Ask me again after we get another National Championship. Until then - let's put all our resources into improving our defense and special teams....
I remember when we had a real alligator. It was kept in a pen on campus somewhere. One night John Reaves and another player got drunk and took an axe with the intent of chopping the gators' tail off. Fortunately the gator only got nicked, which is the only outcome of the incident that I recall.
Feelings would be hurt if a live Gator was used. I think the movie was the one where the kid flushed a baby gator down the toilet in NYC and it grew into a huge one? Anyway, such a thing was an urban myth in olden times. The 20th century was quite a time.
Cocodrilo, that live Gator was kept in a pen adjacent the the Bell Tower and auditorium. It was a chain-link enclosure, probably 30x30, slanted floor with water at one end and chain-link across the top. On hot summer days, with the water not recirculating fast enough, that gator pit would really stink. UF got rid of it in the early '70's.
Being a member of jax gator club we got to push on the field for the UF/pups game. I believe that was in the early 80s. Was a movie prop!
When I was in school, IIRC, somebody threw something into the pen and Albert ate it and I think it lodged in his intestines. He was operated on at the vet school but didn’t make it.
OT but Burt Reynolds, a former Nole, played a guy named Gator in one of his movies. Which was odd, since he certainly could have changed the name. To Nolan or something.
This sounds right. I remember seeing it once when I was a kid but it was gone by time I started at UF
When I was a little kid in the early '60s we'd go look at the gator on occasion. One time we went and there was a turtle in the pen with him.
