Funny Man Flint Rasmussen To Be Inducted Into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame

Legendary entertainer transformed the role of rodeo clown

Flint at Cheyenne Frontier Days / PBR

In its mash-up of sports and entertainment, deadly serious bull rides and clowning riffs, hard hits and funny bits, there is no sport quite like PBR.

For many years, one inimitable man stood, and sometimes moonwalked, at the center of the sport’s unique presentation. Along with arena producer Jerome Robinson, he will be remembered as one of the prime shapers of the experience of attending a PBR event.  

That man, Flint Rasmussen, who retired from his role as PBR’s “Official Entertainer” following the 2023 World Finals, will be inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City on Saturday night.    

“I always approached my job differently than most in this business,” Rasmussen said. “I didn’t want to make a difference in the Western Sports world, I wanted to make a difference in the world. PBR gave me the opportunity to perform in venues that are not traditional Western sports venues, and in turn establishing an entirely new fan base. This induction tells me that I really did make a difference. That maybe I set the bar higher for future performers in rodeo and bull riding. I am honored, humbled, and beyond appreciative.”

Rasmussen’s role was highly unusual in professional sports. Play along and imagine this scenario, during the COVID-19 health pandemic: 

You’re attending a pro football game – a series of violent collisions with down time between plays that often make SportsCenter’s highlights. In previous months, you had been told to keep away from people. The rat-in-a-cage cabin fever has now subsided, and you’re back in your favorite stadium. You’re in the stands, surrounded by other lock-down parolees, having a grand time, because you’re out free among other human beings watching live sports again.

During breaks in the frenetic action, out on the 50-yard line presides The Entertainer. He is part stand-up comedian, part game show emcee. He’s in uniform – shorts and a jersey with brand logos on his chest and back – strutting around the playing field, bantering with the crowd.

“Breaking news! New study alert!” he declares. “It has been determined that strangers in the actual physical presence of one another, without masks on, are much more likely to have a good time.”

Very few people with a public platform can joke about a deadly virus in the course of their employment and get to keep their jobs. The crowd loves it.

The Entertainer locks on a group of young men off field level. The in-house camera zooms on the motley crew, beers in hand, their grinning mugs now on the Jumbotron, Each wears a hair style instantly recognizable as a mullet.

“Guys, I had that haircut back in 1979…and I wore it a lot better,” The Entertainer says.“And this is what you have to look forward to.” 

The Entertainer rips off his cowboy hat, revealing a bald spot the size of an IHOP pancake.

“A solar panel…that powers this love machine! We’re talking Green Energy!”

The chorus of laughter from real people enjoying a live sporting event sounds louder than The Entertainer remembered it. He is pumped, still filling the commercial break. For another minute or so, the floor is his.

“Folks, let me tell you one thing, and don’t you ever forget it: There’s only one Saturday night a week. Let’s not waste it!”

Loud toe-tapping fiddle music bursts from the stadium’s loudspeakers. The Entertainer wriggles a happy Irish jig into a suggestive twerk. The music segues into “Billy Jean.” His body has straightened up, and out of nowhere, there’s a fedora on his head. He’s floating backwards into a perfectly executed Moonwalk, as if infused by the ghost of Michael Jackson. The crowd is cheering, louder and louder. The music fades as all eyes go back the action about to resume.

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This is not an exercise in imagining a weird new way to watch the NFL. It’s PBR during the Rasmussen era – a unique blend of unscripted, punishing athletic competition and full-on comedy.

For nearly two decades fulltime in PBR (and hundreds of rodeos before that beginning with the PRCA in 1994), the smiles and laughs and “Did he really say THAT?” moments were brought to fans by the sport’s wisecracking, mullet-loving, solar-panel flashing, bachelorette-party aficionado exclusive entertainer.

Until his 2023 retirement, the master of ceremonies, on-dirt quarterback, sultan of sarcasm (that manages not to feel sarcastic), and chief instigator of both the mischief and the unfiltered musings playing out across PBR events showcasing the height of athletic daring and subsequent broken bones and lacerated organs (how’s that for a challenging backdrop for making people laugh) was this former Montana school teacher done up in clown makeup, patrolling the dirt as if it was the maple wood stage floor of the Grand Ol’ Opry while making jokes sounding like Eddie Murphy crossed with Larry the Cable Guy.

PBR is one darn fun time, and it was Rasmussen who set the tone and moderated the mood as the sport steadily moved into the mainstream. Former PBR CEO Randy Bernard once said that Flint was as important to the sport’s growth as any single cowboy or bull. What Rasmussen has said about fan-favorite riders like J.B. Mauney and Chase Outlaw on his podcast “According to Flint” applies to him: He was good for business.

Over the years, many fans said a main reason they bought tickets was to see Flint. He was ever-present, despite suffering a heart attack at 41. He had two stents put in, went on blood thinners, was told not to get rammed by a bull, and missed fewer than 40 days.

After that, Flint told fans, “My heart must be OK; it was beating when I got up this morning.”

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As the seasons rolled by, he depended less on dancing and physical comedy. Yet, when PBR began to host fans in the arena following the closed, made-for-TV events during the pandemic, Flint, at 51 years old, was doing cartwheels across the dirt.

To be clear, this was never a one-man show. Rasmussen considered himself a spoke in a wheel, playing off arena announcers Clint Atkins and Matt West with Richard Jones providing the musical soundtrack. He likes a rock band analogy Atkins has used: the bass player may have an off night, and the other band members pick him up. Nobody notices.  

Before Rasmussen began refining the gold standard of entertainment in Western sports, he had always been funny, but unlike bull riders, for example, knowing exactly what they wanted to be from the time they could walk, he didn’t grow up planning for life clowning in the rodeo, let alone reinventing the position.

In his hometown of Havre, Montana, he wasn’t a show-off or class clown. But he liked to have fun and get a reaction. (A collection of his mother Tootsie’s old Christmas letters sent out annually in the late 1970s has a recurring theme: “Flint still entertains us.”)

Flint was a regular in schools plays and sang in the choir, getting a taste of adulation from an appreciative audience. There was a constant “pull” to be in front of crowds performing. Surrounded by Western culture, there was always a place teeming with crowds eager to be entertained – rodeo.

Flint Rasmussen / Flint Rasmussen

At 19, during the summer, first on a dare, he began working amateur rodeos in Montana, getting nervous like he did playing high school football (making All-State), but having an absolute ball in making people smile and laugh.

He was no longer an athlete. But being out on the dirt performing in front of people during a rodeo competition was scratching an itch.

It felt good. It was fun – an emotion he tried to remember years later when body parts he didn’t know he had ached, the airport food court was closed because no one wanted to go to work anymore, and the airline canceled yet another connecting flight.

Flint treated rodeo like a summer job. The plan was to get through college and then teach. After graduating University of Montana Western, he would land a job teaching high school math and history. But he kept getting phone calls. Rodeo organizers catching his act saw potential. Promoters know their crowds, and these people were getting busted up. This Flint Rasmussen character just might make a name for himself if he gave it a chance, they said.

He quit teaching school at 25 and began performing at professional rodeos.

“I was single and didn’t owe anybody anything and didn’t own anything. I thought, ‘I’ll try this for a couple of years’,” Rasmussen told Tulsa World in a January 2021 profile.

During one slow period in the fall, a rodeo in Minnesota called. Their regular rodeo clown couldn’t make the event because his trailer caught fire on the highway. Could Rasmussen come?

Flint did his thing, impressing a stock contractor who recommended him to esteemed rodeo promoter Jerome Robinson, who happened to be planning a few winter shows. Robinson was producing PBR’s first events in the 1990’s and would use Rasmussen including in 1997 at the first of his 26 PBR World Finals gigs.

One man’s very unlucky trailer fire lit the fuse for Rasmussen’s rise, so to speak.

But truth be told, simmering powder was already in place. It’s hard to imagine he would not have been “discovered’ to play bigger stages.

"Piano Man" at Madison Square Garden / Bull Stock Media

Music is wheelhouse to Rasmussen’s schtick, which benefitted from Robinson’s emphasis on contemporary music and investments in high-clarity, high-power sound systems hauled city to city.

Every event was loaded with singing and dancing to help get the crowd going. Leading fans through Journey’s “Believe” and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” was a staple. To the end, Flint still hit the high notes on “Your Love” by Outfield (changing a few lines for comic effect). Around 9 o’clock, for the pretty good crowd on a Saturday, he’d break out a harmonica for Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.”

Flint claims he isn’t musically inclined but don’t tell that to Bernie Taupin, the lyricist and musical partner Elton John, who partnered on a few bulls, including legendary Little Yellow Jacket and Rocket Man. At an event, Taupin watched Flint pretend to play piano on a Billy Joel song piped over the PA.

“You really play the piano, don’t you?” Taupin later asked him.

Rasmussen’s daughters Paige and Shelby are talented musicians (in addition to rodeo athletes; as a Montana State sophomore, Paige won the College National Finals Rodeo all around Championship in 2021), but he had to confess to not playing a lick of piano.

Still, faking out a legend who wrote the lyrics for more than 300 million records sold including 50 Top 40 hits was a pretty good compliment.

The bit that fooled Taupin showed the range of Flint’s talent as he modernized the role of traditional rodeo clowns, previously confined to baggy outfits, telling corny jokes, and participating in hokey skits.

The only “clown” thing about Flint was his exaggerated circus makeup, which he held onto as a salute to rodeo tradition and to distinguish him from the US Border Patrol cowboy-protection team of bullfighters he worked with.

Makeup on, Flint recast the role to be more like stand-up comedy, adding singing, impromptu bits, and physical performances. Because he was so much more than a clown, PBR called him the Official Entertainer.

Instead of channeling previous rodeo clowns, his inspirations were athletes, comedians, and musicians. A favorite was “Dr. J.” Julius Erving, “a great player and great entertainer all in one.” He watched Michael Jackson wow human beings of every age and says he’s the greatest entertainer of all time. Musically, Joel, Bon Jovi, and Garth Brooks were revered influences, and he studied comedians Eddie Murphy, Howie Mandel, and Jerry Seinfeld for their timing and ability to hold of an audience’s fickle attention.

Flint with his friend, the late sports photographer Chris Elise / Andrew Giangola

It wasn’t always all fun and games on the dirt. Rasmussen had been hit and hooked by bulls.

“Most people probably look at my job and say, ‘I could do that,’ because it looks like I am just out there goofing around. But there is a lot going on,” Flint said in an interview with This Week in New York, prior to the season launching at Madison Square Garden in New York in 2020.

“If I’m not paying attention at any given time, I could get hurt very badly. But as far as the bulls go, I think people in cities don’t understand that most of us grew up in a rural, ranch-type setting. We have grown up either around, or directly involved in, the large-animal industry. This lifestyle exists in a strong way in this country. It is how people eat!

“Yes, bucking bulls are different. But they aren’t bucking because they are pissed off. They are bucking because their bloodlines tell them that is what they are here to do. Not every horse runs fast. But the ones in the Kentucky Derby are bred to do it, so they do. Bulls are not rare, exotic circus animals. There are millions of people in this country who are around bovines every single day to provide food for this country and to make a living for their families. So, when anyone in the PBR is face-to-face with a bull, they aren’t really thinking; they are reacting in the way that their body and mind have been conditioned to over the years.”

Flint pilfers David Lee Roth's blazer in Anaheim / Bull Stock Media

Rasmussen’s Hall of Fame career is packed with accolades and awards such as eight-time PRCA Clown of the Year and eight-time Wrangler National Finals Rodeo barrel man.

While influencing the next generation of Western sports entertainers, he remained the perfect man for holding court in arenas before joining PBR’s television team when retiring from the dirt.  

While the “show” was spiced up by his performances, the core competition has always been unscripted, raw, and dangerous.

Supplementing the mayhem of bull rides, Flint’s heart was right on his sleeve as he pushed the envelope, sneaking more and more social satire into his act, reaching new heights during COVID-19 as he danced around the absurdity of the situation at a time when questioning one-size-fits-all health mandates was verboten.

A half-year after the self-proclaimed “super spreader of joy” began riffing on the day-to-day absurdity of life during a virus likely laboratory-engineered and partially funded by tax dollars, comedians like Jon Stewart and Bill Maher then followed Rasmussen’s lead to joke about what the nation had been put through.

When PBR was the first sport to welcome fans back inside an indoor arena in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in July 2020, Rasmussen was at his best. During the outset of another one of the sport’s milestones in leading the way back normalcy, he again found a way to articulate what everyone was feeling.

Flint looked up at the crowd and said, “This is almost like…Life. This is almost…America. I want to thank every fan tonight for coming out and letting us do our jobs for you.”