First Person: Dale Den Herder

How a rebel carried me to three bull rider world finals .Life is enhanced by having a variety of experiences. This was my philosophy when I agreed to become a partner in a customer's business raising bucking bulls for bull riding events in 2004..I knew I loved animal competitions. My father, brothers and I had a Percheron draft horse business for 20 years which we sold in 2002. Bull riding competitions sounded fun. So I agreed to run the financial side of the business while my partner specialized in working with the livestock..There's no certainty in the bull business. He had 20 cows and 20-plus bulls. The trick is to breed so you keep improving the herd. It is a long process. The bulls are trained starting three years after birth. You don't know until after the third year if a bull was worth all the money you spent feeding him. I sometimes joked that my partner was just looking for a sucker like me. I bought out my partner in 2008. .If you want success in a bull breeding business you need to get your animals into events. The best places are the Professional Bull Riders Association (PBR) events. This series of events is the bull-riding equivalent of the National Football League..It is a political business. You need to know someone who knows someone. So I decided to take about 20 of my best bulls to a stock contractor in North Dakota who is connected to the PBR circuit. He was going to select the bulls with potential and sell off the rest. One day, he called me and said, "I am going to sell this rebel bull." The animal he was referring to was later named Whiskey's Rebel..I could understand his frustration with Whiskey's Rebel, who I called Rebel. An eight-foot fence surrounds the pen where cowboys mount the bulls at events. (The pen is referred to as "the chute.") Rebel would stand up on his hind legs, put his front hooves on the top of the gate and try to jump out. They had to tie a rope around his horns to keep him down. I have been to quite a few events; I have never seen a bull do that. He was just a real bad actor and that's good..So when the contractor from North Dakota said he was going to sell Rebel, I told him he couldn't. I thought his qualities were too valuable. Instead, I brought Rebel to The Boyd & Floyd Bull Company, a well-known breeding company out of Stephenville, Texas. Rebel's tendency to be wild in the chute was a problem. If you want a bull in the televised PBR events you couldn't have him wasting time in the chute. After spending some time working with him, Boyd & Floyd's trained him to keep calm enough for the cowboy to mount so Rebel started traveling with them to events..That's when he began to attract the attention of others. They found that Rebel had a really high jump, was quick out of the chute and he was above average for aggressiveness. Cowboys learned to run when they fell because experience told them Rebel would be after them with hoof and horns..The total score possible for a bull ride is 100 points. Half of that total is based on the performance of the bull. His score is based on his degree of difficulty. Judges look for the bull to drop his head, to rear and kick in the back, to spin, and to change directions. The other half of a ride score is the rider's performance, which is only added if the rider remains on the bull's back for eight seconds after leaving the gate. A combined bull-rider score of 90 points or above is considered outstanding. Few bulls have a ride that scores above 80 in their entire careers..A bull that offers higher difficulty is more likely to be chosen by riders because he offers them a higher score potential if they manage to stay on his back. Rebel became a very good draw in any of the rounds he appeared in. He bucked his rider off 65 percent of the time before 8 seconds out of the gate. Many bulls have difficulty bucking their rider off 50 percent of the time..In April 2011, he scored a 90.5 in Oklahoma. Later in 2011, at age 6, Rebel was one of 200 bulls that made it to the PBR World Finals in Las Vegas. For bull riding, getting to the Las Vegas event is like making it to the Super Bowl. He was in the top 500 out of 33,000 bulls registered that year on probullstats.com, the scoring site for the bull riding industry..He made it to Las Vegas again in 2012 and in 2013. In 2013, Rebel placed second in the top 10 "biggest wrecks" of 2013. He bucked his rider so hard that he flipped 360 degrees, head over heels, before planting his face in the dirt and breaking his nose. The rider is OK now. (Visit NorthWestern Financial Review's Blog to see the video.).I loved the experiences brought by owning Rebel. Bull owners in Las Vegas are treated like the owners of Super Bowl teams. For getting to the Super Bowl, owners and players get a ring. Contractors and riders get leather jackets for making it to the PBR World Finals. I could literally go anywhere at the event from the stands all the way down to the chute. It was a real cultural experience for a banker. I got to don my cowboy hat and boots for the after-party where I met people from every part of the bull riding industry..I was lucky. Rarely does an owner have a bull get in the finals three years in a row. I have decided not to try my luck any further. Rebel is retired now, but his legacy will live on. Probullstats.com still ranks him 106th out of all bulls registered.