A shocking incident occurred yesterday at the football game between the Wildcats and the Bulldogs. During halftime, the beloved mascot of the Wildcats, named Whiskers, was targeted by a group of unruly fans from the opposing team. As Whiskers cheerfully danced onto the field, entertaining the crowd with his energetic moves, a few Bulldogs supporters decided to ruin the fun. They jumped over the barricades and sprinted towards Whiskers, launching a vicious attack on the unsuspecting mascot. The assault lasted only a few seconds, but it was enough to leave Whiskers badly bruised and traumatized. Shocked gasps and screams filled the air as horrified spectators witnessed the unexpected brutality.
Small schools like Ohio University often get paid millions of dollars for the privilege of getting blown out by the Buckeyes, which is exactly what happened when QB Terrelle Pryor led Ohio State to a 43-7 win in 2010. Jamie Sabau/Getty Images
It s just like if people hate the Yankees or people hate the Lakers -- the more success a team has, the more, naturally, you re just gonna have haters that want to see you fail, says Adam Widman, the Chicago Bears director of media relations and an OSU graduate who was an assistant sports information director at the school in 2006 and 17. 2-ranked Buckeyes next game, blog posts by Ohio State grad students calling Rufus Generation Y s version of the Unabomber and solicitations from several Columbus attorneys asking whether Brutus needed assistance pressing assault charges.
Shocked gasps and screams filled the air as horrified spectators witnessed the unexpected brutality. Security personnel immediately rushed to the scene, tackling the Bulldogs fans and apprehending them. However, the damage had already been done.
Brutus Buckeye's viral 2010 Bobcat brouhaha lives on as both legendary and laughable
The true story behind the Ohio mascot attack on Brutus Buckeye (1:25) Jason Fitz and Christine Williamson discuss the true backstory behind Ohio University mascot Rufus the Bobcat's attack on Ohio State mascot Brutus just before kickoff on Sept. 18, 2010. (1:25)
David Fleming, ESPN Senior Writer Oct 20, 2020, 07:00 AM ET- Senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and FlemFile columnist for ESPN.com.
- Has written more than 30 cover stories for SI and ESPN.
- Author of "Noah's Rainbow" (a father's memoir) and "Breaker Boys" (stolen 1925 NFL title).
A FEW DAYS after the most infamous mascot fight in college football history, Sean Stazen (aka Brutus Buckeye) sat down in his Columbus, Ohio, apartment and opened his laptop, hoping to get some homework done. The first thing that popped onto his screen, however, were news stories from China and Australia.
The stories featured the hilarious, dreamlike and now ubiquitous photos of the battle royal between Brutus and Ohio University's Rufus the Bobcat just before kickoff on Sept. 18, 2010, inside OSU's Horseshoe. There was a New York Times headline describing the sneak attack concocted by Rufus (aka Brandon Hanning) as a "Student's Machiavellian Plan" that was two years in the making and full of more twists and turns than a fourth-quarter flea-flicker. And just in case Stazen wasn't fully aware that he had been unwittingly thrust into one of the first great viral moments in sports -- one that divides college football fans to this day -- there were links to Ohio State coach Jim Tressel joking that Brutus was "probable" for the No. 2-ranked Buckeyes' next game, blog posts by Ohio State grad students calling Rufus "Generation Y's version of the Unabomber" and solicitations from several Columbus attorneys asking whether Brutus needed assistance pressing assault charges.
After giving up on the idea of homework, Stazen, a senior communications major, turned his TV to ESPN's PTI, where Tony Kornheiser and guest host Bill Simmons were debating . the Rufus-Brutus fracas. "That was the craziest moment," says Stazen, who now lives in Columbus with his wife and 7-month-old son. "I'm sitting there watching myself on TV, wondering, 'Is this real life right now?'"
It was hard to tell.
Meanwhile, in Athens, Ohio, and throughout Big Ten country, Rufus was being hailed as a hero of college football have-nots. There was talk of a statue. And the photo of him socking Brutus in the puss was already being printed on T-shirts, displayed in Ann Arbor bars and used as screen savers across the college football landscape.
"We are the little guys, but we also think we're a lot cooler than Ohio State," says Terry Smith, an Ohio U. grad and editor of The Athens News for 34 years until his retirement in May. "So we've always had this kind of weird, underlying superiority. And to see Rufus come out and manifest it the way he did was pretty great."
In the end, the Rufus-Brutus brawl became the most reliable litmus test in college football. How you interpret the mascot melee -- whether you think it was (A) awesome, or (B) an assault -- depends almost entirely on your feelings about Ohio State and the untouchable (and sometimes unscrupulous) powerhouse level of college football it represents. "Either everybody loved it or everybody hated it," Hanning said of his ambush at the time. "It's never been anything in the middle."
And so to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Rufus' epic attack on Brutus and, at long last, the return of Big Ten play and the Buckeyes' much-anticipated 2020 season (beginning Saturday vs. Nebraska at noon ET), that's exactly how we decided to present it. Alternatively from both perspectives: Ohio State's and everyone else's.
Becoming Brutus Buckeye might be as impressive as earning a football scholarship, with several rounds of tryouts and interviews required. Greg Ashman/Icon Sport Media/Getty Images
Sean Stazen grew up in northeast Ohio, in the heart of Buckeye Country, where as a kid he attended most home games with his dad -- also an Ohio State grad. Sean's bona fides as a Buckeyes nut are easily verified on his Facebook page: a family portrait (complete with PBR tallboys) outside Columbus' infamous Little Bar. There's also a classic snapshot from the 1973 Ohio State-Michigan game at the height of the Woody Hayes-Bo Schembechler rivalry, when the Buckeyes ripped down the M Club banner unfurled at the 50 before a game in Ann Arbor.
In the spring of his freshman year at OSU, Stazen was riding a campus bus and saw an ad for Brutus tryouts. Potential Bruti must endure an intense two-day tryout that includes gauging how candidates work and move inside the giant, awkward nut head; performance of an original skit; various hypothetical practice scenarios Brutus might face; and a formal job interview conducted by a panel of coaches and Brutus alumni. (Stazen now serves as an alumni rep on this panel.)
The mascot screening process at Ohio University (2010 enrollment: 21,508, compared to OSU's 56,064) was slightly less involved.
A month before school started, the Bobcats' cheerleading coach called Hanning.
"Wanna be Rufus again?" he asked.
"Sure," Hanning replied, not bothering to mention one critical detail about his enrollment.
Rufus' oversized head flew off as he attempted to embarrass his Buckeyes nemesis. "That's why I let go," Hanning said. "After a year of being a mascot, it was instinct to try to keep the head on." Aaron Josefczyk/Icon SMI/Getty Images
After not making the cut as a freshman, Stazen reapplied the following year and made the team. It would become a life-changing experience. "Brutus does a lot of events on top of just games," Stazen says. "He goes to children's hospitals here in Columbus and visits kids who are fighting some crazy battles, and helping to bring smiles to those kids' faces -- that's the No. 1 thing I'll remember from being Brutus, not the big games or Rufus but that stuff with the kids."
Hanning grew up in Pomeroy, a village just outside of Athens, as a self-professed Buckeyes hater. In 2008, as a senior in high school, he watched the Bobcats travel to Columbus and nearly upset the No. 3 Buckeyes. Ohio State's last loss to an in-state school came in 1921, when Oberlin nipped the Buckeyes 7-6. After wearing O-S-Who? T-shirts at their Friday walk-through, the Bobcats came aggravatingly close to shocking the world, leading 14-12 in the fourth quarter before eventually falling 26-14. The Bobcats would have to wait until 2010 for another shot at the Buckeyes.
At the same time, there was a string of wild mascot donnybrooks -- Coastal Carolina's Chauncey the Chanticleer vs. James Madison's Duke Dog; IUPUI's Jawz the Jaguar vs. Oral Roberts' Golden Eagle; the Oregon Duck vs. the Houston Cougar -- making the rounds on a rapidly growing video site called YouTube. Frustrated and powerless while watching his Bobcats come up short in Columbus, with an endless loop of mascot melees swirling in his teenage boy brain, Hanning blurted out his idea to his buddies, who of course thought it would be freakin' awesome. "I remembered seeing the Oregon Duck beating up another mascot, and I thought it would be really funny if Rufus beat up Brutus," Hanning told ESPN in 2010. "I didn't know exactly how it would happen, but that was the whole reason I tried out for the Rufus job. That was it."
In his book "Yes, It's Hot in Here," AJ Mass, a fantasy sports editor with ESPN who served as Mr. Met from 1994 to 1997, writes about a kind of mascot mania phenomenon where, much like a goldfish growing to fit the size of its bowl, a mascot's ego sometimes expands to fill its giant oversized foam melon. "The people who get dragged into the mascot world, there's performers, there's professional gymnasts, there's right-place, right-time kind of people and then there's guys who are just 'look at me, look at me,'" Mass says. "But they're the most interesting ones, unfortunately."
Says Stazen: "All I can picture is this guy's dorm room looking like Ray Finkle's bedroom wall in 'Ace Ventura,' with diagrams everywhere of his master plot and pictures everywhere with Brutus with devil horns."
As a freshman at OU, Hanning not only secured the Rufus duties, he even attempted a dry run during a game in Buffalo. "I was thinking I should go ahead and try out tackling another mascot," Hanning said. "He's a bull. I brought a red square cape thing, like in a bullfight. He was just playing around, acting like he was charging me. I tackled him and put him on the ground. It was pretty funny and no one got upset because it wasn't Ohio State."
The next summer, however, Hanning decided to drop out of OU to work and attend a local community college. With the game in Columbus just weeks away and his dreams of bashing Brutus seemingly dashed (most every NCAA mascot is a student), Hanning said that's when he got a call out of the blue from the Ohio cheerleading coach -- who had no idea he was no longer enrolled.
A few weeks later, on Sept. 18, 2010, Hanning boarded the team bus to Columbus and announced, "I'm gonna beat up Brutus."
Everyone just assumed he was joking.
The sheer financial dominance of the Ohio State football program literally keeps football programs at Ohio and the rest of the Mid-American Conference afloat. Before COVID-19 hit, the MAC was scheduled to earn more money from its 11 Big Ten guarantees ($10.5 million) than from its entire TV revenue ($10 million). In exchange for budget-saving paydays between $1 million and $2 million, all the Buckeyes get in return is a virtually guaranteed warm-up W. In the past 60 years, the Buckeyes are 27-0 against the MAC, with an average victory margin of 30.1 points, which could easily be twice as large (they humiliated Miami by 71 in 2019 and crushed Bowling Green by 67 in 2016) if not for Ohio State's uncommon restraint and sportsmanship.
"It's just like if people hate the Yankees or people hate the Lakers -- the more success a team has, the more, naturally, you're just gonna have haters that want to see you fail," says Adam Widman, the Chicago Bears' director of media relations and an OSU graduate who was an assistant sports information director at the school in 2006 and '17. "Brandon had hate for Ohio State; that's how this whole thing started, and it's like, 'Well, if we can't take OSU down on the field, then I'm gonna beat the crap out of their mascot.' It just comes with the territory."
Announced attendance at Ohio Stadium on the fateful day was a packed 105,075. "Brutus Buckeye losing his head in front of 110,000 people at Ohio Stadium is not what we want," Stazen says. Greg Bartram/US PRESSWIRE
The ridiculous top-heavy economics of college football force smaller Division I schools like Ohio to actually grovel and be grateful for the beatdowns and accompanying crumbs they receive from Ohio State. Over time, this Theon Greyjoy-type scenario creates a deep resentment that Rufus tapped into. "Our team was preparing to sacrifice itself at the altar of college football for some big-time publicity and a paycheck," Smith wrote in The Athens News in 2010. "Hanning did the only thing that could possibly allow OU to escape Columbus with some self-respect. He launched a surprise attack, and brought down one of the sacred symbols of Ohio State University, that ridiculous Buckeye."
To make matters worse, the Bobcats were also forced to humble themselves before a football factory that dares to refer to itself as "The" university in Ohio while playing in a place called Ohio Stadium, as if the actual Ohio University, founded six decades before OSU, didn't even exist. "There's football and then there's everything else," Smith says. "And as an OU grad and an OU student, like a lot of other Bobcats I always felt superior to Ohio State because of everything else."
For many, Rufus' form of public service didn't end there. An overlooked subplot to the saga is that two days before the game, Athens was hit by a tornado. The storm killed one resident and destroyed several homes along with the Athens High School football stadium, which was rebuilt and recently renamed Joe Burrow Stadium. "At the time," Smith says, "people around here really needed something to laugh about."
At the iconic Ohio Stadium, opposing mascots actually share a locker room near the Buckeyes' entrance to the field. Stazen always tried to use this time to play gracious host. "But this time, when I went in to get changed, Rufus had already been in there, changed and made his way out to the field," Stazen says. "So I was like, hmmm, strange, OK, maybe he's just a very punctual guy or whatever.
"Brutus runs the team out onto the field, leading the way with another cheerleader, carrying a big OSU flag. So I'm doing this, and all of a sudden out of the corner of my eye, well, my mouth -- Brutus sees through his mouth -- I see Rufus standing on the sidelines, staring, and then he just takes off running right at me, and I'm thinking, 'This is bizarre. What's this guy doing?'"
It's a complete coincidence, but as Rufus charges toward Brutus at midfield, the eyes of each mascot appear to have been stitched in a way that perfectly fits the moment: Rufus has the angry, bulging eyeballs of a rage-ridden feline strung out on catnip, while Brutus' massive dilated oval eyeballs give him the shocked and traumatized expression of someone who just inadvertently Googled a phrase that yielded not-safe-for-work results.
Small schools like Ohio University often get paid millions of dollars for the privilege of getting blown out by the Buckeyes, which is exactly what happened when QB Terrelle Pryor led Ohio State to a 43-7 win in 2010. Jamie Sabau/Getty Images
After contemplating the scheme for two full years, the day before the game Hanning finally decided on his course of action: linger inconspicuously with the OU cheerleaders on the sideline around the 20-yard line, then spring on Brutus at midfield. The ensuing scrum is supposed to create a natural roadblock -- like the marching band scene in "Animal House" -- turning the Buckeyes' glorious, grand entrance into one massive, chaotic human car crash. "I was way up in the press box when it happened," Widman says, "and all I remember is one of my student workers yelling out, 'Whoa, Rufus is going after Brutus!' It was just a crazy scene."
Whiskers was rushed to the hospital, where he received urgent medical attention for his injuries. The incident has sparked outrage among both Wildcats and Bulldogs fans. Social media platforms were flooded with messages of support and calls for justice. Many people expressed their anger towards the attackers, demanding severe punishments for their actions. The local community has also rallied behind Whiskers, holding a candlelight vigil outside the stadium to show their solidarity. People held signs saying "Justice for Whiskers" and expressed their hope for his speedy recovery. Whiskers, who has been the mascot for the Wildcats for the past five years, is known for bringing joy and enthusiasm to games. Children adore him, and his presence is a vital part of the team's spirit. The mascot embodies the true spirit of sportsmanship and fair play, making the attack on Whiskers even more heart-wrenching for the fans. The Wildcats organization has vowed to support Whiskers throughout his recovery and ensure that the perpetrators are held accountable. They have also implemented enhanced security measures to prevent any such incidents from occurring in the future. Despite the trauma he has endured, Whiskers remains determined to return to his duties as the mascot of the Wildcats. His resilience and courage have inspired many, and the support he has received from the community has been overwhelming. As investigations continue, fans eagerly await updates on Whiskers' condition and the progress of the legal proceedings. This unfortunate incident serves as a reminder that even in the realm of sports, where competition and rivalries are fierce, violence and aggression have no place..
Reviews for "Mascot Mayhem: Exploring the Mental and Physical Toll of Being a Mascot"
1. Sarah - 1/5 stars - I found "Mascot gets beat up" to be extremely violent and disturbing. The concept of a mascot being beaten up just didn't sit well with me. It felt unnecessarily cruel and I couldn't understand how anyone could find enjoyment in such a story. I don't recommend this book to anyone who has a sensitive disposition or who prefers light-hearted and positive content.
2. John - 2/5 stars - I have to say that "Mascot gets beat up" was not my cup of tea. I found the storyline to be shallow and predictable. The violence portrayed in the book seemed excessive and lacked any real purpose or meaning. Additionally, the characters were one-dimensional and difficult to connect with. Overall, I was disappointed with the book and wouldn't recommend it to others.
3. Emily - 1/5 stars - I couldn't finish reading "Mascot gets beat up" because it made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. The graphic violence depicted in the story seemed gratuitous and unnecessary. I understand that literature can explore dark themes, but this book went too far for my taste. I was hoping for a more engaging and thought-provoking read, but sadly, this book didn't deliver. I would advise others to approach it with caution, especially if they are sensitive to violence and disturbing content.
4. Alex - 2/5 stars - I picked up "Mascot gets beat up" expecting an entertaining read, but unfortunately, it fell short of my expectations. While the storyline had potential, the execution was lackluster. The violence throughout the book felt forced and didn't add any depth to the plot or character development. The writing style also felt disjointed and didn't flow well. Overall, I was left feeling disappointed and wouldn't recommend this book to others.