The idea of someone like me, the son of a Jewish corporate lawyer and of a woman with three graduate degrees, born and raised in the New York City suburb of Darien, Conn., going to a rodeo is like some sort of Woody Allen joke that ends with a punchline about psychoanalytic findings on a man who wants to get thrown off a wild animal for a living.
Yet from a young age, it was not uncommon for my family and me to make an annual pilgrimage to Arizona, take trips across the border to Nogales, Mexico, and also to stop at a local festival featuring bull riding, calf roping, rodeo clowns, and the kind of jokes that Jay Leno would find hacky.
The fact is that rodeos are great and are hardly confined to the Southwest. Rodeos aren’t merely a sporting event, but an entire spectacle of performative hypersincerity. Perhaps that’s why they resonated so much with this young man who struggles with wallowing in ironic detachment.
Just as there’s a sea of pinstripes and navy blue hats at Yankee Stadium, so, when one enters the bleachers at a rodeo, there’s an unofficial uniform of bootcut Wrangler jeans, cowboy hats, and boots. Denim is big at places like these, with all sorts of fades on the back pockets and knees on the pants that a Brooklyn hipster in $400 Japanese-brand jeans would blog about breathlessly.
Despite the familiar uniform, not everyone at a rodeo works on a farm or ranch. In fact, statistically, a good number of those in the crowd are likely to have white-collar jobs. That’s certainly the case at rodeos in Connecticut, Maryland, and New York.
According to the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, over 57 percent of those who attended an official PRCA rodeo have some college education, and 26 percent are college graduates. Nearly 55 percent have a household income above $75,000 with a fifth having a household income above $100,000.
But even if you spot a software sales associate from Kansas City at the American Royal in September, you’ll notice he’s wearing some sort of riding boot and belt buckle, a different outfit than the one he dons during the workweek.
In Arizona, where Western frontier-culture remains a popular, though dying, aesthetic, you’ll undoubtedly come across some ranch hands in the audience or those who grew up on a ranch. But more likely than not, you’ll find that the people there are playing a part.
Attending a rodeo is entertaining as hell, but it’s more than that. It’s a performative act that signals solidarity with a part of the country that feels swallowed by urbanization and technological change.
NASCAR celebrates man’s dominance over the machine, and football pits human machines against one another, whereas rodeo hearkens back to a time when man was forced to wrestle with nature and beast. In our era of smartphone-charged hyperreality, such an escape is alluring.
That extends to the competitors as well. Most cowboys must pay a fee to participate. There’s no league salary or union guarantee, leaving most of them at the end of each rodeo with less money and more bruises than when the day started.
As the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association puts it, “If [cowboys] place high enough to win money, they probably make a profit, but if they don’t, they’ve lost their entry fee and any travel expenses, so every gamble pit[s] the chance for loss and physical injury against the chance for financial windfall and athletic glory.”
“Financial windfall” is generous, considering that top prizes at most competitions rarely break above $10,000. When you factor in that most competitors travel to each event and stay the night or several nights, professional riders voluntarily chose a life of grit, much like an amateur boxer or mixed martial arts fighter.
Most rodeos aren’t televised, so the spectacle is left solely for the crowd and the competitors. The glory sought by your average cowboy is earned in front of just a few hundred people.
Before matriculating at a respectful college, I did what all young, privileged children did when they have horrible grades but “lots of potential” and enrolled where it is sunny and warm all year: the University of Arizona.
There wasn’t a whole lot to do on campus for a guy who isn’t over 6 feet tall, has dark hair, and lacks the strength to bench press more than 300 pounds, thanks mostly to beautiful kids from California who gentrify the surrounding state universities. But I think it might have all been worth it when I consider the time my parents visited me and we bought rodeo tickets.
Despite the cringes and moans from my father after the announcer cracked horrible jokes about President Obama, the experience remained wondrous. Although I left Arizona after a year, I had found something that day that I had been sorely missing: home.
Joseph Simonson is a Washington Examiner campaign reporter.
