PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

Sport Jesters
By Lisa Coffman

Photos by Michael S. Wirtz

The invasion of Richmond is underway.

Dave Raymond has arrived in the heart of the city, at the Coliseum, coming to the aid of the Richmond Renegades.

The Renegades could use the help. Even though they're in first place in the Eastern Hockey League, tonight they're playing their arch-nemesis, the second-place Charlotte Checkers.

So they've paid Raymond 3,000 to come down from Philadelphia, put on a ridiculous blue outfit and entertain-or at least distract-the faithful. Raymond has impeccable credentials for this kind of buffoonery: For 16 years, he was the Phillie Phanatic, the darling of Veterans Stadium and bane of visiting athletes and umpires.

Right now, it's 38 minutes to the opening face-off. Raymond and his assistant Mark Doughty, who have made the drive down from Pennsylvania in a rented minivan, are walking around the arena, still dressed in matching blue nylon warmup suits and chatting with the crew. The Checkers are warming up on the ice. Section 10 is already shouting obscenities at the team, which, this being minor leagues, seems on the small side for such wrath.

"I don't like what I'm hearing," mutters Doughty. Raymond doesn't mind.

"What you don't want is silence," he says. "Fans spread out, not yelling. Empty seats. That is when I start looking at myself in the mirror saying, 'Look at what you do for a living.'"

Raymond heads for the dressing room (8 by 10 feet, with a water jug, a clothes rack, and a tiny adjoining bathroom) to suit up as Sport, mascot for hire. Promotions director Casey Zimmer shows up to brief Raymond.

"A few warnings," Zimmer says. "That section 10L can be...physical."

Raymond: "fine, fine. The physical ones are the ones that have fun with me."

Zimmer: "Be wary of the Zamboni driver, he will run you over. He is surly."

Raymond: "I like a negative relationship with the Zamboni driver. Can you get me snowballs?"

Zimmer: "Oh, and there is a hot tub, down on the left..."

Raymond (ecstatic): "A hot tub..."

Every culture has, at the heart of its festivities, a costumed figure.

The Welsh have Mari Lwyd, a man in a sheet and horse skull, who goes house to house at Christmas, engaging in poetry duels with homeowners and snorting their wassail. In the Enugu district of Nigeria, villagers bid farewell to their dead with the 11 foot-tall Odo, who wears a wooden headpiece, leopard skin, body suit made of plants, and who dances to chants of praise and a volley of gunshots. At the Dionysia festivals in ancient Greece, revelers ran through the streets in costumes featuring giant phalluses.

And us? We've got a creature made of green carpet whose tongue unrolls like a party favor, a mutant chicken that drops baseballs out of his tail, and now, Sport, freelance furball.

Sport is a reincarnation of sorts for Raymond, who gyrated, whammied and four-wheeled his way to fame and Phillie folklore as the Phirst Phanatic. It all started back in 1978 when the Phillies front office persuaded 22-year-old Raymond, then a University of Delaware physical education major working as the office gofer, to try on the Phanatic suit.

"My fraternity brothers said, "Don't do it,'" Raymond recalls, "'You'll be spit on and have beer thrown at you! And that's when the Phillies win!'"

But Raymond possessed the gift of charming a crowd. And for the next decade and a half, he parlayed his outsized antics into an act that was often more of a crowd-pleaser than the home was.

When he decided in 1994 to abandon a job that he says paid six figures (he won't say which six) and strike out on his own, his understudy, Tom Burgoyne, became the Phanatic. And Raymond took on a new alter ego, Sport, a chubby blue anthropomorph with a feathery beak and a pot belly about the size of a hoop skirt.

Sport was designed by Raymond's business partners, Bonnie and Wayde Erickson, who created the original Phanatic. Their company is Acme Mascots ("Is Your Mascot Experience Sub-Par? Acme Mascots can provide expertise..."), and the idea is to eventually reap Sport for television, cartoon and stuffed animal fame of, say, a cultural giant like the purple dinosaur Barney.

"We want to promote sports, health, nutrition and fitness for kids," Raymond says.

Nutrition?

Mostly, what Acme promotes is Dave Raymond in a blue costume. Have squirt gun, will travel. Single A to AAA baseball. Basketball. Hockey. Golf. Yakima, Moline, Tupelo, Cedar Rapids, Mexico City, Richmond.

Being a mascot is fairly weird, but there are stranger career paths. Paul Devery, who is now Boomer, the mascot for the Trenton Thunder minor league baseball team, used to drive Oscar Mayer's Weiner Mobile. The Mobile is a 23-foot-long car shaped like a hot dog. Devery would tour the East Coast handing out weiner whistles.

Two years ago, Devery was watching a Thunder game and got the idea he might be a good mascot. He tried out, and got the job.

How do you audition to be a mascot?

"I juggled oranges, got on the table, I took out a bat and was goofing around...It's bizarre," Devery says.

"I interviewed last April in Detroit for the Tigers' mascot. I was in this stereotypical office, people in ties sitting around a mahogany table. They said, 'OK, Paul, show us what you'd do if you were in the stadium on a sunny day.' I just kinda danced around the room."

The Tigers offered him the job and a big raise, Devery says, but he opted to stay in Trenton, where his day job is teaching fourth grade in the public schools. ("No, I don't tell the kids. That would ruin the magic. I just say I'm a good friend of Boomer's.")

On the field for the Thunder, Devery's act includes water balloons, fishing rods, sling shots, and constant frenetic activity. He goes through six t-shirts a night and loses 15 to 20 pounds during the baseball season.

Like all professional mascots, Devery claims individuality.

"I grew up in Mount Laurel. The Phanatic was the king of mascots. But I didn't model Boomer on anybody. You got to be your own person," Devery says.

Mascots have all kinds of historical predecessors, particularly clowns. "Clowns are as old as we have recorded history for," says Penn folklore lecturer Dorothy Noyes, "although they're usually not written about historically, unless somebody is trying to legislate them out of existence."

Modern sports mascotdom, though, pretty much begins with the San Diego Chicken.

One day in 1974, a sales executive from the San Diego radio station KGB showed up at the San Diego State University radio station. It was Easter break, deserted, only five students there. He said, "Who wants to work for KGB radio?" A real radio station? Five hands went up.

The sales exec cautioned, "It's not what you think. We need somebody to dress up in a chicken suit."

Five hands stayed up. The exec paused n the doorway forty-five seconds, according to legend, made eye contact with one of the student DJ's, and said to Ted Giannoulas, ""You're small, you'll fit the suit."

Granolas thought, "I'll work hard in this stupid outfit, and maybe they'll offer me a real job."

But it turns out this fairly mild guy had a knack for being a chicken. The radio station started out paying him $2 an hour to make promo appearances around town. On his own, he called the hometown baseball team, the Padres, and asked, if the Chicken showed up at the game, could he get in free? Yeah, why not? So he did. He cavorted a little in the stands, did a little Chicken shtick, and the Padres invited him back. He ran out to umpire Art Williams, pretended the ump tripped him, threw a dust-kicking fit, then, in an inspired second, hiked his leg and pretended to pee on the umpire. He heard "40,000 fans laugh from the belly." He was addicted. By 1978 he was a cultural icon in San Diego, attracting national attention. Making $5.50 an hour.

"The Padres didn't pay me," Giannoulas recalls. "I was still an employee of the radio station."

It's a long story. Ted Turner gets involved. Big salaries get discussed. KGB radio station ups Giannoulas' salary to fifty grand a year. Then he gets fired. Then there's a lawsuit to decide who owns the Chicken, Giannoulas or KGB. It goes all the way to the California Supreme Court, with the Chicken doing his act before the bench. The court ruled in Giannoulas' favor.

"They decided it wasn't the costume that made the Chicken, it was the act. They likened me to Bela Lugosi," says Giannoulas. "What Bela Lugosi is to Dracula, that is what Ted is to the Chicken."

He became a freelance mascot. That was in 1979. Now he's on the road 200-250 nights a year. He earns into the six-digit range (he won't say which six).

"I never thought it would last 21 days, let alone 21 years," says Giannoulas. His executive assistant, Jane Bernard, bridles a little at the word mascot. "He's more of a sports comedian," she says.

"I'm not trying to sound boastful," says Giannoulas. "There's Michael Jordan, and there're basketball players. There are the Beatles, and there are rock-and-roll bands. There's the Chicken, and then there's trick-or treat. People call themselves mascots, they put on a costume and jump up and down, and think they can get mentioned in the same breath as the Chicken."

It is a bit of a shame to put Dave Raymond in a costume. Blond and blue-eyed, he looks better suited to playing Barbie's boyfriend Ken than the blue and shambley Sport. But what else are you going to do with all Raymond's energy except hang a 30-pound costume on it?

Since the hockey game began, Sport has climbed over section after section of fans, sometimes dancing over them with their heads between his legs by walking with a large green sneaker on each of a double row of seat backs. ("He's sick. He's sick," mutters one fan. "It's what I like about him.")

Sport made a beeline for the "physical" section 10L, which was chanting, "Sport, Sport, you suck." There, he got manhandled by one of its rougher-looking members (Doughty trailing discreetly all the while), then made a whispered pact with the guy to stage a Silly String fight.

He has sneezed into popcorn, dirty danced with fans, goosed refs, kissed women (making a hubba-hubba heart-thump gesture with his paws), messed up sculpted hairdos, and stuck a small plunger on a bald man's head. ("There are lotsa great tricks you can do with bald men"). At the next break about 20 junior league hockey players will tackle him on the ice, and he will judge the Loudest Fan Contest. Raymond works the crowd for about 20 minutes at a time, then retreats to the dressing room, where he peels off the costume down to bicycle shorts and knee pads, and sits with a small fan balanced on his knees aimed at his chest, and pours sweat.

For his laborers, Raymond collects per-game fees that range from $3,000 to $7,000. He won't say how much of a cut in pay he's taken from his Phanatic days. (And no, he says, he did not become a multimillionaire as the Phanatic, as some rumors have it. There was this investment n an automated laundry-restaurant that didn't go right. "Otherwise I'd be worrying about the stock market right now.")

There are perils to mascot work. This season, Wild Wing, the mascot of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks hockey team, tried to jump over a wall of fire, but bungled his trampoline launch, fell into the fire and had to be rescued by cheerleaders.

One time, the Chicken left his head and tail in a duffel bag in a Florida diner and didn't notice until he got to his next gig in Connecticut. Giannoulas called the diner. "They run the head to the airport and buy it a ticket, strap it into its seat. It arrives in the third inning. I have never missed a game."

There was the time that Raymond, freelancing as Stuff, the Orlando Magic mascot, hung his 30-pound suit on a fire-extinguishing system pipe in his hotel room, left the room, and flooded two floors of the hotel.

Once, Sport walked off the dugout roof as he was watching fans' antics at a Hudson Valley Renegade minor-league baseball game near Poughkeepsie. Raymond landed on his head on the concrete below and was carried off to convalesce in the dugout bathroom amid the baseball effluvia: old tobacco juice, sunflower seed hulls, and battered porcelain.

And there are legal perils.

In May, a Chicago jury ordered Giannoulas to pay $300,000 to a Chicago Bulls cheerleader allegedly injured when the Chicken tackled her during a 1991 game.

Raymond has been sued because "I sat on a guy's lap, and he claims he lost the ability to make love to his wife. We lost some money there. I was more careful after that."

Raymond was also sued when a backup Phanatic frightened a man in 1991, causing him to fall down an embankment. "I wasn't anywhere near the place, but they sued me, too. Litigation will be the death of mascots. We won't be able to do anything but the Miss America wave."

And then, there are the perils of women.

"Dance clubs would hire me to come and dance as the Phanatic," Raymond says. "I wish I'd had the costume back in my single life. Women would be grabbing at (me) in 30 seconds. You ask them to dance as a regular guy and get ignored, but you get all dressed up like a moron, and these barriers just come down."

Eighteen years of working crowds in a fur suit has made Raymond "more introverted," he says. "I just kind of shy away from people when I am off work." He is newly married, second time around ("my career had nothing to do with the first divorce," he says flatly). He has a 6-year-old son, Kyle, from his first marriage.

What does Kyle, a diminutive kindergartner with white-blond hair about to burst into cowlicks, tell his friends about Dad's job?

"I don't tell them," says Kyle.

Why not?

"Forgot."

What do you want to be when you grow up?

"Hockey player. Maybe Baby Sport, with my Dad." He smiles sweetly at his father.

"Nicky's dad goes to, like, a real job," Kyle offers. Raymond groans and drops his head.

Don't people ever ask Raymond if this is a good thing for a grown man to be doing for a living?

"Yeah. But I show 'em my paycheck," he says. "At least I get paid for being an idiot."

But the check isn't the motivator. You want to know the secret to these guys, the old-timers like Giannoulas and Raymond, the up-and-coming ones like Burgoyne and Devery?

They have this schmaltzy, sweet side. They love getting laughs, getting hugs, getting the shy kid with pigtails to suddenly blurt out in a tiny voice, "I love you, Sport." They get tremulous recalling such love declarations, seeming to briefly confuse adoration of the character for adoration of the guy inside.

"You can't ever get sick of it," Raymond says. The thing I get sick of is preparing and getting there."

"Once I am in the costume, I'm fine. People fall in love with the character. Especially kids. You're dealing with happiness.


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