesome.”
All night long, men were launched into the championship banners. Kicked like hacky sacks. Spun like laundry. Horned in the ass. Thrashed against the steel gates. Their bodies hit the ground contorted into letters of the alphabet. If they were able, they scurried away like frightened woodland critters. Occasionally, riders are stomped on. Sometimes they have died—since its 1992 founding, the PBR has lost four riders to stomping injuries; the death toll at unsanctioned events is believed to be higher. A limited accidents policy covers immediate care for competition injuries, though what qualifies as an accident versus the cost of doing business remains unclear to me. “Generally speaking, it covers the injury and the immediate care,” Sean Gleason, the PBR’s CEO, told me. “It’s not insurance for the riders, so there is no long-term disability or anything of that sort.” This is why, he told me, charitable organizations are so important in their world.
Backstage, a bull was sticking its head through the gate and nuzzling against the nose of another. “Aw,” I said. “They’re kissing.” (Kissing was on my mind.) “They ain’t kissin’,” the bearded wrangler said and disappeared into the herd.
In the crowd, men who had entered as strangers brushed shoulders during a “Piano Man” singalong. The rendition of “Y.M.C.A.” was rapturous. Two bull-riding aficionados high-fived and waxed poetic about the quality of the animal athletes: “These bulls are just different,” one said. “They can feel which way you’re moving, jerk you down and jerk you off.”
The drama was in the dirt—1.5 million pounds of it—where each rider stepped forward to test their fate with the bulls. Sometimes the bull bucked before being let out of the chutes, smashing its rider’s legs into the steel (“Ow! Ow! Stop it, dang it!”). Other times it failed to buck at all and was driven riderless into the tunnel—straight to the steakhouse kitchen? (Truthfully, these bulls, which can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and their semen worth tens, seem to be treated about as well as livestock anywhere.) Austin Richardson rode Buckshot for 88.25 points and performed the Griddy dance. Crimber rode Crazy Party for 85.5, tossing off his helmet to show his pretty face to the adoring crowd. Daniel Keeping was sent airborne, landing ribs first on Punchy Pete’s head mid-buck. The audience gasped, he staggered out of the ring with the help of two cowboys, and I thought about what he’d done to my hand.
As the tournament went on, the riders’ screams intensified—agony, ecstasy, primal roars. In McDonough’s next Jumbotron appearance, he poured a Monster Energy tallboy into his wife’s cowboy boot and drank it. (Giangola later made a point of telling me that Ruvé had not been wearing socks.) This triggered a chain reaction throughout the arena—men yanking off boots from nearby women and girls, pouring beer into them, and chugging. (“I love seeing guys rip off their wives’ boots and have at it,” McDonough told me.) The fun wasn’t limited to couples: A young boy drank Coca-Cola from his sister’s boot. Beside me, a lone fan drank an Aquafina out of his own old Saucony.
***
Photograph by Austin Aughinbaugh. Courtesy of Studio Augie.
Three days, 123 rides, and 79 buck offs culminated in the championship round. Man Hater dispatched Brady Fielder, the field’s lone Aussie, while the bull’s owner, Jean Clark—a sixty-nine-year-old real estate businesswoman and heiress from Cooperstown, New York—watched with satisfaction. Always Been Crazy sent eighteen-year-old Tennessean Hudson Bolton immediately horizontal. Derek Kolbaba fouled out by grazing Smokestack with his non-rope hand at 6.5 seconds—a heartbreaker for the rider, who broke his neck in 2023. Of the twelve championship round riders, only three went the distance. Lucas Divino, a soft-spoken, helmetless PBR veteran from Brazil, took home the trophy with an eight-second, 88.75-point ride of Punchy Pete. His voice quavered and eyes welled up with tears as he spoke to the ringside reporter. “Today, I was walking here toward the chutes, and God was telling me—the Holy Spirit was telling me—‘It’s okay. You’re going to be the champion.’ And here’s the truth: I’m the champion.”
Media, friends, and family spilled onto the dirt. Parents photographed their children with Border Patrol officers and accepted their recruitment pamphlets. The riders—winners and losers alike, all worse for the wear—backslapped and posed for selfies. They gathered at the podium to celebrate Divino, who, the announcer told us, had led their locker room prayer.
The fans filed out. Two guys in cowboy hats sitting in front of me said their goodbyes. They’d been warming to each other throughout the event, chatting, even buying one another beers. I wondered if they were going to exchange numbers.
“Hey, man,” one cowboy said to the other, as they turned to go their separate ways. “Are you on LinkedIn?”
Jasper Nathaniel is a Brooklyn-based writer and reporter. He covers Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and other political and cultural affairs on his Substack, Infinite Jaz.
