Jason Wolf

jwolf@tennessean.com

Pete Nelson crouched inside a box on that broiling August 1999 night.

Contorted and covered in fur, his heart hammered on his throat and torrents of sweat stung his eyes.

“I’m dying!” he thought.

He broke out of the box to gasp for air moments before the Tennessee Titans’ inaugural preseason home game.

A college buddy tore the sleeve off a T-shirt, creating a makeshift headband for Nelson’s brow. Then he squatted again inside the box.

“They’re like, ‘OK, go!’ And you’re jiggling in this box … and then they put you down in the middle of the field and then they just leave you,” Nelson said. “And you’re sitting in there for just a second and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’m in front of 70,000 and they’re about to announce the mascot that they’ve never seen and it’s a raccoon!’ And everything is running through your mind. ‘Nobody’s going to get it!’

“And I bust out and what do you know? People cheered!”

But the headband Nelson wore behind the mascot’s fuzzy face slipped and became a blindfold.

“My moment, that I had strived my whole young life?” Nelson said. “I didn’t see a bit of it.”

Nelson, as “T-Rac,” would lead the Titans out of the tunnel for every home game in their 17-year history dressed as a giant brown raccoon — the state animal of Tennessee — its blue eyes accentuated by a black bandit mask, its pink tongue forever jutting toward its floppy feet.

That streak ends Saturday, when the San Diego Chargers visit for the preseason opener at Nissan Stadium.

The first mascot job

As a high school junior in Florence, Ala., Nelson was a "C" student simply looking for a way to pay his upcoming tuition at the University of North Alabama, where his father served as a beloved American history professor.

“My dad,” Nelson said, “he didn’t just teach a class. He performed it.”

Lawrence “Larry” Nelson doubled as a small-town preacher, and had fallen in love with Verlie Vipond, once a traveling gospel singer. Their eldest son, Larry, died from a brain tumor before his fourth birthday. But the young couple started anew, raising two children, Peter and Julia.

Nelson accompanied his father to a UNA football game as a teenager and was drawn to the Division II powerhouse’s mascot. After enrolling, and with his dad’s backing, the school handed him a partial scholarship and the mascot suit.

“I was never Chuck E. Cheese,” Nelson said. “I was never Santa. I was nothing.”

He spent five seasons as Leo the Lion.

Nelson was a natural — big movements, bravado, in tune with his audience — and in 1999 placed third in the National Cheerleaders Association mascot competition. That same year, after graduation, living in the converted laundry room of a house he shared with his Sigma Chi fraternity brothers, Nelson once again needed a job, and once again worked his connections.

Soon, he was speaking to Bud Adams, founder of the Titans’ predecessor, the Houston Oilers, co-founder of the American Football League, himself a Sigma Chi. Nelson’s phone was atop the clothes dryer he used as a nightstand. Adams spoke from the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.

'In the league now'

After the Titans’ inaugural home game, a preseason victory against the Atlanta Falcons, Nelson called his father from the stadium.

“So, everybody singing your praise like they do down here?” his dad asked. “Telling you how awesome you did and funny and this and that?”

“Dad…” Nelson choked. “Nobody has said a single word to me. Not good, bad, nothing. Nothing! I don’t know what to make of this.”

His dad paused for a moment.

“Well, son, you’re in the league now. When you’re bad, they’ll let you know. But they expect you to be good.”

The Titans won every home game that season, including the most memorable in team history, on an improbable kickoff return touchdown in the final seconds of a first-round playoff game against the Buffalo Bills. Nelson has a picture of the Music City Miracle at home.

As Kevin Dyson streaks down the sideline, a stunned T-Rac stood in the background, arms at his sides, violating Nelson's golden rule: “Don’t be just another guy in a suit.”

Weeks later, he performed at the Super Bowl. Then nine Pro Bowls, and for soldiers overseas, and at countless school programs, nursing homes and retirement parties, developing T-Rac’s physical brand of humor the next two decades, the character an amplified version of his own personality, like Jim Carrey in “The Mask.”

In time, he’d host a mascot camp — a teacher, like his father.

He'd slowly shed the anonymity most mascots' employers prefer.

“I always said I’d need a lot of therapy to separate T-Rac and Pete …” he said. “How do you split the two? It wasn’t easy. It’s not easy. And it cost me. It would cost you some good relationships and family time and stuff.”

Working nights, weekends and holidays take a toll. Nelson is a 40-year-old bachelor.

The physical demands of his lifestyle do, too. Nelson’s had both ACLs replaced. Several ankle surgeries. An elbow popped out and then back into place. Countless injections in his wrists, thumbs, ankle, knees and for the ruptured discs in his neck.

His favorite place after a game? In the bathtub, replacing fluids with an IV.

“If I could do it again, I’d do it again,” Nelson said. “No regrets.”

The laughs, the fans, traveling the globe were well worth it. And the alter-ego has helped him through heartache.

Nelson’s father was rushed to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in May 2013 and remained ill throughout football season, until his death in January 2014. He was 69.

“The smartest man I ever knew had a brain tumor,” Nelson said.

Just like the older brother he never met.

His dad’s diagnosis sucker-punched Nelson during the Titans Caravan, an annual regional promotional tour. He spent that first night beside his father in the hospital, until 6:30 a.m.

“Don’t you have to go on the Caravan?” his dad asked.

“Well, yeah, but I’m not…”

His dad interrupted and admonished.

“Don’t you dare let any of those kids down!”

Time for a change

Adams, the team owner, died during that season, too, leaving the Titans to a collection of family members. The front office has been restructured.

Nelson said this summer felt like his time to step aside.

“The Titans, literally, and I mean this with all of my heart, the Titans and everybody in that building were great to me from day one until the end,” he said.

Nelson isn’t sure what’s next.

On Saturday, for the first time since the Titans' first home game, another young man will be awaiting his debut, up the tunnel, covered in fur, sweating inside the suit.

Reach Jason Wolf on Twitter @JasonWolf and on Instagram and Snapchat at TitansBeat.

PETER JOHN NELSON FILE

Born: Sept. 22, 1975

Which makes him: 40 years old

From: Florence, Ala.

A.k.a: “T-Rac” (the original)

Titans also considered: “A big Greek god-looking thing”

Couldn’t have done it without: The “Rac Pac,” his friends and game-day assistants

Also teamed with: Rhett Bryan of Titans Radio, the “voice of T-Rac”

Godfather: To Bryan’s daughter

Sibling: Julia Strickland, a younger sister. She and her husband are expecting their fifth child

Went to: University of North Alabama

Where he: Portrayed the school’s mascot, “Leo the Lion,” for five years

Other aliases: The Birmingham Barons’ “Babe Ruff” (for a few weeks); “Kool Kat,” of the Arena League’s defunct Nashville Kats (for three seasons)

Favorite Simpsons character: Capital City Goofball

Four rules of being a mascot:

1) Big, deliberate movements.

2) Expressions! Your body does what your face does.

3) Pure energy. Know where the in-game delays are and go all out.

4) Have fun. At that moment. If you’re not having fun, you can’t portray fun.

Quotable: “I know that (late Titans owner Bud Adams) and Pete spent a lot of time together talking about what the mascot was going to be, how to name it, and he was very interested in all that. … I would report to him about where we were with the relocation plans, and to him that was very dry and lifeless. But T-Rac and the cheerleaders were not dry and lifeless. … They’re an asset as far as I’m concerned. Maybe Mr. Adams realized it more than the rest of us.” — Steve Underwood, Titans president and CEO

TITANS vs. CHARGERS

When: 7 p.m. Saturday

Where: Nissan Stadium

TV/radio: WKRN-2 / 104.5-FM