BEAR KNUCKLE: Six Wrestlers Who Fought Bears, And Two Bears Who Fought Everyone
Content Warning – While we're here to have a laugh at wrestling legends embarrassing themselves getting beaten up by bears, this is, at the end of the day, the severe mistreatment of these animals, and this article discusses this mistreatment in detail. Reader discretion is advised.
If the average wrestler told you he fought a bear once, you might well scoff. “Yeah, sure, a ‘Bear’. It was just Tugboat in a big coat, wasn't it? Who was his tag partner, Mantaur?” But like wrestling itself, fighting against real-life bears can trace its roots back to the carny world of circus sideshows. In the late 1800s these fights took the form of boxing matches which were – to an extent – shoot fights, and thus the bears would be muzzled and made to wear boxing gloves and stand on their hind legs as they traded real punches with the professional human boxers they faced. It should go without saying, but much like that video you saw on Twitter of the cat looking out the car window and smiling that you laughed at until someone pointed out its ears are pinned back in terror, these bears did not have a good time doing this. Some were doped up, all of them were de-clawed and those that weren't muzzled had their front teeth removed so that they couldn't bite anyone. Despite only being possible when their opponent was so heavily handicapped, fighting a bear was seen as somewhat prestigious, with some bears even becoming famed opponents. And, in one of the first instances in a long history of the wrestling industry embarrassing itself while attempting to imitate “real sports”, competing against bears made its way to the world of wrestling in the following century.
As it turns out, a lot of wrestlers have fought bears. Like, a LOT. So much so that an exhaustive list of all of them would be impossible, so instead we're going to look at six of the more well-documented stories in particular, before looking at two of the most famous wrestling bears from this era, to see their side of the story.
John Bradshaw Layfield
This match-up, on the face of it, seems like a natural fit. Much like a bear, John Bradshaw Layfield is known for being large, belligerent and fond of clubbing things with his forearms. But as one story from JBL's college days has it, the two are in very different leagues. Even as a student JBL showed a frankly unsettling fondness for bar-room brawling, a trait which would go on to make him a menace of the wrestling locker room and a stiff opponent in the ring. According to JBL's autobiography, this particular incident all started after football practice when one of the freshmen asked him – seemingly hypothetically – how he would do in a fight against a bear. Bragging that he'd definitely win, JBL promptly forgets the conversation until a month later when the same freshman tells him “well, the bear's in town tonight, you coming or what?” This event was a shoot fight, with a $1500 prize for anyone who could defeat the bear, but despite sensing that he may have dropped himself right in it on this one JBL nonetheless remained cautiously optimistic, reasoning that the bear “couldn't be any more than 300 pounds at the most” and that he could outsmart it. Until he spotted a picture of the bear on a poster and realised it was much, much larger than he was anticipating. “This had to be hype, I thought. No way a bear that big was going to walk out on that floor.” Alas, he was sorely mistaken, as, unlike most other fights on this list which are against the – somewhat – more manageable 150-650lb Canadian Black bear, JBL's sparring partner tonight was a Brown bear that stood eight feet tall, had his own entrance music(!) and weighed over eight hundred pounds.
Now I'm no bear professor, but depending on where it's from and how you weigh it that's at least 200lb heavier than your average Ursus Arctos or Brown Bear. Admittedly there's an outside chance that this was an Alaskan Kodiak Grizzly Bear brought in to work the territories – in which case it would actually be on the slimmer side – but either way the then-280lb JBL was very aware that he had bit off more than he could chew as he watched one of his friends try, and fail, to defeat the bear. But despite being nearly 3 times lighter than his opponent and clad in nothing but gym shorts and tennis shoes, JBL didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of his buddies and proceeded to have (what he describes at least as) a surprisingly competitive match... at first. It's not until, after some tentative blows and grappling, JBL managed to roll the bear onto its side, and the bear – seemingly enraged at the prospect of actually putting someone over – promptly goes into business for himself. Despite having no teeth the bear gnawed JBL's neck and ears before battering him under a table until its trainers manage to subdue the berserk animal. Needless to say, JBL didn't win the prize money and was in hot water with the college because, as he put it, while there wasn't explicitly any rule against wrestling bears, he DID break the rule against going to a bar in the first place. For the record, while in interviews JBL typically reflects on being pummelled by a mountain of meat and hair with good cheer and no regrets. Elsewhere in his book, he described losing to Bart Gunn in the Brawl for All tournament as “[Something that] has haunted me ever since, almost daily at times […] I would rather have died in that ring than to have lost”, which indirectly puts Bart Gunn over as a badass far better than JR ever did.
Yoshiaki Fujiwara
While other entries on this list are funnier or scarier, the following debacle is without a doubt the most pathetic and mystifying. Yoshiaki Fujiwara is a legendary, albeit somewhat eccentric figure in Japanese wrestling and MMA, but while there are many feathers in his cap including ‘inventor of the Fujiwara Armbar’, ‘Bear Handler’ is not one of them. In the early 90s, Fujiwara had recently founded Pro-Wrestling Fujiwara-Gumi, a shoot-wrestling promotion founded by former New Japan Pro Wrestling stars such as Minoru Suzuki after the collapse of a prior promotion. At this time Japan had a thriving scene of MMA, wrestling and hybrid promotions, and in the world of puro wrestling NJPW was doing well based on a harder – though not fully shoot – Strong Style. But with all this going on at the same time, why on earth did Fujiwara decide to fight a bear? Well, at the time Fujiwara-Gumi wasn't doing very well, as the product had started to gravitate towards pro-wrestling and away from shoot fighting, which caused his co-founders and biggest star to split from PWFG to found the rival (and far more successful) promotion Pancrase. But despite a more entertainment focused product, Fujiwara was still of the mind that wrestling had to be grounded in legitimacy, remarking in a later interview that “my mantra so to speak was that pro wrestlers have to be strong and on top of, like the icing, that they have to be able to make money. […] At root, if a guy isn’t strong, you can’t call him a pro wrestler.” He may also have taken a leaf out of the book of his mentor, the legendary Karl Gotch, who had been in Japan recently to help set up Fujiwara-Gumi:
[Gotch] would go to the zoo, and he would stare for hours, at like a bear or a lion, and he would ask himself why is a bear strong, why are lions strong. He would just stand and watch and think. […] Gotch was that kind of person. But, lions and bears are simply strong because of their DNA, right? [Laughter] But Gotch thought very seriously about it.
Fujiwara on the other hand seemingly didn't, as Glenn Jacobs – known for his later work as WWE's Kane and for being roughly bear-shaped if you squint really hard at him – recounted in his autobiography when he was summoned to Toronto as a stunt double to help the then-41-year-old Fujiwara train to fight a bear for a Japanese variety show (for those unfamiliar with the format, imagine morning chat shows crossed with Noel's House Party). Now if you're asking yourself “How's he going to put a bear in a Fujiwara Armbar? Bears don't bend that way, and it's a really bad idea to try” then rest assured, he doesn't even get that far. Honestly even calling this a ‘fight’ is a misnomer. The bear – a Canadian Black Bear retired from the circus and now living in an enclosure – appears to have had even less ‘training’ than Fujiwara, pacing back and forth while growling and hissing at Fujiwara for two long slow minutes before charging at him a couple of times and backing off. It's distressing watching, even though Fujiwara himself gets in zero offence and appears to do more damage to his own shoulder falling over than the bear does when it attacks him. Fujiwara does at least have the humility to look rightfully ashamed of himself afterwards.
Bobby “The Brain” Heenan
One of wrestling's most infamous scoundrels (in a fun way, not in an Ultimate Warrior way), legendary heel manager Bobby Heenan, worked a series of matches in the late '60s with his tag partner Baron von Raschke against a bear named Ted. We'll talk more about Ted further down the line, but while Bobby – like most wrestlers who fought bears – hated the smell, particularly when Ted would urinate in the ring, Bobby happily put over what an unusually good worker the bear was, being able to squeeze the bear's shoulders or foot a certain way to signal to it to do a monkey flip or flying mare throw. Funny how actually training the bear makes all the difference, isn't it? Too well trained perhaps, Raschke might have argued, as he would often insist to the referee that the bear had a foreign object or weapon smuggled in his fur while desperately trying to tag Bobby back in.
Bobby and Raschke would also enlist Ted's help when ribbing new wrestlers, who would customarily have to job out to the bear if it was in town when they first joined the promotion. Once they knew the new kid was wrestling the bear, one of them would make a trip to McDonald’s to obtain as many honey sachets as they could get, which they would then smear on their hands before giving the new guy a sportsmanlike pat on the bum on his way out the door. Cue loud screams of terror from the bear's opponent once in the ring as Ted suddenly became very interested in the new wrestler's rear end. While this is still one of the more tame backstage jokes of wrestling history, part of me does wish Bobby had tried this trick on Gorilla Monsoon on an episode of Prime Time Wrestling. If I'm honest though, it probably would have just resulted in the hulking brute rearing up on his hind legs and roaring before horribly mauling the poor defenceless bear.
“Classy” Freddie Blassie
If it wasn't for Fujiwara's escapade described earlier in this article, this would almost certainly be the most baffling entry on this list, mainly due to the wrestler in question's status at the time. During the 1950s Blassie had recently moved to Atlanta and switched from Face to Heel, becoming one of its top stars in the process. So why put him in a fight with a bear out of the blue? Blassie had the same question when Ray Gunkel, the promoter at the time in the Georgia territory, told Freddie he'd booked a bear. Blassie, a man with absolutely zero fucks to give (like Amazon with its taxes, he somehow gives negative fucks) was in no hurry to get mauled by a semi-tamed predator and made that clear. “Don't put me in with that fuckin' thing. I don't want to wrestle no fuckin' bear” and Gunkel promised he wouldn’t.
Cut to a couple of weeks later, when Freddie found out he has to wrestle the bear. It's been a long article so far, so have yourself a little treat – while this happened when Freddie was much younger, imagine the voice of venerable, Wrestlemania-introducing, Elder Statesman of Wrestling era Freddie Blassie, when reading his response to being told he had to wrestle the bear after all:
Despite his surprisingly foul-mouthed objections, Blassie was a professional and went ahead with the match, and in the process became the only person on this list who actually did defeat the bear they fought... albeit by count-out, as halfway through the match the bear simply left the ring and refused to return. While Blassie was pleased with this result (read: “pleased the match was over early”) his dominant performance would come back to bite him, as the local press put him over so well for having scared the bear out of the ring that a rematch was booked, this time in front of an even bigger crowd. Alas, this rematch would prove to be a literal squash match as the bear promptly sat on him, and with Blassie refusing to lower his shoulders to be pinned and the bear refusing to stop sitting on him, the match was ruled a no-contest. According to Blassie, this particular bear was a very sick animal – judging by the revolting smell and bald patches in its fur. And, now incensed at having been made to fight a bear, not once, but twice, Blassie was thoroughly delighted when he heard a few weeks later that the bear had died while taking a booking in North Carolina, and he hoped with equal fervour that its owner caught something from the bear and died too. Stay classy, Mr Blassie.
Bob “Hardcore” Holly
It should come as no surprise that Bob Holly, a man who looks, sounds and wrestles like a character in Fight Club did in fact used to fight in an underground barfighting scene. Although, unlike fellow Brawl for All competitor JBL, Bob was ‘Fighting for Food and Diapers’ for his family as his autobiography The Hardcore Truth titles one chapter, instead of for the sheer fun of it. So when the chance came up, Bob was the only person on this list who responded to the opportunity with enthusiasm, reasoning “I'd never been to a zoo, and I sure hadn't seen a bear in person before, so I figured why not? […] I suppose it was a manly pride thing – or a stupid pride thing – but, seriously, how many people can say they've wrestled a bear?!” Bob doesn't specify what kind of bear he fought (“Who Cares?”) but guessed it was in the 300lb range and approached the fight with some caution – for the first and last time in his career, reasoning that he probably shouldn't try and punch his opponent for fear of hurting them, albeit because if he enrages the bear it's going to hit him a whole lot harder. The ‘fight’ only lasts a few moments before the bear bites him on top of the head and drags him to the floor. This is unusual since, as we've mentioned, a lot of bears used in wrestling had their front teeth removed to avoid this exact scenario, or at the very least wear a muzzle. Then again, the organisers of this fight club also apparently brought in a Golden Gloves boxing champion as a ringer to end his winning streak, so it's possible that at this point they just wanted Bob dead.
Bob maintains this match and the bite that ended it are what caused him to start balding, though it's hard to judge the veracity of baldness induced by bear bites owing to an incredibly small sample size. While he didn't manage to beat, or for that matter hit, the bear he still took credit for softening it up for his friend who – unlike JBL's buddy – wisely decided to go second and managed to defeat it. Tantalizingly, Bob also claims to still have footage of this world's-first “Hair vs Bear” match, although tragically this footage has never surfaced in the years since. This does raise the question though – for a man who begrudged his initial gimmick as a racecar driver and who grew increasingly dissatisfied with his lower-midcard positioning over the years, why did Bob never consider saying to Vince McMahon “I have footage of me fighting an actual bear”? All it would have taken is one private screening in Vince's office and Bob would have broken the Undertaker's streak that year, gone into the Hall of Fame and be headlining this year's Crown Jewel.
Dutch Mantell
If you know a little about “Dirty” Dutch Mantell and the seedier side of wrestling he was a part of in this era you might be bracing yourselves for a rough one, but this is actually one of the nicer stories on this list, as far as these things go. Between takes on the set of the Vice series Dark Side of the Ring the producers thankfully responded to interviewee Dutch Mantell asking them “Can I tell y'all a quick story 'bout a bear?” by realising that they'd hit paydirt and hitting Record.
While wrestling in Tennessee, Dutch was booked to fight a she-bear whose owner and the show's promoters clearly hadn't taken into account how hot it was going to be that day. The bear was out in its cage in 100ºF weather on the verge of expiring, being jabbed at with sticks by a group of bored wrestlers and onlookers. Good guy Dutch was incensed, and proceeded to chew out the wrestlers – in part because he didn''t want the bear in a bad mood before he fought it – and went and fetched the bear a couple of bottles of coke and some Almond Joys. This will be a recurring theme with the other wrestling bears we'll discuss in a moment: bears, regardless of colour or breed, apparently love a bottle of coke. Dutch hangs out with the, now quite mellow and grateful, bear for a while to get it used to him, and as a result had a series of matches that week with the bear WITHOUT being brutalized and humiliated, and presumably managing a higher work rate than 90% of the people Dutch would later work with on Heroes of Wrestling. But, tragically, Dutch seemingly missed the chance to make history in the world of wrestling's backstage ribs by telling an opponent “Don't worry, we'll be fine – the bear was a bit sleepy so I had to give it a little coke, but it's wide awake now!”
Victor the Bear and Terrible Ted
As mentioned at the start of this article some bears over the years would go on to achieve status equivalent to some pro-wrestlers. When these bears came to town they would draw a crowd, and local promotions would put forth their talent to fight it. Even so, there are two names that stand out above all others, for better and for worse: Victor the Bear and Terrible Ted, who wrestled hundreds (thousands, if you believe their owners) of people over their decades-long careers, from wrestlers to sportsmen and members of the general public. NOTE: While these bears are both generally discussed as individual animals, reports of the bears' weight and breed vary somewhat depending on who's telling the story and at least two animals have operated under each name legitimately, and doubtless several more under the ownership of other enterprising scam artists who happened to have a bear and figured no-one would tell the difference. Much like Doink the Clown, Victor and Ted are two gimmicks that managed to outlive their original performers.
Victor
Victor, a Canadian Black Bear, began his career in the late 1950s under the ownership of Tuffy Truesdell, a former alligator wrestler and failed zoo owner, who claimed to have raised him since he was a cub (we should point out that the zoo failed for financial reasons; as far as we know Tuffy wasn't fighting the livestock in his spare time). According to an interview with the pair in Sports Illustrated – because yes, this bear was famous enough to get interviewed in Sports Illustrated – Victor didn't particularly care for wrestling compared to other fighting bears, but knew several moves including hip rolls and was trained to do a flying mare as his finisher. He was also, as it turns out “something of a purist, disdaining gimmicks: "He'll do tag teams," Tuffy explains, "but he won't have nothing to do with battle royals." As mentioned earlier, Victor enjoyed a bottle of cola after each match, but was eventually weaned onto Kool-Aid, supposedly for the sake of his kidneys. Among Victor's many opponents over the years were famous figures such as heavyweight boxer Chuck Wepner, Gorgeous George, “The Destroyer” Dick Beyer, and Wahoo McDaniel. For wrestling fans, one of his most famous opponents was Roddy Piper, then at the beginning of his own wrestling career. Piper was unenthused about the fight – either because he was wrestling for only $25 or because he couldn't think of any racial slurs about bears to yell at Victor – but agreed to it anyway, only for one of his fellow wrestlers to do the same “honey on the ass” trick that Heenan did with Ted, leading to a humiliating debacle for the young Roddy. Thankfully his career recovered, although he seemingly forgot this lesson about engaging in poorly thought-out shoot fights with non-wrestlers when he agreed to fight Mr T at Wrestlemania II.
The bear, on the other hand, would go on to be a minor celebrity, being driven to matches in two Chevy Impalas fused together, appearing on several television shows and starring in the Clint Eastwood film Paint Your Wagon. But this fame wasn't without its dark side – when Mike Herbert beat the bear on the promise of a free car, Truesdell simply let the bear off its chain and let it attack Herbert from behind, thus inventing the Dusty Finish. The original Victor died in the mid-'70s aged 17, and a second bear that was also wrestling for Truesdell under the same name became the “main” Victor. However, it was only a matter of time before continuing the bear's wrestling career became more trouble than it was worth as opponents began to get injured and protesters picketed his events. For example in 1981 according to the Lodi News-Sentinel newspaper, the state of Virginia, struggling to legally ban Victor from wrestling in the state, eventually resorted to revoking his state wrestling license on the grounds that he “was not mentally competent and had too much facial hair”. Victor II was eventually retired to the Chief Saunooke Bear sanctuary in North Carolina.
Terrible Ted
When Terrible Ted was born is a matter for some debate – in The Windsor Star of Ontario in 1969 his owner claimed the bear was then 19, but the first reported match featuring Terrible Ted occurred in 1950, and the Windsor Star story also claimed he'd won 1300 fights by that point. But hey, when a 600lb bear that fights humans for a living lies to you about his age, are YOU going to ask to see his ID? In any case, as a cub Ted originally travelled with a Canadian circus before being bought by Dave McKigney, AKA “The Canadian Wildman” Gene Dubois, who wrestled on his own in Georgia Championship Wrestling, Stampede Wrestling and even NJPW. As mentioned before, Terrible Ted was the trained bear that Bobby Heenan and Baron Raschke faced in Indiana, but they weren't the only wrestlers Ted faced. Towards the end of his run in San Francisco in 1972 Superstar Billy Graham was booked in a series of matches against Terrible Ted – who Graham claimed was a 725lb Alaskan Brown Bear – and while he was less impressed by the bear's work rate than Bobby Heenan was, he did make sure to put over the bear's terrible smell. Ultimately Graham came to resent working with Ted however, as he felt that being laughed at by fans (both in matches and on the street) for wrestling a bear killed any heat he had for the rest of his stint in San Francisco. So the next time Superstar Billy is dishing out some terrible hot takes on the current wrestling product, feel free to think about this period in his own career to cheer yourself back up again.
Ted also worked alongside McKigney in Stu Hart's Stampede Wrestling in Calgary, and in his autobiography, Stu's son Bret Hart described how his dad would keep Ted in a cage under the back porch of their house. The bear was, according to Bret, docile enough to let Bret hang his feet down into the cage and lick ice cream off his toes. This makes perfect sense – if Stu Hart gave me the option of either fighting him or living in a cage under his porch, he wouldn't even have to lock me in because I'm keeping a set of steel bars between me and Stu at all times. Reports are hazy as to whether Stu himself wrestled this particular bear or not, but he did wrestle a Bengal tiger named Chi-Chi around this same time, and once you've done that it's not like you've much left to prove. Much like Victor, Ted also enjoyed a coke and, sadly also like Victor, was involved in a few cases where McKigney refused to pay up after someone successfully pinned him – at one point Ted was even held in an Alabama jail cell as collateral when an opponent tried to sue McKigney for backing out of a fight at the last minute.
The original Terrible Ted last wrestled in 1975, and McKigney's days of bear training would go into decline after a fatal accident in 1978 involving another one of his bears, Smokey, who escaped from his cage and mauled McKigney's girlfriend. But even more so than Victor, the name of Terrible Ted lived on for decades to come. For example in 1987 Dutch Mantell, then wrestling in Tennessee's Continental Championship Wrestling, defended his title with the help of what he introduces as the “500lb Siberian Grizzly Bear Terrible Ted”, as seen in this shot of Dirty Dutch pointing at a bear that is quite blatantly not Ted.
The match this promo led up to was fought by Tracy Smothers after the original billed competitor suffered an injury (or possibly a severe case of SecondThoughtsitis). You can still see a clip of this match being commentated over on an episode of Pro Wrestling This Week which is worth it to hear the venerable announcer Gordon Sollie explaining that bears tend to have trouble applying figure-4 leglocks.
This is where something of a mystery emerges. Another bear named Terrible Ted, who was a 500lb Siberian Grizzly Bear owned by Richard Walker, was documented in a series of photos engaging in bar fights against patrons in Alabama in the mid-1990s. This may even be the grizzly bear reported to be Terrible Ted in that one grainy clip on Youtube that shows Carlos Colon wrestling in Puerto Rico in 1995, though how you would get a bear to Puerto Rico is beyond me. That's not the biggest mystery about this particular bear, though: this bear could well tie together several of our stories so far. Between one vintage photo on eBay that places the owner in Louisiana in 1991, an issue of the Arizona Republic that reports the bear getting banned from fighting in Centralia, Texas in 1992, and a review from the departure of Agriculture from 1992 that discusses the bear fighting in North Carolina in 1988 and biting someone in Missouri in 1990, this bear was certainly widely travelled in the American south in the latter half of the '80s through to the '90s. Now, when did JBL graduate from college in Texas? 1989. When would Bob Holly stop bar fighting in Alabama to become a professional wrestler? 1987. And when did Dutch Mantell make Tracy Smothers wrestle a Grizzly Bear called Terrible Ted in the Alabama-based CCW? 1987. In the photos of this Terrible Ted in the 90's you can even see a “natal ring” of lighter fur around its neck, despite being an adult, just like Mantell's “Ted”. Is all this coincidental? Probably, but it's fun to consider.
So there you have it. These days bear wrestling is thankfully and rightfully a thing of the past, though as with all such things there are a few holdouts. Most recently the career of Caesar the wrestling bear ended in 2010 after he fatally mauled his handler. But it's still an interesting phenomenon in the shared roots of wrestling and shoot fighting in the Carnivals of yore, even if only so we can ask ourselves:
What the hell were they thinking?