JOURNAL-SENTINEL (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) 13 March 05 Gator handler offers a show with bite - Despite losing a few fingertips, he keeps amazing crowds (Meg Jones)
Not every job is a picnic, but most people don't have to worry about a co-worker biting off their fingertip.
Jeff Quattrocchi has lost fingertips - left index and right middle digits - to his fellow employees, who happen to be reptiles with long snouts, scaly backs and razor-sharp teeth.
Quattrocchi doesn't call himself an alligator wrestler, but he does get up close and personal with the animals as he travels from city to city with his "Swampmaster's Gator Show," which has been impressing Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Sports Show visitors at the State Fair Park Exposition Center.
On Sunday, Quattrocchi jumped into a pool of cool water with an 8-foot-long, 200-pound alligator and grabbed the gator's thick tail, splashing and pulling the animal around. Eyes widened. Mouths gaped. Throats gasped.
That was just from the front row.
The alligator looked surprised, about as surprised as a reptile getting hauled around a pool by a creature on a different rung of the evolutionary ladder can get. Then it gathered its wits, turned its head and snapped at Quattrocchi. Quattrocchi has been doing this for 13 years, so he knew what to do - get out of the way.
But he doesn't always get out of the way. He's been bitten 12 times.
"This was bite number 12," he said after one of his shows Sunday afternoon, holding up his right hand. The nail on his middle finger angled sharply because there was no fingertip there.
Little time to react
During the middle of a show last year, he was demonstrating a move called a "finger pop," where he puts his hand inside the alligator's mouth. Because the gator's eyes sit on the top of its head, the reptile doesn't immediately know a human hand is inside its mouth. Quattrocchi has about an eighth of a second to pull out his hand before the alligator snaps its jaws shut, "which sounds like a truck door closing," he said.
On this particular day, Quattrocchi pulled his hand out but snagged a finger on one of the gator's 80 sharp teeth and left behind part of his hand. The Atlanta man has now cut that part of his show.
But he does spend much of his performance educating folks about alligators. Like how to tell the difference between a gator and a crocodile (gators are black, crocs are green, and they have different shaped snouts), how many teeth they have (40 on top and 40 on the bottom) and how sharp their teeth are (very, since gators don't chew their food and don't have a chance to wear down their teeth).
Alligator education
"I don't wrestle alligators. My show is an educational show about the North American alligator," said Quattrocchi, 40, who feeds his charges raw hot dogs. "I don't body slam them. This isn't like the World Wrestling (Entertainment). It's a humane show."
Russ Willms and his 4-year-old son, Lukas, waited in line to get their photo snapped holding Wally, a 3-foot-long gator, who is part of Quattrocchi's traveling show. Lukas smiled as the camera flashed. Wally didn't. He couldn't - a red rubber band snugly held his jaws together.
"It's something you don't get to do every day," Willms said, holding the Polaroid photograph as his son wiped his hands on his shirt. "His belly was really soft. He was a lot smoother than I thought he'd be."
And if Willms meets up with Wally when the gator grows bigger?
"I'd probably run in the other direction," said Willms, of Milwaukee.
Quattrocchi was hired as an announcer for a reptile show at a Florida theme park 13 years ago. Intrigued by the prehistoric beasts, he learned how to wrangle them, and three weeks after he began performing, one of the gators chomped his leg and wouldn't let go for several minutes.
"I made a rookie mistake," he said of the bite that took 14 stitches to close. "But I decided to go back and do it again. It's such a rush."
Quattrocchi's "Swampmaster's Gator Show" is scheduled every day at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Sports Show, which runs through Sunday at the State Fair Park Wisconsin Exposition Center in West Allis.
Gator handler offers a show with bite