Before Andrew “Primo” Alvidrez ever nodded his head under PBR arena lights, before the music hit and the crowd rose, he was waking up before dawn in West Texas, cutting and grooving pipe beneath a sun that didn’t care what you dreamed about. Oil fields don’t reward hope. They reward effort. Show up. Do the work. Don’t complain.

Alvidrez did all of it.

Long before his name echoed through PBR arenas, before World Finals pressure and Missouri Thunder introductions, he was a roustabout, a contract worker grinding through two weeks on and one week off, building tank batteries and cutting and grooving pipe because the job paid for the road. And the road, for Alvidrez, always led back to bull riding.

“I would literally just spend my whole check on the road,” he said. “Wasn’t doing well on the road. Life was tough.”

That was 2017. Young. Broke. Determined. Standing at the kind of crossroads that quietly decide a man’s future. He remembers calling his dad, a lifelong oil field worker himself, thinking maybe it was time to step away from bull riding, take a year, work steady, save money.

Instead, his dad told him to enter a PBR event in Arkansas.

“Usually my dad’s a hard ass,” Alvidrez said. “But he told me, ‘Go enter that bull riding and see what happens.’”

Alvidrez won.

That one ride didn’t just pay a check. It loosened the grip of the oil fields. It rewired the future. He called home saying he wasn’t going back to the Odessa oil fields.

“It only takes one,” Alvidrez said. “One bull ride can change your whole circumstances.”

He hasn’t stopped hammering since.

Those oil field years weren’t wasted time. They were preparation. Alvidrez started young, working while still in high school, bouncing between job sites and college, treating school like a place to sleep rather than a place to settle.

The work was unforgiving. Some days the cold cut through layers before the sun ever came up. Other days, the heat baked the steel until everything burned to the touch. You didn’t get to choose your conditions—you learned to function inside them. Years later, that same lesson followed him. Blazing-hot UTB arenas in the dead of summer. Sweat-soaked chutes. And now, the opposite extreme—Manchester in December, where cold air bites just as hard as any oil field morning ever did.

The work was long. The men around him had the trucks, the houses and the paychecks, but not the joy.

“They didn’t seem satisfied,” he said. “What’s the point of having all these nice things if you don’t enjoy your life?”

That realization stayed with him. So did his faith.

Alvidrez doesn’t dress it up. He’s human. He stumbles. He’s rough around the edges. But when it’s time to climb into the chute, he leans on something bigger than himself.

“The Bible gave me that clarity, just to relax and understand it’s all part of His plan,” he said.

Before every ride, there’s a routine. Quiet scripture running through his head as he pulls his rope tight.

“Bull riding is easy,” he said. “What’s difficult is defeating yourself. The fight is really before the bull ride.”

That mindset carried him through setbacks most never fully recover from, including a broken neck that cost him a first World Finals appearance. Doctors told him how close he was to paralysis. Alvidrez didn’t hear an ending. He heard a question from the man upstairs.

“How bad do you want it?”

Faith has always been the answer. When asked about the devotion he read Day 1 of the UTB season, Alvidrez quoted it.

“I'm the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,” he said. John 10:11.

“God’s our shepherd,” he explained. “We lean on him, and he’ll take care of us, and we’ll be all right.”

It’s a belief that shows up all over the PBR locker room, even among cowboys who don’t talk about it much. Alvidrez notices the quiet moments. The knee on the concrete. The rider tucked away in a corner.

“We’re cowboys, we’re wild, rough around the edges,” he said. “But before they get on the back of that bull, they get on one knee. Somewhere inside of them, there is God.”

Now, Alvidrez enters his seventh year on the Unleash The Beast tour carrying everything the oil fields taught him and everything his faith sustains. He understands the difference between comfort and purpose. Between outcome and process. Between forcing the moment and trusting it.

“Oil field guys are comfortable,” he said. “The PBR locker room, guys are always striving for more.”

That hunger is why he belongs.

From pipeline to Primo, Andrew Alvidrez didn’t rush his journey. He let it shape him. He trusted the process. He learned that sometimes God holds you still, cuts you down, grooves the edges, just like a pipeline—not to stop you, but to prepare you.

And as another UTB season opens, he climbs into the chute the same way he always has, believing what the oil fields taught him long before the spotlight ever found him.

Sometimes, it really does only take one.

Photo courtesy of Bull Stock Media