| Gunning with Garrison |
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Page 1 of 2 With a .50-caliber pistol and a willingness to do anything, ESPN's Cindy Garrison is picking off men one viewer at a time Wounded prey can charge at any moment. The huntress knows this and advances cautiously, tapping her shovel’s spade against the ammo racks in the garage while her father, Len, a shopping-center developer from Marin County, California, presses his cheek to the concrete, pellet gun in one hand, flashlight in the other. One pack rat hangs dead from the rafters, a trickle of blood tracing the timber. The other has retreated beneath the gun safe. Given the nearly complete taxonomy of sub-Saharan Africa hanging, stuffed, 50 feet away in the living room, the animal’s odds of escape are questionable at best. “We shot the one, and then the mama came out and started attacking!” This is Cindy Garrison, five-nine, 35, lean, blond, and athletic, with Xena’s poise, Daisy Duke’s charm, and Johnny Knoxville’s facility for physical humor. I’ve spent the last few days with Garrison at her father’s spread on Montana’s Big Hole River, and I’m coming to understand that when you anchor one of the world’s top-rated hunting shows, animals are constantly picking fights. As the host of Get Wild, Garrison travels the world and produces a weekly half-hour dispatch on fishing, hunting, or culture: casting for tigerfish on Namibia’s Chobe River, stalking water buffalo in Australia, wrestling locals on the Mongolian steppe. With only two cameramen, no security detail, and the expectation of high ratings, her job can often be dangerous. Garrison harbors scars from a tiger and a rabid monkey, plus some truly ghastly parasites injected by three species of filarial flies. Insurance companies won’t touch her. “The more dangerous it is, the more I like it,” she says. 
I’d been surprised that Cindy could have developed her tomboy charisma with two older twin sisters, Wendy and Holly; one younger, Katy; and no brothers. But Len explains: “Cindy was like my son. She spent summers on our ranch outside Klamath Falls, Oregon, learning to rope and ride and fix sprinkler heads.” After time at Santa Barbara City College and University of the Pacific, Cindy migrated to Alaska, where she finished her degree in psychology, worked as a heli-ski guide, and opened Garrison Adventures International. She’d just moved to Denver in 1998 when Len took her on her first African safari. Cindy ended up staying until 2003, leading clients fly-casting in Botswana, Namibia, and Zambia. She still occasionally leads safaris. (E-mail
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) Around that time, ESPN called in need of a guide for an episode of In Search of Fly Water. Garrison led the hosts on an outing and upstaged them. After the shoot, the producers offered her the job as host. “It was great, but it wasn’t me,” says Garrison of the show. Instead, in 2005 she launched Get Wild With Cindy Garrison, which used her personality and willingness to do just about anything for the camera to go straight to number one in ESPN Outdoors’ ratings. The badger waits until the endphoto shoot to launch its assault. Cindy, dressed in jaunty hunting garb, has been mugging for the camera with a 20-gauge, double-barrel Beretta. She’s just walked out of sight when—“Dad! Get the gun. He’s coming right for us.” |
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