February 10, 2024

Losing my mind at the stock show and rodeo

Wait which building is named for which dead rich guy?

Hello, and thanks for reading.

A few weekends ago, I watched a 19-year-old Missourian named Maverick, a silver cross sparkling on a chain around his neck, ride a bull named Dragon’s Breath. He held on for eight seconds, toppled backwards, and walked away with a win in front of a packed Dickies Arena.

It was the final ride of the last event of a Saturday night at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo ProRodeo Tournament. It was cool. I clapped and cheered along with thousands of other spectators. But in that moment, I was also overcome by a sense of unreality.

Overhead, the official Mattress Firm replay of Maverick versus Dragon’s Breath flashed onto the Dickies jumbotron.

Did that string of words have meaning? Had I slipped into some liminal world where old west met high fantasy met corporate sponsorship? What was I doing here?

Where even was I?

Despite what you may think, I actually quite like the Stock Show and Rodeo. I enjoy the vibrant semi-anarchic mingling of humans and livestock, even though it substantially ups the chance of someone stepping in pig shit (which I did). I relish the anticipation of eating funnel cakes, which always smell thirty percent better than they taste. I love watching mutton busting because I’m part of the crowd and a sucker for crowd-pleasers.

But the stock show grounds are also the only place in Fort Worth where I’ve really felt lost.

This newsletter’s name is basically a joke. I started writing it in 2022 as a way of learning more about the city. I’d moved here from Kansas City, and I was “lost” only in the sense that I was in a new place with an unfamiliar history and culture. Most of the time, I have a pretty good innate sense of direction so I’ve never been physically lost in Panther City — that is, until I attended the Stock Show and Rodeo and discovered that its strange magnetic pull scrambles my internal compass.

Whenever I tried to navigate the Will Rogers Memorial Center alone this year, I couldn’t orient myself. How do you get from the sheep barn to that one room where you can buy a cowboy hat for $450? Haven’t a clue. Which building is named for which dead rich guy? Help!

I’ve been trying to sort out my sense of disorientation ever since. What was the source? I’m still not entirely sure, but some of it might have stemmed from the fact that the Stock Show and Rodeo doesn’t stick to sports.

“How about we fire about 75 percent of Washington D.C. and replace them with cowboys and ranchers, that'll get us back to where we need to be,” said an announcer before kicking off the high school scholarship rodeo, a perfectly normal setting for electioneering.

But that kind of explicit political sentiment was atypical. Mostly, the stock show hums with the low-grade nationalism that’s familiar to anyone who has ever attended a major sporting event — but with its own unique twists. No competition would be complete without the national anthem, yet most renditions I’ve ever stood through don’t have to also compete with the CLANG CLANG of broncs clattering around in their chutes.

And of course, there were the flyovers. But not real flyovers. We’re in Fort Worth, home of the Lockheed Martin product that’s somehow both “more than a fighter jet” and less dependable than your typical household appliance, so perhaps that’s why I didn’t get to see any actual planes.

Instead, the Dickies jumbotron would light up, a pre-recorded video of F-35s would go WOOSH, and the announcer would say, with no apparent irony: “That, ladies and gentlemen, was the sound of freedom.”

The announcer had it wrong. I heard “the sound of freedom” a few days later, as I wandered the stock show grounds, and it wasn’t an F-35’s engine. The real sound of freedom is the crack of a bullwhip in the hands of an unsupervised child. You haven’t seen joy until you’ve seen a twelve-year-old running down a semi-crowded street, lashing out at nothing with his brand-new whip.

I kept a safe distance and looked for an exit strategy. According to my ticket, I’d entered a special legal no-man’s land in which any injury I sustained was probably my fault.1 So I ducked into the sheep barn. Temperatures outside were in the 30s and the barns were drafty; the animals, like me, were mostly bundled up, save for the ones actively being shown. I took a seat on the hard bleachers and watched kids with more patience and work ethic than I ever had parade their animals up and down a livestock pen.

I mostly let the judge's words wash over me. Could I really tell what makes one sheep smoother and more full and more flexible than another? I tried but found I had no natural eye for picking winners.

“Absolute beast out here,” the judge said of one. “She just strikes me as a freak.”

Oh yes?

I looked and saw a sheep that, frankly, I had trouble distinguishing from the herd.

Back in the ’80s and ’90s, the Star-Telegram, before it was ripped apart by the internet and hedge funds, used to publish an entire special section every year just to preview the stock show. I’ve perused a few of them, and it’s clear that this was a public service aimed at city residents who, like me, couldn’t be expected to navigate the event without someone holding their hand.

It makes sense. Fort Worth’s stock show began in 1896, back when the (much smaller) city’s economy was actually centered more around livestock and meatpacking, when more residents’ livelihoods were directly tied to the raising and selling and butchering of animals.

But by the late twentieth century, the Stock Show and Rodeo was an anomaly for most Fort Worthians, a fact that’s even more true today as the city has grown. It’s an interesting spectacle for most people, perhaps even an unmissable annual ritual for some, but it’s still a self-contained curiosity that operates according to its own logic: A temporary city within a city with its own language and customs.

At least that’s the best explanation I have so far for why this year’s stock show made me feel, just a bit, like I was losing my mind.

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