Photo: Ian Dewsbury.
The scar drawing a pale line across my right thigh is hard to see, but you can just make it out. It was once accompanied by three adjacent parallel scar lines, but those have completely faded in the 16 years since they were inflicted by the claw of a seven-foot-tall black bear named Caesar.
In April 2006, in a nightclub closed to the public in Akron, Ohio, I was grappling Caesar while wearing an almost pornographically tight wrestling leotard. I was a writer for the UK men’s magazine Loaded, whose name was emblazoned across my chest as I tussled with the animal.
Jamie and Caesar in 2006. Photo: Ian Dewsbury.
In the ’90s, Loaded had huge cultural clout, both chronicling and defining the ascendance of the UK’s “lad culture,” a hedonistic celebration of booze, drugs, sex, raving, and rock ’n’ roll. The magazine contained as many pieces of great writing as it did photos of naked women, and it was a publishing phenomenon.
By the time I worked there, in the mid-2000s, Loaded’s heydays were gone, and the magazine mixed morally reprehensible stunt features with tackier near-nude photoshoots. Unsurprisingly, that editorial policy saw the brand disintegrate into cultural irrelevance shortly afterwards.
But back then, at age 21 and under pressure to deliver more controversial, high-octane features, I thought I’d struck furry gold when I read reports from Ohio about a man named Sam Mazzola and his sidekick, Caesar the Wrestling Bear. Sam organized bear wrestling shows in the Akron nightclub, letting drunk clubbers grapple the creature while animal rights protesters waved placards outside. I phoned Sam, and a few days later I was in Akron, screeching while Caesar bit the top of my head.
That was when my obsession with Sam’s world began, fueled by the ballistic bear-wrestling empire he’d created as well as some disturbing and confusing behavior I noticed from him. I go into more detail about my wrestle with Caesar, and why I returned to tell his fuller story, in the first episode of , the podcast inspired by—but which ultimately became so much bigger than—that afternoon in the bar. Working on the series helped me understand the magnetic, blinding pull of exotic animals, an allure that Sam had built his career on and used for darker purposes.
