At the risk of talking about stuff I don’t know anything about, does this article by Siegfried & Roy pal — and casino mogule sponsor — Steve Wynnn seem to be spinning the whole Roy-attacked-by-tiger tale in about a dozen different directions? To paraphrase:
See, the tiger didn’t attack Roy, understand? It was distracted by some lady who had a big hair-do. It was her fault. And she tried to pet the tiget, and Roy threw himself in the way, heroically. Except he was also trying at the same time to pull the tiger back on its leash. And the tiger did grab his arm in his mouth, but it was, like, careful about it. And a bunch of stagehands tried to tackle the tiger, but it didn’t lash out, it was just confused, and when it grabbed Roy by the neck, it wasn’t an attack, it was just trying to carry him away like a kitten, to protect him from the lady with the big hair-do, and there wasn’t any neck damage done, except for piercing a vertebral artery, which is what really caused the stroke and massive bleeding. It was the artery’s fault, not the tiger. And the lady with the big hair, her fault, too. And please don’t shut down the big show that’ the main draw at my casino, pretty-please. Just pray for the act’s, er, Roy’s full recovery. For his sake, his health, not just because it’s worth a lot of money to my casino. Though, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that, right?
As for what might have happend backstage, when the tiger walked “with perfect blocking” back to the cage, carrying Roy by the neck, “Stagehands backstage used a technique that made Montecore release Roy.”
Makes you wonder what the “technique” was.
Not to minimize the injury done to Roy here, or to impugn S&R’s famed love for their big cats and all, but … um … to say that “What happened Friday night was a fluke, something that never should have occurred. And something that no one could have foreseen” seems more than a bit … ah, disingenuous.
A Vegas “casino mogul,” disingenuous? Say it ain’t so, Dave!
(via BuzzMachine)
According to CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/10/07/roy.attacked.ap/index.html
They had to use a fire extinguisher to subdue the tiger.
I’m sure that’s in all the tiger-handling books. Weird.
I mean, it’s probably effective (apparently so), and it beats striking the tiger with cattle prods or something, but it the interview makes it sound like some mystical, “magical” way of calming a tiger into releasing something (someone).
Fire extinguisher. Gotta remember that one.
I thought that the way you sudued a tiger was either with 10 ton weight or a qumquat.
Well, see, the tiger’s perfectly friendly as long as you don’t provoke it.
It’s just unfortunate that having hair provokes it.
Well, then it’s a good thing that some of us are becoming less and less provocative as the years go by …