Midtown cowboy, riding bulls in Manhattan

NEW YORK — Brian Canter is a few months from his 19th birthday, but if he showed up to play at a Little League game, nobody would check his ID. He is 5 feet 2 and weighs 115 pounds with his boots on.

It's Friday afternoon and Canter is a mere 24 hours from a rendezvous with what is arguably the world's rankest bull. Big Bucks — a name that seems like one of those ironic jokes of understatement, like calling a sumo wrestler big-boned — is 1,400 pounds of widow-making muscle and torque. He's been successfully ridden just once during his years with the Professional Bull Riders, the premier league of the sport. Every other rider that tried was thrown off in less than the eight seconds required for a ride to count, sent plunging in a direction that could be called concussionward. A lot of pros think he is the most unridable bull they've ever seen.

Canter will betray not a hint of trepidation about his showdown with Big Bucks. He is shy but cocky and perhaps a little low on vocabulary.

"I just ride jump to jump," he drawls. "I ain't got no plan or nothing."

Canter is dressed in a black cowboy hat and denim Wrangler jacket. After every sentence, he turns his head and makes a spitting noise, as though he were shooting a nibble of hay out of his mouth. As nervous habits go, this one seems pretty odd, and its oddness is enhanced by the setting.

Canter is sitting in the bar of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, which at the moment is swarming with men in suits from an insurance company, gathered for some annual meeting. A few floors below, a line is forming for the evening's performance of "The Drowsy Chaperone," a Broadway musical about a guy who loves Broadway musicals.

A few years ago, a scaled-down version of the PBR showed up in Manhattan. But last weekend, for the first time, the league brought it all: 45 riders, more than 100 bulls and three rounds of competition over two days.

The spectacle looks and sounds pretty much the same here in Madison Square Garden as it does when televised in other cities, although cultural chasms yawn open now and then. Each show starts with a prayer that includes a call for God to protect the livestock in the building, which might be a Garden first. A cameo by the former mayor prompts the PBR announcer to thank Rudy "Giuliano" for turning up. And the booing gets particularly ugly Saturday night, when Flint the rodeo clown fires a balled-up T-shirt out of a bazooka-like gun and accidentally hits a New York Rangers championship banner hanging from the rafters. The crowd is furious.

"Oh, like a guy from Montana intentionally shot the Stanley Cup flag," Flint howls through the microphone strapped to his head. Not until he dances an absurdly frantic jig to "Cotton-Eyed Joe" is the audience won back.

The attendees are overwhelmingly white. Many have seen bull riding on cable; others just heard about this show and bought tickets.

"I like John Wayne," says David Rosenfeld, in a dark suit and yarmulke, who says he was born and bred in Brooklyn. "He is my man."

"Got to introduce them to new experiences," says Jonathan Schindel, a lawyer by training, gesturing to his two sons. "You never know what will catch on with these boys."

"They are not

becoming bull riders," counters Carolyn, his wife. "You've got to be kidding."

This New York venture is part of the PBR's attempt to mainstream bull riding, which seems to be working. The sponsorship money soared from $360,000 in 1994 to $24 million projected for 2007, according to PBR head Randy Bernard, much of it from companies like Ford and Jack Daniel's and U.S. Smokeless Tobacco. For the upper third of the league's riders, there is a six-figure living to be made, and the top guy — a Brazilian named Adriano Moraes, the only man to win the PBR world title three times — is rich.

"The first three-quarters of my career didn't pay much," says Moraes, who at 36 is pretty much a geezer for this sport. "The first time I won, in '94, I took home $35,000. The last time I won, in 2005, I took home $1 million. I'm lucky to be around for the new money."

Moraes is a phenomenon, not just because he is almost certainly the greatest bull rider ever, but because he's ridiculously charismatic, articulate and hunky in a Jean-Claude Van Damme kind of way.

He has elaborate theories about how the bulls regard riders as predators and themselves as prey, and their impulse is to kill all predators.

"Take the Cape Buffalo. They attack lions, because lions are predators," Moraes says before Saturday afternoon's ride. "They kill the lion today, the lion won't kill them tomorrow. You see?"

Moraes has been in New York all week, doing Imus, TV, ringing the opening bell on the stock market. He has patiently corrected everyone who has called this a "rodeo." A rodeo has a bunch of different events. This, he explains, is just bull riding.

Unlike Moraes, most of the riders are in their early 20s and hail from small towns in states like Oklahoma and Louisiana. For many, it's their first look at Manhattan.

"I have relatives who told me to be really careful here," says Cody Whitney, "like I was going to get stabbed in the stomach when I walked off the plane."

The PBR's recent uptick in pay and profile has been accompanied by an influx of "bucklebunnies," the sport's answer to groupies.

"They can be pretty direct," says J.B. Mauney, 19, the PBR's rookie of the year in 2006. "I've heard things you can't print in a newspaper."

The riders didn't get to mingle all that much with New Yorkers, given their schedule. When they did hit the sidewalks, they were gawked at a lot more than greeted.

"We had a contest on the walk here to see who could get anyone to say hi to us," says rider Dusty LaBeth. "We said hi to 200 people and just two people said hi back. We're not counting the homeless guy who shouted, 'Yiiiii, cowboy!' "

Drawing a rank bull from the random lottery that pairs animals to riders falls into a tiny niche of life experiences that could be labeled both terrifying and lucky. Each ride is scored by judges, with a maximum of 50 points for the rider and a maximum of 50 points for the bull, with those sums tallied for the final score. Riders are judged on their control and balance. (Unless they're bucked off in under eight seconds, in which case they get no score.) The bull is judged on the ferocity of its fight, the height of its leaps, etc. If your bull doesn't rumble hard enough, in other words, you can't win. But if you draw a rank bull and ride him, you can't lose.

So for Brian Canter, drawing the rankest of 'em all is a golden opportunity and a good reason to double-check his health-care coverage. A rank bull has speed, agility, strength and something that sounds an awful lot like cunning. Big Bucks has all that, plus a superlative amount of raw aggression. One of his owners, Tom Teague, calls him a "freak," which he means as a compliment.

The bulls buck, everyone here says, for the same reason hunting dogs hunt — they're bred to do so. This is no doubt true, but there is a strap wrapped around their hindquarters, and though it doesn't come near the delicates, the bulls clearly hate it. They want their cowboy-less, strap-free lives back, pronto.

And often that's what they get. Saturday afternoon, the first six riders are bucked off so quickly that momentarily this sport seems like a revenge drama that bulls dreamed up. They lunge out of the gates, ribbons of mucus streaming from their nostrils, in spasms of rage. When they've shaken off the rider, many of the bulls wheel around with a "You want some of this?" glint in their eyes. Others take what appears to be a victory lap.

Cowboys are tossed like popcorn, spun sideways and dumped on their heads. Some are slammed against the metal gates that line the ring, a few are trampled or speared with horns. About one in 10 needs a hand leaving the arena.

Eventually, riders start to post scores, though even for the winners there is the perennial dismount problem. Bull riding must be the only sport in the world where you can land in a heap in the dirt, get up and run for your life — and win. When Moraes rides a bull named Evil Forces, he stays masterfully onboard for all eight seconds until he's flung to the earth. Mr. Forces, perhaps sensing humiliation, chases Moraes for about 15 feet, eventually catching him and knocking him over.

In Sunday's championship round, Moraes is in first place. Amazingly, he draws Big Bucks, setting up a best-of-species showdown. This confrontation lasts exactly 1.2 seconds and looks more like a karate chop than anything else.

"I tip my hat to Big Bucks," Moraes says to the crowd after being offered the arena microphone. Moraes nonetheless stands atop the leader board until J.B. Mauney conquers a bull named The Boogerman. At the end, Mauney accepts an oversize check for $24,500.

Asked later what he'll do with the money, he says he'll use some to pimp his Chevy Duramax pickup truck.

"I'd like to tint the glass, put a sound system in it," he says, grinning. "The rest is going in the bank."

As for Canter's matchup with Big Bucks, the slow-motion replay shows the bull opening with his trademark, nearly vertical buck, a lurch that will prevent you from smirking about the phrase "animal athlete" ever again. Canter lands on the bull's head, is shot back into the air, and then into the dirt, where he lies motionless for about 10 seconds.

"I saw stars," he said afterward. "That's all I remember."