Cowboy Spring Break not your grandpappy’s rodeo
The official and ornate Pro Bull Riders championship cup was placed on a pedestal just a few feet from poolside at the Luxor on Friday. The weather was unseasonably cool and unseasonably wet. There was a report of an earthquake, which also was unseasonable.
This might have been a blessing — it probably reduced the likelihood of the official bull riders championship cup winding up in the deep end of the pool.
My take is that when you combine bull riders with a swimming pool, it’s like combining golf caddies with a swimming pool: It’s usually just a matter of time until something winds up floating in the deep end.
The pro bull riders are back in town for Last Man Standing, one of the major bull riding events of the season. Only this year they’re having it outdoors, at a temporary corral across Las Vegas Boulevard from Luxor, which is old school and pretty cool.
They’re calling this Cowboy Spring Break, which would explain the pool party and the midway and the scantily dressed women and the multiple stages upon which multiple country acts, including some with rock ’n’ roll influences, are performing mini-concerts at high decibel levels.
The first official event of Cowboy Spring Break was the pool party at Luxor. I would have called it Last Man Swimming, or, after it turned cloudy and it started to rain and everybody sought refuge in the cabana areas or the Jacuzzi, First Man Swimming.
Either way, the smart money was on Robson Aragao, the bull rider from Aracaju, Brazil, whom they call “Spiderman.”
Next to contestant No. 3 in the 95.5 The Bull Cowboy Spring Break bikini contest — if you were there, you know which one I’m talking about — Aragao was built better than anything at poolside. Considering the Luxor Fantasy Girls were on hand, that was saying something.
Aragao was wearing a cowboy hat, shark tooth necklace and pink swimming trunks with cowboy boots. I think he would have freaked out Larry Mahan, dressed as he was.
He said he was drinking a pina colada, nonalcoholic. When one of the leggy poolside dancers — purple bikini top, tiny, tiny cutoffs, black cowboy hat, black cowboy boots — sauntered by, swinging her hips in the manner of Bushwacker the bull, Aragao’s eyes drifted to the tiny, tiny cutoffs.
When he was called on it, he averted his glance toward the clouds. He said he was just looking for the sun that had ducked behind them, and not at swinging hips and tiny, tiny cutoffs.
They let Aragao judge the bikini contest anyway.
Still, by Las Vegas pool party standards, the Cowboy Spring Break one seemed pretty tame — for instance, I didn’t spot one NHL player trying to sneak drugs past the yellow-shirted security force. I’m sure it would be more raucous had the weatherman complied.
But that there even was a pool party sanctioned by and for the PBR — and the fanfest midway thing across the street, and all those rock-influenced country music acts, and a temporary outdoor corral built specifically for the PBR — speaks of how far the tour has come since a dozen disgruntled cowboys met in an Arizona motel room in the early 1990s and wrote checks for $1,000.
That was how the PBR broke away from the rest of the rodeo.
Michael Gaffney, one of the disgruntled dozen, was standing poolside just a few feet from the cup upon which his name is engraved for having won the title in 1997.
Gaffney will turn 46 on the Fourth of July. He’s still fit; he even plans to jump on some bulls in a charity event next week in Texas. Up close, he may look a little older than Robson Aragao, and a little less buff. But he does not look disgruntled.
He lives in Corrales, N.M. He’s got a nice spread with a bunch of acres.
When I asked if this pool party and all the stuff across the street was something he and the 11 other founders envisioned when they pulled out their checkbooks in that Arizona motel room, he offered a droll smile and a one-word answer.
“No.”
Then he leaned forward to whisper in my ear, either because the country-rock music was too loud or because he was about to use a swear word, and he didn’t want the bikini contestants and the bull riding fans packed into the Jacuzzi to hear him.
“Not only no, but hell no.”
J.B. Mauney, the 2013 PBR champ, stopped by to say hello to a founding father. Mauney is from North Carolina, and grew up on a lake, Lake Norman, which is where a lot of the NASCAR drivers make their homes.
He was sporting baggy swim trunks and multiple tattoos and looked just like a guy who has done a lot of wakeboarding, which he has.
Mauney was working on a Bud Light — my guess is that it wasn’t his first, but then it would take more than one for most guys to jump on the back of a snot-snorting 1,600-pound bucking bull with bad intentions, wouldn’t it?
The Last Man Standing will receive $180,000 from a total purse of $250,000. Like Friday’s pool party, and the backside of bikini contestant No. 3, that’s something Michael Gaffney never could had imagined, either.
Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.