The Lonely Journey of the Nation's Best Black Bull-Rider
On a Monday evening in early January, Ezekiel Mitchell pulls up a chair at New York City’s Trailer Park Lounge, which looks like you think it does, and settles in as only a 22-year-old can: by locating a wall plug to recharge his vape, ordering a burger and beer, and scrolling through TikTok.
It’s Mitchell’s second-ever trip to New York City, and a busy one at that. Earlier in the week, he appeared on Fox & Friends. This morning, he was a special guest on a UFC podcast. Tomorrow, he’ll do a segment on Good Morning America.
But the press circuit isn’t the main reason Mitchell is in town. He’s the 15th-ranked bull-rider in the world, and the 2020 Pro Bull-Riders’ (PBR) season opener, a three-round competition at Madison Square Garden, took place over the weekend. It’s not your average New York City event: the smell of horses and bulls is inescapable; approximately every New York and New Jersey resident in possession of a cowboy hat makes an appearance; the rodeo clown wears a “protected by U.S. Border Patrol” shirt, because the U.S. Border Patrol is a major PBR sponsor.
Zeke, as his friends and family call him, went into the event bursting with confidence. “I just think, let’s get this money. I have this huge adrenaline rush and feel so empowered,” he says of his pregame jitters. But his rides over the weekend were mostly duds, and he was never really in contention to win.
No matter. It’s an extraordinarily long season—a full calendar year with no breaks, basically—and Zeke is in a reflective mood. He finishes his burger and beer and gets to talking. “I ain’t never not been a cowboy,” he says. He’s certainly dressed the part: six feet flat, blue vest over a white sweater; boot-cut jeans doing what they’re supposed to do, revealing black crocodile boots with a cognac sole. Cowboy credentials aside, Zeke has caught the national media’s attention because he’s the only black bull-rider in the hunt for a title at the professional level of his sport. There’s been just one black champion in the history of pro bull-riding, Charlie Sampson, crowned in 1982.
Zeke’s contender status is a relatively recent development. He was briefly ranked in the top three last year, before falling off a bit. Now comes the tougher part. A shaky performance at MSG isn’t the end of the world, but there are firmer expectations in place for 2020, and Zeke’s no longer the fresh face on the circuit.
This go-around, Zeke has a newfound inner circle, which features the first black agent in the history of the PBR, and the only dedicated social media manager in the PBR. His inner circle believes Zeke has what it takes to win, plus a one-of-a-kind backstory and a model-quality smile. They want to meld their client into nothing short of a rodeo-transcending superstar.
Zeke is saddled with unique constraints to superstardom, though. In his soon-to-be released book The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America's Urban Heartland, Walter Thompson-Hernandez writes, “The world [will] never fully accept the sight of black people on horses.” Or bulls, for that matter.
Zeke’s victories are not earned solely through skill and determination. He’s at the mercy of a panel of judges, who he can only hope treat him fairly—as well as onlookers, who play an outsized role in determining how he and other black bull-riders are represented and portrayed within the sport. Even when Zeke wins, there’s sometimes a catch: in November 2018, for instance, Zeke finished first at a PBR event in Ontario, California. In second place? His cousin Ouncie, a fellow bull-rider… whom the venue announcer mistakenly told the crowd was Zeke’s brother. Given that he was mounting a 1500-pound animal, Zeke likely didn’t catch the screwup in real-time—but he’s certainly aware of the more overtly critical, sometimes full-on racist commentary about his career.
“I’ve heard people say, ‘You’ll never make it to the PBR with that attitude, thinking people are holding you down,’” Zeke says. “I never said people are holding me down. I’m still on my way up. I realized a long time ago you can’t make people like you, and you can’t make everybody happy. But the truth is there are people who hate me because I’m black. Y’all can hate all you want. I don’t care. I’m going to be me.”
One of 11 siblings, Zeke spent his childhood between Baytown, a mid-sized city near Houston where his mom lived, and Rockdale, a tiny town in middle-of-nowhere Texas where his dad resided. Zeke was always a cowboy, taking inspiration from the movie Tombstone and favoring boots over Jordans. When Zeke’s family could afford cable, he’d post up in front of his bunk bed and watch the PBR until a commercial break hit and his siblings re-assumed control of the remote. As Zeke got a little older, he keyed in on the absence of black cowboys in popular culture. His computer lab teacher in Baytown, a “white lady” who was aware of Zeke’s ambitions, showed him a treasure trove of literature on the rich history of the black cowboy: one in four cowboys in the 19th century was black.
When Zeke turned 12, he got Two Socks, his first horse, as a birthday gift from his cousin. “Two Socks is my best friend,” Zeke says. Riding horses was one thing—riding bulls was another. Zeke’s father, a horse dentist-turned ordained minister, was against the idea of his son getting into what is an undeniably dangerous sport; Zeke’s mom was against the idea too. As a teenager, Zeke was finally, begrudgingly allowed to compete in a steer-riding competition at his church. He was hooked. He and a neighbor even constructed a mechanical bull in his backyard with the help of a car suspension.
By his freshman year at Hill College in Texas, Zeke was doing well enough on the bull-riding circuit to get by, and rewarded himself with a 2003 Monte Carlo that cost $1000. The first weekend with his new ride, he logged 20 hours of driving to get to three different rodeos, pulled a check at each place, and emerged with a king’s ransom of $4200. Then Hurricane Harvey hit, and his mom’s home was decimated. Zeke gave as much of his winnings as he could, which meant he couldn’t consistently travel the rodeo circuit. His own financial situation became perilous.
Max Maxwell, now Zeke’s agent and mentor, had never heard of Zeke before watching him on a July 2018 episode of a Vice show that premiered in the midst of Zeke’s bull-riding aspirations going to hell. In Zeke, Max saw “a young hustler who doesn’t have the right opportunities.” He DM’d Zeke with an unusual proposal: Let’s meet up in Houston and talk about your future. Zeke was skeptical of Maxwell, a self-proclaimed North Carolina-based real estate mogul with a large Instagram following, but drove 90 minutes to Houston anyway. Miraculously, Max really did fly halfway across the country to help. “It immediately felt like he was my big brother,” Zeke remembers. They talked about what Zeke needed to succeed, starting with basics like new chaps, a new vest, and a new helmet. Max took care of all of it. Soon after, he picked up rent payments on a place in Houston for Zeke and his cousin Ouncie, he covered all of Zeke’s travel expenses, and after pulling some strings with the PBR, officially became his agent. He’s never asked for a penny of Zeke’s earnings, and says he has no plans to do so—this is a passion project to assist a kid he admires.
For the first time, Zeke had some form of infrastructure and stability in place. The second step in Operation Superstardom was to find someone who could document his exploits and make people outside of bull-riding care about him. For that, Zeke and Max turned to Dave Harding, a filmmaker and photographer with an immaculately trimmed goatee who had no clue how bull-riding worked when he showed up to his first PBR event in early 2019. “I just had to crank up my shutter,” he says with a shrug about what it's like to photograph Zeke in action. Zeke now hounds Dave about the footage in his possession, in part because he’s 22 and eternally online, but also because he knows it’s his best chance at gaining a following that can register beyond the PBR. He’s up to 49,000 followers on Instagram and 68,000 followers on TikTok. The former is middle-of-the-pack amongst his peers, while the latter, which he created in September 2019, makes him one of the only bull-riders who’ve even attempted to crack Gen Z’s platform of choice.
When Dave first began lending a hand on social media, Zeke was in mourning: on January 15, 2019, his friend Mason Lowe died at a PBR event after a bull stomped on him. That night, Zeke went to the bars—”what Mason would’ve wanted”—got drunk, came home, and cried until he fell asleep. A day or two later, he was back in the practice pen. “I figured if I had more time to think about what happened, it was going to fuck with me way worse than it already was fucking with me,” Zeke says. “I just made it as cowboy as I could.”
Bull-riding has a higher risk of catastrophic injuries than the NFL, which means the ideal career path looks something like this: hit the pro circuit in your early 20s, build a following, and retire within a decade with your money right and your face still intact.
Indeed, Max says one of the first things he did upon becoming Zeke’s agent was push sponsors to spend more on bull-riders. “If these guys are willing to go out there and die for your brand, I think you should compensate them the right way,” he asserts. Prize money can only help so much. The PBR offers roughly $10 million in winnings every year, which is nothing to sneeze at, but not enough to guarantee a sustainable career path; it’s also not enough to warrant hopping on a bull in the immediate aftermath of a friend’s death. And unlike the NFL or NBA, there is no guaranteed salary for competitors, no team-booked hotel rooms, no private planes for travel, no dedicated off-season.
Zeke can afford the overhead costs with Max’s help, but he’s still very much assimilating to his new life. Another roadblock presented itself late last year, when his rent-free spot in Houston started causing problems. Friends were staying for weeks on end, not paying bills and trashing the place. Max took notice and presented Zeke with a new plan: Move to North Carolina, where Max already owns property, and in all facets of his life, really start fresh. “He wants to be a true cowboy,” Max says. “I had to pull him out of the typical young-adult environment. You don’t get to use that excuse when you’re a professional athlete.”
Zeke agreed to go, and currently resides in a house paid for by Max, on a property with a ranch also paid for by Max. A short drive away is a large ranch owned by Jerome Davis, a former world champion bull-rider and co-founder of the PBR who broke his neck in a bull-riding accident, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down—another harrowing reminder of the fragility of the rodeo. He still intently watches and attends events, and offers coaching to anyone who asks for it. “More than anything, it’s a lifestyle,” he says. “When it gets in your blood, it’s hard to shake.”
Davis articulates a key part of the bull-rider’s ethos. Riding off into the sunset to pursue other opportunities is a fine conclusion to a Western movie, but it’s not necessarily the most realistic. Real cowboys don't quit, and they let their riding do the talking, rather than vice versa. Zeke is openly grappling with this push-and-pull predicament. He’s a cowboy lifer, but the rare pro bull-rider who acknowledges a desire to someday transition to something else—acting, modeling, whatever works.
But unless and until Zeke captures a title, his posse’s aspirations are all talk, and the swirl around him—win or lose—is only going to grow more dizzying. At the pro level, rodeo events didn’t fully desegregate until the early ‘80s, and yet, it’s Zeke who can’t escape the incessant questions about diversity (or the lack of it) in his sport, and it’s Zeke who’s often forced to walk a rhetorical tightrope so as not to offend his competitors and fans. These considerations are intertwined with the aforementioned injury risks and financial challenges that every bull rider endures.
And sure enough, after rehashing the entirety of his life and career at the Trailer Park Lounge, Zeke is attuned to the gravity of his situation. Yes, superstardom is the aim; yes, he wants to “push the boundaries of the sport”; and yes, Max and Dave are the people he believes can get him there. Imagine it: The black bull-rider who avoids major injuries, wins a title and millions of dollars, and then seamlessly transitions to something even grander. It’s the dream: the cowboy riding off into the sunset with nothing left to prove.
But there’s also a simpler, more understandable goal for now. Zeke takes a pull of his recharged vape, and for a brief moment, the swirl around him ceases to exist.
“I just don’t ever want to be broke again,” he says.
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Originally Appeared on GQ
