By Andrew Giangola
Del Rio, Texas, hasn’t been a stop on PBR’s elite tour for a quarter-century.
But in 1993, when PBR was a brand new bull riding league, the tour’s visit to the border town straddling Mexico would be a top highlight for one young bull rider in more ways than one.
Twenty-eight years ago, Jerome Davis was an easygoing college student who barely had two nickels to rub together.
Known as “The Carolina Cowboy,” Davis, 20, had joined a colorful band of rodeo cowboys who had broken away from rodeo to form the standalone bull riding league.
Davis had no idea if PBR would succeed. Not that it was a big concern. He was young and free, doing what he loved, thrilled to be along for the adventure with heroes he idolized.
Cowboys, of course, only get paid when they ride successfully. Davis was a confident rider, but even he’d admit the bulls were pretty confident, too.
Going into the Del Rio event, Davis found a way to guarantee at least some measure of a payday.
A film company was on site shooting a Lane Frost bio-picture. They were paying bull riders $50 to dress up like Luke Perry, the Beverly Hills 90120 heartthrob who was impressing everyone on the set by flexing serious cowboy chops in playing the rodeo star.
A quintessential no-brainer: Davis donned the requisite plaid shirt and found a black cowboy hat – along with a handful of toilet paper for stuffing.
“I had a straw hat because it was starting to be warm. Luke was wearing a big black felt hat, so I needed something to keep it on my small head,” Davis recalled.
Minus the cranial TP, three or four other bull riders also turned up looking like Lane Frost, whose life, five years earlier, had been cut short at 25 by a misplaced bull horn at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo.
“There were only a few guys dressed like Luke. Not everyone was as broke as I was,” Davis said.
The pot for doing so with a strong degree of realism was even sweeter. If the ride footage of any Luke Perry lookalike made it into 8 Seconds, he’d earn an additional $500.
Davis knocked it out of the proverbial park, producing what he calls one of the top five rides of his career – 92 points on a bull named Playboy to take the George Paul Memorial Bull Riding XVI in Del Rio, his first PBR win.
“The arena announcer said it was 97 points, but we’re pretty sure he was drunk,” joked Tiffany Davis, Jerome’s wife, chuckling about the good old days of the PBR.
“Wasn’t a bad weekend for me,” Davis said. “I got on a few bulls and won $18,000 wearing those clothes. The movie shows Lane winning Del Rio, and I actually won that bull riding, so that was kind of cool.”
Fans of 8 Seconds will remember the scene where Davis rides Playboy as Stephen Baldwin playing Tuff Hedeman tells Lane Frost to “cowboy up.”
Unfortunately, Davis hurt his knee and was unable to perform additional stunt work for filming the rest of a movie that earned Luke Perry critical praise, gave rodeo pop culture validation and attracted new fans.
In Del Rio, he and Tiffany forged the beginnings of a lifetime friendship with the actor who didn’t even know how to ride a horse in pre-production yet would study and train and wind up mounting rank bulls.
Bull riders can be a naturally skeptical bunch in sizing up outsiders putting on a pair of chaps. Yet, beneath Perry’s radiating Hollywood fame, Davis saw a hard-working cowboy who looked and acted like one of the guys.
For his part, Perry, who passed away in March of 2020 at 52 after suffering a stroke, would later say that while he played many athletes, he was most connected to the bull riders of the PBR.
Like a cowboy, he’d support Davis in many ways when a bull riding accident left Jerome paralyzed.
“We got to become buddies,” Jerome said. “Luke would call out of the blue to see how I was. He felt like an old friend every time we talked. I can’t say enough good things about him; he was just a super nice guy.”
This weekend, as Jerome Davis tunes in to PBR on CBS in Del Rio, he’ll remember one of his best moments on a bucking bull and also meeting a true cowboy who’d become a great friend, taken from all of us much too soon.
