Bucking in the Concrete Jungle: PBR Launches New York Mavericks
A bull riding team is launching in New York City. What would you name it? What would its logo be?
That was the formidable and exciting task in birthing the New York Mavericks, who along with the Oklahoma Wildcatters are joining the PBR Teams league for the 2024 season – the league’s third.
While a Maverick often refers to a young horse, in a New York context, “it’s more about being an iconoclast. You have to be a little bit crazy and different to work and survive in New York City,” said Chris Isenberg, a native New Yorker and one of the founders of Doubleday and Cartwright, a Brooklyn-based design firm which spearheaded the naming and brand identity project for the team and its General Manager Chris Pantani.
“A Maverick means independent thinking, relentless energy and determination, someone who marches to their own tune on their own tempo and time,” Pantani said. “We want to pay homage to our fans who represent that way of living while standing out to get noticed.”
The team’s logo needed to evoke toughness – like the sport and the fan base – and make it clear that it represents bull riding.
A bandana-wearing rider atop a bull ready to explode from the bucking chute does just that. Because every ride is a dance between cowboy and bull who each contribute to the score, Joe Lee, the agency’s creative director on the project, championed depicting both the human and bovine athletes.
The Mavericks are for the entire New York-New England area, Pantani contends. He points out that the Teams league had a southern and central footprint before the Mavericks joined, while PBR’s individual competition tours have sold out events in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Maine.
“The New York and New England fan expects championships,” Pantani said. “It’s a tall task ahead, and we’re ready for it – by assembling a great team of riders, competing hard, making our fans proud and winning a championship.”
On Thursday, the league is expected to reveal the three riders from each of the eight-founding team’s respective rosters who will be double protected in the 2024 expansion draft to be held in April.
With only 24 riders across the entire league protected, the Mavericks, along with the Wildcatters, will be able to choose from among many of the best riders in the world.
Whether it’s the Yankees or Red Sox, the Giants or the Patriots, the Rangers or the Bruins, fans in the region are known to be loud and knowledgeable, loyal and demanding.
Closer to Barclays Center, while New Yorkers have tasted championships, it’s been a while. The area’s two NFL franchises, two MLB teams, two NBA teams, and three NHL teams are amid a frustrating dry spell keeping the champagne bottles corked.
In bull riding, before the introduction of team play in five-on-five bull riding games, the New York area has produced two world champions. Bobby DelVecchio grew up in the Bronx, practicing bull riding moves on his fire escape, bull rope in hand. He left home at 15 to join the rodeo circuit and went on to win the 1981-82 PRCA reserve world championship.
Daylon Swearingen, from Piffard, NY was the 2022 PBR World Champion and is now a member of the Carolina Cowboys in the PBR Camping World Team Series.
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Pantani recently joined the Mavericks after two decades with Cooper Tires, 18 years of that tenure spent overseeing the brand’s integrated PBR partnership getting traction in nearly every area of the sport.
On the other hand, although Doubleday & Cartwright had previously rebranded the Milwaukee Bucks and created the identity for Inter Miami CF from scratch, they were bull riding newcomers who had to immerse themselves.
They attended events and watched the Prime Video docuseries “The Ride,” gaining an appreciation for Western culture and the grave danger riders face on every out. They found a legacy of cowboying closer to home, the horseback riders sent to 10th or “Death Avenue” on the west side of Manhattan in the mid-19th Century to help stem the horrific tide of pedestrian deaths. All the inputs helped inform the Mavericks name.
“Bull riding is exotic; it’s like a trip to another place and another time,” Isenberg said.
In a business sense, a Maverick is traditionally a visionary who achieves what’s never been achieved before. They’re known to shake things up, rocking the status quo.
The Mavericks will host their inaugural PBR Camping World Team Series homestand on August 9 and 10 in Barclays Center – the arena’s first professional bull riding event.
In downtown Brooklyn, the dog days of summer are going to boast a bunch of bull.
Let the sports shake-up begin.
