The Millennial Women Who Created Gritty
Bad ass ladies birthed the greatest sports mascot of all time
“The fact that this man, or man-like creature, is the product of a team of primarily young women, a team that has positively crushed the concept of what it means to be a professional mascot in the age of social media, shouldn’t be a surprise. They’re digital natives with an inborn desire to break the Internet.”
If I had to describe the theme of my writing (all the books, all the newsletters, articles and podcasts) it would be BAD ASS WOMEN DEFYING EXPECTATIONS.
You may come to The Sicilian Inheritance for the delicious food and stunning landscapes, for the murder mystery and the adventure, but everyone seems to be staying for the brave and brilliant women supporting other women in a world created for men.
The book continues to fly off shelves. I know indies are mostly sold out and I am sorry. Midtown Scholar still has some signed copies. So does Bluebird. Amazon ran low last night but they seem to have restocked. Get your orders in for your book club because I am zooming into clubs all over the country to make my super sexy and spicy Sicilian Negroni. We are also about to give away a reading retreat weekend at our cozy cabin in the Catskills to one lucky reader who posts on social. Grab your copy before it actually sells out and tell your friends :)
Now onto Gritty, the greatest mascot in the greatest city in the world— PHILADELPHIA. I wrote this story for a women’s magazine years ago. YEARS. But then the pandemic happened and the editors were worried that hockey would never happen ever again and the story got killed. I still think about it all the time and I still haven’t seen a great piece on the origin story of the Gritty. I chatted about it on the Bad on Paper podcast a couple of weeks ago and people have been demanding the story.
So you ask and I deliver.
THE MILLENNIAL WOMEN BEHIND THE WORLD’S MOST CHARISMATIC MASCOT
Christine Mina accompanied Gritty, the Philadelphia Flyers mascot, to San Jose’s SAP Center for the All Star hockey game.
“I was security, slash his mascot mom,” Mina, the Flyers 27 year old Senior Manager for Digital Media recalled with a wry laugh.
A giant conference room at the SAP Center was transformed into a kind of mascot dressing room—a quagmire of fur and testosterone. Mina led Gritty into the melee.
“And a mascot from another team bumped into me. And then another. They didn’t want me in there. It was predominantly male and no other mascot had a dedicated person with them,” Mina said. “And for the rest of the weekend the other mascots were feisty. They’d bump into me or block my view during events. I would definitely say it’s a boys club. It’s a FUR-ternity.”
Mina is one of Gritty’s many mascot moms, a tight-knit team of mostly millennial women who are largely responsible for the genesis of Gritty and for his intense celebrity brand that has boosted revenue for the Flyers and landed Gritty on Good Morning America, the Jimmy Fallon show, Colbert, and inspired the New Yorker magazine to call the mascot “pure male id, but without any of the menace….a man who, with every gesture of his herky-jerky, fuzzy body, was not afraid to express emotions that were both true and sensitive.”
The fact that this man, or man-like creature, is the product of a team of primarily young women, a team that has positively crushed the concept of what it means to be a professional mascot in the age of social media, shouldn’t be a surprise. They’re digital natives with an inborn desire to break the Internet.
“I feel grateful to have such talented young women in our league,” Heidi Browning, the CMO of the NHL told me when I called her to chat about Gritty. “Gritty has been so nurtured by these young women to continue his storyline and his growth. We are huge fans of Gritty at the NHL because he is a true gift to hockey, a viral sensation who has evolved into a brand. He’s accessible to casual fans and fans who haven’t watched hockey will watch for Gritty.”
As mascot moms, Christine Mina, Sarah Schwab, the franchise’s Senior Director of Communications and two women named Lauren, Lauren Capone and Lauren Robins (they often referred to themselves internally as “The Laurens”), carved out a niche for themselves and for Gritty in the male-dominated world of professional mascots—a world that still refers to themselves as a FUR-ternity for Chrissakes.
I first encountered Gritty in the flesh, er fur, when I moved home to Philly from San Francisco a year ago. I was at a Flyers game and watched as the fluffy eight foot tall monster awkwardly waddled over the stadium chairs in the Wells Fargo arena on a Tuesday night. He leaned over, his distended stomach grazing a toddler’s forehead and reached out a massive paw to steal a woman’s shoe. He smelled it, nodded and then ran away with it. The monster tossed the shoe in the air, caught it and did a shimmy with his enormous backside in the face of a rotund older gentleman. A few minutes later he still hadn’t returned the shoe. Some poor woman was shoe-less in the stadium.
“He’s a dumpster fire and I f*cking love him,” I heard a woman whisper to her date behind me.
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