A bull that likes to spin is especially treacherous. Riders who fall to the inside of the whirling bull are likely to be trampled or butted or used as decoration on the animal's horns. At the rodeo, a cowboy is disqualified if he hits the ground before the eight-second ride is completed. If he's lucky, the bull doesn't disqualify him from life. In saddle bronc riding or the bareback event, a cowpoke will most often pick himself up off the ground, utter a short word or two of Anglo-Saxon origin, yank the brim of his Stetson angrily down to his eyebrows and stomp back to the riding chutes.
Bull riding is red alert, start to finish.
In as much as a Brahman bull will fight a man on horseback as enthusiastically as one on foot, there are no pickup men. Instead, a rider depends on that most courageous of heroes, the bull-baiting clown, to divert the animal's attention. Without the clown, a dismounted bull rider is road kill. If you can call bull riding a sport, it's certainly a rough one. You could get a bloody nose just reading about it.