How a hockey player quit the sport — and became a professional bull riding champion

IT’S AN UNAVOIDABLE TOPIC for Nick Tetz when he’s hanging out at a bar.

He’s a professional bull rider. That’s a mechanical bull in the corner. How long can he last before flying off?

“It’s kind of like telling someone you’re a UFC fighter and having someone say, ‘Oh really? Go fight that guy.’ And you’re like, ‘Well no, I’m not going to go do that,'” said Tetz, a rising star in Professional Bull Riding PBR who competed in last year’s PBR World Finals.

To set the record straight: He could hang on a mechanical bull “probably for quite a while.”

Depending on his, ahem, mindset at the time.

“It depends on how many wobbly pops I’ve had that night,” he said. “I’ve been on a few of them. It’s a different vibe than riding a real animal. I usually stay on until my head starts spinning,”

Tetz’s head was spinning for a different reason about a decade ago. He was being pulled in different directions. One moment, he was a hockey player growing up in Calgary, seeing a path forward to juniors and then perhaps a pro career beyond that. The next moment he was hanging onto a steer at amateur rodeo tournaments around Alberta.

Eventually, he chose bucks over pucks.

“When I got to the age where I started to get on steers and bulls, it just kind of took over,” he told ESPN, days before a PBR tour stop in New York City. “I thought about the bull riding more than I thought about hockey. It switched directions completely.”

The 2018 PBR Canada Rookie of the Year and 2022 PBR Canada champion, Tetz said his hockey past has directly led to his current success in rodeo — as an athlete, as a teammate, and as someone who learned it’s the passion that ultimately makes or breaks a champion.

TETZ GREW UP in Calgary. He considers himself a Flames fan, but he grew up rooting for the Edmonton Oilers. He felt like he had to, as Ryan Smyth, a 15-year veteran of the team, was his cousin.

Sort of.

“My auntie married his uncle, so not by blood or anything. Maybe a second or third cousin? I got to meet him a couple times and hang out with him. So I still like to brag about it,” he said, laughing.

Being an Oilers fan in Calgary wasn’t as uncomfortable as one might imagine.

“Honestly, it’s harder being a Flames fan. Oilers fans are pretty crazy, and they’re all over the place,” he said. “It seems like home-ice advantage isn’t a thing at Calgary games, that’s for sure, because there are so many Oilers fans all over the place. It doesn’t matter how bad the team is. They ride or die.”

Like many Canadian kids, Tetz was surrounded by hockey players. Friends. Extended family members who played Junior A hockey and had a chance to advance to the Western Hockey League.

Tetz was skating before he was 2 years old. He was constantly playing hockey. “It was my first love. I wanted to make the NHL,” he said.

He went to a private school, Tanbridge Academy, where hockey wasn’t just a focus but was literally one of his courses. “We weren’t a big enough school to have a hockey team, so we just did practice sessions on the ice,” he said.

Tetz estimates that between school and his youth hockey teams, he was on the ice nine times a week.

He played high-level youth hockey, including the Circle K Classic tournament in Calgary. His Elite Prospects page shows four seasons of the sport, culminating with the Calgary Royals U18 AAA in 2016-17. He said he played against players such as Peyton Krebs of the Buffalo Sabres and Kirby Dach of the Montreal Canadiens back in their youth days.

Tetz’s teammates were aware of his affinity for rodeo. “But I don’t think any of them really knew how invested I truly was into it,” he said.

His love for riding was first sparked on a ranch in Arrowwood, Alberta. Duane and Judy Ashbacher were Tetz’s godparents, local stock contractors who own a family ranch and helped produce local rodeo events. Tetz would go there in the summer to work.

“The older I get, the more I can see what [my dad] was doing: I think he kind of thought I was starting to become a spoiled hockey kid and he figured I needed to learn how to work,” he said.

Tetz was around 12 years old, baling hay and learning to drive around the ranch. When his dad arrived to pick him up, he asked Tetz whether he wanted to get on a steer and ride it for the first time.

“I was scared to do it, honestly. But my dad seemed really excited about it, so I didn’t want to disappoint him,” he said. “Two years later, I was going to pro rodeos. A couple of years after that, I had made my first Canadian finals and just kept rolling from there.”

Tetz was about 15 years old when he decided bull riding was his passion. When he did, a funny thing happened on the ice.

“I was still playing hockey competitively. As soon as I realized that I didn’t really care as much about hockey as I did bull riding, all of a sudden I never really had a bad game,” he said.

He ended up earning first-pairing minutes as a defenseman, despite knowing that hockey was no longer his sport of choice.

“I never really had a bad shift after that,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh man, I should have just stopped caring a long time ago. That would have saved me and my dad a lot of arguments while driving home from the game.'”

His father, Bruce, loves hockey. He loved watching Tetz play and was invested in his son’s burgeoning career. He traveled for his job, and he would book his trips around Nick’s games — always making sure he was home on Tuesday night and again on Saturday.

Eventually, Tetz and his teammates aged out of the Royals association, which meant it was time to make the jump to Canadian junior hockey. Some of his friends moved on, including a few who would play in the NCAA instead. Tetz had his own chance to make the jump to juniors, but his heart was elsewhere.

“An amateur rodeo I had entered had its finals at the same time as the junior team’s main camp,” he said. “All I really had to do at the camp was show up and not suck [to make it].”

When his father talked about signing him up for that junior main camp, Tetz had to inform him that he had entered the Lakeland rodeo finals on the same weekend.

“I think I’m going to go to that instead,” Tetz said.

He still remembers his father getting upset in that moment.

“It was because he didn’t really know where I was at. I didn’t … I didn’t really tell him or anything,” Tetz recalled. “I’m sure at some point he kind of thought it was kind of a waste having done all of this hockey. But him and my mom always raised me to understand that if you’re going to do something, you need to be all-in and try the best you can at it. That’s what hockey was like for me [until rodeo].”

THAT “HOCKEY IS LIFE” approach was something Tetz applied to riding. He considers it a main factor behind his success.

“A lot of people don’t take it to the next level. They think it’s cool to be the bull rider, to go to the bar and brag about how you were out there,” he said. “The guys that truly love it, you don’t ever hear them talking about that kind of stuff unless somebody asks them. It’s because you gotta truly love doing it. It’s so dangerous that if you don’t love it, it’s not worth doing. You’re almost stupid for doing it if you don’t love it.”

Tetz sees the embodiment of that vibe in a current NHL player: Chicago Blackhawks rookie sensation Connor Bedard.

“That kid’s unreal. He just truly loves playing hockey. Broken wrist, shooting pucks with one hand, you know? That’s why he’s got such a good release now,” he said. “It’s just going that extra step compared to other people. Because you truly love what you do.”

Tetz said that hockey gave him the foundation he needed as a young athlete. It helped him catch up as a rider.

“I started the sport a little bit later than a lot of guys. I was always busy playing hockey and couldn’t afford to get hurt, so I was playing catch-up most rodeo seasons,” he said. “What kept me competing around everyone was my athletic ability that I had gotten from playing hockey.”

Unfortunately, hockey also gave him something else a little less beneficial to his main sport.

“When you’re a bull rider, you want to stay a little bit smaller. But I’ve got hockey player legs,” he said. “I’ve lost them a little bit, but there’s a lot of Western-style jeans that I can’t fit into because my thighs are a little bit bigger than everybody else’s.”

Casey Lane, general manager of the Arizona Ridge Riders, said Tetz’s history with hockey helped him understand the importance of preparation.

“What it means to stick to a plan, to go to the gym, to listen to what your coaches are saying,” Lane said. “To work his own individual success plan on a daily basis is something, again, is not something that’s engrained in Western sports athletes, who generally come up on their own with no coaches, no plans. They just sort of do it until they are good enough to become professional, and then they become professional.”

The PBR Team Series debuted in 2023 with eight teams. The Arizona Ridge Riders picked Tetz up as a free agent early last year.

“Nick was the diamond in the rough for me. I soon realized that he was our secret weapon,” said Colby Yates, the Ridge Riders’ head coach. “His talent speaks for itself, but Nick has an ability to maintain confidence in not only in himself but with the whole. He is a coach’s dream and the ultimate team player.”

Hockey also helped him understand his role in the locker room. Tetz quickly reverted back to his normal role.

“I wasn’t sure what my role was going to be [in PBR], but coming from hockey, I was always the energy guy. I kept the room light, messed around, let’s keep the vibes high,” he said. “The guy who high-fives everyone before we went out. Keeping the morale up.”

The “energy guys” in hockey can set the tone early with an effective shift. Tetz transferred that mindset to rodeo: In many events, he was the first one on his team to get on a bull.

“I liked it because whether I did good or bad, I still could contribute to the team. If I was the first guy out and I did great, I got the ball rolling for us. If I didn’t, I could come back and help motivate the other guy,” he said. “It reminded me a little bit of hockey. That brotherhood going into the arena, stuff like that.”

Lane said the Ridge Riders moved Tetz up the order because his team sports background helped him understand momentum.

“Regardless of whether he rode or bucked off, he still understood how important it was to get back in the dugout with the team, pump the next guy up, pulling ropes, slapping backs, really creating an energy there that helped us create a winning culture regardless of how the momentum of the game was going,” Lane said.

The Ridge Raiders finished third in the PBR team standings in 2023. One of Tetz’s career highlights came one year earlier, when he was crowned 2022 PBR Canada champion. He received a $50,000 bonus, which was quickly cycled into home renovations for him and his fiancée. Perhaps just as importantly for a bull rider, he also won a belt buckle.

“It was the first buckle I got that had my name on it,” Tetz said. “That win was pretty special for me because it gave me a lot of opportunities that I don’t think I would have gotten.”

It was the kind of accomplishment that he dreamed about as a young athlete. Only, at the time, he didn’t think it was going to be in rodeo.

“When I was a kid, it was all about getting to the NHL and winning the Stanley Cup. What’s crazy is that I’m at the NHL level for bull riding,” he said.

“The job’s not finished. But it’s cool to look back and realize what you’ve accomplished and where you came from. It’s pretty unreal.”