They work all hours of the day and night, and once the arena is built, they’re hard at work in the bull pens.
“We kid that in this world, there are show dogs and bulldogs, and we’ve got a good team of bulldogs,” said Jerome Robinson, a 1999 inductee into the Ring of Honor and the man tasked with overseeing the weekly load-in of the Built Ford Tough Series. “They aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty and get things done.”
Friday night, the St. Pete Times Forum was the site of an NHL game as the Tampa Bay Lightning hosted the Florida Panthers.
It’s not uncommon for another sporting event to take place in an arena the night before a BFTS event, but usually, it’s an NBA game. Because of the Lightning’s final home game of the regular season and the upcoming Stanley Cup Playoffs, this weekend’s PBR event is literally on ice.
At the conclusion of the Friday night’s game, a subfloor was laid down on the ice, followed by a layer of plywood.
The crew was depending on the dirt arriving at 2 a.m., but it came an hour late. A process that normally takes four or five hours took eight, and put the entire load-in behind schedule.
“Unfortunately, it’s a domino effect,” said Robinson, who added that the production crew helped out his crew of nine with the fencing.
“Until those fences get put up, that runs them behind,” he said.
“We were three or four hours behind our normal start time and the production crew helped my guys get the VIP platform and things built,” he continued. “Then once we started on the pens, they went back to their thing.”
After working all night to ready the arena, Robinson’s crew took only a 30-minute dinner break after assembling the back pens before the first bulls arrived at the arena.
“I kid everybody that we don’t hire any specialists,” Robinson said. “They become livestock handlers, and right now, they’re out there sorting the bulls and bringing the bulls in. All through the show, they’re the ones who load the bulls in the correct order and get them back on the trucks.”
The senior members of Robinson’s crew are Clint Davis and Joe Hales, who have been working PBR events between five and six years. J.D. Reasoner has worked four.
Robinson added that normally they “burn ‘em out in three” years, but that he had a really good group of workers that includes Seth Skurja, Brad Russ, Ross Horny, Nick Dewey, Ken Parlari and Kenneth Hoy Foster III, aka “Tomahawk.”
Most weeks, their work goes unnoticed.
“That’s really good, because that means they’re doing their job,” said Robinson, who added that as soon as the event concludes Sunday afternoon, they’ll be disassembling everything to “get it back on the trucks and head to Las Vegas.”
— by Keith Ryan Cartwright