Jess Lockwood holds on and wins the PBR Monster Energy...

Jess Lockwood holds on and wins the PBR Monster Energy Buck Off at Madison Square Garden on Jan. 8, 2017. Credit: Getty Images/Al Bello

Daily commuters from New Jersey to Manhattan can be ornery, given the frustrations involved. But this weekend some figure to be more ornery than most.

Bulls can be like that, especially ones whose job it is to throw professional riders off their backs as quickly as possible, often on national television.

Hey, it’s a living, and unlike most commuters, these get private rides into town over the George Washington Bridge.

“The bulls get treated better than we do,” Jim White said with a laugh.

White is production manager for Professional Bull Riders, which is making its annual season-opening, first-weekend-in-January, fish-out-of-water visit to Madison Square Garden through Sunday.

He is responsible for overseeing logistics, and logistics always are a challenge on the PBR tour. At the Garden, they are a bigger challenge.

“But it’s a fun challenge,” he said. “We call ourselves the 'Toughest Crew on Earth,' because if a building can handle us they can handle anything.”

It began in 2007, when PBR was looking to add a New York stop in search of sponsor and media attention and was told that early January was all that was available at the Garden in winter. Deal!

Since then, it has become an incongruous post-New Year’s tradition, with fans who are increasingly knowledgeable and turn out in sufficient numbers that CEO Sean Gleason called it one of the season’s top-grossing events.

“It’s been an important market for us to spread the word in mainstream media that PBR is out there and doing well,” he said, adding that after not-so-profitable early years it has become “one of the most hotly requested tickets I get.”

That includes fans of the sport in the immediate area, and ones who travel to combine a visit to New York with watching the competition. “It’s turned into a major destination,” Gleason said.

PBR said about 20 percent of fans at the Garden travel from more than 51 miles away and 9.3 percent from more than 101 miles.

But the spectators still are predominantly local, and that makes for an atmosphere that riders say is unique.

Keyshawn Whitehorse first visited the event several years ago as a spectator, then competed in 2017. Last year, he was PBR Rookie of the Year.

“The energy of the fans, how reactive, how into it they are, there’s nothing like it on any of the other stops,” said Whitehorse, a member of Navajo Nation who is from Utah.

“They boo when they want to boo and they’ll cheer when they want to cheer. Some places they only cheer. Here you get positive and negative . . . They know when the rider deserves a re-ride, so they boo the judge.”

Tanner Byrne, a nine-year PBR veteran who is from Saskatchewan, said, “Growing up in Canada, going to small-town rodeos across my home province and country, to get to ride bulls at the Garden is a dream come true.

“The first few years it was definitely very foreign [to fans], and that was entertaining in itself. People weren’t too sure what was going on. They were cheering everything and booing everything and were unlike any other crowd we have . . . But it’s grown. The New York City fan base picked it up and started to figure out what we’re actually doing out here.”

In the early years, White said, there was a steep learning curve regarding everything from how the Garden operates to how to set up a bull-riding arena on a fifth-floor hockey rink in the middle of Manhattan.

“I got a lot of gray hair that [first] year,” White said.

PBR lays 40,000 pounds of plywood over the ice used for Rangers games, then installs about 130,000 pounds of steel bucking chutes, panels, gates and posts.

Finally, there is the dirt – 750 tons of it that arrives on 45 trucks from Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

Getting the surface just right is essential. If it is too soft, it is dangerous for bulls, who are unable to get proper footing; if it is too hard, it is dangerous for riders, who are unable to find a (relatively) safe landing spot.

PBR spends more than $21,000 in bridge tolls alone for the event, trucking in bulls daily from New Jersey.

Gleason pointed to a 2010 event in which top riders competed in Times Square as giving the sport a key boost in New York, which has come to embrace the novelty.

Byrne rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Friday.

“As cosmopolitan as New York is - there are so many people that come and go from this place - there are usually 50 percent that have never been to PBR before,” White said. “They have a blast. They enjoy it. It’s Americana in the heart of probably the most unique city in the world.

“There’s nothing like Manhattan, and when people come and they see this, they’re like, ‘Wow! Cowboys!’”

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