One on One in Bear’s Lair : From Football, Wright Moved On to Wrestling Animals Without Pads

A mature Jack Wright is a gentle man, and the world is a safer place for it.

He packs 248 pounds onto a 5-foot-11 frame, most of it well-defined muscle. He claims only 9.5% body fat, and you can believe him.

With long hair framing a head that seems to rise from a body devoid of a neck, Wright, 37, is a bear of a man. And perhaps that accounts for his affinity toward the animal that represents the state of California.

Then again, maybe it was just a natural progression--from arm-wrestling to bear-wrestling.

Wright, strength coach for World Cup ballet skiing champion Ellen Breen during her formative years, won the world arm-wrestling title at age 18, and to show it wasn’t a fluke, repeated the following year.

Then he ran into a guy named Ron Oxley at a local health club, and a life of relative normalcy vanished.

“Ron had property in Acton where he trained exotic animals,” recalls Wright, who at the time was playing nose guard at Pierce College with aspirations of pursuing a football career.

“He had lions, tigers and bears. The place was like the Land of Oz.”

Oxley provided all the animals for the Grizzly Adams television series and Wright, the bear-man, got plenty of work.

“Oh, it was easy,” said Wright. “Most of the regular studio stunt guys would jump off a 100-foot building if you asked them to, but they wouldn’t go near an animal.”

Maybe the stunt guys were intimidated, but the bears at the Land of Ox weren’t, and Wright recalls an unbearable summer evening in Acton when he was feeding sherbet to one of the creatures.

“(The bear) took a swipe at me and tore all the cartilage in my ribs,” said Wright, who holds no rancor toward the beast. “I probably gave him the wrong stuff. I didn’t know orange wasn’t one of his favorite flavors.”

Wright took delight in bringing his football pals from Pierce to Oxley’s animal farm and steering them toward the bears, who had been raised there from cubs.

“Most of those guys thought they were strong enough, but none of them were willing to wrestle. And you couldn’t blame them for not being crazy like me. Bears are so powerful.

“You’ve gotta watch them all the time. One of my buddies was feeding this bear some jellybeans and stuck his hands in his pockets, maybe to get some more jellybeans. The bear was waiting, staring at him, then smacked him on the back and he fell face-first into a mudhole with his hands still in his pockets.

“The guy was wearing tight jeans and fell on top of his hands, so he couldn’t pull them out to protect himself. It was funny. So the bear gnawed on the guy’s head a little bit before we pulled him off.”

Wright--who has been working his way west from his birthplace in Van Nuys to high school in Granada Hills to college in Woodland Hills and to his current residence in Chatsworth--played football for three years at Kennedy High as a defensive end.

“I didn’t want to go both ways,” said Wright, who has bench-pressed a recorded 554 pounds--without enhancers, he’s quick to remind. It’s a figure that at the time made him the strongest football player in the United States, professional or amateur.

“I hated the offensive line. You couldn’t grab people. I would’ve just gotten one penalty after another.”

A severe shoulder injury ended Wright’s nascent football career after a season at Pierce, and he found himself at an orthopedic clinic in Inglewood.

“The surgeon, Dr. (James) Tibone, looked at the X-rays then looked at me and shook his head,” Wright recalled. “He said I had the shoulder of a 70-year-old man who’d just been involved in a serious accident.

“Then he said, ‘I suppose you’re one of those guys who hopes to bench-press 300 pounds.’ I had to laugh. That’s a weight I just warm up with.”

Wright has appeared on a number of made-for-TV sports shows, doing strength things like lifting beer kegs filled with water and lead shot, and bending steel bars around his neck.

He even made it into the record book with a stunt, where on a show called the Guinness Game he pushed a wheelbarrow laden with 2,400 pounds of steel bars for 22 feet.

But this man with the strength of a bear and the nerve to use it sheepishly says he suffers from stage fright. “Don’t call me an actor in the paper,” Wright cautioned. “If I have more than one line to say, I just freeze up and blow it.”

Anyone care to argue?