"I like when they get [messed] up," Jasmine Rushum said Friday night as rider after faceless rider saddled up for a dance on the dirt-covered Bryce Jordan Center floor.
With that offhand statement, Rushum (freshman-division of undergraduate studies) -- a native Philadelphian whose initial response to attending a bull riding competition had been "Hell no!" -- tapped simultaneously into what is arguably most appealing and frustrating about the Professional Bull Riders Enterprise Rent-A-Car Tour, which came to town this weekend for two full nights of whoopin' and hollerin'.
The sport is made most intriguing by the novice spectator's acute, white-knuckled awareness that at any point a fantastically awful mishap could take place. A fall off the enormous beast is guaranteed; the rider's goal is to stay on for a mere eight seconds.
But after that fall, when the rider attempts to scramble away from the bucking, unburdened creature, there is a moment at which it seems anything can happen. Death by trampling, a horn through the chest -- all the terrifying possibilities realized in Pamplona, Spain each summer seem within reach.
This bloodlust rarely found satisfaction among the dozens of riders trotted out Friday night. At one point, a rider got caught under a bull and was dragged back toward the gate. In another instance, a bull rammed horns-first into its handlers, for the moment foregoing their attempt to corral the bull as they squeezed against the side of the arena.
The problem is the Professional Bull Riders tour did little to embellish this surface view of bull riding in one of its rare scheduled stops in the Northern states.
"I guess it's just a really hard sell up here because it's more of a Southern thing," Geoff Weeks (freshman-theatre), of Jacksonville, Fla., said. "It's not really big down there, but it's around me."
There was no explanation of the scoring system -- if the rider hangs on for eight seconds, the bull and rider both receive judged scores, which are then averaged into a total figure.
Despite the fact many of the local farm boys and girls came to the show Friday looking the part in cowboy hats and boots, discussions with many of these seemingly informed audience members revealed they were mostly clueless about the art or the numbers behind the sport.
At some point, the show transitioned into a championship round, during which Australian Ben Jones was declared the winner after the penultimate ride. Jones seemed glued to the back of the bull as it made its most fitful appeal of the night to roaring applause.
Afterward, Jones bolted to the center of the ring, throwing his hat in the air, thrusting his hips in ecstasy and injecting the show with its first real hint of personality outside of the announcer's strident attempts to rile up the 1,000-plus viewers scattered among the BJC seats.
But it was too little, too late. If PBR -- when that acronym alone isn't a selling point on a college campus, they need a better marketing team -- hopes to someday appeal to the Eastern elites, it will need to come up with a way to craft a compelling narrative throughout each two-hour show.
The first step would be to take a hint from a game beloved by many a soft-palmed Yankee: golf. As another sport in which a field of largely no-name competitors is whittled down to a winner, the concept of a leaderboard -- by which onlookers are informed as to who the players are with the top scores -- makes the game actually watchable.
From there, even first-time spectators can begin to identify with the players, pick favorites among the top tier and become emotionally invested during the course of a match.
Until the Professional Bull Riders tour puts some cash toward such fancy technology, the audience is going to find Ben Jones scrambling for his life just as thrilling as his victory ride.
