It appears that my trip to the Mid West is more likely to happen. I spoke to Interim Coach Skipper and he told me I did not need to remain with the team while they performed their calisthenics and tackling rituals and that I should take a golf cart that says “Bruins Football” and is used to cart around players with broken femurs and drive up to the Evanston area.
The football facility has been more empty than it was in the days of Coach Foster. In those days, it was full of visiting dignitaries: Bill Walton, Dorian Thompson-Robinson, even Stephen Davis. The best of the Professional Sports landscape convened here, and I was very busy fist-pumping at them and carrying various flags, and occasionally doing complicated hand-slapping rituals with their children. Coach Skipper has favored a more austere environment, wanting the players to focus on the fundamentals and not as he said “taking selfies doing butt bumps with the mascot.” These are not the ideal conditions for mascotry, but I also believe that the professional is able to work within whatever restrictions the Coach sets.
I have, with other professionals, discussed the essential traits of a good mascot. I believe that the essence of good mascotting comes from the principle of buffoonery. The mascot must be a silly, jovial oaf whose antics entertain the crowd without ever becoming a sad or macabre spectacle. One’s thoughts naturally turn to stories of the infamous inflatable velociraptor who attempted to rollerskate down stars, slipped, and went flying as its mouth flopped open in a disgusting, leering spectacle, its tail deflating in silence as it was swarmed by medical personnel. The crowd was not guffawing but terrified that the fool had broken his limbs. My colleague, the duck from Oregon with whom I had passed many hours discussing the finer points of our profession, also pointed to the time the Denver Nuggets mountain lion passed out while being lowered from the arena ceiling before landing on the floor in a lifeless heap in a demonstration that looked like a warning sent from a rival mascot crime family.
The professional mascot should charm and delight, unlike, for example, the dreadful Stanford “tree.” I had endured its disgraceful antics for several years every time it visited, many times suspiciously wavering and tottering in an amateurish stomach-turning parody of the types of wholesome capering about one should expect from a trained mascot.
It is difficult to describe what I mean by professionalism in buffoonery, but I often heard this anecdote from my father, also named Joe Bruin. He told me that he heard of a mascot who had gone over to a section filled with rowdy children who had spent hours at a tailgate ingesting the type of candy where one licks a sugary stick and then swirls it around in pure sugar, and he had een warned that these children had already been chided for roughhousing. Nevertheless, the mascot walked over there, greeted the children and the largest and most aggressive went in for what appeared to be a hug before kicking the mascot in the most sensitive of regions. He wandered off into the tunnel to shake off the pain before returning to the section and another child then repeated the motion. Once again he returned to the tunnel before going out again, knowing the fate that awaited his most delicate parts, and once again another child delivered. A cheerleader organizing t-shirts to be thrown to the crowd said you cannot keep going out there, please find another section, but the intrepid mascot, without flinching, took another five kicks and one punch without showing pain, discomfort, or disgust, and managed to high five and take photos with more than a dozen children in the section. The mascot completed the game before retreating to his quarters with a package of frozen peas, a job honorably and professionally done.
Many mascots become briefly fashionable as the ideal of the profession. For a time, I suppose it was Gritty, a hockey mascot with maniacal eyes and a morbid, terrifying grin. I suppose those in the profession valued a mascot who appears to be performing his duties with the unhinged enthusiasm of an escaped maniac, but I suspect it will not be long until the pendulum swings in the other direction and the professional standard defaults to those of us who have perfected the more subtle mascotry arts instead of flashy, fashionable antics such as breakdancing or leaping from a trampoline and dunking flaming basketballs before getting immediately sprayed by a team with fire extinguishers.
I motored up the scenic environs of Interstate 90 from the airport, bludgeoned by the ubiquity of Brian Urlacher hair replacement billboards. Urlacher is himself one of the most famous Lobos from New Mexico, a program that contributed to an incident that led to the ouster of Coach Foster. I do not care for the slanderous insinuations about Coach Foster. In my experience, Coach Foster was a good, honorable coach who acted from the most noble instincts of his way of life. I do not believe that it was a defect of character that led to the team deploying their linebackers ineffectively against the relentless New Mexico rushing attack, nor do I think it was his intention to put heralded transfer quarterback Nico Iamaleava in a position where his statistics are well below where they had been at the University of Tennessee even though he had deployed a large section of the program’s resources to bring him over to our facility.
It is not the job of the mascot to question the Coach on the direction of the program but only to stir up the fans in support, to do pushups after scoring touchdowns, and to never hang one’s head or be caught by cameras in the “surrender cobra” position after an ill-advised turnover or defensive breakdown. These things are simply not done by the professional mascot.
As I motored up the twisting byways of Evanston, I could not help but think of how things had been in the heady early days of Coach Foster’s leadership. In those days, we had a larger staff of mascots, particularly with my colleague Josephine Bruin. From time to time, she would try to show me videos of other mascots such as the time Tommy Lasorda tried to assault the Philadelphia Phanatic after it made a series of provocative belly shakes in his direction and the old Coach was offended enough to try to steal the Phanatic’s personal ATV and to knock down the mascot and beat him with the Phanatic’s own crude effigy of himself, a video that I admit I had watched alone in my parlor during off-hours several times and found very amusing despite the Phanatic's actions that went beyond what I feel is appropriate mascot behavior.
Of course, I had explained that I was far too busy attending to my duties: checking “Let’s Go Bruins” cards to make sure that no one had slipped in a card with obscenities, combing the costume fur, cleaning and oiling every part of the hot dog gun to make sure that it fired consistently and regularly but would not cause an injury to a spectator's face. I suggested if she has time to watch Phanatic videos, she surely had time to take comical photos with Jonathan Ogden where he looks enormous compared to even the largest mascot heads, as I had been alerted that he had just arrived on campus.
I arrived at the Lake and saw another mascot just sitting there, saying perhaps to no one in particular how much he enjoyed the smell of dying fish in the air on a crisp autumn day. He turned to me and noticed that I too was a mascot. He asked where I had come from and I told him I was the Bruin after working for the interim Coach. I am not sure why I did not mention working for Coach Foster.
The Wildcat told me he was slightly embarrassed discussing important matters of mascotry with me, a mascot who worked in the Rose Bowl while he was at home in a stadium that fits fewer people than our basketball arena. But we both, I suppose, were working at difficult times. “I have heard that previous mascots here were locked in a cage until Northwestern scored, which rarely happened, back in the ‘80s,” the Wildcat said. I resolved that no matter what happened that afternoon I would learn some of the more restrained antics that Coach Skipper preferred, perhaps a Jose Canseco-style forearm bump.
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