We are about an hour south of Fort Worth, in Whitney Texas. I happen to see a Facebook ad showing us an upcoming event at the Cowtown Coliseum for Professional Bullfighting. Yes Facebook, we know you watch our every move and serve us ads based on our conversations, our searches, and our locations. Just stop pretending. Anyway, I saw the ad and thought it looked like a lot of fun, and after all, we are in Texas!
As it turns out, the Cowtown Coliseum is in the Stockyards at Fort Worth. Check out my review of The Stockyards, here. We Purchased Box seats, and the online portal showed there was only 3% seating left. We felt lucky to have gotten seats, and good ones at that! Well, as it turns out, the place wasn’t full. Not even close to full. In fact, it was only about 10% full. So, we might have been tricked a little. But, regardless, we were about to see some exciting bull fighting, and we still had good seats.
The Coliseum is definitely old. It has been around for well over 100 years, and I’m sure it could tell some fantastic stories! There are several vendors in the old hallways of the Coliseum and even a couple in the upper stands. The seats are decent and the box seats we got were comfortable. We sat just 3 rows up from the fence and were ready for some good ole western rodeo style excitement!
The show started promptly, and the Ringmaster was very personable and kept us interested. The show started out with an introduction of the fighters. Most appeared to be in their early 20’s and I just kept wondering what parent wouldn’t be freaking out about their kid fighting bulls for pay. The show is set up reminiscent of one of those arenas shows, like the Dixie Stampede or Medieval Times. The Ringmaster encourages each side of the arena to cheer for a color, red or blue, representing a set of bull fighters. We were on the losing team, the blue team.
The show was mostly centered around a bull being released into the arena and the “bullfighter” trying to encourage it to charge him and he use some fancy footwork to avoid being unalived. The bulls however, all just seemed to want to go back to their cozy little stall and eat hay and sip water. For the most part, the show was pretty boring. I know, I know. We don’t want to see anyone hurt, but why go to these shows if there isn’t a thrill? The show was very rehearsed and even the bulls knew they just had to run out like they were mad, make a minimal effort, and then run back in through a gate that led them to their pen. We spent as many minutes watching a bull stare nose to nose at the exit as we did watching him take a run at a “bullfighter.”
All in all, the show was kind of boring. It was clearly all rehearsed many times, and while you certainly can’t predict every action of a bull, the bullfighters and bulls were obviously well trained in their roles. We left disappointed. We would have rather spent those 2 hours in the Stockyards, visiting some of the really nice shops there. Would I recommend this event to others? Not really. BUT, I do believe they offer much better events than the weekly show we saw. So if you are going to be visiting the Stockyards, by all means check out what shows the Coliseum has during your visit. I’m sure they offer exciting rodeo and western events. We just weren’t impressed with what we saw this past Sunday.
