No Stranger To Las Vegas, Pro Bull Riders Make History By Hosting Fans At Events During Pandemic
By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
Sure, good ol’ Dana White is having a grand time on his Fight Island as the Las Vegas-based MMA promotion sets up shop in the Middle East during a novel cornavirus pandemic. And Bob Arum’s Top Rank boxing keeps on putting on bouts in MGM Grand’s Grand Ballroom bubble in the heart of the Las Vegas Strip.
But while there’s chatter about the NHL staging a 24-team Stanley Cup tourney North of the Border, the NBA trying to keep Instagram models from penetrating its bubble at Disney and Major League Baseball just trying to start its season of 60 games, there’s been one sports organization that has been forging ahead putting on events since April.
And now the Professional Bull Riders — PBR — is blazing more trails by holding sports events with fans.
Nobody in the alphabet soup of sports — from UFC, NHL and NBA to MLS, MLB and WNBA — has plans for fans at their games any time soon.
But PBR did just that last weekend in Sioux Falls, South Dakota where the state’s governor, Kristi Noem, even rode a horse with an American flag at the Denny Sanford Premier Center Saturday night.
Pueblo, Colorado-based PBR, which comes to Las Vegas every November for its championship events, attracted crowds of 1,774 on Friday, 2,261 Saturday and 1,811 Sunday in South Dakota. And while UFC and Top Rank were staging fight events in Las Vegas in June, PBR was also holding competitions at the South Point Arena in June. too.
But last weekend, PBR moved forward to new ground. The bull riders drew the first crowds of fans at a sports event since COVID-19 brought the sports industry to a screeching halt in mid-March.
Kosha Irby, PBY’s chief marketing officer, said he gets goosebumps just thinking about being part of the first sports event in America where groups of fans congregated in a venue during a pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 137,000 Americans.
“We knew all eyes would be on us,” Irby said during a live streaming interview with LVSportsBiz.com Thursday afternoon. You can watch that interview here:
“We did not take it lightly,” Irby said.
While many state governors are requiring their residents to wear masks in public, fans who came to watch the bull riders had the option of getting their temperatures read at the entrance and of wearing masks. Most wore masks, Irby said.
It should be noted that all bull riders and PBR staffers were required to take temperature readings all three event days.
PBR had a detailed game plan, which addressed everything from the space between urinals inside the arena to deploying pod seating, where space and distance would separate pods of fans. Tickets were sold in groups ranging from two to eight, with people required to know each other to sit together.
“It worked. We got fans in and out,” Irby said.
PBR plans to to take its bull-riding shows and the pandemic bubble that goes with them on the road to places like Bismark, North Dakota; Logan County, Oklahoma; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Fort Worth, Texas in August.
Sites like Tampa and Las Vegas have experienced spikes in coronavirus cases, which makes the PBR schedule subject to modification. PBR will sell only up to 50 percent of arena seating capacity for the year’s 12 remaining Unleash the Beast events to physically distance fans.
Keep in mind there’s also this tour:
Irby said PBR realizes that all these events are subject to local COVID-19 situations and that game plans will likely have to be altered to comply with varying health department standards from state to state and even county to county.
PBR relies on about 125-140 workers to stage these bull riding shows — that’s less than one-fourth of the more than 600 personnel being deployed by UFC to put on its four Fight Island fight events in Abu Dhabi this month.
PBR hopes to have fans at T-Mobile Arena in November for the title competitions.
But this being the age of COVID-19, it’s all subject to change.
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