PUEBLO, Colo. – From the moment stock contractor Chad Berger first laid eyes on Smooth Operator, he knew.
“I remember the PBR World Finals when he was a 4-year-old in the Classic,” Berger said. “I seen that bull, and I thought, ‘Wow, he’s pretty special.’”
Reflecting on the bull’s historic career a decade later, Berger can confidently say he was right.
The two-time YETI World Champion Bull is the 2024 recipient of the PBR’s Brand of Honor, given annually to the animals whose spirit and skill have surpassed even the highest expectations of the bull riding world.
“It’s pretty special,” Berger said. “It’s been quite a ride. It’s been quite a ride we’ve been on. My wife Sarah, and all my kids, and all the guys that ever hauled a bull for me, they’re a big part of it. It takes an army to move a mountain, and that’s what I’ve got. I have a great army.”
Berger would go on to purchase Smooth Operator about six months after that first encounter, after the woman who first bought him at an ABBI sale decided she didn’t actually want him. After failing to outbid her the first time, Berger got his bull for the price he’d wanted to pay in the first place.
“And the rest is history,” Berger said. “It was pretty lucky. Them are once-in-a-lifetime kind of bulls, like Little Yellow Jacket and Bushwacker and SweetPro’s Bruiser. You’re very fortunate if you get one of them in your lifetime. I’ve had a lot of great bulls, but there’s just something about those elite ones that just never give up. Their heart’s bigger than their body.”
But all that was to come later.
When Berger first began bucking Smooth Operator, the potential was immediately there.
“The first few times I bucked him, I thought, ‘Man, this is the rankest bull I’ve ever flanked in my life,’” Berger said. “He went to Seattle, Washington, and J.W. Harris drew him in the 15/15. He bucked him off so hard I don’t know how he got back up. Then Sunday, he made it back in the short go, and he picked him, and he threw him again, so hard.”
But the downside to bucking so hard is the injury risk. Smooth Operator separated his spine from his pelvis at that event, requiring a year off to heal.
He would later shatter his kneecap and sustain a multitude of other injuries, all because of the high-impact nature of his bucking.
“He was never penned with another bull,” Berger said. “I was always scared. I didn’t want nothing to hurt him. But he was just so hard on himself. He was something else. But we did a lot of things. We fed him lubricin so his joints would stay healthy, and we put a beamer machine on him to massage him and get his blood flowing better. We did a lot of things to keep him going as long as we did.
“He could buck so hard out of there, kick so high, and twist his body almost folded in two. There’s a lot of pictures of him where he’s just almost folded in two and kicking straight in the air. He wanted to buck so hard that he would hurt himself. It’s like the football players – they play so hard that they hurt themselves. That’s the way he was. He was like freaking Lawrence Taylor from the New York Giants. He would come at you hard every time until he hurt himself. And that’s the way Smooth Operator was. He gave it 110% every time, and if he couldn’t give 110%, it was because he wasn’t feeling right because he was hurt. When he was healthy, he was going to buck so hard that he could hurt himself at any time.”
Thanks to the exceptional care he received, Smooth Operator kept coming back. In 103 outs on the premier series between 2014 and 2021, he was 90-13 with a 44.47 average bull score.
One of those rides – a 93.75-point trip with Cooper Davis in 2018 – stands out to Berger as one of the best rides in PBR history.
“He rode him on the boardwalk in New Jersey, and I just think that was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, ride in PBR history, and it was on Smooth Operator,” Berger said. “That was a very cool day for me. Cooper is a good friend of mine, and he just made a ride that not many people could ever make. It was quite a ride.”
That 2018 season was a brutal one for Berger as his prized bovine Pearl Harbor passed away suddenly due to a blood clot. Pearl Harbor was leading the bull race at the time of his passing.
Berger says he doesn’t want to be superstitious, but he has a theory.
“I just think Pearl Harbor gave that gift to Smooth Operator, because the next two years, Smooth Operator won (the world title) at 9 and 10, and he was so banged up that there’s no way in the world he should’ve won it,” Berger said. “But he was just – he had another step to him. I believe in God and miracles, and I think when Pearl Harbor passed away, he told Smooth Operator to go get it.”
Indeed, the following two seasons went a long way to make up for Berger’s heartbreak in 2018. Smooth Operator became the 2019 YETI World Champion Bull at 9 years old, the oldest bull to ever win a world title, and repeated in 2020 at 10 years old.
RELATED: Smooth Operator erupts for YETI World Champion Bull title and YETI Bull of the Finals victory
Famously, after he clinched the world title in 2019, he took several victory laps around the dirt in T-Mobile Arena.
“It takes a lot to make me cry, but that made me cry,” Berger said.
There were even more tears the following year. Berger had open-heart surgery in the spring of 2020 and then had to miss the 2020 PBR World Finals due to COVID-19. He watched the whole thing play out from his home in Mandan, North Dakota.
RELATED: Smooth Operator becomes oldest back-to-back YETI World Champion Bull in PBR history
“I was sitting in a chair at home, and I just bawled like a baby when he won it,” Berger said. “It was so special. Just watching him run around and keep doing laps and laps, and I was sitting 1100 miles away. It’s something you’ll never forget, and I’ll have great memories all my life. If I never get another Smooth Operator, I’m pretty happy.”
Smooth Operator’s final out was at the 2021 PBR World Finals, when he bucked off Derek Kolbaba in 5.52 seconds. Not long after that, he was diagnosed with cancer. Berger made the difficult choice to end his suffering and put him down in February 2022.
RELATED: Remembering Smooth Operator (2010-2022)
“He was special right to the end,” Berger said. “He’s buried on my ranch here with a headstone. He’s home now. He’s up there with Pearl Harbor. They’re talking it over.”
Smooth Operator joins Pearl Harbor as a Brand of Honor recipient on July 11 at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, before the inaugural Wildcatter Days on July 12-14.
It’ll be an incredibly special moment for the Berger clan, and he hopes people remember Smooth Operator for his tenacity.
“That he had a heart of gold and never gave up,” Berger said of his bull’s legacy. “He come back from several injuries, and come back better and better. If he could’ve stayed injury-free, I think he could’ve won three or four world titles. But he never gave up. I never gave up on him, and he never gave up. I just knew he was a special animal and knew we had to do everything we could to keep him healthy and keep him in the game. All we had to do was keep him in the game, and he could win. I knew it. But his legacy, I think, is just a bull that was all heart. There was no room for anything but heart in his body.”
Photo courtesy of Josh Homer/Bull Stock Media
