When the PBR Team Series storms into Kansas City this weekend, the broadcast beamed and streamed to fans outside the T-Mobile Center will include a personality traditionally exclusive to the arena…with a compelling twist.
Flint Rasmussen, the heart and soul of the in-arena PBR experience for the past 17 years, is ditching the makeup. He will be mic’d up for the broadcast, dressed in traditional western wear and planning to spend as much time in the stands and around the bucking chutes as on the dirt.
While Flint will be back in his usual role when the 2023 Unleash The Beast starts up again in November, for now, it’s a new Flint for a new series.
Yet, in many respects, he’ll still be doing his thing.
Flint’s “thing,” as fans know, has been to serve as the life of the party, mood setter, and chief instigator of the mischief and the unfiltered musings playing out across bull riding events, interjecting belly laughs into the height of athletic daring and danger.
In putting riders on teams in five-on-five bull riding games, PBR Teams events will still combine punishing unscripted athletic competition with music, pyro and fun, family-friendly entertainment.
Only instead of a twerking, moonwalking, “solar-panel” flashing Rasmussen, we’ll see a “roving lifestyle interviewer and reporter,” as he describes the new role.
“The big adventure in front of me is allowing my mind to work as it always had,” Rasmussen said. “The focus remains, how do I benefit the show, following and amplifying what’s happening in the arena?”
It will still be the same beautiful mind unleashed.
While the exact feel of the broadcast will happen organically, by all indications, Flint will still be the sport’s super-spreader of joy.
He will bring human-interest warmth to the telecast, which will provide fans in the arena and at home with a singular presentation for the first time. In other words, what fans hear on TV is what is being presented to those in the arena through a new audio system cranking 512,000 watts of sound.
Will Flint still engage hilariously with members of mullet brigades and bachelorette parties? Will he take out the ol’ harmonica for a tune around 9 o’clock on a Saturday?
Well, it’s hard to say. Flint will only know after the dirt is lit ablaze, the bulls are bucking, and the event is underway, relying on improvisational skills honed over decades of entertaining in public.
He joins a broadcast piloted by Kate Harrison and featuring Alan Bestwick and Matt West as sideline analysts, bringing every single ride and wreck of the new PBR Team Series to fans.
“This is in large part a big, hairy experiment,” he said. “Will TV translate to the live arena and vice versa? It’s exciting to try something so new. It’s a little bit scary and fun at the same time. I don’t think any sport has ever done this before.”
It won’t be the first time Rasmussen has tried new things to blaze new trails.
He’s a former high school teacher who went on to completely redefine what had been the role of a hokey barrel man “clown” in rodeo – previously the realm of affable guys in baggy outfits, telling a certain style of corny jokes and participating in silly skits.
He made the role so much more than that of a clown, forcing a change in the job title in the process. He would be called PBR’s Official Entertainer.
Even as a kid, Flint loved to entertain. But unlike so many bull riders who knew exactly what they wanted to be from the time they could walk, he didn’t grow up planning for a life clowning in the rodeo, let alone reinventing the job in a transformative way.
In his hometown of Havre, Montana, he wasn’t a show-off or the class clown. But he liked to have fun and get a reaction.
He was a regular in school plays and sang in the choir, getting a taste of adulation from an appreciative audience. There was a constant “pull” to be in front of crowds performing. Growing up in the Western culture, there was always a place drawing crowds eager to be entertained – rodeo.
When Flint was 19, during the summer, first on a dare, he began working amateur rodeos in Montana, getting nervous like he did when playing high school football (making All-State), but having an absolute ball in making people smile and laugh.
He was no longer an athlete. But being out on the dirt performing in front of people during a rodeo competition was scratching an itch.
It felt good. It was fun – an emotion he tries to remember many years later, when body parts he didn’t know he had ache, the airport food court is closed, and the airline has canceled yet another connecting flight.
Flint initially treated rodeo like a summer job. The plan was to get through college and then teach.
After graduating from the University of Montana Western, he got a job teaching high school math and history. But he kept getting phone calls. Rodeo organizers who had caught his act saw potential. Promoters know their crowds, and he was busting them up.
This Flint Rasmussen character just might make a name for himself if he gave it a chance, they said. He quit teaching school at 25 to perform at professional rodeos full time.
The rest, as they say when there’s not a more interesting way to put it, is history.
On the dirt fronting PBR’s premier series, Rasmussen established himself as the gold standard in Western sports entertainment.
Even at 54, he was doing cartwheels on the dirt earlier this year in Unleash The Beast events, and fans will again see the more physical and agile Flint next season.
For now, he’s intent on setting new standards as a TV personality in the PBR Team Series beginning Friday night on RidePass on Pluto TV at 8:45 pm ET. The CBS “Game of the Week” features the Nashville Stampede taking on the Kansas City Outlaws on Sunday at noon ET.
If anything, the new job will be easier on his knees.
You can read Flint’s full story in the critically acclaimed new book, “Love & Try: Stories of Gratitude and Grit in Professional Bull Riding,” available on PBRShop.com and benefitting the Western Sports Foundation.
