Jess Lockwood’s Ride for Redemption

Jess Lockwood won the opening round of the PBR Unleash The Beast last weekend in Tampa with a commanding 89.5-point textbook ride on Raider, a tricky bull who spun away from his hand.

He had been struggling with bulls going in that direction but found a way to adjust and triumph – just as he has done in life off the dirt battling challenges larger, messier and more complicated.

“It feels great to be back,” Lockwood said on Friday night as the event leader heading into championship Saturday, when he’d ride two more to win in the sport’s first visit to Tampa in 14 years. “I went through a bit of a rough patch for a couple of years. I found God again. I found myself again. My family and friends have been with me. It feels good to be back riding bulls with my PBR family.”

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“This was the Jess Lockwood who’s won two world titles! He looked pretty dang good!” exclaimed 2016 World Champion Cooper Davis on the Paramount+ telecast from Tampa.

Jess Lockwood showinghis World Champion PBR buckle. | Bull Stock Media

The first gold buckle in 2017 put Lockwood on top of the bull riding world at the ripe age of 20 – the youngest champion in PBR history. Two years later, he became the youngest two-time world champion and a multi-millionaire.

He handled fame well. For a time. A barrage of injuries and a failed relationship would trigger a spiral into addiction.

Lockwood is five feet five inches and 130 pounds. His slight body took a pounding before and after the two titles. Early in the first championship season, his groin muscle was torn clean off the bone. Later, a bull came down on his torso with forces calculated as the same as being thrown from a third story window – breaking four ribs, puncturing his lung and lacerating a kidney.

The former Montana state high school wrestling champion and son of saddle bronc and bull rider Ed Lockwood is one tough customer. With organs punctured and sliced, ribs snapped like matchsticks, he stayed in the hospital on the East Coast for one night, then eased into the passenger side of a buddy’s truck and rode shotgun all the way back to Montana.

But the injuries kept piling up. In pursuing his third title, Lockwood rode I’m Legit Too in Kansas City for 91.5 points, but in getting off, caught his spur, ripping a hamstring off his hip. He had pelvic surgery. Then a bull tore the muscle off his repaired pelvis. He broke a collarbone. A brutal kick to the back of the head split his neck open. Doctors stapled him up, sewed his ear back on and reattached the tip of his tongue.

Every time Jess was knocked flat, he popped up like the proverbial carnival mole that never stays down. But the wreck-recovery rinse-and-repeat took a toll.

Jess Lockwood’s personal slide began following a second pelvic surgery and his divorce.

“I started falling into a ditch,” he explained to Davis, color analyst for the CBS and Paramount+ PBR broadcasts, in an interview. “I had a failed marriage. I had multiple injuries that stacked up. I had feelings and thoughts in my head that were eating at me.”

He turned to a controlled mind-altering substance to escape.

“I started using Adderall – an Adderall addiction – as a way to disassociate from those feelings and to get away into a whole other world where none of it mattered, and I was just masking the pain,” he said. “Those days, they were unique to say the least.”

Jess Lockwood riding a black bucking bull. — Jess Lockwood | Bull Stock Media

Bull riding is in Jess Lockwood’s blood. Or at least he was being conditioned for it just days after being born. Little Jess was one week old when wrapped in a blanket by his mom Angie and brought to his first rodeo. When older, before bed every night, he was allowed to watch one hour of videos of his favorite PBR riders. Turning 18, he got his PBR card and moved south to Texas, living on the ranch of his bull riding mentor, PBR co-founder Cody Lambert. Jess had dreamed of being the world’s best bull rider. It was time to live the bull riding dream.

Now, in the grips of Adderall addiction, Jess Lockwood didn’t think he needed that so much.

“Towards the end of my addiction I knew it was so bad that I needed help,” he said. He drew on what he recognized as unconditional love and support of his family and friends to “snap back to reality.”

Some take on and beat addiction at the Betty Ford Center. Jess pursued more of a Ty Murray-Willie Nelson route. He went on the rodeo trail with his aunt, barrel racing champion Lisa Lockhart. On the road he was able to quit the powerful stimulant, cold turkey.

“That was the first and biggest step,” Lockwood said. “It took me away from home. There wasn’t any hiding (the addiction). I couldn’t sneak stuff around.”

Lockhart helped her nephew through physical withdrawal from the drug. His mind cleared. He decided he was a bull rider again, and he stepped into the practice pen.

The two-time champion just needed a chance to prove himself. Supported by his good friends Davis and Derek Kolbaba, he was picked by the Carolina Cowboys as a free agent in 2025.

Lockwood with Carolina Cowboys teammate Cooper Davis. | Bull Stock Media

“No one else believed in me at that point,” Lockwood said. “I was like the flu for other teams. They knew what I went through with addiction, and the big question was, ‘Is Jess gonna be his normal self when he comes back riding?’”

Lockwood was a crucial piece of GM Austin Dillon and coach Jerome Davis’s championship puzzle, going 9 for 19 during the regular season, and 2 for 3 in the playoffs, including a massive game-winning 90.25 points on Oyster Creek Brawler to beat the Nashville Stampede inside T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

After adding a Teams title to two individual championships, Lockwood began the 2026 Unleash The Beast season with three round wins – in Tampa, New York and Milwaukee.

It’s fitting his team is named for cowboys, because that’s what Jess Lockwood is trying to be.

He believes that a cowboy, being human, makes mistakes but owns his actions.

“I’ve dealt with fame and accomplishments at a very young age,” he said. “I had some rough goes in life and took a terrible path. Now that I’ve beaten addiction and am where I’m at, I’m very proud of the track I’m on in life, the people around me. I don’t think that would have been possible without the addiction side of things. I believe it’s made me a better person than I would have been without it, even though it’s not a very good thing to have happened to anyone. I’m glad it happened to me to make me the person I am now.”

Lockwood rocketed to No. 8 in the world in Tampa, knocking down a walk-off ride win by scoring 90.35 points on Lights Out. Another big score, however, came with a price. He rushed off the dirt gritting his teeth with an apparent neck injury – unable to join the celebratory TV interview and sidelined from this weekend’s three-day UTB in Sacramento. After a brief scare, Jess plans to return the following week in Salt Lake City.

In his candid, expansive interview with Davis, Lockwood laid out his goal: to win a third World Championship and second Teams title. He was the world’s top cowboy as a 20- and 22-year-old during campaigns marked with broken bones and bruised organs. Can he do it again as a 28-year-old?

Whatever happens in the bucking chutes, on the leaderboard or in the X-ray room, however the title race ends in May, Jess Lockwood is back. He cleared his head, found himself, and willed his way into another championship conversation. And the entire sport is better for it.

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