So Long, Tiger : After 44 Years in the Ring, Circus Champ Gunther Gebel-Williams Takes a Circuitous Route to Retirement

It is a public farewell that has developed into the most protracted, most visible goodby since Douglas MacArthur left the Army.

The end began last year with a circus matinee in Venice, Fla. It will continue through this year until November next year and the absolutely final show in Pittsburgh. That’s 300 au revoir performances to date with 1,000 to go before tigers cease snarling at, and crowds stop gasping admiration for, animal trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams.

Blond, cocky, acrobat-built Gebel-Williams, 54, became a circus man 44 years ago. He blinked. Now his career is over.

Shows Added Up Quickly

“Fast, ja , very fast,” he says. There is a sigh and surprise at just how fast. “Yesterday, when somebody said this was 11,000 shows in America, I thought, mein Gott, I was doing this for 25 years before in Germany and there, every week, 14 shows and never have I the slightest idea how many times I perform.”

But now he does. Now each performance, every city is a tick toward his final exit standing on Congo, the bull elephant who has been with Gebel-Williams for two generations. San Diego this week. Anaheim next week. Then Long Beach and Los Angeles.

“Every time I ride out I say: ‘That’s another one . . . bye-bye,”’ he said. “So maybe, with every day being a last day, it will be a little easier at the end.”

But it won’t. Gebel-Williams knows it. Four decades of staring down 400-pound Bengal tigers is less frightening than looking square at retirement.

“I will feel terrible for sure,” he said. The accent is Boris Becker’s and littered with charming misusages. “I hope at final show I have nothing to say ever to nobody and maybe I won’t have to go to the microphones and say all these thank yous.

“I just want to run out and go into the street and sit on a corner and nobody have to see me. Because I’ll cry. For sure. I try to be a very tough guy all my life but this is a lifetime splitting.”

It is Sunday amid six performances in two days, a grind that circus performers call a six-pack weekend. The Phoenix Suns have moved out of their Memorial Coliseum, and Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus has moved in.

It is an appropriate place for Gebel-Williams to talk about his life, his animals, circuses and performers, what they were and what they have become.

Yesterday, the circus, this Roman root of pure show business, was the Big Top and two-night stands in small towns, center rings and sawdust and acts that spoke three European languages fluently and a little Serbo-Croatian.

Today, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey shows touch mostly air-conditioned arenas in big cities and no Ringlings, Barnums or Baileys remain alive. There are three rings but no identification of “center ring” because that implies a superiority that has been known to upset contract negotiations with performers.

A kid who runs away to the circus these days will be turned over to juvenile hall. There are health controls, dependent education, public relations, insurance and Cleveland Amory to worry about. Sawdust is used only to cleanse and camouflage animal accidents in public.

Gebel-Williams has lived both eras. Sometimes, he says, it feels like it has been forever. It certainly has precluded a normal life and standard trivialities such as vacations, 40-hour work weeks, mowing lawns and watching “Roseanne.”

“No time for nothing,” he says. “You come here in the morning, make shows, enjoy what you are doing and make sure the audience enjoys it and . . . poof, gone, another day.

“Then rush to the next town. Then one day you say you have to stop because you forgot to live.”

He is 54 and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is 42 and Gordie Howe was 52 and Willie Shoemaker will soon be 58, but there is no comparison between retirements.

“Because everybody else has a season,” he says. “A great football player, a great basketball player . . . they all have time off. But I make this every day of the year, always 16 hours a day, and I never take a vacation.”

Still, that is only a portion of his decision to retire.

Gebel-Williams is slowing, physically and mentally.

The athleticism and concentration required to ride horses and climb elephants and be 45 minutes of a 150-minute show now comes more from conscious effort than his instincts.

Why Risk Having to Think?

And a man who has to think about things has no place inside a steel cage with 18 suspicious tigers whose supper has been delayed because showman Gebel-Williams believes a hungry cat is a peppier performer.

“When I have the idea to jump over a chair, I must do it very easily without thinking,” he explains. “I don’t want to take the risk of jumping and thinking maybe I can do it, maybe I can’t and I’ll fall and land on my nose.

“Why have to think about it? Why take that chance?”

And by hanging on, he asks, why risk a reputation he has bled for? There have been more than 500 stitches. The scars on his arms are a scrapbook. He stretches one mark with his fingertips: “This was a big zebra in Sweden . . . Los Angeles the chew on the elbow . . . here Knoxville . . . Richmond, Va., here.

“For sure, I could do it (circus work) another 10 years. But I don’t want audiences to come in here and say: ‘I saw him 10 years ago and, my God, he was different then.’ ”

Gebel-Williams doesn’t know why Muhammad Ali clung to the ring. Or why A.J. Foyt continues racing.

“I saw an interview with Foyt after Indianapolis and he said his life is racing, and I said to myself: ‘Sure, maybe he enjoy it to drive behind others. But I don’t want to stay behind and know there’s somebody doing better.’ ”

Nor does he want to see others performing his unique acts. Poachers have come from Europe and Asia to videotape his performances. There are leopard and tiger acts in Russia and Japan and “they know everything, every move I do from coming here.”

“I don’t want to go one day and see somebody else doing my act better than me. Later on, I don’t care. But right now I have to stay in this position for another year and that’s it.”

The position he is in, of course, is that unique spot reserved for those who are the best there is.

He has done talk shows with Merv, Johnny, Dick and Barbara. Three circus Oscars are his. He has been deeply profiled by the New York Times, Sports Illustrated and Psychology Today, which managed to sterilize the glamour of it all by describing his training methods as “heavy doses of positive reinforcement . . . and very mild adversive stimulus.”

Then there was his American Express commercial. Takes were endless and the tiger became impatient. It bit Gebel-Williams on the wrist. “This is my hand, dammit,” roared the bleeding trainer. “I don’t want to leave here without it.”

He earns in excess of $100,000 annually and it costs the circus another $2 million a year to pay, feed and transport Gebel-Williams’ 30 employees, 21 elephants, 22 horses, 22 tigers, 3 camels, 2 llamas, 3 Shetland ponies and 12 Russian wolfhounds.

The act is really a family of four--Gunther, wife Sigrid, son Mark, 18, and daughter Tina, 26. xThey live aboard a personal railroad car and travel between cities in a 40-foot motor coach. Sigrid, a former model, handles books, bills and the daily schedule. Tina performs with the wolfhounds. Mark is in training to be a trainer.

“The whole family give me support and so I do only my work with the animals all the day,” Gebel-Williams said. It is an essential continuous relationship that might smother others. “I don’t make my tax payments and I don’t pay my bills and I never hang a picture on a wall. Ever. Never.”

He also has no time for parties, Sunday interviews, animal activists and fans who call him a lion tamer: “I am a trainer, not a tamer . . . and I don’t deal with lions. The lion is a big showman, all noise. Grrrrrrr, guraaaaaah. Tigers are much better. They are more open, more honest.”

He is a fan of John Wayne, any astronaut, a 1986 Chevrolet Corvette he trailers to each city on the two-year tour, big motorcycles, the occasional Scotch and Coca-Cola, cowboy boots, cowboy belt buckles, cowboy shirts, cowboys and neurosurgeon Denton Cooley: “I saw him do an operation in Houston and he just stood there for eight hours and concentrated. This is unbelievable.”

He is 5-feet, 8-inches tall, 160 pounds and a blue-eyed gymnast in rhinestone tights, a bantamweight Tarzan wearing an open vest over taut chest. It has been said that Liberace may be gone, but there still is Gunther Gebel-Williams. The blond hair, however, is natural if not quite as bright as it shows.

Circus clowns call him Gunther Goober-Giblet. That acceptance he loves. For he is a circus boy who became a circus man and then, to many, a legend to be listed alongside Lou Jacobs, Emmett Kelly, Clyde Beatty, the Wallendas and the Silly Symphony.

It was ailing, fading, dying Jacobs, the first circus performer to be honored by a U.S. postage stamp, who once said: “This guy, Goonter, he is the next stamp.”

Goonter was born Gunther Gebel in Schweidnitz, Germany, now a part of Poland. His father, a soldier in World War II, died on the Russian front. His mother, a seamstress, found a postwar job with the Munich-based Circus Williams--then abandoned her son to owners Harry and Carola Williams.

It was a rejection that still confuses Gebel-Williams. But from it, he believes, came a fixation for closeness in his own family. It also explains his way with animals.

“I was 12 years old and alone and I had nothing,” he remembers. “Then I started with a little pony that was close to me. Then I helped a horse in practice and I felt it trust me. Suddenly, I was something to somebody and friendship was coming from the animals.

“I never planned it. I never had the idea I wanted to train tigers. I wanted to do something a little bit different and, for me, everything always just come.”

As did a father-son friendship with Harry Williams.

But in 1950, Williams was killed in a chariot racing accident during a London performance. Carola Williams asked Gebel to supervise the circus. He agreed and became Gebel-Williams in honor of a memory--and to add clout to the instructions of a 17-year-old circus manager.

Gebel-Williams was performing with leopards and pumas, and tigers riding elephants and horses, when Irvin Feld--a concert promoter fighting to keep the Ringling Bros. circus alive in America--went after this toast of Europe. He got him in 1968 for $2 million. That included the man, his animals and 5-year employment guarantees for any Circus Williams employees.

In Gebel-Williams, Feld received much, much more than a circus act.

He bought a workaholic who starts at 8 a.m. and rarely finishes before midnight. He humps hay bales, hoses down the tigers, rehearses the old animals, trains their young, scoops droppings and checks equipment from whips to harnesses.

“I have to do this. For the animals. I give them something to eat and they know I’m not just there to order them around. I build the relationship from this. I do this with my tigers and I do this with my elephants. With horses it makes no difference. As long as they have something to eat, who cares who?”

Closeness and constancy, he says, are the only secrets to his work. There is no mysticism here, no Tarzan magic. Just be there.

So the tiger cages always are parked close to Gebel-Williams circus bus. He feeds Natasha and Rambo, Mousy and Buffy, slabs of beef daily. He talks to them by name in passing, tucks them up at night--and will not be with them if there is a veterinary call.

“I will not be there when they have to give a shot,” he said. “A lot of tigers are scared to death of a needle. It is painful for them. If I’m there, they might be scared to death of me and think I made the pain.”

Yet he cannot love his tigers. Nor does his physical contact go much beyond a scratched neck or a rubbed rump.

“There is no love affair,” he says. “Respect is the most important thing. It is not: ‘I love you, come here my pussy cat.’ Every one has claws and teeth and I respect them as a tiger, not as a pussy cat.

“And every single one has to keep its own personality. I don’t want him to put his tail between his legs and always be scared to death. The message is: Respect me and I respect you. But I am in charge.”

So much in charge, in fact, that he can take 18 tigers from India and Siberia, enormous, proud, loners all, and work them easily as a team. The simplicity is overpowering. As one clown noted: “What the man does is provide a personal relationship. The tigers aren’t wild anymore. They’re tame. But tame only for him.”

On this meltdown Phoenix night of his 11,000th American performance, Gebel-Williams is working in the cage as always. Perfectly. Quickly. Softly. There are two handlers but no loaded revolver in the wings.

He whispers and winks and feigns surprise but his voice remains smooth. The tigers know they are doing right. Gebel-Williams tightens his neck, frowns, and the voice is harder. The tigers are warned that somebody might be thinking of screwing up.

But they are with him, happy to hear their names, content to follow the directions of his verbal shorthand spoken in English and German. Jooomp, Floppy. Ooop, Rolls. They stand on their hind legs and play leapfrog. They waltz, romp, roll over and are Hobbes to his Calvin.

Gebel-Williams salutes the applause and strides from the arena. “That’s 11,001,” he says.

Next year it will be abdication.

He plans to move upstairs to circus management, to visit other Ringling Bros. shows and pull their animal acts together. He must hire a cat act to replace his own. He must also supervise his son’s potential as the next Gunther Gebel-Williams.

Mark thinks he has it. He says he doesn’t doubt that he will be trainer enough to manage the big cats. One day.

Gebel-Williams isn’t quite so confident. He is not sure that his son has spent enough total time with the animals. There have been too many distractions from school and the chores of circus apprenticeship.

“We will have to find out,” says his father. “I’m yelling at him. I’ve given him a lot of help. But this is a job where you cannot push somebody.

“He is moving towards it. But in the end, performing, you are alone. So, outside (the cage) one day I’ll say: ‘Let’s do it.’ And then we’ll see what happens.”

And then Gebel-Williams will have to retrain himself; to leisure time, to a home that doesn’t move and a marriage with children in other parts of the country.

“I will miss being around the oldest animals, for sure,” he said. “Especially the elephants. My own Congo. Teichy. Nellie who comes in 1948 when I start in 1947. This elephant never goes one day in these 40 years when I wasn’t there.”

As long as the animals are alive, he said, he will keep going back to see them. He has vowed never to give the animals to another trainer. Nor will he allow the circus to sell them off.

“This is not going to happen to my guys,” he said. “If that happen, I’d buy ‘em all back and put ‘em in a big place and we’ll be together for all time. For sure.”