Motorcycle Rodeo

As trashy jokes beginning with “You might be a redneck if...” pervade our society, it’s truly hard to notice just how true and biting those jokes really can be. Tonight, I sat through what could possibly be considered the epitome of redneck activities, completely spellbound and dumbstruck by what I saw.

Motorcycle rodeo. Two manly words. Motorcycles are big, beefy machines capable of propelling a 250 pound man and his “biker bitch” a distance of no less than 15 feet (given the proper wind condition, collision speed and mini-van weight), and rodeos are incredibly macho events in which real men pit themselves against the bucking bull or steadfast stallion in a fight to the death (or to first place). How could it be that this event could be anything less than amazing?

They had all the standard rodeo events and motorcycle events—races, barrel slalom , trailer pull—but then they had three events, three heart-pounding, ball-busting, chap-wearing, gut-wrenching events that took the “motorcycle rodeo” from uncommonly sexin’ to level-of-income vexin’. Allow me to articulate.

Event one: The tire pull. This ain’t yo’ momma’s tire pull. This is one serious tire strapped to one revved machine. Two racers compete to see who can make it to the finish first. How is this redneck? Oh, I forgot a few things. The racer’s significant other (wife, girlfriend, cousin, sister, momma’, et cetera) has to sit on the thing. While she is riding, she has to grab a potato off of a traffic cone during the race, then once the driver reaches the end of the course, she has to get up and run her ass back to the start and plunk that potato into a five-gallon anti-freeze bucket. I guess it’s a throw-back to the days when the ladies had to make some taters—and quick! If the prospect of a bitch falling off an old tire strapped to the back of a hog doing 30 isn’t enough to get your blood pumpin’, I don’t think this kind of rodeo is for you.

Event two: Musical cycles. Another classic event, although usually played with chairs and without motorcycles. Oh yeah, they also use potatoes. You see, instead of the fine ladies racing to find a chair when the music stops, they have to dive off the back of a bike into a pile of hay and fish out a potato. Of course, there aren’t enough potatoes to go around, so someone usually ends up in a slap fight over hidden tubers. Of course, once all three rounds were over, the scoreboard cleverly showed the winner (as if it couldn’t be deduced by the woman with the most taters in her britches). A quality event, and fun for the whole inbred family.

Event three: The wiener bite. No, I’m not making this shit up—this was all seen at 1:00AM on the SPEED channel. A thawed hot dog was suspended over the race track and covered with mustard (I’m not entirely sure of the order). Then, the bikers drive slowly down the track and their “bike bitches” have to suck down and bite off as much of the wiener as they possibly can. The difficulty? No one may touch the ground during this event. It calls for nerves of steel for both parties, and it seems like the more successful teams were able to shift their body weight, as well as the bike itself, to stay inline with the wiener at low speeds. Along with many questionable comments regarding practicing for the event, the highlight (for me) must have been when the winner (with a whopping 4 inches of wiener bitten) told the reporter that, if she won at the championship, it would be her fifth-consecutive championship win at the wiener bite competition.

Thank fucking God I live in a country this gloriously rich in heritage. I’ll see ya’ll at the next motorcycle rodeo.