THE GAZETTE (Colorado Springs, Colorado) 28 August 05 The great gator grapple (Dave Philipps)
Mosca: A sign on the chain-link fence around Colorado Gators’ lagoon warns, “Alligators will try to eat you through the fence. Do not antagonize them.”
From the relative safety behind the fence, visitors can watch the biggest gators on the farm — some as long as a sedan — waiting in the reeds to feed. Below the viewing stand goat bones litter the beach.
On a recent afternoon, visitors also could watch the resident gator handlers usher three young, nervouslooking guys through a gate and down to the water.
The guys had willingly enrolled in gator wrestling school, a three-hour introductory class about how to land, pin and escape these 500-pound snapping crocodilians.
The lagoon was their final exam. The goal was to grapple a gator and ride it like a buckaroo — without getting chomped. If they succeeded, they’d graduate from the world’s most prestigious (and only) alligator wrestling academy.
If they failed, well, see you later, alligator.
“They can move fast on land, they can move faster under water. Don’t try to out-run them. You’ll lose. If they come at you, just stay still,” Noah Mather, one of the farm’s gator gurus, told his students. He wore a Crocodile Dundee hat, had a pack of American Spirit menthol cigarettes rolled up his sleeve and barked orders like a drill sergeant while he handed out ax handles to each of his students and told them to follow him into the murky green pool.
One guy asked the best way to club an advancing gator.
“Ha! You don’t hit ’em. That would just make them mad,” said Mather. “If one’s going for you, hold out the stick and let him bite onto it instead of your arm.”
Colorado Gators began in 1977 as a fish farm growing tilapia for human consumption in the naturally warm springs emanating from the depths of the San Luis Valley. In 1987, owners Erwin and Lynne Young bought 100 alligators from Florida to act as “garbage disposals” for the extra fish parts.
It didn’t take long before curious crowds started showing up to see the gators. Now, tourism trumps tilapia as the farm’s biggest earner.
Jay Young, son of Erwin and Lynne, and his best childhood friend, Noah Mather, started wrestling the alligators when they were kids.
About three years ago, the “boys,” both 31, started teaching classes in gator grappling. Now they hold about one a week.
“We get mostly more extreme, adventurous types,” said Mather. “Guys for the most part. But we’ve had some women too.”
His students that day were Brandon Addison, Jeremy Espinoza, and David Maddox — all college-age raft guides summering in Buena Vista. They had spotted an ad for the wrestling classes in a newspaper.
“When we saw it, we had to do it,” said Addison.
“Yeah, it’s not, like, one of those things you get to do every day — totally sweet,” said Espinoza.
“We kind of did it on a dare,” Addison continued. “All the guides passed a hat to get the money. We originally had five guys coming, but two backed out.”
“But we’re here. We’re ready. This is going to be amazing,” said Maddox.
Mather started them with the babies: 3-foot gators with jaws the size of a pit bull.
“These guys are fast. They bite. But as long as you grab them tight behind the back of the neck and don’t let go, they can’t get you,” Mather said as he stepped into the first pool.
He lunged down with a meaty forearm and pulled up a thrashing gator from the brown water.
“Once you go for them, you have to commit. If you drop them or hesitate, they’re going to get you,” he said as a gator whipped in his hand.
“OK, get in here and try it,” he said.
One by one the guides splashed after the gators. Each grab was less timid.
“This is crazy awesome,” Espinoza said as a 3-footer hissed in his grip. “It’s so cold and leathery — unbelievably strong.”
After a half-hour of catch and release, Mather was satisfied his pupils were ready to move on.
During the next few hours, they worked their way up from 4-foot gators that looked like extras at the watering hole in “Wild Kingdom” to 6-footers weighing as much as the average college sophomore.
By this time, the reptiles were big enough to have names.
“Go get Leroy over there. Pull him out and pin him,” Mather ordered.
Leroy was too burly to grab with one hand. Instead, the would-be crocodile hunters had to dive, grabbing his head with both hands while catching his heavy, slapping tail between their knees.
Before long, the guides were soaked and slathered in mud.
“This is a bigger rush than kayaking the numbers,” said Espinoza, referring to a boiling Class IV stretch of the Arkansas River.
Addison, the biggest and most eager of the guides, dove after the 150-pound gator and dragged him by the tail onto the beach. A few times the gator shook loose and Addison dove after him. Finally, he got behind Leroy, pinned him and hefted up the open jaws for style points.
“That’s it, make him smile pretty. Let’s see that smile,” Mather yelled.
Mather smirked under his crocodile hat. The students had learned well. It was time to go to the lagoon.
The American alligator will eat almost anything.
Small gators eat minnows, insects and tadpoles. Larger ones eat bass, turtles and ducks. And the really big ones eat whatever they want: raccoons, deer, pelicans, other gators, even an occasional golfer fishing for his ball in a Deep South water hazard.
For eons, alligators lived as the quiet kings of the American river ecosystem.
Then came gator wrestling.
The pastime evolved from gator hunting by native tribes living in the Florida swamps. The American Indians often brought live gators home on ropes, and in the absence of refrigerators, kept them alive on tethers until mealtime.
White immigrants to the South started wrestling alligators as a tourist attraction in the 1920s. Today the South is dotted with gator farms offering daily wrestling shows. Colorado Gators is the only one west of the hundredth meridian.
By law, Florida allows tourists to touch gators only if the animals’ jaws are taped shut. Colorado, understandably, lacks alligator-handling statutes, so pretty much anything goes.
Every year, Colorado Gators has a rodeo where wrestlers compete to see who can rope and haul in the biggest reptile in the shortest time.
Alligators aren’t especially aggressive, but when people jump on their backs and try to hold them down they’ll thrash like toothy fire hoses, lunging from side to side with their jaws while lashing with their tails.
All Colorado Gators students sign a release that reads:
“I do hereby admit that if I’m crazy enough to willingly put my hands on an alligator, I deserve to get bit. Furthermore, I promise not to whine too much if I do get a few bumps and scrapes or even a flesh wound.”
By the time the students reached the lagoon, most had a few scrapes and bruises. So far, they had avoided flesh wounds.
“If we are lucky, we won’t lose any limbs. If worse comes to worse, at least we’ll know where the limb’s at,” Mather said as he waded waist-deep into the lagoon.
He has been bitten before. It hurts. He still hasn’t gotten the feeling back in some places.
But the gators generally let go. None ever has tried to drag him under.
The class waded in behind Mather. Dozens of slitted eyes stared, without blinking.
Mather singled out a big gray, dragon-looking creature. It was Sasquatch, the granddaddy of them all, 11 1/2 feet from tooth to tail and weighing in at 600 pounds.
“This is real wrestling,” Mather said. “What we were doing before was just messing around. It isn’t wrestling till they weigh more than you.”
He dove into a quick belly-flop, landing smack on the animal’s back. Sasquatch exploded across the lagoon, writhing and splashing while Mather clutched the cold, bony shoulders.
“You see? This is how you do it!” Mather yelled over the splashing.
Finally, he pinned the gator in the muddy shallows and called the class. Mather carefully put a rope leash around the gator’s neck.
“OK, one of you come here and get on,” he ordered.
“This is totally sick!” a slack-jawed Addison murmured under his breath.
This was the last test: to ride Sasquatch.
He was too strong to really wrestle, but if they’d been paying attention, they would at least know how to stay away from his jaws.
Maddox crept up and jumped on. Sasquatch bucked, splashed, started to roll and threw Maddox into the water.
The animal’s jaws flashed.
Jay Young, who had been helping teach the class, swept in like a rodeo clown and pulled Maddox out of the way.
The river guide’s eyes were wide with terror.
Mather chuckled. “You still got all your fingers?” he asked.
Without realizing it was a joke, Maddox held up his hand to show that he did.
THE GAZETTE (Colorado Springs, Colorado) 28 August 05 What does one wear when playing bait for gators? (Dave Philipps)
What does a guy wear to wrestle gators?
It’s not a question I’d spent a lot of time pondering.
Then I signed up for Colorado Gators’ introductory wrestling class. Suddenly, the initially crazy query became a little urgent.
I paced around the house trying to figure out what to wear. What did Crocodile Dundee have on in those awful movies?
All I could picture was his stupid brown hat with the toothy band.
Not helpful.
Then my Generation Y fashion sense kicked it.
“Dude, a Lacoste polo shirt with the alligator insignia on the chest would be trendy in a retro irony Royal Tenenbaums sort of way,” it argued.
I doubted that 600-pound gators had much appetite for irony.
Logic didn’t help either. On the one hand, gator wrestling involves swimming, which suggested flip-flops and shorts. On the other hand, gator wrestling involves wrestling gators, which suggested chain mail.
On the third hand (the plastic hand the doctor gives you after a gator has chomped off one of your originals) logic seemed to say “YOU IDIOT, DON’T WRESTLE GATORS!”
In the end, I covered the bases by wearing a T-shirt (sans Lacoste emblem), shorts and flipflops, and packing the closest thing I had to chain mail — a double-ply pair of Carhartt work pants.
Pulling up in front of the gator farm, it was clear the instructors put little stock in wearing the proper pool attire or protective gear. My teacher, Noah Mather, wore a muddy “2005 Alligator Rodeo” T-shirt, shin-length baggy shorts, and of course, a toothy, brown Crocodile Dundee hat.
He had an incredibly clean pair of red suede clogs that he kicked off when class started, explaining that one never wrestles in shoes because, “when you’re creeping through the water, you want to be able to feel the gators with your toes.”
The other wrestling coach, Jay Young, wore a ripped pair of jeans and a black sleeveless T-shirt — basically the uniform of a heavy metal roadie. He also had the Crocodile Dundee hat.
Bottom line, they said, was that it is not what you wear, but where you wear it: Keep away from the mouth-end of the gator.
Colorado Gators takes care of about 400 alligators. Most were raised from eggs, but some arrived full-grown from urban areas as close as Boulder and as far away as New York.
Young recently returned from hunting down a gator that popped up in a park in Los Angeles.
These urban gators are basically orphans. Their owners buy them at pet stores, then they get freaked out when little Snappy has grown to five feet and is chewing through the bathroom door.
The owners (or the authorities) then call Colorado Gators.
The farm gives the orphans a home, but in a twist straight out of a Charles Dickens novel, the gators have to wrestle for their room and board.
It seems a little cruel to watch a guy in a toothy brown hat jump on an otherwise calm gator, loop a rope around his neck and drag him thrashing over to the beach. PETA can’t be far behind.
But as Mather explained to a crowd of Girl Scouts watching him grapple with an 11-footer recently, “This is the only way for us to get a good look at them. A lot of time the gators will fight with each other in the ponds. If one gets injured or sick, we can’t tell if we just leave them hiding out in the reeds.”
He pointed to a deep tooth mark in the animal’s snout he had recently treated.
So wrestling can act as a regular checkup. Not much bedside manner, but like Annie said, apparently speaking for all orphans — human and reptilian — it’s a hard-knock life.
It’s not easy for the wrestlers either.
I chose to go into the gator pond in the shorts and bare feet.
Making sure to stay away from the mouth end of the gators, I limped out after four hours of instruction with scraped and bruised legs from lashing tails.
Chain mail wouldn’t be a bad idea next time, if I could only find a variety that floats.
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