Somehow, things like this don’t even surprise me anymore.
There was a time in my life where I would have been shocked by a professional sports team’s mascot being so unhinged, but in 2023, everything seems rather normal.
Plus, this unreal premise includes Gritty, the mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers, and he (or she, or it) has made stuff like this commonplace.
If you somehow have missed out on the living nightmare that is Gritty, I have to bring you into the weird world of the most unsettling mascot in the NHL. The team’s website describes their strange looking orange mascot as the following:
“Gritty is the official mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers. Gritty is best known for his uniquely Philadelphian personality as well as his Flyers fandom.
Standing at seven feet tall, with non-blinking googly eyes, covered head to toe in orange fur and an unkempt beard, Gritty’s appearance is inimitable. Gritty’s edgy personality and temperamental attitude have allowed him to push the envelope of what is possible or acceptable for a team mascot.”
And to really drive it home, here’s a video from back in 2o18 when the team introduced their bearded fever dream of a mascot:
That unsettling energy that Gritty possessed in his opening press conference back in 2018 has stayed consistent and persistent in the years following. He’s always up to something, and the jury is still out on whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Gritty is definitely good at getting eyes on him though. One of his more recent stunts got some younger kids involved, which was a good thing, but the strings attached to the stunt with the younger kids was…let’s just call it a bad thing.
To just get straight to the point, Gritty was looking for kids to play goalie against him on the ice, and the sign he was holding explained the stipulations of the competition:
“Make a save, you get my stick. I score…I date your mom. Deal?”
Not sure what kind of kid (or mom for that matter) would willingly join in on that kind of competition, but apparently there were some takers. And by that I mean Gritty scored on a bunch of kids and was then able to “take” their moms on a date.
He even captioned his post of the video with the shockingly forward statement of:
“Please, call me dad.”
