 
“Used to be I could make seven hundred dollars a day,” says James Peacock, thirty-seven, who has been a wrestler at Native Village in Hollywood, Florida, for eighteen years. “Nowadays if I come home with a hundred dollars, it’s huge.” From the early 1900s to as late as the 1990s, alligator wrestling was for many men in Florida a legitimate, fairly sexy career. Now alligator wrestling is largely extinct. Those who wrestle professionally all know each other; the fraternity is small enough that only first names are necessary. Most wrestlers have been trained by a handful of mentors scattered throughout the South, old-timers who have retired and are not being replaced. “Of the five hundred people I’ve trained, maybe fifteen continue to wrestle,” Peacock says. One apprentice, twenty-one-year-old Marco Zeno, started learning at age twelve but was forced to leave Native Village for the more tourist-friendly Orlando because, he says, “everywhere else, alligator wrestling is dying.” Another veteran, sixty-year-old Tim Williams, estimates that there are only about twenty true wrestlers left in Florida, and “probably only a couple handfuls of people who wrestle right,” which means men who know the techniques, men who respect the animal, men who keep their thumbs. “I don’t know too many people training anymore,” Williams says wistfully. “We might be the last place.” Williams is referring to his domain, Gatorland theme park, located in the belly of Orlando’s vacation district, a short drive from SeaWorld and Universal Studios. Williams, a stocky rectangle of a man who, with his white hair and mustache, bears more than a passing resemblance to Wilford Brimley, has been a professional alligator wrestler since his early twenties. He was still a kid when wrestling legend Ross Allen pulled him aside and suggested he might be just the sort of man to enjoy straddling one of the world’s finest predators for a living. In his thirty-five-year wrestling career, Williams has “sat on more gators than you’ve ever seen in your life” and been bitten “too many times to count,” including once, during a show, when the gator’s teeth came straight through his hand. “The gator did what we call a lockup,” he explains. “He grabbed my hand and wouldn’t release. I told my backup guy, ‘We have a problem here,’ and he laughed and said, ‘What do you mean we?’” Gatorland is home to more than a thousand alligators—lolling in swamps, dining on horse meat, sunning themselves on sand banks while visitors marvel at their primordial appearance and sharp, prominent teeth—and is one of the only remaining places stateside where you can still witness gator wrestling on a professional level, done by folks making a career of it, not by Jethro behind his double-wide. Because of this, there is a waiting list at Gatorland of would-be wrestlers, guys with a jones for excitement, a flair for showmanship, and a love of reptiles. “We look for personality,” Williams says. “Chemistry. Make sure they can read.” Novice wrestlers train for up to a year before performing live. Then they must pass a final exam, which requires them to pin at least a dozen alligators one after another, performing a complete show with each one, all within two hours, fifteen minutes. The intensity of the final proves the wrestler can handle a gator when exhausted, knows which gators to choose first, and has enough stamina to perform the same routine multiple times without flagging. Once hired, alligator wrestlers at Gatorland take home between nine and fifteen dollars an hour. The cash is hard earned. The knees go first. Squatting over a writhing chunk of muscle, knees dug into the sand, strains the kneecaps to the point that longtime wrestlers have been known to get reconstructive surgery, like linebackers. The inner thighs also suffer, from holding the gator still. The muscles tear and stretch, giving greenhorn wrestlers a distinctive walk somewhere between that of a cowboy and a ballerina. Their hands suffer the most. Wrestlers train in sand pits or gravel pens that leave them with hamburger knuckles and palms raw and callused from clutching the tail. Their fingers are strained from holding the animal’s mouth closed, gripped as you would a club sandwich, a club sandwich that could eat you. “The rule is you can only hold for five or six seconds before switching hands. It’s the death grip,” Williams explains. Without a strong hand, a wrestler has nothing. Wrestlers exist with a baseline of discomfort. Cuts and bruises are a daily occurrence. Sand is always in their shoes. There is no air-conditioning in the ring. No coffee break. But there is no nonsense either. No gossip or argumentative customers or “Do you want fries with that?” Instead, wrestling an alligator offers a chance to bump up against your mortality, to cheat death, to feel your heart spring to life, to struggle in the mud with something real and tough. It is an opportunity to ride a dinosaur. So what if nowadays it pays less than laying pipe. “Why would anybody mess with an alligator? It is crazy,” Williams says. “But I love it. I feed off it. Hell, it’s fun. How many jobs can you say that about?” “Wrestling an alligator feels kind of like walking into your house when you think a stranger is in there,” Zeno says. “You’re waiting for something violent to happen.” And the risk? The force exerted by a twelve-foot alligator’s jaws is more than two thousand pounds per square inch, which is akin to having a Chrysler dropped on your wrist bone. Wrestlers have lost hands, had their heads crushed. Stitches numbering into the hundreds are not uncommon. “Carpenters hammer their fingers, don’t they?” Williams says with a smirk. “A true wrestler,” explains Peacock, “is someone who still does it after a few bites. There are not many of us in that club.” Those in the gator-handling community know that an unscarred wrestler is a dangerous wrestler. “Every wrestler gets bit,” Williams says. “The best advice I ever got was from Sam Row, this old guy who worked with me at the Jacksonville gator farm,” Williams says. “I was about to go into the big gator pit for the first time, and he pulled me aside and said, ‘Son, remember, all they got is time.’” THE NATURE OF THE BEAST There is a primeval vibe to Florida. An unambiguous sense of nature’s supremacy. It is there in the tides and the ball-bearing rains and the insects as big as snowshoes and the vines that never stop growing. Florida feels, amid the heavy green and wet, as if it could overtake you at any moment. Alligators make sense here. Early Native American and Spanish settlers hunted alligators as a matter of course, but naturalist William Bartram was one of the first scientists to study the reptile, in the 1770s. His sketches of the beast, resembling sea monsters more than crocodilians, quickly entered the public consciousness. Alligators inspire hyperbole. To look at them is to believe the myths. That they can run 60 mph. That they can climb twelve-foot fences. The truth is only slightly less fantastic. Alligators can go two years without eating. The acid in their stomachs can digest bone. They have been around for 230 million years, surviving the dinosaurs. Alligators can run 10 mph; they can climb small fences. There are more than one million alligators living in Florida. About one for every seventeen residents. On the plus side, most of us are too big to swallow. “People see alligators and they think they’re going to get eaten,” Zeno says. “Well, if you mess around, you’ll probably get attacked. He’ll rip off your arms and legs. But you won’t get, you know, eaten.” Zeno weathered a bad bite a year ago, teeth sunk in from ankle to knee. Since then, he has held gators in higher esteem. “Alligators don’t eat people because they want to eat people,” he continues, clarifying. “They eat what comes to them. A baby could get too close and the alligator would think it was a prey item. You never hear about a gator eating a cat.” The first professional alligator wrestler was Warren Frazee, aka Alligator Joe, a thickset roughneck in a battered hat who as early as 1895 dammed up creek sloughs in southern Florida to create makeshift alligator pens. His manipulations of the animals were said in the Miami Herald to cause “much wonder,” and by 1911 his alligator shows drew more winter tourists to South Florida than any other single attraction. Following him was Henry Coppinger, Jr. The son of a horticulturist who emigrated from Cork, Ireland, Coppinger was born in 1898 at his father’s tropical garden park and grew up chasing gators like butterflies, trapping and selling hatchlings to folks in town for fifteen cents each. In time, he took to diving in the water to yank adult gators out. This habit garnered enough rapt attention from park visitors that Coppinger soon progressed to actual wrestling. Tourists responded, clamoring to see the Alligator Boy for a quarter a head. Also wrestling at the turn of the century were the Miccosukee and Seminole Indians, largely for tips. “A lot of people think alligator wrestling was a rite of passage to manhood for Indians,” says Seminole wrestler Richard Bowers. “Not true. It was strictly an entertainment.” Footage of said matches was shown on newsreels in movie theaters, which made the spectacle of alligator wrestling both extremely popular and synonymous with the Florida Seminoles. The Seminole shows quickly became a huge source of income for the villages, a fact that overrode the Seminoles’ fundamental belief that one should never taunt an animal. In a quickly devised loophole, would-be wrestlers simply had to ask permission from a member of the Snake Clan, then promise to treat the gator with as much respect as one could when prying open its jaws and flipping it onto its back. While Coppinger turned “cracker-style” alligator wrestling into a profitable sideshow, the Seminoles were arguably more skilled at handling the animals, having been pulling them from rivers (to skin, eat, and trade) for centuries. In time, every roadside fruit stand had an alligator pit. By the 1970s theme parks featuring wrestling prospered, making the profession of alligator wrestler both lucrative and undeniably impressive. “We were rock stars on a smaller scale,” explains Jim Darlington, forty, a former wrestler who still works at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm. “When people found out what I did, women would hand me their phone numbers.” “We’d have double-decker buses filled with tourists,” Peacock recalls. “In the old days it was cool to say you were an alligator wrestler.” But times have changed. Since the late 1990s, attendance at shows not tied to major theme parks has been down. When everyone has 395 cable channels and unlimited access to the world’s horrors online, thrills are easier to come by. Also working against wrestlers is the new climate of animal rights. Native Village recently had to close for a couple of weeks for lack of business. Peacock’s shows weren’t even clearing “enough to cover medical bills.” “Activists see it as stressful to the animal,” he explains. “We’re judged right from the beginning.” “We stopped wrestling here because of the image,” agrees Darlington. “Jumping on the back of an alligator—that’s not a conservation message.” Nonetheless, he misses the old days. “It’s still part of my identity,” he says. “It was a blast.” For his part, Peacock is looking into retirement; he may start wrangling for movies. “It looks like the last eighteen years of my life are going down the drain,” he says. “The showmanship of diving into a pool and pulling a gator out and putting your head in his mouth—those days are over.” Which depresses the wrestlers on many fronts. “I’d be a different person if I’d never wrestled,” says Bret Chism, one of the first people Williams trained at Gatorland. “I’d be boring. I’d be going to electronics shows.” He smiles shyly. “Without an alligator, I’m just a guy.” PRETTY. DEADLY. The wrestling arena at Orlando's Gatorland is a circular pit filled with sand and surrounded by a shallow moat of water, inside which a dozen or so alligators between ninety and two hundred pounds sunbathe. A fence encloses the moat and the gators. Behind, bleachers rise, offering unobstructed views of the ring. “It’s like Nascar,” Williams says. “Spectators want to see a nice little crash.” Today Williams is selecting fresh gators for the ring. He is dressed in his uniform of camouflage pants, thick boots, and a Gatorland work shirt with his name and title, the Dean of Alligator Wrestling, stitched above the pocket. He walks out behind the 110-acre park, where hundreds of nonworking gators idle in large pens. Williams hops nimbly onto a floating wooden platform, a rope lasso in his hand. As he does, several alligators scatter and hiss, a sound more chilling than that of any cobra. Williams answers with his own gator call, a guttural clucking “ungh, ungh, ungh” that seems to only further aggravate his quarry. A few of the gators splash and lunge, one coming inches from Williams’s ankle. The authoritative snap of the jaw gets his attention. “Calm down now, girl,” he chides. “I’m not interested in you.” The wooden platform bobbles as gator after gator turns, hides, pushes, and prods, but Williams remains calm, riding the waves like a surfer, the lasso dropping down now and again to encircle potential talent. Wrestling gators have to be “pretty.” This means no scars, no bite wounds, no missing legs or tails, and no underbite (it causes fingers to slip). Strong coloration is preferred, as is an ornery disposition. The ideal gator is nine feet long, a hundred pounds, and prone to spinning when pissed. Crowds love a spinner. “We change the gators out every three to six months so they get some rest,” Williams explains, gently nudging a belligerent gator off the platform. “Plus, fresh alligators are more apt to bite, which makes for a better show.” After a few minutes, Williams has roped a gator and yanked it out of the enclosure. The gator, unhappy to be snared, bucks and throws itself against the fence and the ground. Williams giggles. “We got us a good one, boys!” he says as he leaps to clear the gator’s lashing tail. His team steps in to help, tackling and pinning the animal long enough to bind its mouth with electrical tape. The gator shakes its massive head. “That’ll break a bone if it hits you,” Williams warns. Williams wastes no time finding a second gator, looping its neck as it attempts to dive under the dock. Williams anticipates the move and braces himself so he won’t be dragged into the drink. Deftly, he twists, leveraging the gator’s weight against him, a swift tai chi swoop that enables him to spring the recalcitrant animal onto the platform and out of the water. He executes this perilous move virtually subconsciously, the way a seasoned chef chops without looking at his hands. On the way back to the park, two gators now taped and tied in the back of the truck, Williams wants to make something clear. Gator wrestling isn’t about brute force. You can’t out-butch an alligator. Not even if you’re Shaquille O’Neal, who on one of his many visits to the park was unable to pull a ninety-pound gator out of the water. LORDS OF THE RING “You cam to see some crazy, dangerous stuff, right?” Kenny Danberry is in the Gatorland ring, his first day back after being injured a month ago. Danberry, a thirty-three-year-old former Lowe’s manager, ditched his job two years ago to take up alligator wrestling, a career choice that did not sit well with his wife. His gator is spinning and hissing, riled to have been lugged from the water. “He sprang a leak,” Danberry jokes, panting and sweating through his shirt. He cups the alligator’s mouth as the audience gasps and applauds. Danberry straddles the gator, inching up from the back and carefully avoiding the whipping tail, and performs his lineup of tricks. He rests his chin on the snout, the gator opening its mouth as if yawning, and releases his grip (“the Butterfly”). He gets the gator to snap its jaws (“the Pop”). When the gator jumps, the crowd does too, the primal threat echoing up into the top bleachers. Danberry ends the performance twenty minutes in by flipping the gator on its back and putting it to “sleep,” while the spectators “awwwww.” The patter is memorized, and funny enough, providing a pleasing but easily ignored sound track to the action, which is riveting, like watching a bullfight in slow motion. Williams hovers ringside, observing Danberry as a mother does a toddler at a swimming pool. He catches every mistake—a thumb an inch out of place, a grip held a second too long. He tracks every opportunity for disaster. He has seen what happens when wrestlers get sloppy. He has driven the car to the hospital. TOUGH LOVE It is 9:00 a.m. and already 104 degrees when Williams loads some small gators into his truck for an off-site show. “Come on up now, chirren,” he says as he lifts a zippered canvas duffel bag. The alligators writhe around, dragging their tails across the fabric with a weirdly stirring chafe. On the road, Williams talks about the future. “I’m very concerned about the plight of the alligator,” he says. “We’re knocking down trees and building subdivisions. It is hard for alligators to pack up and move. You’d be surprised how many people say, ‘Why don’t we just kill them all?’ I can appreciate their fear. But my dad always told me the things we fear the most are the things we understand the least.” Before the show in Orange Lake, Florida’s largest time-share, Williams frees and drains the gators by pressing their stomachs. A small trickle of urine spills into the meticulously landscaped palmetto bed. “Gatorade,” he jokes. Inside a conference room, 250 people anxiously wait to see real live alligators. Williams dabs sweat from his temple. He likes doing the shows, being a gator docent. But dispensing education and folksy comedy is not the same as getting your shins in the sand, a spinning gator nipping at your feet. “In over thirty-five years of working with gators, they’ve brought me more joy, short of my kids, than anything else in my life.” He wipes his brow again. Williams has been divorced twice. After the second divorce, he had his wedding ring melted down and imprinted with an image of one of Bartram’s early alligator sketches. He has a girlfriend now, a schoolteacher he loves who tells her friends she is dating Tarzan. Williams says that when his life is over, he will be cremated and, per his instructions, “stuck in a chicken carcass and fed to Pop, my favorite alligator of all time.” Pop is forty-five years old, thirteen and a half feet, and nine hundred pounds. For thirteen years he has threatened Williams. When Williams thinks of Pop, his eyes soften, his shoulders drop. “Nothing would make me happier than to know that he finally got a piece of me,” he says with a broad smile. Then, he hoists his alligators to his shoulder and heads off to perform. But not before taping their mouths shut. |
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