Inferno Will Hook You and Stomp You in the Ground

I want you to know, Dad, that this isn't your fault. You did everything a father could to impart a love of baseball. You made sure I had all the cheese fries my twelve-year-old stomach could hold at those long-ago Trenton Thunder games. Last week you made me finally check out Nats Stadium, where even without Strasburg pitching we saw the home team trounce the number one Braves and Nyger Morgan steal home.

But my heart belongs to the rodeo now.

Marissa took me to the rodeo Thursday night in Great Falls, Montana. Breast cancer awareness was the cause of the evening, and pink T-shirts, checked shirts and button-downs filled the stands. Many of the riders flung about the dust in the arena appeared as bouncing streaks of pink, and one bull by the name of Flipper wore pink a coat of pink paint as he did his damndest to gore his rider. There may have been a correlation between the pink coat and the attempted goring.

Events began at seven, after the announcer prayed for the armed forces and cancer survivors, and a young alto led us in singing the National Anthem. Between bareback bronco riding, steer roping, barrel racing, and other competitions, cowgirls in red sequined shirts rode through waving literal banner ads.

Watching broncos take cowboys with hyper-American names like Nick Stubblefield and shake them like Polaroid pictures is fun in a spine-clutching masochistic horror movie kind of way. The crowning joy, though, the event that makes rodeo the manliest, fist-pumpingest pastime in these United States, is steer wrestling.

In steer wrestling, a small steer runs into the stadium, followed by a rider. The rider attempts to leap from his horse, catch the steer in a headlock, sweep its legs out from under it, and piledrive it into the dirt, all inside of ten seconds. To recap: one leaps from a galloping horse and brings a steer to earth with a flying tackle. Truly, this is the most badass contest between man and beast until we sanction gorilla boxing or shark judo.

Bull riding is a close second for adrenaline, especially when a positively Satanic long-horned bull named Zombie has its rider on the ground, ripe for goring, and the rodeo clowns, who almost certainly aren't paid enough, distract the bull by running straight at its face. Early in the bull-riding segment a red-shirted scarecrow stood in the middle of the arena, but a few rounds in the bull knocked it across the stadium like a kid kicking a dandelion and it sprawled there for the duration.

Guarding against the possibility of the audience not finding all this near-disfigurement exciting enough without accompaniment, the management pumped music into the arena. The heartland-friendly rock of "Courtesy of the Red White and Blue" and "American Girl" gave way to "Seven Nation Army" and "Enter Sandman" as dusk arrived.

Rodeo rations the bum-puckering excitement of these contests by interspersing them with barrel racing, pageantry, and other light entertainment a la vaudeville. Vince Bruce, introduced as "the Wizard of Whips and Ropes"1, was one such act. The wizard rode in astride two horses, keeping a broad lasso in orbit around himself and his mounts. "As you can tell by the sound of my voice," he told us, "I am from the deep, deep west of London. But I do speak your language. Get. Her. Done!" He hopped a unicycle in and out of a spinning lasso, held playing cards in his mouth and sliced them in two with a whip, rolled lassoes along his back and between his legs, and quipped about riding off into the fog and crashing into buildings.

There was also a rodeo clown, Brian, who wore knee high socks and a pink feather boa and provided color commentary that seemed to genuinely piss off the regular announcer. At one point he did a skit that culminated in a trashcan full of dud fireworks exploding in his hands, which finally startled a laugh out of us.

It's probably easy to read about the evening's proceedings and imagine that we enjoyed the rodeo ironically, the way we fortify ourselves with gin-and-tonics and ironically watch the Twilight movies or Insane Clown Posse's "Miracles" video, the way twentysomethings shout "'Merrica!" at overzealous campaign speeches or Fourth of July displays. At least 90% of the time, this wasn't the case. There's a winning sincerity to the rodeo, from the kinetic butchness of the flying cattle tackles to the gutsiness of the clowns' running interference.

There's no better example of the rodeo's imperviousness to cynicism than the announcer's repeated calls for applause. They were gentlemanly and florid, a relic from a mythic age of frontier chivalry, like a gunslinger doffing his hat to a big-bonneted schoolteacher and apologizing for strong language. No matter how quickly or abjectly he landed in the dust, rare was the rider who climbed to his feet without applause.

"All he will get...is your hands slapping together."

"They are waiting in the wings for a handclap. See to it that they get one!"

"Back to South Dakota he goes, remembering the great round of applause he got in Great Falls on a Thursday night."

Compare this to baseball games in my native Philadelphia, where locals have booed Herbert Hoover, Santa Claus, and, allegedly, the sun.

Such is the power of this tone, that when the announcer calls for a prayer, or delivers some bad news along the lines of "Inferno will hook you and stomp you in the ground!", there is a blunt truth to it.

All this, and three dollar beer.

You and me, rodeo. Yee-haw. Really.

1. That this sobriquet did not sound at all like a raunchy independent film star is a tribute to the raw wholesomeness of the announcer's tone.