Yes, It's Hot in Here: Adventures in the Weird, Woolly World of Sports Mascots by AJ Mass

Author:AJ Mass [Mass, AJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale Books
Published: 2014-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

In Which We Learn That Baseball Is Indeed a Business

WHEN JOHN ROUTH WAS IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, he was like most teenage boys—completely unable to think clearly in the presence of a cute girl. So when Mary Foster, the prettiest member of the cheerleading team, asked him if he wanted to be the mascot for the Hand Hornets, how could he possibly refuse? Besides, his own brother had crafted the costume’s head the year before. Little did he know at the time how that schoolboy crush would permanently alter the course of his life.

When Routh was a student at the University of South Carolina, one of the fraternities created a mascot named Big Spur to ride on its homecoming float, and after that parade, Big Spur started attending the school’s football games. But the athletic department was concerned about liability issues arising from having an unauthorized mascot at athletic events, and in 1980 they decided to phase in Cocky, a cute but dumpy-looking barnyard chicken of their own creation. Routh was given the “honor.”

The reception given to this unsolicited change in mascots was poor to say the least, so much so that the school decided to allow Big Spur to continue to perform at football games while relegating Cocky to “minor sports” like women’s basketball and men’s baseball. It was during a performance on the diamond that Routh’s work caught the eye of the NCAA. He was invited to travel with the team to Omaha for the College World Series.

“While I was there, I got to meet coach Ron Fraser of the Miami Hurricanes,” Routh said, “and he was really impressed with the way the crowd responded to my performance. After seeing what I could do, he decided he was going to create his own mascot character called the Miami Maniac, and the next April he came to watch me work as Cocky in South Carolina. I guess they were having a problem finding a decent performer. You can’t just put a guy in a suit and expect positive results.”

Fraser invited Routh down to be the Maniac for a weekend series against the Florida State Seminoles. To say it went well is an understatement. “The crowd was expecting the Maniac to just stand around, because that’s all he’d done,” Routh explained. “I got out there and ... did stuff. There was an audible gasp from the crowd.”

The following year, South Carolina again made the trip to Omaha, but was eliminated from the tournament early. The Miami coaches asked Routh to stay on as the “unofficial mascot of the College World Series.” Routh recalls that they took off the jersey identifying him as being from South Carolina and stitched together two T-shirts from the souvenir stand. Miami won the trophy and Routh celebrated with the team.

Fraser invited Routh, who was graduating, to come to Miami to work full-time as the Maniac. But South Carolina didn’t want to lose Routh either, and offered him a free ride to attend graduate school if he’d remain with the Gamecocks.

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