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Other than the PBR World Finals in Las Vegas, the American Heritage is the biggest event
throughout the regular season tour. These bulls that they buck at the American Heritage
- stock contractors had to start paying on them when they were just babies. They've made
payments throughout their career. So when they finally come to this event that pays
over $100,000, finally they have to roll the dice of where they've invested their money
over the past two years.
So this is my Heritage calf, Come On Baby. Saturday morning he competes for over $100,000
so his housing, his comfort is my number one priority right now. We're going to let him
out and soften up his stay, you could say. The Futurities are judged by quarter points
and six judges so sometimes I think the difference for him is having a good meal and a good night's
stay so we're going to do what we can to make everything right for the bull. About every
town you go to there's a little bit of different taste in water. Sometimes it takes a day or
two to get them adapted. You can tell like from the house where we live on well water
so you come here and it's got a chlorine smell to it. Bulls might not drink so good the first
day but when it's 96 degrees like to today, I'm pretty sure he's going to drink.
1999, was the first bull, and it wasn't Bullnanza then, it was Bullmania, and then after a 2
year run as Bullmania, it got renamed to Bullnanza and of course from there, it had a 15 year
run of Bullnanza events across the country. Of course, not only here at the Lazy E but
we did Oklahoma City downtown, we did Nashville, we did Bullnanza Arena, we did Burmingham,
we did you name it, we had a little mini tour within the tour. Clint Branger and Tuff back
in the day went back and forth. The first Bullnanza was 1989 which of course was pre
PBR. And then in 1992 PBR formed and Lazy E was an integral part. We were actually 4
stops of the 6 on tour. In 1994 was the first actual PBR World Finals and so 1992 to 1994
Bullnanaza was the entire tour per se other than maybe I believe George Michael's bull
riding was part of the tour and then maybe Tuff's in Ft. Worth. It's interesting where
the industry has come. From those first days when we hand selected those bulls and we brought
3 or 4 bulls from about 30 different contractors. Now that don't happen. Now you've got 150
contractors that's got 50 great bulls. The bull industry itself, how it's just exploded
is phenomenal. There's actually too many good bucking bulls all said and done. But it's
really interesting the way the industry has just exploded. This is year 2 for us with
the American Heritage and the caliber of bulls, untouchable. And then the purse is just phenomenal.
It's awesome to see that kind of a purse for a bucking bull event. It's just neat. With
the format of the American Heritage, with 180 plus bulls in the Futurity and another
88 in the Derby, there's almost 300 head of bulls here. The majority of them we house
underneath the roof. That's about 10 semi loads of steel from preform manufacturing
which nobody else does, nobody else has the room to have air conditioning for the bulls
in mid-June as it is right now so they can buck and not be out in the sweltering heat.
Just the set up and to have the watering system and all the little things that make an event
work. Yeah, we're very prideful and we like to think that we do it the best. I know there's
other places out there but you're damn sure that when you come here, we're going to try
our hardest.
This is really the culmination of planned matings between bulls and cows that people
have spent years on. They take their cow and breed it to a certain bull because they believe
they're doing to get a desired response, let's use that term, a desired response, that's
what they're thinking about. And then this little old baby calf hits the ground and if
it's a bull, when it's a few months old, they've got to send their very first payment in to
enter this American Heritage Futurity. So they sent their payment in and a couple of
years ago they sent in over 600 of those and then as the calf progresses and grows and
gets bigger and looks good, then they got to make another payment. And then they're
called sustaining payments and they go all the way through. And there's calves that drop
out so it went from 600, it dropped down to 300, then it dropped down to 200 and as you
look over this big spanse of the arena here, there's 158 of these Futurity calves here
that have paid a $1500 entry fee from the time they were born up to now and they're
competing for a purse of over $400,000. The winner's going to take home in the $90,000's
and the prestige of being the breeder of the year, I mean, there's people that this is
what they do. They do this and they see their rewards. Our goal at the ABBI, American Bucking
Bull, Inc., is to prove parentage. We have a partner, the PBR owns half of us and the
Professional Bull Riders, that's the elite group of bull riders, if you're going to have
an elite group of bucking bulls, you have to pair them against an elite group of bull
riders. That's why that marriage works so well. We get to buck them about a half dozen
times at our events. We take them to the World Finals, that's where we crown our $250,000
a year champion. The point that you're making is this is the greatest opportunity from the
ABBI standpoint is the take the planned matings. We have a database where we take the parentage,
we keep it, we store it, we save it and then if you say that you calf is out of Belle's
Blue, you'll remember that bull, he was one of our top bulls, we can go back in there,
check the DNAand see if what you said it true. We can prove parentage. We're the 2nd largest
breed in the United States that proves parentage by DNA. A lot of people say I don't understand
all that but the point is that we try to have factual registration papers whereas the American
Angus Association, they just do a random sampling of their cattle. We check them all and we
feel like that's what we have to do if we're going to compete with these animals and for
people to have the opportunity to pick how they're going to breed this cow to that bull
because that's what it's all about. It's about matching two groups of genetics up that will
make a winner. When we give our stamp of approval, there's many, many bulls, you look at the
D&H Cattle Company, Mossy Old Mudslinger is, a bull that always comes to my mind, he's
a great producer, as we've seen these calves come through that event after event and it's
a Mossy Old Mudslinger son or a Mossy Old Mudslinger grandson, or the dam is a Holy
Moly daughter, there's different things about that you can just see. I think of Gene Baker,
I just talked to him just a minute ago, he's the 3 time, he's won this event 3 times in
a row. So there's no secret that if you want some genetics to come to win this, you might
want to go look at a guy like that. There's some bulls in here that breeders have spent
thousands of dollars on these matings, countless thousands of hours, getting them ready to
go and they know that it's not just about beating their competitors, it's about adding
value to their ranch. If you win this, and your raised that calf, you know it was born
and bred on your ranch, you've got his mom and you've got that set of genetics, and you've
got the sire and you've got that set of genetics and you know how to reproduce that calf, it's
not just the swell of winning, there's money involved there too. The winner gets the pride
in knowing that their breeding program is doing something special. There's people in
here you can just about, I won't say to jinx them, but there's people in here that their
breeding program is you know that they're in and out every year. You know they'll be
in the top of this game just because they've spent so much time, so much money, so much
effort, in trying to produce these buckers that it's working for them.
We have 245 bulls here this weekend. Got 245 of the ground. They provide us with a really
nice set up here. We've got a lot of bulls in this air conditioned building, huge building,
and we've got some bulls outside but all together 245 in competition. They start paying on these
calves when they're yearlings. They start paying on them and then half way through the
process they have to nominate their calves in order to come to this event. It's a 2 year
process. You're not paying on a bull, you're paying on a breeding program. You don't know
what these bulls are capable of when they're yearlings. When they're 2, you know, you have
a little bit better idea so he said it best, you're playing with your program, not individual
bulls.
There's right at 200 entries in this event. They're only going to pay the top 20 bulls
out of this event. There's people who've come from Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North
Carolina, they come from all over the country to come to this event. It's something they've
been paying on all year long and they have more than just $1,500 in it, by the time they
get here, they've got $4,000 in that one bull. Having to drive home with no money is a pretty
devastating feeling. I know I'm only 5 hours from here and if I leave here and don't win
no money, it's a pretty rough drive home just 5 hours away, I can only imagine 25 hours
away. It's going to pay somewhere around $95,000 to win this event and the last hole is probably
going to be around $3,500 to $4,000 so there is a lot of money up for grabs but 200 calves
and only 20 people are going to get paid of it, you've got to be on your A game and hope
your bull's rested and ready to go.
Dad and Daryl started raising bucking bulls in the early '70's and so by the time we got
to the point where we were producing World Champion bulls, there was already 20-30 years
of generations of blood lines built in to that. Trying to engineer that bull, it's a
process, you're getting genetics from here and here and picking out the characteristics
so there's a lot that goes in to raising that bull. He might have 20 years to get to that
point where you've got a World Champion. Every bull's different on getting a bull ready for
the Heritage. This is the biggest event before the finals and so a lot of these calves, they've
got 6 months into this one event. Getting him ready to the whole deal, getting the nutrition
right, and some bulls mature easy and they come out of the pasture and they're ready
to buck. But most of the time, the first couple of months you really need to grooming them
nutrition wise, hauling them, getting them used acclimated to new surroundings so it's
a long process to get to this point. When you see that calf born you know he's good.
And then it takes 4 - 5 years of grooming that bull, right nutrition, everything that
goes in to it, and then one day when you see him on TV, that's what makes you smile and
say you did a good job.
Basically you can breed the best to the best and hope for the best but that don't mean
you're going to get it. Because it's just like Secretariat, probably the greatest thoroughbred
that ever run on a track, but yet he never had any sons that did any good on the track.
But now I do know that I've got some Bushwhacker calves myself and they really do try to buck
and they remind me quite a bit of him so hopefully he will pass that on but just because he has
it, don't necessarily mean that he's going to pass that on to his offspring. His calves
will definitely be 3rd generation buckers if they go ahead and pan out like we hope
they do, because he was out of Reindeer and Reindeer was such an athlete himself. The
difference between Reindeer and Bushwhacker is Bushwhacker has a brain and I don't think
Reindeer had much of a brain. Bushwhacker is a really highly intelligent animal and
he is waiting and trying to figure out the first 2 or 3 jumps what he's fixing to do.
He's trying to feel for that cowboy. Ideally that he's trying to feel for him and he's
trying to find his weakness and figure out which way he may be leaning a little more
to one side or the other and I wouldn't be so sure if half the time he don't know which
hand the guy's riding with and he's going away from him. Genetics is definitely a role
in this deal but genetics or anything else you do is not going to take the place of great
management. You've got to manage these bulls like they are athletes and treat them like
they're athletes. Because if not, it would just be like Michael Jordan or somebody they
could play ball in the backyard or something like that but if he never had a coach or anybody
else to kind of teach him or push him and keep him in shape, they he never would have
been who he is. I think the bulls are the same way.
We won in 2011 Cord and we was like 40th bull out out of 200 bulls and our bull bucked and
was leading it and we sat there the whole time anticipating every bull that bucked.
After every bull, you're like "am I going to win this thing." There was about 20 bulls
left, I couldn't take it no more, so I told a good friend of mine "I can't take it" so
we walked outside and we set outside until I heard the last buzzer go off, and I walked
back in and they said I won it. It was the most thrilling thing that I've ever experienced
in my life. This is the greatest thing. American Heritage is the greatest thing for the ABBI
ever.
We started in the bucking bull business in December 2009. We started just buying bulls,
big bulls, and started going to little play days and jackpot rodeos and then in the summer
of 2010 we started looking into cows and started the breeding portion. It's been a challenge.
We've ended up buying 32 cows from various different people and we've done some AI work,
went through Canton and did some AI school. This was a big gamble. We had 6 bull calves
in 2010 and we took them as 6 month olds and bucked them to see what they did. My son named
Chunky Monkey and Jo Blow my father-in-law named. And they were the best two of them
all so that's who got the spots and we've been paying the entry fees and coming here.
Didn't expect to place this high. When we bucked them at 6 months, when we paid the
first entry fees, it more my wife and kids cause he jumped up in the air and kind of
sprawled out and landed flat on his belly. But he had something, it was just something
there. And then my father-in-law he had a dream of naming a bull Jo Blow so we named
him Jo Blow. We bucked him 3 or 4 times since then and he just had something. This last
time we bucked him, he didn't do real well so I was nervous but we'd already paid all
but the last payment so we threw it all in the bucket on these two bulls to come up here.
Make the 8 1/2 hour drive and threw the gamble out there and see if we can win something.
Here at the American Heritage as a judge, we're looking at the bull that has the most
complete combination of the 5 criteria. The 5 criteria are buck which is how high the
front end comes off the ground, kick which is amount of kick and the extension of the
back legs, spin which is the direction change, whether it's both ways or one way, the difficulty
is in our opinion how hard that bull would be to ride if it had an actual rider on it,
and intensity which I like to call how much they really put into how hard they're bucking.
Me as a judge, I'm going to look for the one that something really stands out which it
may be an exceptional amount of kick or an exceptional amount of buck. All the other
ones have all those criteria but just not to that level. Usually the winner or the top
2 or 3 bulls will separate themselves from the field by being really exceptional in 1
or 2 of those criteria and showing themselves above the rest. The scoring system is 1 to
25 with quarter points. You could have a bull that could be 15 1/4 up to a bull that's 24
3/4 and if it's the perfect bucking bull which is what they're all striving for, it could
be a 25. As a judge, we're looking for something that gets as close as it can because nothing
would be greater than putting a 24 1/2 or a 25 out there on an animal.
First thing I want to do is congratulate each of you guys for sure. Congratulations. Congratulations.
Good name too. That's pretty neat that now the whole world knows Jo Blow and that was
the funny thing that this is the first year that they've done this statue, a $5000 statue,
and for me it's going to be the Jo Blow statue for now because nobody knows what this bull
is. There's not a name on it. We watched you all set front and center at the 50 yard line
through 90 something head of calves today sweating it. Walk us through that and what
it feels like to finally say "I am the champion." There's no words. I got 92,000 words but you
... We set there last night going through today's bucking order and going okay which
bulls do we need to watch, which bulls do we need to watch and ... I'm sure everybody
else did that too and who would have thought that Jo Blow ... that proves that it can be
anybody. When it came down to pay this last payment on the American Heritage, I almost
didn't pay it just based of his last one and my wife Lisa, she said "No, just pay it. We'll
take him up there." We've already paid into it this much and I never would have thought
we'd get this far with him. We didn't even book a hotel room for last night here. When
we got into this, the bucking bull business, I was thinking it was going to be 10 - 12
years before we ever won a big check and you've got to put your time in and do the ground
work for anything and that's kind of where we focused. This kind of makes all them lonesome
trips with no paycheck on the way home, those long drives home, worth it. I hope we can
keep going. Don't ever give up. I almost did. Just pay that last payment and hope for the
best, I guess. You can't win if you don't play.