It’s the Pitts By Lee Pitts I used to be a huge sports fan but with each passing day, I’m becoming less enamored with professional sports. Now there’s something missing in my life and I think I know the solution: team rodeo. I know, team rodeo has been tried before but it only failed because it wasn’t financed properly. I don’t think we need to create another rodeo league when the answer is staring us right in the face: the Working Ranch Cowboy’s Association Rodeos. For those who aren’t familiar with ranch rodeo, they have more exciting events than your regular and more predictable PRCA sanctioned events like wild cow milking, steer doctoring, wild horse racing, etc. The ranch rodeo events duplicate things done on an ordinary cow ranch, but I would make ranch rodeos even more exciting by adding ranch wives blocking holes in the fence while staring down 20 head of wild, huge, mad, stampeding horned bulls. The wife who stays the longest in the gap without getting run over wins. What makes ranch rodeo so interesting is that the participants have to be employees of real ranches like Haythorne Land and Cattle, R.A. Brown Ranch, the Muleshoe, Sandhill Cattle, Broken Spear Ranch, Singleton Ranches, etc. If ranch rodeo wants to achieve its true potential, they’ll need to attract BIG money from TV and cable companies, but in a world where media companies are shelling out big bucks for mediocre content, I think ranch rodeo will be far better watching than Keeping Up With The Kardsashians. If ESPN ever discovers ranch rodeo, they’ll be some changes made. Cowboys will be hired just because they are good at milking a wild cow or pulling on a tail to help trip a steer. Ranch rodeo cowboys will get agents, sign multi-year contracts, be traded back and forth like baseball cards and make more money than they can afford. Because ranch owners won’t want to risk their investment, they’ll want to keep their athletes outta the wire and outta the hospital so all-new job descriptions will be invented like vice president in charge of counting fence posts, squeeze chute oiler, hub cap duster and cow chip polisher. Ranch rodeo cowboys will have numbers and their names on the back of their Wrangler® shirts so that “jersey” sales alone will make them millionaires. They’ll become celebrities and appear on TMZ and the FBI’s most wanted list. Nike® will start making cowboy boots and the Trevor Brazile boot will outsell Air Jordan’s. Bunkhouses will be upgraded, team members and their horses will fly on a private team jet to each new competition and wild cow milking will become an Olympic sport. The finals in Amarillo will become bigger than the Super Bowl. Ranch rodeo will attract big billionaires to enter the sport by buying winning rodeo ranches for $10-$12 billion, even if the ranches aren’t as big as the football field at your local high school. The sanctioning body will have to implement a rule that the number of cowboys on a team can’t be larger than the total acreage of the ranch.
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