“It weighed 90 pounds, including the tanks,” says Tim Derk of the T-shirt cannon he helped invent when he worked as the Coyote mascot for the San Antonio Spurs in the 1990s. “It was like carrying a TV set on your back. The gun was probably at least four feet long. It used a cast-iron pipe — the kind that goes into the floor underneath your commode. It just weighed a ton.” Of course, someone else might have tried the stunt before Derk, but when he dressed up as “Rambote” — Rambo meets the Spurs’ Coyote — and sprayed the cheap seats with freebies, few sports fans had seen anything like it.

“The Phoenix Gorilla and I were two of the pioneers,” Derk says. The T-shirt gun evolved during what might be called the “slingshot era,” a time when mascots used enormous rubber bands to fling souvenirs — usually shirts — into the crowd. But the slingshots had limited range, and Derk and his fellow mascots wanted to send swag to the top of the stadium. Derk’s not sure who first suggested the T-shirt gun: “It wasn’t that one minute it did not exist, and then it did. It just evolved out of us trying to improve the slingshot idea.” For inspiration, the mascots looked to the spud launcher, a cannon designed to shoot potato-size objects. They realized it could also launch a balled-up shirt.

Image Credit... Garrett Ellwood/NBAE/Getty images

In the mid-1990s, Derk advertised the new addition to his arsenal with a video: dressed in full Coyote costume, he pretended to solder the gun in a machine shop. (He’d actually farmed out the job to a mechanic.) The first bazooka was powered by a CO2 canister that Derk wore, backpack style, over his Coyote pelt. Today he marvels at how far the technology has come. Some T-shirt cannons now weigh just a few pounds.