Category Archives: mascots

Big-game mascots

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Here’s another vote affirming that the 2022 men’s World Cup tournament was pretty pretty good. Fabulous sporting theater, with a championship final that just might have been the greatest soccer game ever played. (It certainly was the best I’ve seen. But it is difficult to accept that anyone has witnessed each of the 22 World Cup title matches dating to 1930, let alone every soccer game throughout history, so such a definitive statement clearly is on shaky ground. I’ve seen a mere nine Cup finals, two in person, and maybe a few hundred other games, total, in a sport that has been around for more than 150 years.)

Of course there were imperfections beyond the playing field, given the collision of convivial fun-and-games with the ugly back story of Qatar’s corrupt acquisition of the event, the host nation’s treatment of immigrant workers and its general strong-armed opposition to dissent.

But, OK, even if we don’t ignore those particulars—the way Fox TV did—it’s fair to wonder how the tense, riveting athletic drama could have been any better.

So let’s move on to the aspect of marketing, which is the soul of any such enterprise these days, and one relatively overlooked facet during the Qatar extravaganza was the 2022 World Cup mascot.

It happens that I fancy myself an aficionado of international sports mascots, having been on site for 11 Olympic Games and two World Cups. (The photo above is a team picture of the Olympic mascots I collected.)

In modern times, the mascot’s primary function is to symbolize a particular event or organization, a sort of branding exercise, and at the Qatar tournament the mascot, La’eeb, did check significant cultural and soccer-related boxes. La’eeb’s  personification was of a white, floating ghutrah—the traditional headdress worn by Arab men—with eyes, eyebrows and an open mouth, and its name is the Arabic word meaning “super-skilled player.”

Similar comparisons were Italy’s 1990 Cup mascot, a stick-figure with a soccer head called “Ciao,” the familiar Italian greeting, and Mexico’s 1970 “Juanito,” attired in a Mexican soccer uniform and a sombrero. FIFA, the sport’s international ruling body which owns and operates the World Cup, described La’eeb as being from “a parallel mascot-verse that is indescribable.”

But Sam Knight, in a wide-ranging and thoroughly enlightening World Cup report for The New Yorker, found La’eeb, being a sort of ghostly thing, reminded of the thousands of reported fatalities during the construction of the Cup venues by “hundreds of thousands of workers, imported from the Global South and frequently abused in one of the smallest and riches countries on earth.”

Knight wrote that, seeing La’eeb, “everyone was encouraged to find his or her own meaning, even if that meaning was death.”

Beyond that, a typical purpose of a big-event mascot is to plug the wares of official sponsors, and in Qatar’s case, that wasn’t about to happen after the local authorities’ last-minute ban on beer sales at Cup venues. Though Budweiser had a $75 million contract with FIFA and reportedly wound up losing at least $5 million during the tournament, the promotion of its product suddenly became out of the question.

So La’eeb obviously was no Cobi, a classic mascot role model from the 1992 Summer Olympics. A little cartoon dog, Cobi was depicted everywhere in Barcelona during those Games, a shameless huckster for Olympic sponsors: Lifting a bottle of Coca Cola, holding hands with an m&m (plain) and on and on. My friend Jay envisioned Cobi having a New York agent constantly on the phone lining up endorsement deals for the little dog.

Cobi was so named as a play on COOB which, translated and unscrambled, stood for Barcelona Olympic Organizing Committee, and was created by local artist Javier Mariscal, who had caused a bit of a stir by claiming he was “enjoying the most wonderful drug” when he first drew the critter.

Anyway. Cobi was a memorable token of that event. As were the polar bears, Hidy and Howdy, at Calgary’s 1988 Winter Olympics; and Neve and Gliz, a snowball and ice cube, at the 2006 Turin Winter Games; and the kookaburra (called Olly for Olympic), platypus (Sid for Syndey) and Millie (for millennium) at the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics.

Then there was Atlanta’s 1996 Izzy, impossible to be classified as a person, place or thing, so mysterious that its original name was Whatizit. Izzy didn’t appear to stand for anything—not the host nation, the fact that those were the Centennial Summer Olympics, nor something as relevant as the Olympic motto of “higher, swifter, stronger” that was embodied by a coyote, hare and bear at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games. At least with the ’84 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, the first in the United States in 52 years, organizers trotted out Sam the Eagle, an allusion to the national bird.

Up next, it recently was announced, will be a pair of anthropomorphic female caps for the 2024 Paris Games. They are Phryges—soft, generally red hats worn by freed slaves in Phrygia in an ancient Greek kingdom of what is now Turkey, but said to have a strong connection to French history because they were worn at the time of the French Revolution as a symbol of freedom.

Ultimately with these global hullaballoos, though, as the 2022 World Cup demonstrated, the main thing is showing off super-skilled players.

Animal behavior

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Anybody notice how disinterested the University of Georgia’s mascot appeared during Monday night’s national championship football game? Georgia and Alabama were going at each other hammer and tongs, with 67,000 spectators shaking the rafters and the game’s caffeinated commentators at full volume.

But a quick TV shot of Uga, the bulldog who represents Georgia’s athletic teams, revealed one spectator who wasn’t even pretending to care about developments on the field. Looking half-asleep, grumpy, wish I-were-somewhere-sniffing-fire-hydrants, Uga’s demeanor convinced me that real-life mascots aren’t the answer.

A mascot should embrace its cartoon aspect. It should be a little silly and certainly lively—a bit of dancing, some gymnastics, a few eye-catching stunts, possibly a feigned duel with the opposing team’s mascot. (To a point, anyway. I once covered a Georgia Tech-Maryland basketball game that featured what was dangerously close to a real fight between two students dressed as the Tech yellow jacket and Maryland turtle during a timeout. Could have called a technical foul on those people inside the wacky critter suits.)

Anyway, it turns out that there is a Mascot Hall of Fame (founded in 2005 and based just outside Chicago) and, among the 25 inductees, not one is live—though Blue, Butler University’s bulldog, was a finalist in last year’s voting. There are indeed a few interesting live mascots extant in college sports—among them, Ralphie, the University of Colorado buffalo, and Bevo, the University of Texas longhorn steer.

But the argument here is that those live beasts are not willing participants in the proceedings. Georgia’s Uga is a perfect example, thoroughly out of his element on a football sideline, requiring an air-conditioned dog house and the presence of bags of ice at home games because bulldogs are susceptible to heat stroke in the humid conditions of the Southeast. The Arkansas Razorback, Tusk, obviously wouldn’t know a fumble from an audible—and, furthermore, Tusk isn’t even a razorback, since those exist only in Australia. He’s a Russian boar (sort of in a razorback costume).

So why not leave the work to humans operating inside goofy outfits of anthropomorphically depicted wildcats and ducks and shocks of wheat? Such a tradition is how this topic showed up on my radar shortly before the Georgia-Alabama game.

There was an obituary about a New York Mets’ former ticket-office employee named Dan Reilly, whose place in mascot history came 58 years ago when he slipped into an unventilated, oversize papier-mache head with simulated stitches—to resemble a baseball—and became the original Mr. Met mascot.

Mr. Met was inducted into the Mascot Hall of Fame in 2007, described as “a humanoid with a baseball head.” He—Mr. Met, not Dan Reilly—thus is immortalized alongside, among others, the Hall’s first member, the Phillie Phanatic—whose human inside-job man, David Raymond, happens to be the founder of the Mascot Hall of Fame.

The Hall, which bills itself as essentially a children’s museum, describes its mission as “celebrating the unsung heroes of sports and communities.” Something we grown-ups can appreciate as well.

Of course the 1970s madcap San Diego Chicken—later recast as The Famous Chicken—is in the Hall, recognized by the New York Times as “perhaps the most influential mascot in sports history.” The Chicken pioneered the widespread creation of mascots in professional sports, though colleges have been cranking out less sophisticated ones for decades.

In my half-century as a sports journalist, I naturally have crossed paths with mascots tied to high schools, colleges, pros and Olympic sports, including one favorite at the former grass-roots domestic competition known as the U.S. Olympic Festival. That was in 1989 in Oklahoma City, when a lad named Ken Evans dressed himself in a furry critter suit and wandered among the 38 sports being contested over two weeks.

He found that “the big question” among Festival attendees “was, ‘What am I?’ Am I a bear or a gopher or what?’” He was a prairie dog, christened Boomer. And my recollection is that he lamented there being neither ventilation nor some sort of fan inside the big prairie-dog head, which became an enormous problem when he got sick to his stomach in the Oklahoma heat.

But, see: Even the people in the cheap seats could tell that was a mascot fully involved in the moment. One who knew the score.

Time out for NCAA mascots

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This is a pet peeve. Why is it that televised coverage of March Madness, which the NCAA insists is amateur sport contested by “student-athletes” motivated purely by devotion to Dear Old Alma Mater, skips the college atmospherics?

Instead of grave, ad nauseam dissection of strategy amid pauses in the action not already taken up with commercials—all that redundant hoops talk-talk-talk—how come we don’t get to eavesdrop on the occasional school fight song? Or catch a glimpse of some mascot high jinx?

During an early-round game in Memphis a couple of years ago, TV missed UCLA’s Joe Bruin acknowledging the geographic proximity to Graceland by donning dark glasses, scarf and white jump suit and hoofing to Elvis music. Can’t help falling in love with that.

elvis

Instead of official canned “CBS College Basketball Theme” music going in and out of advertising breaks at this weekend’s Final Four, why not linger briefly on the Oklahoma band pounding out a few bars of “Boomer Sooner”? (The music is a rip-off of Yale’s “Boola Boola,” but any fight song does a better job of placing the viewer on the scene than generic network tunes.)

What mostly separates the Big Dance from just another NBA production are the pep bands and anthropomorphically costumed wildcats and ducks and shocks of wheat—partners in high times for the schools and their most involved followers, the students and alumni.

Not so long ago, I found an interview of Iowa’s Herky the Hawk during a March Madness timeout every bit as stimulating as listening the coaches and players ponder tactics and who’s No. 1. Since birds don’t talk, Herky’s end of the conversation consisted of charades….

herky

Me: How tall are you?

Herky: (Tapping a finger six times into his other palm, pausing, then tapping four times) 6-foot-4.

Me: What year in school?

Herky: (Tapping twice). Sophomore.

Me: Your major?

Herky: (Rubbing his thumb against two fingers). Business.

When lightly regarded Stephen F. Austin shocked West Virginia in this year’s first round, then gave Notre Dame a serious scare, the folks on the “electric teevee machine”—as my friend Charlie Pierce calls it—raved about the gritty, unemotional play of SFA senior Thomas Walkup. What never was mentioned was how Walkup, a muscular lad with a wilderness beard, was doppelganger to the school’s lumberjack mascot. (Newsday’s Laura Albanese noticed, and posted the Tweet below.)

lumberjacklumberjack

West Virginia, by the way, joins Stephen F. Austin as one of the few colleges whose mascot appears in human form (also bearded) with its Mountaineer. Which is fine, though not as much a conversation piece as St. Joseph’s University’s student-inside-an-eagle suit, who tirelessly flaps his wings throughout games. Or Syracuse’s student-inside-a-giant-orange.

We all know the tournament has no real relationship to higher education. The NCAA’s current 14-year March Madness television-rights deal is worth $10.8 billion. A single conference, the ACC, already was guaranteed $30 million based on advancing six teams into this year’s Sweet Sixteen. The most successful coaches regularly are the highest-paid employees at their colleges. One of this year’s semifinals features two teams—North Carolina vs. Syracuse—shaking off the effects of recent academic fraud.

By stripping away the peripheral ambiance—which, I submit, is a saving grace for an otherwise cynical and hypocritical operation—television’s treatment of the event further amplifies the serious-business aspect. At least give me a hint of campus life with the periodic fight song. And a student in a wacky critter suit.

(Mizzou's Truman, left, and me)

(Mizzou’s Truman, left, and me)