ONLY A FEWRIDES into the finals, cussedness and bloodlust have spread like a virus from one animal to the next. Bulls are rushing the cartwheeling riders, and the clowns are getting sacked.

A bull named Mean Machine horn-scoops Darrell under the armpit and flings him, cleats over Stetson, onto Shorty. Two bulls later, Darrell is protecting a semiconscious rider named Cody Campbell when the bull Bad Medicine bats him to the ground with its neck and spins on top of Cody, trampling him for several seconds before Darrell can shoo him away. Flint tries to lighten the mood by shooting free T-shirts into the crowd, but the T-shirt gun misfires with a gasp, lobbing one into the dirt.

Next up is a cowboy named Clayton Foltyn. After he jumps off a ride named Evil Forces, the bull whirls around and swats him to the ground with the side of a horn. Darrell gets in the way before Evil can drive a stake into Clayton. Evil catches Darrell below the knee of his left leg, which is planted firmly on the ground. With a flick of his head, he sends Darrell flying like Superman in reverse.

Darrell's sprint back to Clayton turns into a hop; he grimaces in pain before limping out of the arena.

A few minutes later, I sneak through empty stock pens under the bleachers and find Darrell seated on a black padded table in the rear of the sports-medicine room.

"How are you?" I ask.

"Oh, I'm good, mate," he says evenly, but slower and quieter than normal.

"Did you rebreak them?" I ask, referring to his tibia and fibula.

"Naw, I think I just tore the old scar tissue loose," he says unconvincingly, shifting the ice on his lower leg.

Huddled around a small TV broadcasting the action are a dozen or so riders, most of them with "minor" injuries—concussion, separated shoulder, strained hamstring. In the fluorescent light, they look even younger than their twenty-ish years, acne blooming across their foreheads, and they taunt each other like classmates on the playground.

"What, did I get off like shit or something?" a freshly wounded rider asks.

"Yeah, you got off like shit," the others jeer.

This, I suppose, is the less glorious reality of clowning in the PBR. Darrell's job is to protect these yahoo kids. And it can hurt. Evil Forces, it turns out, cuffed him exactly where his left leg was healing, just above the ankle. He will hobble around the house for five weeks before his rebroken tib-fib mends.

When I talk to him a few months later, though, he'll be as enthusiastic as ever, looking forward to a PBR event in New Mexico, then one in Idaho, then Montana. I still won't be able to tell if he's deranged or misunderstood, but his quiet courage is certainly flabbergasting. Thirty weekends a year, he keeps clowning, keeps loving it, even while knowing that, ultimately, he's doomed. The braver he gets, the more injuries he'll sustain. The bulls never really lose.

That night at the finals, I say goodbye and climb back over the pens to a concrete access ramp, what I think is a safe, out-of-the-way place to write a few notes. But before I've scribbled a page, a man with a cattle prod yells, "What the hell are you doing here?!"

He orders me to stand still beneath the lintel of a closed door. Seconds later, two bulls lumber and huff down the ramp, their horns sweeping toward me like the guns of a battleship. With my legs quaking, I quietly, almost inaudibly, repeat my mantra.