[Note: This is article was updated on August 15, 2011.]
If you follow bull riding you are familiar with sudden changes in bulls' names. You might remember when Big Tex was Tilt-a-Whirl, Skyhawk Rug Man was Juice & Goose, and RMEF Elk Country was Geronimo. And of course I'm a Gangster became Uncle Buck and then went back to I'm a Gangster.
There are a few different circumstances in which a bull's name changes. First, the owners may just decide to change his name. Second, the bull is sold and the new owner names him something else. This was the case with Uncle Buck. When he was sold to Jeff Robinson, Jeff blessedly restored him to I'm a Gangster.
But there's another way to get to name a bull, and that's by buying naming rights. When you do, you can turn a bull that used to be Sasquatch into RFD-TV. The beloved Major Payne's name was recently changed to Super Duty. The bull named Stubby is now called Stanley FatMax. And now we have Deja Blue Emu and Blue Emu Hank, and Jack Daniels After Party. But buyer beware, there are fans out there who will never forgive you for taking away Sasquatch and Juice & Goose.
I get a lot of questions about how you keep track of the bulls, with all the name changes and, in some cases, duplicate names. And, in fact, there are a lot of both of these and it can be hard to keep them sorted out. One Perfect Poison is a short go bull and the other is not. Silvano Alves can ride one of them every time and the other he can't.
So how do you know for sure who's who?
All bulls' names are preceded by a number. These are brand numbers, assigned to each bull (and cow) by its owner or breeder when the calf is branded, usually some time in its first or second year. The PBR usually doesn't use the numbers when talking about the bulls in its regular articles (granted, it can get cumbersome to use them all the time), but you can always see them when Slade Long talks about them in "The Morning Line" and you can find them on the PBR bull stats page and on the event day sheets.
5403 Perfect Poison (Boyd/Floyd) is usually in the short go. 615 Perfect Poison (Circle T) is usually a regular round bull.
And as for Major Payne / Super Duty, whichever name he goes by officially begins with K93, and no matter how many times his name changes, or how many other bulls have the same name, that number will remain the same and will identify him - superstar that he is - forever.
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