Professional Bull Riders now has a New York City team
BULL riding is coming to New York City, and it’s more popular than you might expect.
Last year, NYC received a Professional Bull Riders expansion team in the form of the New York Mavericks.
While bull riding might be a foreign concept to many New Yorkers, Madison Square Garden and the Barclays Center were packed last season to watch cowboys go to work.
This year, Professional Bull Riders is expecting nothing less, and team general manager Chris Pantani has a simple answer for the turnout:
“Everybody wants to be a cowboy.”
The introduction of the team format in PBR has given the uninformed fan a way to digest bull riding like any other professional sport.
“So it’s the same as any main type sport you look at,” Pantani said.
“It’s just a Western version of that sport. The competition is five on five.
“Think of it as a hockey overtime or a soccer shootout. Away team goes, home team goes. It’s five players compete for an aggregate score.
“So you have games, you have practices, you have standings, you have world champions, everything is just like a regular or mainstream type sport.
“So fans can follow. So you don’t need an endemic fan to really follow the sport.
“You can relax, enjoy with your family, look up and you can see a score. And it’s two separate dugouts.
“The teams are separated on the arena so you can actually follow and see what’s going to happen at the same time.”
PBR hosts an annual event at Madison Square Garden, but the team event at Barclays was the first time the sport made it to Long Island.
That will continue this year at UBS Arena, where the Mavericks will host the team series from September 18-20.
Fans are expected to turn out in droves for this event, embracing cowboy culture hundreds of miles away from the south.
Pantani labels this as the “Yellowstone effect,” referencing the popular Paramount+ TV series.
People around the country are interested in southern culture, and it has shown in attendance and interest in PBR in recent years.
According to PBR, ticket sales increased by 23 percent between 2022 and 2023.
