Tuffy Truesdell originally shows up in wrestling databases in 1937, although his first recorded match with an alligator is listed ten years later. On March 7, 1947, Tuffy defeated A Wrestling Alligator in Wichita, Kansas, in seven minutes flat. By June 5 of that same year, the alligator had a name. In a show at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, Tuffy defeated Rodney the Alligator, no time given. 

A dozen years later, Tuffy was spending most of his time wrangling a bear named Victor, although he got the best of Rodney the alligator in another Gardens engagement in 1961, pinning Rodney to the mat in three minutes, 15 seconds. By that time, the alligator was appearing in matches across Texas and New Mexico as Rodney VII, although he (or they) would soon be retired in favor of Victor. 

Along the way, an investigation by one local humane society found that Tuffy wasn’t breaking any animal cruelty regulations, although two others banned his act, and I imagine the ban would be universal these days. Yet during the 1960s, Victor was iconic. The charismatic bear appeared with Tuffy not only on the wrestling circuit, but also on TV programs ranging from The Ed Sullivan Show, To Tell the Truth and Let’s Make a Deal to Johnny Carson and Mike Douglas. Victor was also mentioned as wrestling Clint Eastwood, or vice versa. Victor won. 

I first grew interested in Tuffy Truesdell—well, obsessed—after one of my in-laws mentioned that her uncle had lived in our neighbourhood as a boy, and that he’d known a man who walked his alligator down the sidewalk. This was on Ferrier Avenue in the east end of Toronto. Since I’m writing a novel set partly in Toronto, I’ve been hoovering up local books and colour, and the detail seemed too good to leave alone.

When I asked her for more information, Susan emailed me Tuffy’s name and his status as an alligator wrestler. That sent me tumbling down an online rabbit hole, where I found a wealth of archival stories about Tuffy that were exuberant, melodramatic, gritty and hilarious; useless for what I’m writing–a real time waster–but completely delightful. 

I also think they were largely hokum. I began looking into Tuffy at the same time as I was re-reading Michael Ondaatje’s classic novel, In the Skin of a Lion, which is also set partly in east-end Toronto (where the protagonist, Patrick Lewis, keeps a pet iguana). The novel and the stories about Tuffy rubbed up against one another, and I thought about the way Ondaatje’s book gave the city a mythic glow, while Tuffy seemed to have a poetic tendency to mythologize. 

Mythic: having the nature of myth, or ancient stories. 

Mythologizing: to create a false picture of a situation. 

We might prefer to say marketing these days, and of course that’s what Tuffy was doing, marketing himself in neon letters ten feet high. 

The Ur-story about Tuffy appears in the February, 1970, issue of Sports Illustrated, his adventures laid out in a long and wonderful piece by journalist Frank Deford. I couldn’t resist quoting from it when I first mentioned Tuffy in a review of two Toronto books, and I can’t resist another excerpt here. Deford is riding in a converted limo with Tuffy at the wheel. Tuffy’s wife Lee sits behind him mixing martinis, and the bear, Victor, sleeps in a cage at the back, occasionally waking up to beg peppermint candies. It turns out that Victor has a sweet tooth, and is rewarded with a bottle of Coke after every wrestling match.

“This particular evening,” writes Deford, “the group in the limousine is on its way to Salt Lake City, where both Tuffy and Victor will wrestle the next night. That is, they will wrestle different people. At sports shows and fairs, after Victor has taken on all comers, he squares off against Tuffy. When they work the wrestling circuit, however, Tuffy returns to his former profession and takes a regular people match, while Victor goes against the most despised resident villain.

“Tuffy will not wrestle alligators anymore, though. He could be the first person to work both bears and gators on the same bill, but Tuffy is not interested in that distinction. ‘I’m not greedy,’ he says. ‘It was only a few years ago Lee and I are in Canada with the alligator farm, raising Victor, and we actually don’t know if we can make it through the winter to open up in the spring. It was just bad business, trying to make that alligator farm go.

“‘For 200 alligators in Canada, you got to keep the heat up in the winter,’ Lee explains.”

A brief pause to note that in another article, Lee says their alligator (singular) slept under their bed, causing Tuffy to have nightmares, afraid it would get out of its cage.

“Having bears fight professionally in public places is nothing new,” Deford writes. “In the past a whole hungry dog pack would be loosed on a trapped bear, an exercise so savage that vestiges of bearbaiting statutes remain on the books and harass Tuffy Truesdell. Early this month Victor nearly was benched in Chicago by an Illinois law calling for fines up to $200 for everyone who watches the fighting or baiting of a bear. But 9,200 risked it during the halftime of a Chicago Bulls-San Francisco Warriors game and Victor defeated Bulls General Manager Pat Williams, among others. Officials of the Anti-Cruelty Society observed closely and decided Victor was hardly the one being baited. Only twice has Victor legally been prohibited from wrestling. This occurred in Lewiston, Me. and Pasadena, Calif., two animal-loving cities that have distinguished themselves by sanctioning other atrocities: the second Ali-Liston fight and the annual Rose Bowl parade.

“Brave men have often taken on bears head to head. Paul Bryant, the football coach, earned his nickname that way. Tuffy himself recalls challenging a transient wrestling bear while he was still in his teens. Wrestling bears were not uncommon then, especially for what in the fair and circus business is called a ‘concert.’ That is the act you have to pay an extra two bits to see once you get talked inside the tent for an original quarter to see the whole show… 

“Statistically, it is safe to say that Victor has a better record than even the Harlem Globetrotters, something on the order of 50,000-0-1. One time a professional wrestler on the West Coast named Don Leo Jonathon did hold Victor to an honest 10-minute standoff. At that time both Don Leo and Victor weighed 350 pounds. Victor, who is 11 years old, now carries about 450 pounds on his 6-foot frame. Don Leo, in the intervening period, has failed to keep pace…

“Stumpy and powerful, an Occidental Oddjob, Tuffy himself stands about 5½’ tall and weighs just over 190. ‘I’m 53 now but, of course, I’m going to live to 100,’ he says with matter-of-fact authority. Altogether, he evokes the best memories of Julius, the brother of Jeff—in Mutt and Jeff—who was known as ‘the strongest little man in the world.’Tuffy is understanding and generous, apparently having rid himself of all misdirected aggressions one particular day when he was 6 years old and the school bully picked on him. He thrashed the bigger boy, proving his stature and losing a first name he despises—Adolphus—at the same instant. He has been Tuffy since.

“Tuffy migrated to wrestling from boxing as a teen-ager because his short arms left him at such a disadvantage as a pugilist. ‘I had to quit school in the 11th grade to help support the family,’ he says, ‘and the next year I went into the Civilian Conservation Corps. In the CCC I worked eight hours a day, hard work, for eight months, and I really developed. Then I worked for a St. Louis bakery…’

Eventually, writes Deford, Tuffy’s career slowed down when fans developed a preference for bigger wrestlers. It nearly came to an end the time he was tossed from a ring.

“He received extreme unction and needed three holes bored in his head. After a brief military stint that lasted until Army doctors found out about the hole-drilling episode, Tuffy went to Mexico, where there was still an interest in lighter wrestlers.

“’I drove down to old Mexico,’ Tuffy says, ‘and they booked me all over, in six of the republics. I have been in all of the states of the union except Alaska, all the provinces of Canada except Newfoundland and in six of the republics of old Mexico. Anyway, we were building up for a big match against their champion, Tarzan Lopez, in Mexico City when I was offered a tidy sum to perform in such a way that I would be welcomed back.

“’I was always a clean wrestler, but this time I should have taken the money. I should have known. I beat Tarzan Lopez, but they threw everything in the world at me and I just did get out safely. Now I had the belt of old Mexico, and there was no U.S. middleweight champion anymore. There was just about six of us middleweights left that were active. The title was dormant, so I was just proclaimed. Nobody could beat me anyway, except when they had too much weight. I was the last of the middleweight champions. There was no more money in it. I would have stayed in rasslin’, because I had the knack of winning then, but when the chance came I had to get into something else. I tried a thing with midget rasslers; I trained two boys, Pee Wee James and Tom Thumb. And then I started working the gators and after that the bear.’”

It seems to be true that Adolf (Tuffy) Truesdell was born in Goshen, Ohio on September 8, 1916. However he spent his youth, he seems to have served in the U.S. military during World War Two, probably in 1942 and as briefly as he says. By 1943, he’s listed on the Cagematch internet wrestling database as fighting for Tom Packs Sports Enterprises, largely in Missouri, and he’s registered as winning most of his matches. There’s also a match listed in Mexico City, then he appears in Toronto in 1947, alligator in tow.

Now for a more prosaic fact. The real-life Tuffy is heavily associated with small-town Sarnia, Ontario, where a 2016 Sarnia Journal story refers to him as “Sarnia’s own.” At about the same time, Will “Gilligan” Truesdell shows up online as a member of the third generation of Truesdells to run Sarnia’s fabled Wharf Fish & Chips shop. Will is said to be the son of “Sarnia icon Tuffy Truesdell, an alligator and bear wrestler.” The story appears on the Sarnia Lambton Crime Stoppers website, and Will is alleged to have been arrested for failing to possess a fishing license. The page, which is headlined “We Hooked Another One” reads as if it’s a local joke. “If you can help Will make bail please contact him.”

Wharf Fish & Chips closed in 2022, after having been run for most of its tenure by Mona Truesdell. From 1950, it was located on Davis Street, where according to a Facebook page, it was known for “the stairs between the dining rooms, jukeboxes on the tables and alligators on display.

“It all started with Scotty McEwan who sold fish on the streets of Toronto in the early 1930’s. He eventually opened a takeout Fish & Chip store on the Danforth specializing in halibut. He insisted on a standard of quality products still upheld in our restaurant today. The success of his venture inspired him to open four more locations in Ontario…Sarnia, St Thomas, Chatham and Hamilton. Scotty’s daughter, Mona Truesdell, travelled to oversee the businesses ran by managers in these locations. Eventually, the restaurants were sold to the managers and the Sarnia location was the only one kept by the Truesdell family.”

Ferrier Avenue, where Susan’s Uncle Bill remembers Tuffy walking his alligator, runs north off the Danforth. I wonder if Scotty’s fish and chips shop was the reason Tuffy lived here. Also whether Mona Truesdale was his wife; at least his first wife. The Sports Illustrated article names the woman in the limo in 1970 as Lee Truesdell who, “before she met Tuffy… toured as a professional square dancer with Midwestern Hayride and for a time served as one of those girls on a spinning board whose job it is to get narrowly missed by a blindfolded knife-thrower.”

Or maybe she toured the family’s fish and chips shops, and Lee was a nom-de-guerre.

Tuffy makes numerous appearances on local history pages about life in and around Sarnia, performing at the Corunna Gala Days, even showing up to help a sheriff in New Hamburgh, Ontario, with an alligator-related publicity stunt. Meanwhile, a son named Larry Truesdell is quoted in a 1981 Washington Post article as saying that he dropped out of school in Grade 5 to follow in Tuffy’s footsteps, failing to tell reporter Genevive Meyer where he’d lived before then.

Meyer writes:

“Bear rasslin’s been around before back in the Roman days,” says the 37-year-old Truesdell, a short, talkative man in cowboy boots with slicked-back blond hair. The elder Truesdell (Tuffy) is still the boss of the outfit and the road manager for another wrestling bear, Sonny, currently crushing opposition on the West Coast. The original Victor suffered a heart attack six years ago in New York and died.

“Now there are 15 different wrestling bears in the Truesdell stables. All of them go by the stage name Victor, but they all, like Sonny, have names of their own, too. All but the two now on tour are quartered in Cherokee, N.C., on an Indian reservation, where some are bred and some are trained for wrestling. 

“’All bears can’t be trained. You gotta get one with the right disposition,’ said Truesdell. ‘Females are temperamental.’ Each bear has its own swimming pool and private air-conditioned den for the sultry summer days.”

And if you believe that…

Sorry to interrupt.

“The original Victor went to and from his engagements in an airport limousine,” writes Meyer. “The current Victor is relegated to a cage in the back of a blue and white Ford pickup truck.

“The alligators of days gone by have been abandoned. ‘Alligators you can’t train. All they want to do is eat and eat you,’ said Larry Truesdell, sitting with his wife, Mary, during a break between performances this weekend. The Truesdells have been married for a year. Mary, a tall, dark-haired beauty, is one-quarter Cherokee, and adorns herself with turquoise and silver jewelry, including a delicate brooch in the shape of a black bear. ‘She’s the only woman I could find that likes me and the bear. One don’t come without the other,’ said Truesdell. Mary smiled her agreement.”

Mona Truesdale died on January 28, 1997. A memorial notice placed ten years afterward in the Sarnia Observer calls her a dear mother and grandmother. It lists her survivors as Tisa and Randy, Carla, Marc and Emma, Shauna and John.

Tuffy Truesdell died in North Carolina on March 30, 2001, aged 84. A notice two years later in the Sarnia Observer names him as a dear father and grandfather. His survivors are listed as Tisa, Randy, Carla and Marc, Shauna and Billy.

I have no idea which parts of any of the Tuffy stories are true. It’s certainly the case that names change, families reassemble and that an alligator was once walked down a sidewalk in east-end Toronto. I’m ready to believe that a bear died of a heart attack in New York City, mainly because I want to. It is also a fact that Little People prefer not to be called “midgets,” and that wrestling alligators and carting bears around in cages is indeed animal cruelty. And I’m aware that the urge to mythologize remains strong in all of us, with many preferring to deny or elide the ordinary lives we really live, at least most of the time. Although we all have our moments in the sun.

If anyone knows who Tuffy’s wife was, or his wives were; whether Will “Gilligan” Truesdell and Larry Truesdell are brothers, half-brothers or the same person, please use the comment form on the Home page and get in touch. I don’t have any plans to write a piece of fiction about Tuffy. I think he did a good job of that himself. But he was a neighbour, sort of, and—how should I put this?

I’m nosy.