Bull riders trading 10 gallon hats for...helmets?

[trof]

Jeez.
What's the macho world coming to?
Last night I was channel surfing and came across this scene:


A tough as nails, kick-ass BULL RIDER wearing a helmet and face mask?
And the bull's horns are sawed off?
Hell, next they'll be wearing pink tutus and sipping tea with their pinkies in the air.

I found this article on the web:
There were so many helmets strewn about behind the chutes at the season-opening Professional Bull Riders event that the bull riders could not always tell them apart. Cord McCoy and Harve Stewart, about to board bulls, laughed at the near mix-up when they spotted their identical helmets resting side by side.

At the time, the two-time world champion Chris Shivers, 30, sat in a back room on an examination table, looking at a digital photograph of his face taken minutes before. Thanks to a glancing blow from the horn of a 1,500-pound bull named Rebound, his nose was bent, shaped like California.

A doctor straightened it, and Shivers sat with gauze stuffed up both nostrils, face bloodied, wearily explaining why he does not wear a helmet.

“It looks like a pretty good idea now,” he said.

Shivers, who broke his left cheekbone and eye socket last year, said he was too old to change now. Then he spit blood into a trash can.

Bull riding is midway through a cultural shift, nudged one broken nose or concussion at a time. Helmets are still not mandatory, but their use is growing faster than anyone imagined a few years ago.

At the Baltimore event last weekend, 23 of the 45 riders wore them, the first time that those with helmets outnumbered those without. At last month’s National Finals Rodeo, the championship of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, J. W. Harris became the second rider in three years to win the bull-riding title while wearing a helmet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/sports/othersports/10helmets.html?_r=1