Yellowstone’s Neal McDonough Joins Celebrity Stampede Into Sports Ownership

Seemingly every celebrity wants to own a sports team. Neal McDonough, an actor best known for his roles in Yellowstone, Tulsa King, and Band of Brothers, has joined the party, taking a stake in a PBR (Professional Bull Riders League) Team Series franchise.

McDonough and his wife, Ruvé, are joining the ownership group of the defending champion Austin Gamblers. Michael Dell, the billionaire founder of Dell Technologies, came aboard as a minority owner before the team’s inaugural 2022 season. Sources say Peyton and Eli Manning also had talks about investing in the Gamblers.

Like many celebrities, the Boston native is a huge sports fan. The chance to become a team owner was irresistible, he told Front Office Sports. Down the road, he’d also like to own a minor league baseball team.

“I don’t have a whole lot of time. So when I have that spare time, I’m watching ESPN. I’m watching my Red Sox. I’m watching my Celtics. I’m watching my Bruins. I’m watching my Patriots. You know, being from Boston, that’s part of who I am. That’s in my DNA,” says McDonough. “For my whole life, my goal was to be part-owner of a sports team. Never in a million years did I think I’d be part owner of a PBR team.”

Investing in teams has increasingly become a go-to financial play for some power players in the entertainment and music business. 

Jay-Z kicked off a golden age of celebrity sports investors in 2003 by landing a piece of the NBA’s Nets. Now celebrities ranging from Ryan Reynolds and Matthew McConaughey to Will Ferrell and Serena and Venus Williams own stakes in various franchises across the U.S. and abroad. 

“Celebrities are becoming players in the sports world with increasing frequency, trading on their fame and fortune to secure supporting roles as team owners for professional franchises in the U.S. and abroad,” notes Fortune. “It’s a sign that sports teams are being recognized as appreciating assets, no longer as just trophy assets of old-money families and newly minted billionaires.”

McDonough, who played the villainous Malcolm Beck opposite Kevin Costner in Yellowstone, is also collaborating with PBR and Angel Studios to coproduce a  movie, The Last Rodeo, which premieres nationwide May 23. 

PBR, a subsidiary of TKO Holdings, signed McDonough as a brand ambassador earlier this year. Besides appearing in PBR’s digital and social ads, he attends a half dozen events a year. McDonough has since become a fan favorite for shotgunning drinks from his wife’s boot.

During his interview with FOS, the 59-year-old actor was brutally honest about his up-and-down career in Hollywood. He achieved success in movies like Star Trek: First Contact and the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. But McDonough was fired from the ABC series Scoundrels in 2010 for refusing to take part in a sex scene with a woman who was not his wife. The acting offers dried up—and McDonough says he developed an alcohol dependency.

“I lost everything and I felt like I was dying,” he recalls. “And I was drinking so much whiskey at the time. I was just trying to mask the pain and get through all the horrible things I was going through. And finally, when I hit rock bottom, when I said, ‘God, why have you forgotten about me?’”

Once leading-man roles dried up, however, his icy-blue eyes made him perfect for antagonist roles like the land-grabbing Beck on Yellowstone and Cal Thresher on Sylvester Stallone’s Tulsa King. He also served as a self-assured spokesman in commercials for the Cadillac ELR. 

McDonough says he was impressed when the crowd said a prayer at his first PBR event, and spoke about how PBR and its athletes wear their patriotism on their sleeve. The huge TV success of Yellowstone, and its various spin-offs, have popularized cowboy culture, fashion, and sports in recent years. 

“America is about family values. America is about working hard to achieve certain things. And it’s not to achieve a certain car or a certain status symbol. It’s to achieve a great family. That’s what America is really about,” says McDonough, who boasts more than 120 movie/TV credits. “My mom and dad came from Ireland. Twelve bucks in my dad’s pocket. And he said, ‘Make me an American.’ He walked into the Army office and they shipped him overseas for five years. So it’s that work ethic that America really has.”

PBR has been cashing in on the Western renaissance. In May 2024, the league signed a media-rights contract extension with CBS Sports that runs through 2030. It also inked a deal with Dr. Phil McGraw’s Merit Street Media to complement the CBS coverage. But just a few months later, PBR terminated the relationship after McGraw’s company stopped paying its bills. The rights to PBR’s non-CBS hours are now being shopped around. 

Since the launch of the PBR Team Series in 2022, franchise valuations have been on the rise. The initial eight teams sold for about $3 million each in 2022. But when the series expanded to 10 teams in 2024, the Avenue Sports Fund and LIV Golf star Talor Gooch’s FJS Ventures paid about $22.5 million, respectively, for the New York Mavericks and Oklahoma Wildcatters.