Twice, he’s stood in the middle of a dirt-filled arena, accepting a million-dollar check for putting in the try and bearing the bruises to reach the pinnacle of his sport as the world’s best bull rider.
Twice, he’s stood with an acoustic guitar on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.
Once, he stood in the nearly empty Vatican and was personally blessed by the Pope.
And now, he stands to put on a royal blue and yellow jersey to coach one of eight bull riding teams in the PBR Team Series, a new league riders and executives alike believe may well transform Western sports.
“I guess you could say I’ve lived the life of Forrest Gump,” said Justin McBride, coach of the Nashville Stampede, which will have its inaugural homestand on August 19-21 at Bridgestone Arena, a familiar venue that PBR in its individual-competition incarnation has visited 22 times.
McBride, the PBR World Champion in 2005 and 2007, is best known to newer fans as the high-energy analyst for the sport’s broadcasts on CBS and Pluto TV.
He has a knack for enthusiastically and concisely describing rides that may look like a blur of chaos and dust to the uninitiated in a way for new fans to quickly “get it” while rabid ones won’t get bored.
Reeling off those impromptu breakdowns requires a sort of muscle memory of the brain that has been developing in McBride’s head since he was a 3-year-old kid from Oklahoma taking to Western sports.
Since then, life has taken him many places, but wherever he’s gone and whatever he’s done, bull riding has dominated.
Heck, he has photos of his grandmother on a bull. Could it be any other way?
And Justin McBride knows bull riding.
The riders he is most enthusiastic about aren’t necessarily those like Jose Vitor Leme and Kaique Pacheco, who he describes as blessed with God-given talent elevating them to another plane, but the ones willing to listen, observe, improve, and push their talent to new levels.
In other words, the guys willing to be coached.
“Seeing bull riders get better is something I love,” McBride said amid a whirlwind day last week packed with six interviews with media outlets in and around Nashville. “When PBR started, the guys were better than the bulls. We’ve seen that equation flip. With coaching, we are now going to help riders get better. And I think we’ll help guys stay healthier, too.”
For the Stampede, the good news is they’ve secured the second pick in the upcoming Teams Draft, as decided by the fortuitous pop of a ping pong ball at Madison Square Garden before the annual Unleash The Beast January event.
The Austin Gamblers, set to pick first in the inaugural draft on May 23 following PBR World Finals in Fort Worth, have stated that two-time reigning World Champion Leme is their man.
While anything can happen at the draft, which will be carried live on sports radio in Nashville, McBride is thrilled with everything a franchise-building rock like 2018 World Champion Pacheco could provide to the team.
Over two days of Stampede launch activities in their home city, including McBride being declared “Mayor of Smashville” during the Predators vs. Edmonton Oilers hockey game, Pacheco was brought in to help promote the new team.
It was no coincidence the focused 27-year-old Brazilian – who had conquered 15 of his last 19 bulls to rocket from No. 52 to No. 3 in the world standings – happened to be in Nashville in the middle of the week before a crucial late-season Unleash The Beast event in Tulsa.
Yet as important as riders like Pacheco will be, in preparing their selections, teams are quietly observing that the picks deeper in the draft will likely have the greatest impact on their 10-event regular season leading into Team Finals, November 4-6 in Las Vegas.
In five-on-five team competition, putting up qualified rides is paramount. The top athletes are anticipated to ride well. It’s the riding percentages that ensue after a team goes deep into building a new squad that will reveal those that have nailed their scouting and coaching.
The most successful teams will likely be the ones that find diamonds in the dirt, if you will, and develop promising young riders or significantly improve an inconsistent cowboy or journeyman with world-class coaching and the motivation of bull-riding brothers on a team.
“Once you get a stranglehold on your ego and can control your emotions, the human body can do just about anything,” McBride said. “We are looking for guys who have the mentality and desire to push beyond what seems humanly possible.”
McBride relates his “scouting MO” to the championship race of 2004. A bad get-off on a bull named Lefty snapped his lower leg like a dried-out matchstick. One plate, 11 screws, and three weeks later, he was back.
He started hot but faltered on his final bulls. Mike Lee would take the 2004 world title, but McBride’s heart and try were undeniable.
The year before, he had broken ribs and punctured a lung shortly before World Finals. He rode then, too, winning a round in Las Vegas – nearly taking the 2003 title from Chris Shivers. He kept pushing and would ultimately win two PBR world titles.
Very few athletes can come back mere weeks after a traumatic injury. The outliers who can compartmentalize the pain and mentally move on to do the seemingly inhuman have McBride’s eye.
“If you smash your thumb hammering nails, you can go off and cry about it or keep hammering nails; it’s all in your mind,” McBride said. “I’m looking at the guys who keep hammering."
Listening to him talk about his ideal team of tough, committed riders eager to get better, it sounds like the Stampede’s head coach is scouting young riders a lot like Justin McBride.
Those who wind up wearing Nashville’s blue and yellow will have the good fortune of developing their craft under a coach who is as adept at getting into a rider’s psyche as breaking down their rides on national television.
That’s not to say there aren’t other great coaches in the PBR Team Series.
Watching the scouting, motivational, and chute strategies of legends like Jerome Davis (Carolina Cowboys), Michael Gaffney (Austin Gamblers), J.W. Hart (Kansas City Outlaws), Cody Lambert (Texas Rattlers), Luke Snyder and Ross Coleman (Missouri Thunder), Cord McCoy (Oklahoma Freedom), and Paulo Crimber and Colby Yates (Arizona Ridge Riders) is part of what makes the team league so compelling.
Stampede fans are blessed to have a true multi-hyphenate talent who, beyond all his bull riding accolades, including 32 career wins (an all-time PBR mark) and being the first PBR rider to win $5 million, was also literally blessed by the Pope.
It’s a story McBride has never told publicly. Considering where his Forrest Gump-like life has taken him, he feels it’s an appropriate time.
Nearly 20 years ago, McBride was touring Italy and had taken a train to Rome, closely studying the travel and translation guides to make sure he didn’t miss a thing.
He saw the major sights: the Roman Coliseum, the Trevi Fountain, and of course, Vatican City – the independent city-state which is the center of Christianity.
Inside St. Peter’s Basilica, the Baroque-Renaissance-style church serving as the Papal enclave, McBride was lost in the beauty, history, and mysticism of an edifice considered the holiest in the world.
McBride isn’t Catholic, but he was completely caught up in the sacred aura of the world’s largest Christian church building, where St. Peter, a fisherman from Galilee who was a leader among Jesus’s disciples, is said to be buried.
He must not have heard orders to leave. He looked around to realize he was alone in the world’s most famous church.
In the distance, he heard a shrill scream of surprise and ran over to see a woman in the presence of men dressed in the kind of colorful striped uniforms seen at a Renaissance-themed dinner theater.
It was the Pontifical Swiss Guard.
“It dawned on me: I am not supposed to be here,” McBride said.
The guards pushing a wheelchair were about to roll a man wearing a flowing white robe and skull cap past McBride.
But Pope John Paul II motioned them to stop next to the stunned American.
Looking up into McBride’s eyes, the white-haired man believed to be directly channeling the will of God raised his hand to his forehead, then crossed his chest.
He nodded, and the guards wheeled him away.
The young American bull rider in town to see a few sights had just been personally blessed by the Pope.
The following year, Justin McBride won his first PBR World Championship. Make of that what you will.
Andrew Giangola is the author of Love & Try: Stories of Gratitude and Grit in Professional Bull Riding, available in early June on PBRShop.com, with proceeds benefiting the Western Sports Foundation.