Hondo Rodeo Fest is a Superdome country extravaganza | Entertainment/Life

The dress code was wide-brimmed hats and narrow-toed boots at the Caesars Superdome Friday, the opening day of the Hondo Rodeo Festival that combined championship roping and riding with rockin’ concerts. The vibe was festive, exciting and patriotic, with a touch of piety.

The Hondo Rodeo Fest was an all-day affair. A food, craft and fashion fair with live music took place in Champions Square. In the center of it all was a mini rodeo arena where children were periodically allowed to ride sheep. At 4 p.m. the ever enlarging crowd was allowed to enter the Dome, where the party would proceed until almost midnight.

After the singing of the national anthem, opening prayer, and the ignition of a flaming Hondo Rodeo logo on the Dome’s dirt-covered floor, the first action of the day was a contest among select riders from the Angola Prison Rodeo held annually in the forbidding penitentiary in West Feliciana Parish. The visiting inmates, clad in padded vests and crash helmets, took turns attempting to stay put on wildly bucking broncos, though gravity always prevailed in the end.

Their part of the show concluded with something called “convict pinball,” in which the inmates tested their nerve by standing inside of hula-hoops placed on the dirt as a fighting bull charged toward them. Sometimes the bull flipped the incarcerated cowboys off of their feet and into the air or trampled them under its hooves.

The Hondo Rodeo proper is an all-star event, with $1 million in prize money awarded over the course of the weekend. The very first pro rider in the whole shebang was Kade Sonnier of Carencro Louisiana, whose specialty is bareback riding. On Friday, Sonnier was spat suddenly from a ringside pen, clinging to a horse with extreme anger management issues, without benefit of a saddle. For the next 8.43 seconds, Sonnier was thrashed around like a rag doll in a clothes dryer until the horse’s temper cooled.

Rodeo riders are considered athletes, and rightfully so. In a pre-rodeo interview, Sonnier said he works out five days per week to stay “generally strong.” Asked what it’s like to be thrown from a horse, Sonnier laughingly said, “I don’t know. I try not to do it very often.” Sonnier said he believes he’s got the best job in the world, “making a really good living and living a little boy’s dream.”

In the bareback riding event, the horses – known as equine athletes – dole out the punishment on the humans. But in the calf roping contest, the humans get their revenge by chasing down and tackling young cows on the Dome floor like Demario Davis tackles scrambling quarterbacks – apologies to Saints fans for the reminder.

On Friday, Shane Hanchey of Sulphur Louisiana, tied Texan Riley Webb for first place in the calf roping contest with an astonishing time of 7.34 seconds. In an interview earlier in the day, Hanchey said he has his own private rodeo arena where he practices roping daily. “Everything is repetition,” he said, “the more you do it, the better you become at it.”

During the opening day rodeo, many an athlete performed on home turf. In the ladies breakaway roping contest, Louisianan Josie Conner placed first and Louisianan Cheyanne McCartney placed second. And in the bull riding category, three of the eight bovine-battered contestants came from the Bayou State.

Audience member Josh Gardner said that bull riding is everybody’s favorite event, because “it’s the most exciting.” He and his wife had driven from Pass Christian, Mississippi for the Hondo Rodeo Festival.

He said he thought it was cool that the riders would compete on three consecutive nights, thereby increasing their chances of taking home some of the substantial prize money. Gardner pointed out that $12,000 was the first-place payout in each event and “that’s not a bad night for eight seconds of your time.” The Hondo “would definitely be a rodeo that a lot of riders would want to get into,” he said.

Horse play aside, Gardner said his wife Shanelle Gardner “has been wanting to see singer Jason Aldean for 12 years,” and Friday would be her chance. Starting at 10 p.m., Aldean’s concert would close out the Hondo Rodeo Fest’s first day.

To accommodate both the fenced-in rodeo area and large-scale concert stage, seating in the Dome was roughly cut in half, with capacity attendance for the event set at 28,000. At the start of the show, the lower tier seats, nearest the rodeo action, were mostly occupied. But the crowd in the upper decks was sparser. When the rodeo ended and the music began, higher-priced ticket holders were allowed to flow into the area in front of the stage.

Before Aldean, the seemingly eternal, storied, southern guitar band Lynyrd Skynyrd took the stage. The shaggy old boys, who’d just returned from a gig in Brazil, could certainly still weave together their brand of driving rock. Their rendering of “Sweet Home Alabama” became a Dome-wide singalong, and the encore “Freebird” was a dive into a sea of 1970s gestalt.

Aldean followed with his spare sound and unshowy showmanship. He noted that after all of his years performing, Friday was his first show in the Superdome. Though he sings about tractors, dirt roads and small towns, Aldean rocked as hard as Nine Inch Nails. Shanelle Gardner gave the thumbs up to his show.