Baylor University has had a live bear mascot since 1917 when a Camp McArthur soldier allowed students to parade Ted, often called Bruin, across the football field during games. Then in 1981, the first costumed bear mascot, sponsored by Wendy’s, made his debut at a Baylor basketball game. Andy Spencer (’87) was the last Wendy’s bear and the first to wear a Baylor jersey when the university took over from Wendy’s. When his daughter Deanna Spencer Pratt (’19; she has a Bachelor of Science in Family and Consumer Sciences) decided to follow in his footsteps, Andy was one proud Papa Bear. Still, things could have gone very differently.
“To be quite honest, I wanted nothing to do with being a mascot,” says Deanna, whose goal at Anderson High School in Austin was to play volleyball. As fate would have it, the same day she got cut from tryouts (“I guess I wasn’t as good as I thought I was,” she says) she got an email from the school’s Trojan Times announcing open tryouts for a team mascot. What she remembers is praying that her father hadn’t seen the same email. “I thought that being a mascot was social suicide for a high school freshman.”
Not only had Andy seen the email, but now he was on a mission to convince his daughter that being a mascot was the most fun she’d ever have.
“We went back and forth for a while,” says Deanna, who caved when Andy offered to buy her a laptop if she just agreed to talk to the coach. “I’d been begging for a laptop and figured that there was no way I’d get the job since I was just an incoming freshman with no experience.”
After a tour of the school, the coach showed Deanna the costume and took her downstairs to meet the cheerleaders, who were on the varsity squad. Then she dropped the hammer and against all odds introduced Deanna as the new mascot.
When she broke the news to her father, they were both crying. “He was crying tears of joy while I was crying tears of sorrow,” says Deanna, who can laugh about it now because being a mascot turned out exactly as her father had promised her it would.
“The first year I wasn’t sure if I was any good at it, but I went to cheer camp the summer before my sophomore year and met mascots from all over the state of Texas.” By the end of the week, Deanna had won the All-American title, the first of three she’d earn with her father as the mascot coach before she graduated from high school.
In 2014, during her freshman year at Baylor, Deanna was one of the Bruiser mascots at the first game in McLane Stadium, and later that year she was featured on ESPN’s College Gameday when the network broadcast live from the Baylor campus. Heady stuff, but what she loved most about being a mascot was interacting with the children who came to the games. “You’re their hero,” she says, “and you should see the joy in their eyes when you take a picture with them.”
“When you’re doing something funny and you make someone smile, you just know that they’re enjoying what you do,” says Andy, who knew he wanted to be a mascot when he saw the Wendy’s bear leading a parade of children dressed up in bear suits around the stadium at a football game during his freshman year. Competing with 40 other mascots at Southern Methodist University in the summer of 1986, he was given the “Best Mascot” award.
If there’s a downside to being a mascot, it’s the heat, which can be excruciating. “If it’s 90 degrees outside, it’s 20 degrees hotter on the field and another 20 degrees hotter in that suit,” says Andy. “The trick is to prep for three days before the game by drinking plenty of water.”
So, what’s a typical day like for a Baylor mascot during football season? “It’s completely different now than it was in my day when I’d get to the stadium two hours before the game and change into my suit in the parking lot,” says Andy, who would be in that suit for the next five or six hours.
By the time Deanna was suiting up as Bruiser, the Baylor Spirit Squads (All Girl Cheer, Coed Cheer, Songleaders, and Mascot Team) had their own locker room with AC. “There were at least six mascots on our team, and we’d get to the stadium about five hours before kickoff to hang out. About two hours before the team came into the stadium, one of us would suit out for a bear walk to pump up the crowd,” says Deanna, who with co-captain Marie Stark, introduced a new character named Marigold in 2017. “We got a new coach, Kristin Hankins, who said she’d heard my family’s story. Since my father was the first Bruiser, she wanted to give me the opportunity to create my own legacy.”
They knew from the get-go that the new character would be a girl bear and came up with everything from her name to her look to how she’d walk. “If Bruiser is the Big Man on Campus, Marigold is his spunky best friend,” Deanna says. “She’s like a ball of energy all the time.” For her debut, Marigold wore a gold jersey with the words Baylor Line in bedazzled green letters on the front. On the back of her jersey is the number 17 because that’s the year she was created, and a flower crown has become her staple.
During her senior year, Deanna suited up as both Bruiser (she describes his walk as a swagger) and Marigold, whose hands are always moving. Both mascots visit the tailgaiting tents to generate enthusiasm, and they are always on the field during flyovers or when the National Anthem is being played. To deal with the unrelenting heat inside those costumes, safety is now the number one priority. Mascots not only rotate out every hour and are trained to recognize signs of dehydration but also have handlers, who advocate for them.
Andy has been around long enough to witness the evolution of the costumes worn by mascots since he was the Wendy’s bear. “That suit was polyester and kind of shaggy,” he says, “but the one after that, which was made by Doris Fugate at Custom Costumes, was like a big jumpsuit with a head that went on top. Costumes today cost between $10,000 to $12,000 and are more sculpted with muscles and fur from the chest up and near the bottom.”
One thing that hasn’t changed are the standards to which mascots are held. “You are the face of the university while you’re wearing that suit,” says Deanna. “If there’s a bad call and the crowd is mad at the refs, you can’t be mad too because you’re supposed to be an uplifting presence.”
“I teach mascots that in a stadium of 47,000 people, someone is watching you at all times,” says Andy, whose advice is to keep moving. “We call mascots who aren’t moving stuffed animals.” Apparently old habits die hard. Even now, one hand over his heart, the other behind his back, Andy still sways slightly from side to side when the National Anthem is played just as he did as a mascot.
Deanna met her husband Scott at Baylor, and the couple welcomed their first child in May. So, are they hoping to see a third generation suit up as Bruiser or Marigold? “Obviously if that happened it would be great,” she says, “but only if that’s the path they choose.”
With diehard Baylor fans for parents and grandparents, our bet is that the odds are likely in their favor.
