There are 13 Leather kids back home in Calliope, Queensland.
So maybe it was only a matter of time before two of them wound up on opposite sides of a PBR Teams game halfway around the world.
Macaulie Leather and younger brother Boston Leather have shared a last name, a hometown, an Australian championship bloodline and, for one season, a Missouri Thunder locker room.
On Sunday, they will share an arena... Just not a jersey.
The brothers’ latest reunion comes in Game 3 at Rattler Days when the Missouri Thunder and Kansas City Outlaws square off in the Show-Me State Showdown, putting the 2023 and 2024 PBR Australia Champions across the chutes from one another as the Teams regular season pushes toward Las Vegas.
For Macaulie, it is another game in what has become a breakout season for one of Missouri’s biggest weapons.
For Boston, it is another opportunity to prove Kansas City was right to notice a hot hand on the Challenger Series.
And these guys come from a family of 13 kids, so competition is nothing new.
With a family that big, apparently you have to pick and choose who gets Christmas presents.
Sunday might just decide which Leather brother gets a gift and which one gets coal.
At least until the next one.
Macaulie did not exactly grow up with a carefully mapped-out path to becoming one of Missouri’s designated heavy hitters.
Bull riding was not much of a family tradition at all.
His mother came from a country background, but his father, Calvin Leather, did not. It was only after the family moved to Calliope and attended the town’s annual show that the sport really entered the picture.
Older brother Elijiah Leather went first.
Macaulie followed.
He was around 9 or 10 years old and, by his own admission, was not particularly interested until he watched Elijiah climb aboard.
Then everything changed.
“I thought it was the greatest thing ever,” Macaulie recalled.
From there came more local events, more steers, more bulls and eventually a career that carried him from Queensland to the 2023 PBR Australia Championship and then into the heart of the PBR Teams title race in the United States.
In 2026, the laid-back Australian has become considerably louder on the stat sheet.
Leather has delivered four 90-point rides for Missouri, punctuated by a career-high 93.35-point masterpiece aboard King Tut in Anaheim.
Missouri General Manager Luke Snyder has steadily trusted him with increasingly difficult assignments. Leather rides with his left hand down, but Snyder says the direction of the bull hardly matters. When there is one especially nasty matchup sitting in the draw, Missouri has become comfortable handing it to him.
Thunder Head Coach Ross Coleman has a more cowboy way of putting it.
And he would know.
Away from the arena, Coleman is also one of Leather’s roping partners, where Macaulie is every bit as dependable as he is with a bull rope in his hand.
To Coleman, Leather is simply “a hand” — and “a hand on a rope horse.”
The kind of cowboy you can put in a tough spot, whether it is in the arena or back home, trust to stay composed and know he is going to give you a chance.
That description fits the version they see in the locker room, too. Even-keeled. Few words. No dramatic swings between the good weekends and the bad ones. When Leather does decide to speak, Snyder says the room tends to listen.
His toughness has never required much explanation, either.
Earlier in 2026, Leather broke his jaw in the chute.
He still called for the bull.
By the time he walked back toward the locker room, blood trailed behind him. His lower jaw was visibly out of alignment, one side sitting higher than the other, his teeth no longer meeting the way they were supposed to.
In true Aussie fashion, he made short work of the recovery and returned to the same role Missouri has increasingly asked him to fill: find the hard bull and give the Thunder a chance to win.
That is not to say nothing rattles him.
A 93 will apparently do it.
“I know I’m more than capable to get on a bull like King Tut and get a 93, but that was still a bit of an eye opener,” Leather said.
Fair enough.
Macaulie is the second-oldest of the 13 Leather children.
Boston is fifth.
There are eight girls and five boys in the family, and bull riding is hardly confined to the two champions now competing in the United States. Their oldest brother rode before stepping away after becoming a father. Their youngest brother, Raglin Leather, was already climbing on anything he could find at 12. Their sisters gravitated toward barrel racing.
Christmas dinner, Boston admits, can produce the occasional fight.
With 13 kids, that probably qualifies as good attendance.
The two brothers now making their mark in PBR Teams have already carved out a particularly unusual chapter in the family story.
Macaulie won the PBR Australia Championship in 2023.
Boston followed in 2024, winning both the national championship and Rookie of the Year honors in Townsville and making the Leathers the first siblings to win back-to-back PBR Australia titles.
Then, for a season, the story became even more serendipitous.
They were teammates.
Both Leather brothers rode for Missouri in 2025, sharing the same locker room as the Thunder made a run all the way to the PBR Teams Championship game in Las Vegas. They left T-Mobile Arena as runners-up after falling to the Carolina Cowboys, coming one game short of adding a Teams title to the family's rapidly growing collection of hardware.
For two kids who first got into bull riding because their brothers were doing it back home in Calliope, winding up together on one of the final two teams standing in Las Vegas was not a bad place for the story to go.
It also gave Missouri enough time to learn something important about Boston.
If civilization collapses and the Thunder roster somehow washes ashore on a deserted island, Boston is apparently the guy to keep around.
During their time as teammates, he was once selected as the rider most likely to survive the longest on a deserted island.
There are worse scouting reports.
Especially for a cowboy who spends his free time hunting.
But the matching jerseys did not last.
And Boston did not exactly disappear.
Instead, the younger Leather started making plenty of noise on the PBR Challenger Series.
He caught fire in September, winning in Rochester, New York, with a 165.80-point aggregate after covering two bulls, including scores of 84.80 and 81 points.
Kansas City was paying attention.
With injuries piling up on the Outlaws’ roster, Boston’s Challenger Series run helped put him on their radar before the club signed him as a free agent midway through September.
Then he made the decision look pretty smart.
Boston went 2-for-3 during his first event with Kansas City in Greensboro, including an 86.15-point ride Friday and an 83.45-point effort on Tijuana Two Step Sunday that helped the Outlaws defeat Oklahoma.
And he has not cooled off much since.
On Sept. 26 in Oklahoma City, Boston finished second at another Challenger Series event after riding Dandelion for 84.45 points.
There was one other Leather in the draw that night.
Macaulie lasted 1.6 seconds.
Boston got the family bragging rights that time.
Consider it an early installment before Sunday.
Kansas City General Manager Jon Williams saw the same traits Missouri already knew.
Toughness.
Work ethic.
And, maybe most importantly in a sport that will eventually make everybody hurt somewhere, a guy who genuinely enjoys getting on bulls.
That part was never guaranteed for Boston.
Unlike Macaulie, who saw his older brother ride and immediately wanted his turn, Boston freely admits his early bull riding career was not exactly evidence of a future national champion.
“They just threw me on,” he said.
Did he have a knack for it?
“Definitely not.”
For years, he struggled to ride much of anything.
It was not until around 16 that Boston began putting more work into his riding and seeing things change. Football eventually faded away.
Bull riding did not.
Even his move to the United States required another adjustment.
The bulls were different.
Australian bulls, Boston says, tend to be bigger, heavier and slower. Their American counterparts are often faster and more athletic.
His solution has been the same one generations of bull riders have used before him.
Get on more of them.
Simple enough.
Painful, occasionally.
But simple.
Now the Leather brothers arrive at Rattler Days wearing different colors.
And the rivalry they are stepping into is already dead even.
Kansas City claimed the first Show-Me State Showdown of the 2026 season at Freedom Days, beating Missouri 266.90-179.00. Sandro Batista, Eric Henrique Domingos and Natanael Serra Aires all converted for the Outlaws, while Macaulie bucked off Tags in 3.17 seconds.
Missouri answered at Thunder Days.
This time, the Thunder piled up 266.95 points to Kansas City’s 177.60 behind a 90.50-point ride from Paulo Eduardo Rossetto, 88.55 from Julio Cesar Marques and 87.90 from Maverick Smith. Macaulie came down from Stryker in 4.18 seconds, while Kansas City got qualified rides from Cassio Dias and Heitor Santos Ferreira.
One rivalry game apiece.
Sunday in Fort Worth is Round 3.
And it still will not be the last word.
The final Show-Me State Showdown of the regular season is waiting at the very end of the schedule, when Missouri and Kansas City meet again Saturday night in Game 5 at Outlaw Days.
So the Leather brothers are not just walking into a sibling matchup.
They are walking into a rivalry already tied 1-1, with two meetings left to settle it.
Macaulie is part of a Missouri group fighting near the top of the standings and has established himself as one of the Thunder’s primary starters.
Boston is helping an Outlaws roster trying to build momentum after injuries forced Kansas City to search for reinforcements — and doing it after riding himself directly onto their radar.
There should not be much trouble separating loyalties.
At least not once the game starts.
Macaulie has already said having Boston back at Teams events, healthy and riding well, is “bloody great.” Snyder saw the same thing when the brothers shared Missouri’s locker room: no matter where their gear bags sit now, they pull for one another.
Sunday simply adds the complication of a scoreboard.
And maybe that is fitting.
Because despite everything they share, Macaulie and Boston have taken noticeably different routes to the same place.
Macaulie followed Elijiah onto that first steer, became an Australian champion and developed into the quiet cowboy Missouri trusts with some of the rankest bulls in the building.
Boston was tossed onto steers because his brothers were doing it, freely admits he could not ride much of anything at first, then became an Australian champion himself, fought his way back from a knee injury and rode his way through the Challenger Series into another opportunity in PBR Teams.
They have been national champions in consecutive years.
They have been teammates.
They have stood together on a Missouri team one win away from a championship in Las Vegas.
Now they get to try to beat each other.
Macaulie is the man of few words.
Boston is the former teammate you apparently want around when the boat sinks and a deserted island appears.
Different personalities.
Different teams.
Same blood.
Off the dirt, Macaulie hunts, follows the NRL, PBR, ProRodeo, NFL and UFC, splits his NFL loyalty between the Eagles and Bills, listens to rap, hip-hop and country and lists Taco Bell and Asian food among his favorites. If bull riding were not his full-time job, he says he would still want to work with horses. His biggest influences include his dad and Cody Lambert.
Boston hunts, plays golf and still carries enough of his football background that, given another career, he says that is where he would probably land.
Bull riding has already put them on the same team, the same championship stage and now opposite sides of the Show-Me State Showdown.
And depending on the bull pen and how the lineups shake out Sunday, the game could very well come down to one Leather or the other.
Either way, Sunday will decide which brother gets the upper hand in the rivalry — and, just maybe, which one will be hearing about it on the car ride home.
With Macaulie established as one of Missouri’s biggest weapons and Boston heating up for Kansas City, this one comes with a little more than team bragging rights.
It comes with brother bragging rights.
Photo courtesy of Bull Stock Media