Gritty, the Philadelphia Flyers’ sensation-causing mascot, is a weird and scary avatar for a weird and scary time. The 7-foot-tall orange monster didn’t just put one city in touch with its identity: He is all things to all people. He is meme. He is messenger. He is message. And, in many respects, he is messianic.

“There’s Nothing More Philly Than Being Unapologetically Yourself”

No one likes us

No one likes us

No one likes us

And we don’t care

We’re from Philly,

Fuckin’ Philly,

No one likes us

And we don’t care

So sang Eagles center Jason Kelce on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, capping a speech that would turn out to be the highlight of the city’s first Super Bowl parade. Kelce’s speech was legendary from the moment he took the podium, half-drunk, entirely hoarse, and wrapped in a borrowed Mummer’s costume. The then-30-year-old Ohio native barked, coughed, and stage-whispered a polemic address about how individual members of the Eagles had been doubted and cast aside and the team had turned into a swaggering, fashionable champion. How a frequently overlooked, embittered, unfashionable city could at long last point to the biggest stage in American sports—perhaps even American pop culture—and shout “Scoreboard!”

In Kelce, Philadelphia thought it had found its avatar, its Patronus, the physical manifestation of its id: gigantic, hirsute, gaudy, unpredictable, boisterous, too aggressive to be entirely benign, too ridiculous to be entirely frightening.

How little we knew.

Just as John the Baptist foretold the coming of Christ, Kelce was merely a harbinger of a new avatar for Philadelphia—one larger, rounder, hairier, and far, far weirder. About eight months after Kelce’s address to the city, the Flyers introduced a new mascot: a 7-foot-tall orange monster named Gritty.

In the past two and a half months, Gritty has proved to be an overwhelming success as a mascot. More than that, he’s become a legitimate cultural phenomenon, a weird and scary avatar for a weird and scary time. He is all things to all people.

“Gritty is fairly appalling, pretty insurrectionary for a mascot, and I don’t think there’s any question that that’s our kind of symbol,” says Helen Gym, an at-large member of the Philadelphia City Council. “There’s nothing more Philly than being unapologetically yourself.”

“I Suffered the Insecurity. I’ve Suffered the Disappointment.”

Gritty’s arrival and appearance were shocking, but he didn’t just emerge fully formed from outer space. According to the official backstory on the Flyers’ website, Gritty has been living beneath the team’s arena for years and emerged in 2018 because “recent construction at the Wells Fargo Center disturbed his secret hideout, forcing him to show his face publicly for the first time.” The team’s official bio says little else about Gritty’s origins, other than that his father was a “bully,” a nod to the championship-winning Broad Street Bullies of the 1970s. (Which bully fathered Gritty remains a mystery, but my money’s on Bob “The Hound” Kelly, you old so-and-so.)

In reality, Gritty had to be created, and it took a particular mind to spearhead that process: the original Phillie Phanatic.

In 1978, the Philadelphia Phillies introduced the city’s first iconic, fuzzy monster. The first performer to don the green suit full time was a Phillies marketing intern named David Raymond, who continued in that role until 1993. After leaving the suit behind, Raymond opened his own marketing company, Raymond Entertainment, which specializes in the creation and management of sports mascots. Raymond says Gritty came together the way all of his company’s mascots do: a brainstorming session between his designers and the client.

“In the early going, I tell them, ‘Don’t focus on any visual image. If you have an idea, that’s fine, we don’t want to discount your idea, but the most important thing is to create a story for your character,’” Raymond says. “And the roots of that story should be mined from the history of the organization, the most successful people and events in your organization’s history, and urban myths and legends. Then do the same thing with your community.”

A conception of the team and its fans leads to a story, which leads to a character, Raymond says, and that’s what happened with Gritty. While Raymond Entertainment has overseen mascot launches across the country, the company’s roots in the Delaware Valley (its headquarters are in suburban Chester County, Pennsylvania) made that research process easier in Gritty’s case. But research is nothing compared to lived experience, and Gritty incorporates lessons Raymond learned while playing the Phanatic.

“I knew the psyche of Phillies fans because I was one,” Raymond says of his early years in the green suit. “I was just like them. I suffered the insecurity. I’ve suffered the disappointment. I’ve seen all of that, I’ve felt all of that, and it came out in the Phanatic’s personality because the Phillies didn’t give me direction—they just said, ‘Go out and have a good time.’ The rest just happened because it was natural.”

From the beginning, then, Gritty was designed not to stir up a few laughs on the internet, but to stir up a deep emotional connection with Flyers fans, to reflect back something they already felt about themselves. It’s a tall order, but in Raymond’s mind, that’s the only way to get a character to stick. “You’re only going to get people to care about anything if you demonstrate that you care, and you demonstrate that you understand the people you’re reaching out to,” Raymond says.

On September 24, the Flyers unveiled Gritty for the first time at Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum with a now-infamous fist pump, twirl, and wobble of his googly eyes.

The Flyers, Raymond says, had long resisted the idea of creating a mascot, at the insistence of founding owner Ed Snider, whom Raymond calls “old-school.” The Flyers unveiled a furry mascot called Slapshot in 1976 but quickly shelved it, leaving the team without a mascot for more than 40 years. But after Snider’s death in 2016, the team’s marketing department pushed ownership to reconsider, Raymond says, and after overcoming so much institutional inertia, they weren’t going to be half-hearted about their new mascot.

One part of doing a mascot right, Raymond says, is sticking to the bit no matter what, rather than submitting the mascot to the public for approval, a lesson learned from the Sixers’ failed mascot vote in 2011. Philadelphians, and people on the internet in general, can sense uncertainty and will punish it.

Raymond says he and Flyers vice president of marketing Joe Heller anticipated that if they presented Gritty as a finished product, the fans would warm up to the mascot in spite of, or perhaps even because of, national ridicule. They just thought it would take longer than two days for public opinion to swing in their direction.

Gritty

Drew Hallowell/Getty Images

“This Ridiculous, Horrifying, Absurd Creature”

Mascots are always at least a little silly and ridiculous because at their core, they’re created more for children than adults. Gritty is no exception. His hands squeak, and his belly button—which Raymond calls a “woobie”—is a brightly colored outie. The woobie, says Raymond, was the brainchild of Chris Pegg, who plays Rockey the Redbird for the Triple-A Memphis Redbirds and is a mutual friend of Raymond and Flyers senior director of game presentation Anthony Gioia.

When the Flyers unveiled such a weird, menacing mascot, it brought to mind something Frank Oz said about his longtime collaborator and Muppets creator Jim Henson: “He thought it was fine to scare children. He didn’t think it was healthy for children to always feel safe.” According to Raymond, in any sufficiently large group of children, a mascot, even a familiar one, will make at least one of them cry. Not Gritty.

“I’d never seen a mascot rollout anywhere where I didn’t see at least one kid running, crying in terror, trying to grab on to their mother’s legs,” Raymond says of the Please Touch Museum rollout. “I didn’t see any of that [with Gritty]. The kids were dancing and hollering and calling for him to come over, but no kid looked terrified.”

It took Gritty a while longer to win over the grown-ups. The initial reaction to the mascot was mostly a mix of shock and horror: For the Win called Gritty “nightmare fuel.” Last Week Tonight host John Oliver called Gritty “horrific,” appointing him to represent Brett Kavanaugh on the show’s Dog Supreme Court. Even The Ringer is not free from sin: In one post, Ringer staffers called Gritty “capable of haunting your dreams by adding GOOGLY EYES that move as he jumps around”; and says he came from a “wacky, possibly disturbed corner of some Flyers marketing person’s brain”; and that Gritty “embodies the void-staring, maniacal nihilism that Flyers fans must feel after a 43-year cup drought.” There’s playing to the crowd, and then there’s the Flyers’ new mascot threatening to kill his team’s hated intrastate rival. Within a couple days, Gritty had proved himself to be too weird to dismiss as a focus group misfire like the failed Sixers mascots. But most important of all, outsiders started to ridicule him.

If you can hear Jason Kelce wheezing out the refrain of “No one likes us / we don’t care” right now, it’s because nothing gets Philadelphians, and Philadelphia sports fans, to get behind something quite like watching the rest of the world crap all over it. Philadelphia sports fans have a reputation for being quick to anger, slow to forgive, and fiercely defensive about whatever corner of the sports or cultural universe they’ve staked out, no matter how incomprehensible that position appears to outsiders. That reputation is facile and reductive, but also largely accurate.

There’s plenty to mock Philadelphia sports for, from the Eagles’ consistent playoff failures under Andy Reid to the Sixers’ rash of bad outcomes for first-round picks, and even The Process itself. The Phillies have lost more games than any professional sports team in human history, and the MLS’s Union, founded in 2010, have never won so much as a playoff game in the MLS Cup while finding their way to three U.S. Open Cup finals since the franchise’s inception and losing them all.

Then there are the Flyers, who were a success as an expansion team right off the bat in the late 1960s and were one of the powerhouses of the 1970s and 1980s, winning the Stanley Cup twice and making the Cup final four more times between 1974 and 1987. But the years since then have been largely fruitless, despite Snider spending as much money as any owner in the league in pursuit of a championship. In the sense that they’re a rich, largely unsuccessful franchise with little recent success, the Flyers are the Dallas Cowboys of the NHL, except the Flyers’ last title is 20 years further in the past.

Suffice it to say, Philadelphians are a little touchy, and rallied around Gritty as if the whole Delaware Valley had turned into the “You can’t do that to our pledges, only we can do that to our pledges!” bit from Animal House.

“It’s the initial appearance, and then there’s everybody’s reaction that has Philadelphians embracing this ridiculous, horrifying, and absurd creature,” Gym says. “I think Gritty’s arrival was cemented when he flopped on the ice and came down to Miley Cyrus’s ‘Wrecking Ball.’ This is not going to be your everyday, fluffy, huggable mascot.”

A month after Gritty’s introduction, Gym, in her capacity as a Philadelphia city councilwoman, put forth a resolution welcoming the Flyers mascot to the city. Every level of government issues symbolic resolutions in support of or opposition to one cause or another, or lauding individuals or groups for contributing to the public good, and now Gritty has his. The resolution itself calls out Oliver by name and lists more than a dozen insults directed at Gritty—the words “hellion,” “eldritch,” and “grotesquerie” are some of the verbal slings and arrows Gritty suffered. In this respect, it’s reminiscent of the Declaration of Independence, a large portion of which is devoted to grievances against King George. Gritty looks like Philadelphians feel, and his place as a city icon is now a matter of government policy.

“The greatest thing of all is not really just Gritty, but how Philadelphians embraced Gritty, how people came together around Gritty,” Gym says. “I’ve seen tributes to Gritty that have been flat-out amazing and jaw-dropping and others I wish I could unsee.”

“Fuck You, That Creature’s Ours, and We’re Taking It!”

Some Gritty memes, however, are not just funny or scary, but overtly political. Gym’s resolution addressed this issue head-on; “non-binary leftist icon” was one of the descriptions quoted in the resolution. The resolution itself goes on to praise Gritty for his status as a political symbol: “Gritty has been widely declared antifa, and was subject to attempted reclamation in the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. It has been argued that he ‘conveys the absurdity and struggle of modern life under capitalism’ and that he represents a source of joyful comic respite in a time of societal upheaval.”

Gritty started appearing on political material before the Flyers’ season even started. On October 2, President Donald Trump visited Philadelphia and was met by protesters, a handful of whom had prepared signs featuring Gritty and chanted, “Gritty hates Trump!” Jokes and commentary about Gritty’s political leanings ensued, followed by memes and eventually entire social media accounts dedicated to leftist Gritty content.

One of the best examples of the genre is the Fellow Worker Gritty Twitter account, which sends out Gritty memes to some 13,500 followers. Fellow Worker Gritty is run by a group of Philadelphia-based organizers for the Industrial Workers of the World, who snapped up the handle shortly after the first Gritty protest signs appeared. (The account bio reads, in part, “Not an official IWW account because the local branch refuses to accept my dues in Philly pretzels.”) One of the people behind the account agreed to an interview under the condition of anonymity and is quoted here as “FWG.”

“The great thing about memes—as ridiculous as this sounds—is they create an instant mass internet mobilization,” FWG says. “Memes can be used to perpetuate systematic oppression, or they can be used to burn down the prison-industrial system or talk about police brutality.”

Within a month of Gritty’s unveiling, he’d so thoroughly permeated leftist circles that even the Pittsburgh chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America was using him in recruiting material.

“I think fundamentally, Gritty transcends politics,” Gym says, “but there’s no question he’s been embraced by the left and progressives, and others who feel as if one orange horror has been met with another. What I do appreciate about Gritty is the idea that he’s huggable but potentially insurrectionary.”

FWG does not share this view. In their mind, Gritty’s leftist identity supersedes Gritty’s identity as a hockey mascot. Fellow Worker Gritty is at this point independent of anything the Flyers say or do with the mascot; the two share only a name and an appearance.

“We were like, ‘Fuck you, that creature’s ours, and we’re taking it!’ And it worked,” FWG says. “If you look Gritty up anywhere, people in other cities are talking about Gritty as an antifascist icon. That makes the concept of antifascism more mainstream.”

A corporate marketing campaign would seem like an unlikely symbol for leftist organizers, but FWG finds poetry in taking a symbol from a multimillion-dollar corporation. “I think it’s correctly metaphorical. It had to be something like this,” FWG says. “Corporate America—the people in charge of the money and in charge of our livelihoods—are never going to give us anything. We’re always going to have to take it from them. That’s why class struggle exists.”

Gritty

Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

“He Came in at a Time When We Least Expected It but Probably Needed Him the Most”

One thing that becomes clear talking about Gritty is how seriously people take him. Everyone agrees that he’s a ridiculous creature who takes pratfalls and appears in funny GIFs, but somehow, he’s become genuinely meaningful, whether for his role in forging community bonds, or for his assistance in taking back our country from the forces of evil and oppression, or just because he gives a face to the feelings of exasperated absurdity that permeate American life in 2018.

“He came in at a time when we least expected it but probably needed him the most, and people make of Gritty what they will,” Gym says.

It’s a miracle that Gritty has lasted this long without at least his act going stale, if not outright milkshake ducking. Philadelphia, for all its tenacious underdog spirit and groundswell of labor and civil rights activism, is a city riddled with difficult political and racial fissures. On one hand, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner continues building on his agenda of criminal justice reform. On the other hand, the city maintains a statue of former police commissioner and mayor Frank Rizzo in the shadow of City Hall, and, despite backlash comparable to protests over Confederate monuments in the South, has reneged on promises to move it. It doesn’t take too much imagination to picture the Flyers sending Gritty to a pro-police photo op. In under three weeks, Philadelphia will host its annual Mummers Parade, the event that lent Kelce his now-iconic costume, but one that has also been marred by racist, anti-gay, and anti-trans performances.

There’s a danger to wrapping up one’s identity in anything one can’t control, whether it’s an artist, a sports team, or a fuzzy orange monster. And if Gritty played it safe, he’d stop being worth investing in; the reason Gritty is so popular is because he’s weird and unpredictable in a way that isn’t cultivated to be “edgy.” Fear of being let down might just be the price of trying to live with empathy in a society that frequently elevates the cruel. It’s worth thinking about something FWG said: that their Gritty is not the same thing as the Flyers mascot.

“I think that the spirit of Gritty will be fulfilled through the proletariat,” FWG says. “As the spirit of Gritty moves people, that’s how the people will act.”

However you feel about that political message, and regardless of whether you even think it’s possible to divorce Gritty as a symbol from Gritty the Flyers mascot, there’s some truth to the idea. People don’t love Gritty because they love the Flyers. People love Gritty because Gritty is an emotional and rhetorical conduit.

Gritty appeared before a city looking for a way to express its identity and offered millions an outlet for their fear and frustration. Gritty is weird and scary. Gritty doesn’t always behave himself. Gritty doesn’t always have his act together. Gritty feels big feelings and makes big gestures, and invites others to do the same. He helped people articulate ideas and feelings they’d previously been able to communicate only imperfectly, through the language of climbing lampposts, singing about being unliked, or shitposting about Marxism. He is messenger. He is message. And in many respects, he is messianic.