Issue 157

August 2017

If people Google me to do research on wrestling or MMA, they find the pictures of me wrestling bears. They’re like: “What the heck?”

I started wrestling when I was nine years old, but I actually started doing karate when I was five. Before I started wrestling, I was working with animals, shadowing my dad and learning what he did. We would do all kinds of shows and I would follow him around. At this one show, I would wrestle the bear.

It wasn’t like I went out in the wilderness and wrestled wild bears like some people thought. To me, they were our pets. We never treated them like pets though, because they are always wild and we are well aware of that. We treated them like they were our own from the first day we got them.

The reason the story broke and got as big as it did was when I was a senior in high school, I was at an outdoorsman’s show in Cleveland, Ohio. I wrestled a bear in front of about 600 or 700 people. The people at the show were all animal lovers, outdoorsmen or hunters of some sort. They all respected the show and enjoyed it.

The local news was there. They filmed it and did a story: the fact we had these animals, that they were rescued and we were able to have a close relationship with these deadly beasts. CNN took it from there and then The Colbert Report took it even further.

Before that, I worked with the bears. I would have them on a leash and make them sit down on a bale of hay. That’s what my dad trained them to do – at state fairs for people to take pictures.

Leading into my sporting career, I was always around these exotic animals and doing something with them. You look back now and think about it and it seems like crazy stuff , but back then it was normal. It’s exactly what had I grown up doing.

We had to clean the cages once a week, whether it was 90 degrees or negative five outside. That was proper work – overly hot days, spraying down the outside cages and picking up poop for a few hours at a time.

The animals always counted on us, because we were more of a rescue place for them. For us, it was definitely more of a lifestyle. It’s a lot of work. Nobody really understands unless they have seen it in person. We love animals. I have always been an animal lover and it was fun. It’s something I loved to do every day.

With all the permits and stuff in Ohio, you aren’t able to get animals like that any more. All of our animals over time went to be looked after at different zoos and rescue places in different states.

Looking back, it’s definitely something that’s crazy to the average person. Most people are around little dogs or cats or something like that. When they see you in a picture with a lion, or a tiger, or a bear they are like: “Holy crap. That’s crazy! Why would you do that? Weren’t you scared?” But for me, it’s normal. I’ve been around those animals since I was a little kid.