My first trip to the sideline of an NFL game is pretty memorable. First impressions stick with you a long time, and my first impression of those New Orleans Saints players was how darn big they are. I mean really big. Even the little guys were big.
I got a similar first impression last year when I sat on the frontm row at the Enterprise Center in St. Louis, just a few yards from the bucking chutes. It was my first up close and personal look at a PBR bucking bull.
Bucking bulls are literally a breed of their own. These 1,500 or so pounds of solid muscle look the part. They have muscles on top of muscles. They can leap four or five feet off the ground. Or at times, contort their body so it is at a 90-degree angle from the turf. Mean, lean and ready for battle. Seeing it in person, so close, was dramatic. One bull tossed a rider four feet from my seat, with the dirt and the bull snot and slobber – along with the bullrider – flying all around. There was only one better seat in the house to see this action, but he only kept that seat about four seconds.
“These bulls are bred, there is a long line of bloodlines for bucking bulls,” says Koltin Hevalow of Smithville in northern Missouri, ranked No. 10 in PBR. “These bulls go back to some of the greats, they get bred up. They get trained and fed. When it comes to the feeding program on these bulls, the best way you can put it is you are messing with a bomb and you are a mad scientist.”
This year I was back at the Enterprise Center for Unleash the Beast, and it was no different than a year ago. Staff photographer Lori Lunceford and I had front-row seats courtesy of the PBR. Hevalow, at 5-6 and 135 pounds, crawled on top of Crunch Time, just short of a ton’s worth of bucking bull. Crunch Time was one of dozens of bulls brought to the Enterprise Center Dec. 2 along with over 700 tons of dirt as St. Louis welcomed the PBR, its cowboys and these amazing bulls.
Bringing four bulls to the competition from their Hookin’ W Ranch in Tupelo, Okla., were Laramie Wilson and Katie Perschbacher. They breed, train, buy, sell, coddle and love bucking bulls, as well as take their best all around the country to compete in PBR and other events. This year at the Enterprise Center they had Top Dollar, Skippy, Risky Business and Rustic Pearl.
Top Dollar has bucked off 96% of riders in an average of three seconds and is ranked No. 50 in the world. He has a streak of 20 buckoffs, the latest being a 3.71 buckoff of Paulo Eduardo Rosseto at PBR’s Unleash the Beast event in the Enterprise Center two weeks ago.
Bred for bucking
So where does a bucking bull with all that muscle and athletic skill come from?
No. 1, they are bred for it. Dad, grandpa and great grandpa did it, too, so it’s in the blood. There are also special feeds, and the Hookin’ W Ranch flies in a chiropractor from Texas and a veterinarian from Wyoming when needed to take a look at a prize bucking bull. There is an MRI machine on site to take a look deep down into that bull muscle.
“We have it down to a science now,” Wilson said during an interview prior to the PBR event. “We track the pedigrees on all these bucking bulls. There is a bull registry, and we trace it all the way back to 1960, and some would even argue the 50s. It’s just like the racehorse business. We breed world champions to world champions. That’s the biggest thing, finding the right cross. You mix and match the genetics till you get it right.”
Says Perschbacher: “You name it, they (bulls) got it. We have a whole team behind us who make sure these bulls feel good.”
Sounds simple enough. But there is much more to raising a champion.
“Once you get the right cross, it’s just like an athlete,” says Wilson. “An athlete goes out and eats cheeseburgers at McDonald’s, and he’s not going to perform. You have to take care of them, make sure they are on the right track to be successful.
“You have to give them everything. You don’t turn them loose in the pasture like a beef cow. They stay up in the pen. You have them on a certain feed ration. I have three different types of feed at my house. We had a bull last year, Woopaa, that wasn’t doing as good. I had a feed designed especially for him, and I mix it by hand every morning.”
Hookin’ W Ranch has 35 bulls, 80 cows and 80 calves right now. They will start bucking those calves soon to see which ones have potential, bucking power. Which could be the next national champion?
There have been some good ones through the years.
Perhaps no bucking bull in rodeo history was as feared as Bodacious, a 1,900-pound cross-bred Charbray that burst upon the scene in 1992. In four years, Bodacious was virtually unrideable. All muscle, the bull with the yellow coloring bucked off 127 of his 135 riders.
Top-tier PBR bulls can sell for $100,000 to $250,000 at the peak of their careers. Arguably the best ever, Bushwacker, sold for $250,000. He was a three-time PBR World Champion Bull, winning the title in 2011, 2013 and 2014 and once had 42 consecutive buckoffs.
A young animal with DNA-verified parentage can be worth as much as $100,000 with the right bloodlines, some going for as high as $500,000.
Hookin’ W Ranch had its own bull making history. The retired Woopaa has lifetime earnings of $500,000, was the 2021 PBR Season Champion and 2020 ABBI World Champion Classic Bull and has the highest marked ride in PBR history, a 98.75 by Jose Vitor Leme in 2020.
On the road with these gentle giants
There is only one way to get bucking bulls from Point A to Point B – in this case from Tupelo to St. Louis – and that is by stock trailer. A nice stock trailer, but nonetheless a stock trailer.
Wilson and Perschbacher, along with Lizzie the dog, choose to take their animals on the road themselves, and sometimes it is a long and winding road. St. Louis isn’t too bad. They took a day to get to Cuba where they stay at the Cuba sale barn – a barn they like to make a stop at whenever they head east or south – then made the short drive to St. Louis and the Enterprise Center.
“Everywhere they go, we take them,” Wilson said about an hour before their four bulls showed their stuff in the Enterprise Center. “That’s our livelihood, so I am not going to send them with someone else. Me and Katie and our dog Lizzie take them on the road.”
They try not to travel more than eight hours in a day. Last year they spent well over 150 days on the road.
“We left Christmas Day for New York and were gone 17 days,” said Perschbacher. “Then we were gone 25 of the 31 days this October. Usually, we are gone from Thursday to Sunday, home long enough to take the laundry to the dry cleaner.”
One might think it would be a bit difficult to tote a bunch of 1,500-pound vicious bucking bulls around the country, but Perschbacher says that isn’t usually the case. Woopaa curled up on a two-inch thick rubber mat when he was on the road. Sure, for eight seconds or less once or twice a week they can be vicious and downright dangerous, but she says most of the bulls are, well, I will let her tell you. . . .
“Sometimes people think all these bulls are so mean,” she says. “Some of them can be. Risky Business, I don’t pet him, I don’t mess with him. Top Dollar, I can go in there and I have videos and pictures – tons of them, of me going in there and petting him and me sitting beside him. They have a personality and it’s really cool to watch. He’s (Top Dollar) like a big teddy bear.”
When asked about the “rankest bull” he’d ever ridden, Hevalow quickly responded it was Cool Whip, formerly No. 1 ranked in the world. He also was quick to point out Cool Whip’s split personality.
“I rode him 6-7 seconds, and he just blew my hand out of the rope,” he said. “I always tell myself there isn’t a bull who can buck me off. That’s kind of the mojo I’ve always had. But that’s part of bullriding. You are going to get bucked off.
“He’s kind of a hard bull to get mad at, though. He’s like a big pet. You can love on him and scratch on him. He’s not a mean bull. Not going to come after you.”
While PBR riders have fans, so do the bulls, who are often as big a draw as the riders. Top Dollar, and Woopaa before him, are big stars on social media. After all, the bucking bulls, like the cowboys trying to ride them, are among the best in the world at what they do. And more often than not, it’s the bull that ends up the victor.
“They know their job,” says Wilson. “They just know what to do. They’ve done it since they were a year old. Best I can say is they are bred to do it. Just like a racehorse. They are all going to run, some just run faster. Bulls are the same way.”
Most of the PBR riders you talk to love what they do, which probably plays a role in their success. Same thing with the bulls. They are bred for it, and in some cases, live for it.
Woopaa was retied in March of last year. To this day, Wilson says when the trailer backs up to the pen to load the bulls for their road show, Woopaa comes running up to the pen, “thinking I am going to get on that truck.”
Woopaa was bred and trained to compete, and his love of the game shows me that in the world of bull riding, the bulls get it, too.
