It's a bear of a job, but Rockets mascot loves it Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle Clutch, the Houston Rockets mascot for the past eight years, recently tied with Squatch, of the Seattle Supersonics, as Mascot of the Year in polling on Gameops.com, a Web site geared to sports entertainment professionals. At 7 feet, 2 inches tall (suit included), Clutch is second only to Yao Ming in height when he takes the court at the Toyota Center. He met with Joe Stinebaker, the Chronicle's day city editor, for lunch last week. Given Clutch's 92-inch waist, the Chronicle picked up the tab. (Clutch is not permitted to be photographed out of his costume or to use his real name in public). Question: How did you get started in this field? Answer: "I started doing mascotting in high school actually, at Wissahickon, right outside of Philadelphia. One of the cheerleaders asked me to do it. They didn't have tryouts or anything in high school. They just asked whoever was the most outgoing, wackiest, craziest, class-clownish type senior each year. So my senior year they asked me to do it, and I had a lot of fun doing it. It was a way to, you know, uh, kind of ... " Q: Meet girls? A: "Yeah, that's it! I started dating the captain of the cheerleading team. She was my girlfriend my whole senior year and into college. But it was also a way to flex that creative entertainer muscle. This was a way to do it without breaking the rules. And then when I gotto college, again, it's not like I set out to try out or anything. I was just hanging out with some cheerleaders at a little dorm party ... Q: Cheerleaders again? A: (Laughs.) Yeah, cheerleaders seem to be a central theme. Go figure. And I married one of the dancers from the team now (Susie, one of the Houston Rockets power dancers). So my freshman year of college (at the University of Delaware), I'm hanging out with some cheerleaders, and I said, "Oh yeah, I was the mascot in high school," and they said, "Come out for tryouts." The tryouts were the very next day. ... And you come in, there's no costume and they're like, "Here's the situation. It's a Delaware football game. We're down by 21 points in the fourth quarter. Whaddya do? And by the way, no talking." You're like, what the heck? So I just started going nuts, jumping up and down, pre_tending the other team was there, threw a chair across the room at the other team. And I walked out feeling about 2 inches tall, and they called me two hours later and said, "You got the job." Q: So how do you go from the University of Delaware to the Houston Rockets? A: I was a mascot instructor in the summer of 1995 at Universal Cheerleaders Association and I taught all the California camps and the New Mexico camps, which was, uh, fun. It was a real hardship being stranded with 200 California cheerleaders through the summer. Every job has its perks. That summer, UCA got a call from the Rockets, and the Rockets were basically looking to start this new character to supplement the one they already had -- Turbo. ... And you're not gonna send a guy in a Spandex outfit into the stands to start hugging kids and spraying Silly String and sitting on people's laps. You need the big, traditional, real-life-cartoon-type character. So UCA recom_mended me as well as a couple other instructors they had. ... I got the call, I guess, two weeks into October in 1995. Q: By the way, why a bear? A: You know, that, and "Can I have a T-shirt?" are the questions I get asked most often in life. The Rockets wanted to create some kind of big, costumed character, something that could be animated. I don't know that they felt a rocket in a costume form was gonna be the lovable, huggable type character that they wanted. ... It was actually our owner's (Les Alexander) idea. He thought, "What better than a teddy bear?" Q: How do the players take to you? A: Great. I've had great relationships with pretty much every player we've ever had. Steve (Francis) and I joke around all the time, both in costume and out of costume. Same with Yao. But other players over the years -- Charles (Barkley), he was one of my favorites. What a personality he had. Clyde (Drexler) always seemed to be the nicest. If I had to pick the nicest player I've ever seen, with his manners and with his attentiveness to the fans and the crowd. I've never seen that guy turn down an autograph, no matter where he's going or how much of a hurry he's in. He just has an air of refinement about him. Q: I know you've had at least one mishap, too. A: Oh man, yeah. This is probably in retrospect one of my funniest stories, but at the time I didn't find any humor in it. I'm on the court, and we have this big gun that can shoot a T-shirt a couple hundred yards into the upper levels. It was so powerful that we weren't allowed to shoot it into the lower levels, because it was just too strong. So I'm doing the thing where I'm making one section cheer, and one of the dancers is doing this number where he runs one way, but he's looking the other way playing to the crowd. So he's not looking where he's going and runs right into the back of me, knocks me clear down to my knees, lowering the barrel of the gun at the same time. He jarred me and the gun and set the gun off, and I'm only 20 feet away from the huddle. So a T-shirt comes rocketing out of the gun, goes right into the huddle and hits Cuttino Mobley right in the chest -- I think in the left pectoral muscle -- and drops him like a sack of bricks. Can you just imagine? All the players are attentively listening to Rudy (former coach Rudy Tomjanovich) as he's giving out the plays, and out of nowhere this player just drops. He went out the whole first half with a deep contusion to the chest muscle, and he was not happy with me. I think it took about a year for him to get the correct story. But for about a year, anytime we were at an event together, he was like, "Get away from me!" Q: Talk about the cool parts of the job. A: There's a lot of cool parts of the job. Probably the thing I love the most is when you do a skit on the court and it hits, and it works. You suck the crowd in, because they don't know where this skit is going. ... There's that and, of course, when you have little kids that just come toddling up to you with this look of amazement in their eyes. They're not experiencing the character the way the rest of the fans do. They're experiencing it as, for whatever reason, there's a 7-foot-tall bear that's wearing a Rockets jersey cheering for the team. And it's a real bear to them. So when you see that look in their eyes and they come up for a hug, that gets you, yeah. Q: What do you do on days when you're sick, or you've had a fight with your wife or a bad day? Isn't it hard to get up all the time? A: Yeah, I'm no different than anybody else. You have your bad days. But the costume for my job is not an additional challenge for those bad days. It's almost a therapy. It's the release where you can set your problems aside for an hour or two. It's just an extrapolation and exaggeration of my own personality.
If you ever get a chance to meet the guy that performs as Clutch, he is one of the funniest people you'll ever meet and a genuinely nice guy.
Some reason I really don't find that woman in the picture THAT attractive.....she kind of looks like my grandmother...
I walked into that one.... I knew someone was going to post something like that. I was thinking I should of edited my last post completey. What I meant was, she looks old in that picture, wearing something my 60 year old GM would wear. I am sure she probably looks much better in other photos/real life. Is that the "Suzie"?
I know that Susie, the girl ya'll are drooling over visits the site. I met her once at the Rockets cheerleader autograph session and asked her if she was the cheerleader married to Clutch and she said ya and how did you know, and i said Clutchfans baby, and then she told me that she reads the site too but doesn't post. So the answer to your question is, yes.
I used to work at the same firm as her, and I met her a couple times waiting for the elevator when travelling to the Houston office. Don't know what it is - I've always been a little turned off on blondes, but she seems so sweet even I think she's gorgeous. If you can judge a person by their spouse/friends, he must be pretty cool, too.
Truly a wonderful person our administrator is. Both as a mascot and a site administrator. Keep up the good work bearpaws!
