JJ Gottsch, Austin’s ultra-connected sports executive, stood in downtown Republic Square, where 300 lots were auctioned to found the Texas capitol city in 1839.
Beneath his black cowboy hat, Gottsch was flashing the broad, satisfied smile befitting a man about to introduce a professional sports team to a resurgent modern-day boom town drawing more than 100 new residents every day.
Gottsch, originally from Nebraska, has spent more than two decades creating successful sports franchises in Texas, including minor league baseball operations with Ryan Sanders entertainment, and serving as Chairman of Austin’s Sports Commission.
Now, as CEO of the Austin Gamblers of the PBR Team Series, he was officially announcing the first pro sports team that will play at the sparkling new Moody Center at the University of Texas, with its first homestand scheduled for August 26-28.
There was also fresh news to break: Michael Dell, who 38 years ago had started a computer company in his dorm room at the University of Texas about two miles east of the park, was coming on board as a team owner.
Dell, now chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, joins fellow Texans and technology investment visionaries Egon and Abby Durban in the Gamblers ownership group. Each appears to be as passionate about the excitement and growth prospects of team bull riding as they are about funding and operating very successful global businesses.
After the initial group of PBR team owners was revealed earlier this year on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, Dell’s follow-on commitment reinforced to the sports and business world that this new league is for real.
Also on hand for the team unveil and speaking to the coterie of media drawn downtown on a windy, sultry day was Gamblers head coach Michael Gaffney, who in 2004 put up the biggest ride in PBR history — marked 96.25 points on Little Yellow Jacket. It was a record that stood for 17 years until it was broken by Jose Vitor Leme twice within four months late in the 2021 season when Leme went for 97.75 points and then 98.75 points on Woopaa.
Wearing his latest PBR World Champion belt buckle — the title clinched on the ride that is now the greatest ever — the sturdy Brazilian with earnest, jet-black eyes was speaking with reporters on the grass near coach Gaffney, which is kind of like Babe Ruth doing media next to Hank Aaron.
Ever polite, Leme posed for a few photos next to a sign commemorating what’s been dubbed “The Perfect Ride,” for it was the first time a PBR bull rider had been awarded a maximum of 50 points.
This past January at Madison Square Garden, the Gamblers had the good fortune of watching a ping pong ball pop their way to secure the No. 1 pick in the inaugural PBR Team Series Draft, even though the odds for capturing the top pick stood at less than five percent.
While every pro sports draft serves up surprises, it’s very likely the Gamblers will pick Leme.
He’s viewed as a once-in-a-generation athlete, competing in a sport where longevity can often be more a matter of luck than physical conditioning.
The career of a PBR rider isn’t quite as short-lived as the average NFL running back, but there’s good reason a quasi-emergency room is set up in the bowels of every arena. Injuries do take their toll.
At 25, Leme, whose 2021 season is considered the most dominant ever but who has battled injuries throughout 2022 while still finishing the regular season ranked No. 4 in the world, could have many good years left.
If he can stay healthy, he’s perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime athlete.
“He’s on a level by himself,” Gaffney said about the rider who shattered his high-score record. “To not take a two-time reigning World Champion would be idiocy.”
It’s not just raw athleticism, riding percentages and big scores that each of the eight teams planning their respective roster is keeping top of mind as the May 23 PBR Teams Draft approaches.
Creating championship contenders in any sport, especially one as punishing as bull riding, is as much about fox holes; the best squads are comprised of a collection of gritty, dedicated, selfless individuals — the kind of guys you’d want in the proverbial fox hole.
Leme — a former soccer star in Brazil who is a relative late-bloomer in starting to ride bulls at 17, following in his dad’s boot steps — checks that character box, as do so many other cowboy athletes across the sport.
Team owner Egon Durban has been known to call bull riders “superheroes” — with a level of courage equal to the moxie and skill involved in staying in the middle of a muscular, 1,800-pound bull bred to buck for 8 seconds.
Gaffney, who grew up in southern New Mexico, the son of an Air Force fighter pilot, is married to a doctor. He walks around with a rebuilt metal shoulder. He knows a thing or two about heroism.
“We want solid individuals who are good team players and fully dedicated to what they do,” Gaffney said. “That’s how you build the continuity and culture for the good of the team and its city. We have that in our cowboys. They’re good boys and great athletes.”
As another Austin transplant, Gaffney speaks about the sport and its prospects locally from the hardscrabble experience of touring the country back in the day with boot-leather tough cowboys like Jim Sharp, Ty Murray, and Tuff Hedeman.
As one of the original 20 bull riders who broke away from rodeo to form a standalone bull riding league, he was an active principal in bringing PBR to life.
“It was a pipe dream for us,” Gaffney remembered on Republic Square. “We said we’d all throw in a thousand dollars, and then we looked around the room and asked, ‘Who has a thousand bucks?’ That check that I wrote wasn’t hot, but let’s say it was warm.”
When PBR was sold a dozen years later to private capital, Gaffney and the 19 others — some who wrote checks of sufficient temperature to burn a finger — saw their investment produce an astronomical rate of return that would elicit a whistle of admiration even from business impresarios like Egon Durban and Michael Dell.
Gaffney, Gottsch, and the Gamblers ownership team believe the quick acceptance of Austin FC in a good-time city hungry for sports entertainment options evinces the vast potential for a bull riding team in central Texas.
“We hope to capture some of the excitement generated by the soccer team,” Gottsch said. “There’s a reason bull riding is the final event of a rodeo; there’s nothing like it. On top of the inherent thrills of team bull riding, we will create an amazing sports entertainment experience, including a food and music festival with an Austin flair. Establishing a team here with the outstanding ownership group we have is an incredible opportunity to elevate the extraordinary things PBR has done over the last three decades.”
“We have such a melting pot here in Austin,” Gaffney added. “Our sport is tailor-made for this town. I think the people of Austin are really going to enjoy and get behind the Gamblers.”
The identities of the superheroes in black-and-white Austin Gamblers jerseys, who will go out and do the seemingly incomprehensible in five-on-five bull riding games, are still to be determined.
Jose Vitor Leme, for one, is known to punt his helmet like a soccer ball after a big ride.
It’s not hard to imagine him right at home getting his kicks in the Moody Center.
For fans in Austin and everywhere, that May 23 rider draft the day after PBR World Finals in Fort Worth – to be streamed for fans on RidePass on Pluto TV — can’t come soon enough.
Andrew Giangola is the author of “Love & Try: Stories of Gratitude and Grit in Professional Bull Riding” (Cedar Gate Publishing), available on PBRShop.com on June 1 with proceeds supporting the Western Sports Foundation.