By Allen Nelson
Over the last couple of years, I have written several articles about the TwoBulls Professional Bullfighting Academy. Through the course of the articles, I have answered many questions about the academy, what it is, what it does, why it is, and so forth. We have a limited number of our academies in 2008, and I think I’ve hit upon a question that hasn’t been answered.
The academy has several different levels as far as bullfighting is concerned. The academies are not for entry-level bullfighters. The purpose of these academies is to prepare bullfighters for competition in TwoBulls and Daisy Tour events. While bullfighting is taught at these qcademies, we aren’t trying to teach these students to fight bulls, they have already been fighting bulls for some time. Through our application process, we select students who know how to fight bulls and prepare them for competition.
We teach them the judging system and how to compete. In competition, you can’t fight bulls “good enough” and earn a check. In competition, you have to be the best that you can be on each and every situation you work. As the rest of rodeo knows, contestants aren’t Auaranteed a check, and most bullfighters have to learn to make the transformation from hired labor to contestant. However, even though our students know how to fight bulls, we still find ourselves teaching students things they didn’t know about fighting bulls and raising their level of expertise. Sometimes, we only make them a notch or two better, but often the increase in efficiency is very dramatic.
The unanswered question that I have not addressed is, “Who is teaching these courses and what do they know about fighting bulls?” Jim McLain and I teach the academy. As to what we know about fighting bulls, well, at this point my best answer has to be, “Ask an academy graduate." The proof of any program is if it produces or not. I’m confident that in the future, the “top” bullfighters in the industry will come from the PBF Daisy Protection Tour and will be able to reference the TwoBulls Academy and the system itself as a great influence on how they fight bulls and why they are where they are.
If you think about it, what is a bullfighting school about? Is it about the accomplishments of the instructor or is it about what the students who graduate from the course accomplish? As I’ve already stated in the past, the academy is not a bullfighting school as you know it. Bullfighting schools don’t fail anyone. No matter how well you do, or how poorly, you leave the school and begin booking events.
Bullfighting schools can’t place you in events. No one teaching a bullfighting school today has the power to make events available to the graduates of the school. Since everyone graduates, everyone goes out and starts trying to book rodeos in a market that is already saturated with bullfighters. In that environment, the only way to advance is by who you know and how much you work for. If you don’t book rodeos, how will people see you? Will bullfighters help you advance, or will it be bull riders, committees, producers, and contractors? When you went to the school to learn bullfighting and demanded that the instructor know bullfighting did you consider that all these people who haven’t ever fought a bull would have so much to say about whether you advance or not?
When you graduate from the academy, you can still go out and book rodeos like everyone else, but you also become eligible to enter events at the entry-level of a system that promotes the cream rising to the top through competition. It becomes a situation where you advance based upon fighting bulls correctly, not who you know, what the bull riders think, and not what you work for. These events give you the type of exposure you need to be able to obtain sponsorship. If you seriously want to make a living fighting bulls, you will have to learn about and obtain sponsorship and endorsements.
Once a student graduates from the academy, it is in the best interest of the PBF to see that the student continues to become the best that he can be. When a student is at a TwoBulls or Daisy Tour event, it is in the best interest of the student and the Tour that in and out of the arena, the student is the best that he can be at every event. Once a student leaves a bullfighting school, how much of what he does and how he performs comes back to the instructor? As president and vice president of the PBF, what the contestants do always comes back to us at every event. As instructors for the academy, we are invested in our graduates.
So, rather than bore students with what we did in the past, no matter how significant it is, we prefer to concentrate on preparing the student for the future and letting them prove the significance of the academy through their actions.