BREVARD’S AWARD-WINNING SENIOR NEWSPAPER
Volume 18 Number 2
OF FLORIDA
July 2014
myseniorlife.com
Parrish teams up with Mayo Clinic page 20
Cocoa Beach is ‘Animal’s’ sanctuary
FEATURES
Local author Anna Flowers in upcoming documentary page 15
Cocoa Beach resident Jim Myers wrestled for decades as George “The Animal” Steele, while also teaching and coaching at a Detroit high school. Senior LIfe Photo By MIKE GAFFEY Jim Myers said he came to Cocoa Beach to die. Instead, he found new reasons to live. Myers, 77, who rose to fame as the hairy, green-tongued, turnbucklechomping pro wrestling wildman George “The Animal” Steele, had been diagnosed in 1988 with Crohn’s disease, an incurable bowel ailment, and had been told by his doctors to move to the mountains to spend his last days. Suffering from bad knees and preferring beaches to mountain peaks,
Myers and his wife of 58 years, Pat, chose to move to Florida instead. They looked at residences in South and West Florida before a fellow pro wrestler, Tony Garea, invited Steele to his Cocoa Beach condominium after a wrestling show in Orlando. “As we came across those two bridges, it was like utopia at the end of those two bridges,” Steele recalled. “It was like ‘Wow!’ ” The couple eventually bought an oceanfront condo. There, Myers, who had spent three decades wrestling around the world, grappled with his crippling disease for 10 years. Then in
1998, Myers’ stunned doctors told him his Crohn’s had vanished “Just last week the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation sent one of their people from New York and a couple of photographers to do a story in their magazine about my health and my improvement,” Myers said. He spent more than a month in the hospital after his final match due to Crohn’s and once considered suicide because of his struggles with the disease. “I haven’t had any markers of Crohn’s. I’m not saying I’m in remission, but I have no
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Cape Canaveral boomer still playing baseball
Steele continued page 6
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page 22
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http://suntree-internal-medicine.com onlineLife New Make your appointment Senior • JULY 2014
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