Andreatta: Being a mascot is not all fun and games

If there's a godfather of Rochester mascots, it's Nick Hadad. He's only 29, but he once juggled seven different mascot gigs simultaneously and has been in the game for 14 years.

"Sometimes it feels like 50," said Hadad, who, when he's not the feathered, smirking R. Thunder of the National Lacrosse League's Rochester Knighthawks, works at a bakery.

Four years ago, he said, the doctors told him he had arthritis from all his mascotting, a line of work that never makes any most dangerous jobs list but deserves an honorable mention for its triad of perils — dehydration, sadistic fans and indignity.

I know because on Monday I stepped, quite literally, into the 34 EEE shoes of Finley, the moon-eyed grinning shark of Rochester's pro basketball RazorSharks.

It was the team's Kid's Day, and Hadad was a leader for eight mascots tasked with entertaining a crowd of about 4,000 at Blue Cross Arena. Notables included Spikes of the Rochester Red Wings and an oversized Dunkin' Donuts coffee named Cuppy.

"Stay hydrated," Hadad warned me before we hit the court. He was hard to take seriously in yellow leggings, but the perspiration trickling down my spine told me to pay attention.

Everyone said it would be hot in the costume. But none of the counsel prepared me for what — by the end of the first quarter — felt like a Turkish bath in the Florida Everglades.

One of the drawbacks to being a mascot is having no way to show duress. Your smile forever projects a freewheeling, fuzzy ball of fun, when in reality you're a dying man in a shark suit. Had I collapsed into a heat-induced seizure, the crowd would have gone wild.

Mercifully, I ran into the Bishop Kearney Lion when I did. He was positioned near a large vent in Section 121 that was blasting cool air. In furry mittens, I lacked the dexterity to unscrew the grate and crawl inside, so I settled for gently swaying my backside against the cold. I didn't care how creepy it looked.

Apparently no one else did, either, because hordes of people took advantage of Finley swaying in place to converge on me for photos and autographs.

The way Hadad explained it, there are two types of people who approach mascots: The vast majority who love them and the minority who want to hurt them.

Some mascot lovers inadvertently hurt them, specifically waist-high children who run directly at them full speed and head-butt the man inside in the groin. Spotting these children in time to intercept them is impossible with a peephole at a fixed 45-degree downward angle obscured by shark teeth. But they are innocents.

Then there are the malevolent, like the three boys who descended on me from a 200 level staircase. They couldn't have been more than 12, but I'd been warned about their kind.

"Take a look at the people you might be running into next," Hadad said. "Sometimes they just have this look in their eye, and it's hard to describe, but you'll know it when you see it. They want to mess with you.

"Approach with caution if you have to, but if you can avoid it, avoid it."

The trio looked friendly enough with their fists outstretched for a Finley bump, but their manic giggling suggested trouble. Then, Bam! A shot to the snout. Ugh! A poke in the gut. The last one yanked my dorsal fin. Then they ran toward the snack bar.

The only time I got scared, though, was when a woman asked me to hold her baby for a photo. I was on a step and could barely hold myself together, let alone hold a baby. This wasn't a toddler with a couple of teeth whose chub would've broken her fall, either. This was a helpless newborn with the natural protective film still on her eyes.

Overshadowing all these perils of the mascot trade, however, is the wholesome fun of bringing joy to so many people in so short a time. It's what keeps Hadad and those like him fighting through the aches and pains for $50 a pop.

People lighting up for you is infectious. The biggest letdown of the day was exiting the dressing room in my street clothes after the game and realizing that none of the children and parents milling about the lobby were smiling at me anymore.

As Finley, I must have high-fived and hugged and posed for pictures with hundreds of smiling RazorShark fans. What those fans won't see in their photos is that I was smiling right along with them.

Twitter.com/david_andreatta