Animals draw crowds at Kansas State Fair (+video)

From the world-famous Budweiser Clydesdales to waltzing tigers to a guy on a 9-foot pogo stick to a Roman Catholic priest with a hula-hoop, you see all kinds of stuff on opening day at the Kansas State Fair.

The 103rd edition of the annual classic opened Friday with lots of traditional exhibits and activities and some new things to see and do.

Much of the crowd’s attention on opening day went to the Clydesdales, the equine ambassadors of the Budweiser beer brand and perennial stars of Super Bowl commercials.

“They’re big and pretty,” said Dana Pieper, a horse owner from Palco.

And seeing them up close is a lot better than seeing them on the small screen, she said.

“When you see them on TV, you have a computer re-enactment of something telling a story or something,” she said. “Here, this is real life.”

On the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the horses at the State Fair are the same “hitch team” that appeared in what could be Budweiser’s most iconic commercial ever, the aired-only-once Super Bowl ad tagged “We’ll Never Forget.”

In that commercial, the horse team drew a wagon through New York City and knelt and bowed to the skyline where the Twin Towers used to be.

Clydesdale wrangler Scott Morrison, who hails from Minnesota, said traveling with and caring for the big horses is a lot of work, especially setting up their temporary tented stalls. But he said he loves the job.

“You get to do a lot of traveling and see a lot of nice places and meet a lot of good people,” he said.

Activity pretty much stopped and every head turned Friday afternoon when the wranglers hooked up the horses to their trademark beer wagon and paraded through the fairgrounds. If you want to see the Clydesdales in action, Saturday will be your last chance because they’re only at the fair for a two-day run.

‘Wits about you’

Another new act drawing big crowds was Bruno’s Tiger Show, appearing daily at 11 a.m. and 1:30 and 6:30 p.m. in the fairgrounds’ Gottschalk Park.

Long, blond hair streaming out from under a jungle-khaki snapback ball cap, Bruno leaps and swirls as he leads seven tigers – six orange and one white – through a routine of jumping through hoops, dancing in circles, rolling over and even walking high wires.

“I don’t know who’s got who trained in here – they’ve got me running around,” he quips to the crowd as he puts the tigers through their paces inside the wire-fenced ring.

Bruno’s frenetic and sweaty performance is as much self-preservation as showmanship. His head constantly swivels as he tries to keep track of all the big cats surrounding him, and his girlfriend, Jenny Courtney, acts as a spotter and calls out if one of the tigers behind him starts to come down off its pedestal.

“You do got to have your wits about you when you’re in there,” he said after the show. “They are trained tigers, not tame tigers.”

Ask Bruno, actually Brunon Blaszak, and he’ll show you the three long scars on his leg where the tigers got a little too playful.

“It’s just a natural cat reaction,” he said. “When they hit you with their paws and claws, it’s not like getting hit by your housecat.”

Blaszak is a third-generation tiger man whose family runs the Tigerland Oasis attraction in Myakka City, Fla. His show is part wow factor and part education.

While wild-animal shows have drawn protest in recent years, he says shows and attractions like his family’s are part of keeping the species alive. He emphasizes that all his tigers have been born and raised in captivity and that wild tigers are nearing extinction with some subspecies already gone.

“I think it’s kind of important for people to know tigers are slowly dwindling,” he said. “I would find it disastrous if a beautiful species like this were to disappear and the only place you could see tigers is in a book or on a computer screen.

“It’s like a horse or a dog show. I do tiger shows. It’s what I do and I like doing it.”

‘Pogo Fred’

Not on the official schedule but another show worth seeing is “Pogo Fred.” Fred Grzbowski of Ohio is a roaming performer who sets up his sticks where and when the muse strikes him.

His signature trick is pulling a stringless tennis racket down over his head, body, legs and finally feet as he bounces on a record-setting 9-foot, compressed-air actuated pogo stick.

As he pulls the racket down over one shoulder at a time, he tells the crowd, “This is not a gimmick, this is not contortion. This is just stupid.”

Grzbowski punctuates his routine with some mildly off-color standup, er, hop-up comedy. Typical quip, as he pulls the racket down over his chest: “I do this for one reason: It gives me cleavage.”

He closes out the show with backflips on a regular-size pogo stick and a warning to the children in the crowd: “Don’t try this at home. Do it at your neighbor’s house. Or do it at school so your parents can sue.”

And sometimes, it’s not the scheduled acts that turn heads at the fair.

Dressed in his black-and-white clerical garb, Father Jason Borkenhagen of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Parsons wandered through the horse barns with a bright yellow hula-hoop hung over his shoulder, leading the annual visit for the church’s eighth-grade youth group.

The whole group had hula-hoops and matching church T-shirts, except the priest. But they weren’t the Catholic hula-hoop performing troupe they looked like.

“We made them at the Kansas Energy Expo booth,” Borkenhagen explained.

He declined to give a demonstration.

“I gave up hula-hooping a long time ago,” he chuckled.

This story was originally published September 11, 2015 at 2:12 PM with the headline "Animals draw crowds at Kansas State Fair (+video)."