Slithering across her cage and up the glass wall, the four-foot-long rattlesnake looked as eager to meet the guests invited to the Ariat brand store in Fort Worth, Texas, as Mark George, General Manager and President of the Texas Rattlers, a new bull riding team that was throwing a coming-out party last Friday before the PBR Global Cup at nearby AT&T Stadium.

Wearing a snazzy black Texas Rattlers jacket festooned with one of the coolest logos in sports, forbidding venomous teeth and all, George was more than happy to make the western diamondback snake the star of the show while unveiling the Rattlers’ uniform and showing off his coach – rodeo and bull riding legend Cody Lambert.

Just as the live snake mascot can pack a lethal bite, Lambert may hurt opposing teams, too, when the inaugural PBR Team Series season begins in July. Is there any living human who knows more about bull riders and bulls?

George has spent years living in California, but he feels right at home in Fort Worth, the so-called “Gateway to the West.”

His employer, the Fisher family, which owns longtime PBR partner Ariat as well as the Gap, was the first ownership group to commit to acquiring a PBR Team Series sanction and, as such, was granted the privilege of selecting their home market. They chose Fort Worth, a city riding the Western culture’s gale-force winds, and one which George calls “Cowboy Disneyland.”

On a warm Friday afternoon in March, when the historic Fort Worth Stockyards District was teeming with tourist foot traffic, that description hit the mark. George, a Stanford Business School graduate who has worked in areas as divergent as managing the digital business for a luxury retailer in Europe to business development for the Oakland A’s, which the Fisher family has a majority ownership stake in (as well as stakes in the San Jose Earthquakes of MLS and Scotland’s Celtic F.C.), is hip to rising markets and new opportunity.

He senses a great one in putting bull riders on teams. His gut feeling was validated the following night in seeing scenes like members of Team USA Eagles vaulting off the bucking chute to deliriously mob Daylon Swearingen after he earned his second 90-point ride of the event, scoring 91.5 points on Diddy Wa Diddy to seal a second straight Global Cup win for the boys in red, white and blue.

“That’s the farthest those guys have run in the past eight years,” PBR official entertainer Flint Rasmussen joked to the crowd after the big ride, mimicking a huffing and puffing cowboy about to keel over.

As great as individual PBR competition has been for nearly three decades, the team element brings to professional bull riding those kinds of new highlight-reel moments frequently seen across team sports.

None of this is lost to George or any of the 25,000 screaming fans inside the home of the Dallas Cowboys watching five teams of bull riders vying for global bull riding supremacy.

When the PBR Team Series debuts with neutral-site games at Cheyenne Frontier Days (July 25-26), fans will see more hat-flinging camaraderie.

Nine years ago, out of sheer curiosity, George attended PBR World Finals at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas. Like so many others who experience the sport live, he quite simply fell in love with it.

He was captured by the raw passion among both athletes and fans, as well as the old-fashioned accessibility of the sport’s biggest stars. 

George found himself speaking for 20 minutes with three-time PBR World Champion Adriano Moraes, who regaled him with tales of winning the World Finals.

“I’d never had that kind of direct connection to athletes before,” George said. “I was impressed with how they put their lives on the line to do the one thing they loved more than anything else in the world.”

Since then, the Rattlers’ GM has only missed one World Finals.

When PBR CEO and Commissioner Sean Gleason brought the idea of a new team league to the Fisher family, there was never any doubt about a commitment. It was just a matter of locking down details on what the new league would look like.

As coach Lambert has said, George sees teams as the next logical step for a sport that’s grown steadily over three decades.

“There’s multi-generational durability with teams that is very exciting for fans,” he said. “Riders’ careers last a few years. Teams endure for decades.”

The Ariat-presented team is planning for “our own local Super Bowl,” George says, when Rattlers Days come to Dickies Arena for a three-day homestand on October 7-9, the penultimate regular-season event before Team Finals in Las Vegas on November 4-6.

“The great part of this is, beyond the local experience we’ll create, Rattlers fans can still cheer on their teams on other event weekends,” George said.

Each of the league’s eight teams is now hard at work planning a unique spin on their respective homestands. A few of their executives stopped into the Ariat store to say hello, wish George, Lambert, and senior brand executive Susan Alcala good luck, check out the snakes (also in the cage was a smaller blacktail rattlesnake, wrapped cozily around an Ariat boot), and hope to glean any smidgen of competitive information.

Among the other team executives in the house were 1997 World Champion Michael Gaffney, coach of the Austin Gamblers, and Nashville Stampede GM Tina Battock, along with team executive Keith Ryan Cartwright, who refused to divulge his actual title or team responsibilities, adding to the subtle mind games already underway.

The light needling and banter among competing teams – and few are better at the game than Lambert – was all good-natured.

Battock and George, along with other team bosses, have said they want what’s best for the sport.

Like the Rattlers, the Nashville Stampede is located in a hot market that is a growing destination hub. As in Fort Worth, people flock to Nashville to have a good time. There’s energy in the streets. Country music is big.

Perhaps at some point, the teams will share marketing strategies to create new fans and bring even more people into the arenas.

“Our long-term commitment is to the league, and PBR has done a great job setting us up to be successful,” George said. “We are big fans of the riders and the sport. We want what’s best for both.”

On May 23, the Rattlers will pick third at the rider draft following PBR World Finals at Dickies Arena. As the teams fill their rosters, one of George’s main priorities is negotiating rider contracts that will keep them happy while making good business sense for the team.

The brand-new league promoting bull riding games is sailing into unchartered waters and, coming from the city on the Bay that invented “Moneyball,” George’s philosophy is to play the long game.

The restless rattlesnake in the cage who stole the show at the team’s inaugural VIP event inside the Ariat store will live into his 20s, according to Tim Cole, his handler, who has rescued “dozens and dozens” of snakes over the past half-century.

George predicts that ten years from now, the PBR Team Series will look completely different from how it appeared at its launch. He’s not sure exactly what that might be, but he’s bullish that a sport that has moved forward in every year of its existence will only grow bigger and get better.

“There’s so much enthusiasm for Western culture and this sport,” he said. “The possibilities are endless.”

Andrew Giangola is the author of Love & Try: Stories of Gratitude and Grit from Professional Bull Riding, coming in May from Cedar Gate publishing.