PUEBLO, Colo. – When PBR founder and Director of Livestock Cody Lambert was a bull rider, his group of traveling companions rolled deep.
Jim Sharp. Tuff Hedeman. Lane Frost. Ty Murray.
“We were part of a group that, when we walked behind the chutes, we knew everybody was looking at us,” Lambert said in a recent video on the Rattlers’ social media channels. “We were there to do a job, and we had the confidence that we knew we were going to get the job done.”
In Lambert’s day, bull riders were almost constantly on the road and turned to each other to create a makeshift family while they were away from their loved ones. It was an atmosphere that Lambert says pushed them all to be better.
“It used to be you were as close to them or closer than anyone in your family, and you spent so much time together, and you felt like a team,” Lambert said. “You felt like you were part of a team.
“We didn’t ever say anything like that, but you had to win. You didn’t want to be the only one in there that wasn’t winning. I was fifth in the world one year, and I was the fourth-best bull rider in my car.”
The next chapter of Lambert’s long, illustrious career is as the head coach of the Ariat Texas Rattlers, one of eight founding teams in the inaugural season of the PBR Team Series. The new league launches on July 25-26 at Cheyenne Frontier Days in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with the Rattlers hosting their homestand at Dickies Arena on Oct. 7-9.
The PBR Team Series’ inaugural 11-event season will include a three-day homestand event hosted by each of the eight founding teams and culminate in a team championship at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on Nov. 4-6, 2022. An additional neutral site event will be held in Anaheim, Calif.
Lambert is no stranger to coaching and has been credited with having an influential impact on many bull riders and rodeo athletes of various generations, including two-time World Champion Jess Lockwood.
Being at the helm of a team, however, is a new challenge, but Lambert hopes that this new venture harkens back to the days of having a family within the locker room.
“Being a part of a team, being a part of a group like that, it’s a support system that helps you mentally, it helps you competitively, it makes you want to win even more,” he said. “That’s my vision for it and my dream for it, is that the guys are going to hold themselves more accountable because, if I do really well riding, that affects your children. That affects the other guys on the team and what college their daughter gets to go to, or something like that. There’s more than just me counting on me. I’m by myself riding, but there’s more than just me counting on it.”
The Rattlers take bull riding’s new frontier into the heart of cowboy country. In June 2021, PBR announced a groundbreaking joint venture with Stockyard Heritage Development Co. and ASM Global in which PBR will help program Cowtown Coliseum and bring dozens of annual western sports and lifestyle events to this iconic venue and the historic Stockyards District.
Cowtown Coliseum in Fort Worth held the first Unleash The Beast event in 1993, while in 2018, AT&T Stadium in nearby Arlington was the site of the highest-attended single-day event in PBR history, hosting more than 46,000 fans.
Additionally, the PBR Global Cup has called AT&T Stadium home three times – 2019, 2020, and 2022 (tune in for the 2022 PBR Global Cup USA on Sunday at 8 p.m. ET on CBS Sports Network) – and in 2020, due to COVID-19 restrictions, AT&T Stadium held the PBR World Finals after the event was relocated from Las Vegas due to COVID-19 (coronavirus) restrictions.
“The cities are going to have teams to cheer for,” Lambert said. “Once they become fans of that team – fans of the Rattlers, the Texas Rattlers, the Fort Worth Rattlers – they get to be fans of that, then they’ll be fans of the next generation of bull riders that are riding for that team.”
Lambert hopes the PBR Team Series will be a huge boon for the sport of bull riding.
He also hopes that the riders will come to rely on each other like a family and experience the same rush of walking into an event with your boys at your back that he did back in the day.
“It was a time that I wish that all the young guys can experience, and I think we’re all going to get an experience like that,” Lambert said.