Dan Radakovich had an orange tiger paw on his lapel and a gleam in his eye. Clemson’s athletic director was excited one summer afternoon in 2017.
It wasn’t just the glow of a football national championship won seven months earlier in Tampa.
He wanted to talk about a new alliance with LSU, Auburn and Missouri, something called the Tigers United University Consortium.
“I love this,” Radakovich said. “It’s so good for Clemson, and for LSU, Auburn and Missouri, too.
A movement of smart people dedicated to saving wild tigers looks even better right now. It’s in hard contrast to a seven-part documentary that’s surged to the top of the Netflix popularity list. Ratings are surely boosted by coronavirus stay-at-home orders.
is about the sordid American business of captive tigers. It features real-life characters fiction envies (spoiler alert!):
Joe Exotic, just one of those eventually imprisoned, gun-blasting egomaniac wanna-be country singer and gubernatorial candidate kind of guys with a rural Oklahoma zoo and a husband who was 32 years younger before he shot himself on company property.
Doc Antle, founder/director of Myrtle Beach Safari and accused by a former worker of running a cult-like, sweatshop workplace while exploiting women.
Carole Baskin, noted animal activist and founder of Tampa’s Big Cat Rescue. Exotic with every other breath alleges she had her mysteriously missing ex-husband fed to some of those rescued tigers but she seems nice.
With a cameo appearance by Clemson President James Clements as the guy who came up with the idea of pitching in to save a beloved, endangered species.
“I’ve only watched a little bit of (‘Tiger King’),” Wright, dean emeritus of Clemson’s College of Behavioral, Social and Health Sciences, said by phone. “But I know all about it.”
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