Bo Davis, 44, knows bulls. He rode his first full-grown bull when he was 11 and won his first rodeo bull-riding event when he was 15. He rode bulls on the pro circuit until the ripe old age of 26, when he went into the contracting side of things and specialized in supplying bulls for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) and Professional Bull Riders (PBR) events.
That's why he knows that there is a lot more that goes into producing a bucking bull than simply a bad attitude -- though he admits that certainly doesn't hurt anything.
"There's a lot more to it than it being rowdy," he said. "Some of my best bulls have been the kind of bulls my daughters could pet out in the pasture, but they gave riders all they could handle in the arena. After a while, you sort of know what to look for.
"Just because you have a bull that's a stud doesn't necessarily mean their offspring will be studs," he said. "You have to know the genetics and you have to breed good mothers to bulls."
Davis said the bull business has come a long way in the last 10 years, mostly because of advances in genetic testing and proving in bulls. American Bucking Bull, Inc. (ABBI) now register's a bucking bull's DNA to provide producers a record of how a certain line of bulls has performed in the rodeo arena. Before that, Davis said there were some "misunderstandings."
"You could say you were selling semen from Bodacious, but there wasn't any way to prove it," he said. That's where some of the misunderstandings arose.
Davis raised and contracted bulls for rodeos during the rise of the PBR, which features bull riding exclusively. The popularity of bull riding as a stand-alone event over the last decade was good for somebody who knew bulls like Davis did. He ended up stocking bulls for rodeos in Chihuahua, Hawaii and Madison Square Garden in New York City, in addition to the Texas circuit, but he wanted to do more. He wanted to put on his own rodeo. He partnered with the Cadillac Rodeo Company for bucking stock other than bulls and hit the road.
"I put together my own crew with Leon Coffee (legendary rodeo clown), my own sound man, and a stock partner and we began to put on the kind of rodeos we wanted to see," Davis said. "We sit down with the people who are putting on the rodeo to find out what they want to see, and I work from there to make it something that everybody enjoys."
Bucking bulls are almost always cross-bred, though one of his best bulls, Shiloh, was pure Limousin. Two other Davis bulls, Chief and Smiley, were also high-money bulls on tour. He said the F1 Tiger Stripe Brahman crossed with Hereford can produce a good bull for his purposes.
"There's absolutely no set pattern for a bucking bull," he said. "You can't always go by looks. It's a lot like scouting an athlete. Sometimes you see a kid with a good athletic build and some confidence and you can usually figure he's a good athlete, but looks aren't everything. Sometimes a bull that you never thought would amount to anything proves you wrong, just like coaches can be proved wrong about a player."
While the big venues have their own rewards, the bread and butter as well as the heart and soul of the operation are the small and mid-sized towns that have their own rodeos every year. Of the 32 events he puts on each year, smaller rodeos provide the bulk of his work. In his view, the sport of rodeo is growing in popularity.
"The PBR is getting real popular, and I'm seeing more people at some of these smaller rodeos too," he said. "I think with the harder economy, people are staying closer to home. The small towns have always supported their rodeos, but just from what I've noticed last year and this year, more people are coming to them now than they were."
