Baying for blood at the Britney Spears rodeo

The gossip rags are hoping it gets worse (for Britney) so they can make a bigger profit
I HAVE long dreamed of getting ringside seats at Madison Square Garden, but my nocturnal fantasies usually centre around rock concerts or basketball games.
They certainly don’t include cowboys and bulls.
Last Saturday night, I accompanied my friend Lauren Glassberg to the Professional Bull Riders’ Invitational. Whoa, I hear you say. And whoa would be right. The PBR Invitational is a rodeo with wild bulls instead of horses.
Glassberg, a TV News reporter for WABC’s Channel 7 and a native New Yorker who should have been the fifth woman on Sex and the City, was covering the event, and, after flirting with the cowboys, we were given the best seats in the house, so close to the action that a bull kicked gravel down my cleavage.
Professional bull riding is billed as “the toughest sport on dirt”. The concept behind holding this event in New York?
The toughest sport meets the toughest city, though that didn’t seem to stop the MC from asking the crowd for “a little New York hospitality”.
Whatever that is. I felt like I had walked off the streets of true blue Manhattan into red-hot Bush country.
There were adverts for the US army and billboards for chewing tobacco, Jack Daniel’s, Wrangler jeans and pick-up trucks. Men wore Stetsons and T-shirts that read: “Real men last eight seconds.”
Everybody seemed to walk a little funny, and there was a whole lot of spitting going on.
When Jewel trotted by us to go backstage before re-emerging in the ring to sing the national anthem, we mistook her for Pamela Anderson. Big blonde hair and boobs was a definite theme.
The whole idea behind this testosterone-laced happening is that bull-riding superstars from the US, Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Canada gather to see who can stay on the bull for at least eight seconds. These guys can earn more than $4-million for their pain. And it has to hurt.
When the three-time champion of the PBR Invitational, a Brazilian named Adriano Moraes, took to the stage, Glassberg leaned over and whispered:
“Isn’t he cute?” (He is). And then: “His face is reconstructed from titanium plates.” As Moraes mounted his bull and the animal begun to buck furiously under him,
she whispered: “I wonder if they can have kids?” Good question.
Moments later, a bull named Scaredy Cat threw his rider to the ground and stomped on his ear, drawing blood. The crowd groaned. After a bull called Carlito’s Way had had his way with another cowboy, a clown began to do a rendition of Britney Spears’s Baby One More Time, which brings me to the subject of the world’s most maligned pop diva, and the bloodthirstiness that we have developed for her downfall. Before I went to the PBR Invitational, I was planning to dedicate this column to her latest meltdown. But having a mental breakdown is not a spectator sport and neither should having a hard time be one. I don’t know if she has an undiagnosed bipolar condition or if she is just highly manipulative, selfish and addicted to drugs and the media attention that she seems to court, but the vitriolic attention and the paparazzi baying for her blood even when she’s being wheeled away on a gurney cannot lead to anything but further harm for her and her children.
Make no mistake: the gossip rags who pay for the pictures are hoping it gets worse so they can make a bigger profit.
And then there are the bandwagon riders. From Dr Phil, who tried to film a special show from her hospital room (he swears the Spears family asked him to intervene), to a rock group called Bandarazzi who performed in front of the ambulance that was removing her from her home so they can include it in their music video. When she was admitted to hospital, we heard howls of outrage on newspaper websites and blogs demanding that the media stop goring her due to her apparent fragility. What needs to stop is our demand for this kind of news. If you are buying into the frenzy, obsessively refreshing TMZ.com for the latest update, know that you will have blood on your hands too should she end up like Anna Nicole Smith.
The bulls have animal-rights supporters picketing for them outside Madison Square Garden. Who does Spears have?