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PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Tommy Lasorda lost his cool. The Phillie Phanatic — that furry, flightless bird out of the Galapagos archipelago — nearly lost his head.
Sports fans across the world lost their minds 36 years ago at the sight of the cartoonish clash that involved the portly Los Angeles Dodgers manager, a life-sized mannequin beaten in effigy and the potbellied Phanatic.
This was no staged bit, unlike the Phanatic’s habitual taunts of the visiting team that exist to this day.
No, on Aug. 28, 1988, at a rather inconsequential game on the artificial turf of Veterans Stadium, Lasorda was fed up with the Phanatic and his antagonistic antics and in a rare, raw moment of rage, attacked the most famous Phillie of ’em all — both real or fictional.
“He came out,” said the Phanatic’s best friend, Dave Raymond, “and beat up a Muppet.”
Billed as the Phanatic’s closest confident, Raymond actually played the Phanatic from 1978 until 1993. He has remained connected to the industry as a mascot consultant to the stars and helped create, brand and train the next generation of hundreds of stadium characters.
Wherever his speaking engagements take him, one of the first questions — if not THE first — asked of Raymond is this: What was up with the Phanatic and his greatest foil, Tommy Lasorda?
“He thought it was all in good fun,” Raymond said Wednesday as he recalled the anniversary. “Apparently it wasn’t. I was trying to make sense of it.”
Lasorda and Raymond had actually been on friendly terms dating back to the late 1970s when they toured together with MLB All-Stars for a series of games in Japan. Through the 1980s, Lasorda seemed in on the joke, screaming and cursing at the Phanatic from the dugout, before laughing with the rest of the Dodgers.
“He would always do it up the level where I thought he was really angry and then he would come back and laugh,” Raymond said. “I realized this is what I liked doing.”
So what happened on that late August night that made fists and feathers fly?
Lasorda had grown tired of what he considered the Phanatic’s constant degradation of the Dodgers uniform, not so much poking fun at the manager himself. Raymond confessed that former Dodgers infielder Steve Sax participated in an inside job of often swiping an extra Lasorda uniform and discreetly passing it off to the Phanatic’s gigantic green paws for skits.
Lasorda finally secured his Dodgers uniforms for the first two games of the series. For the third, Raymond says he bought a generic Dodgers jersey and had Lasorda’s name embroidered on the back. He dressed a dummy in the uniform and wagged it in Lasorda’s face. Lasorda walked out of the dugout and again seemed to play along. He marched toward the Phanatic, then stopped and pushed the mascot’s beloved four-wheeler away from him toward the dugout. The Phanatic popped his belly toward Lasorda and stuck out his tongue in seemingly good-natured fun.
Then it disintegrated into a schoolyard wrestling match.
Lasorda turned and ran after the Phanatic, grabbing the creature by the neck and tossing him to the ground. Lasorda tried to strip the jersey off the Phanatic before he whacked him in the head with the mannequin for good measure.
The Phanatic’s head added about 15 inches to Raymond’s frame and weighed about 5 pounds, so when Lasorda twisted the neck, he almost popped off the head, leaving Raymond mortified — imagine the horror of young Phillies fans who would have been exposed to the man inside that big beak.
“I just grabbed him and I about kicked him on his butt,” Lasorda said. “That wasn’t funny.”
The tale of the tape gave the edge to the Phanatic.
Lasorda was not in fighting shape when he confronted the 6-foot-6, 300-pound, 90-inch waist frame of the Phanatic.
The 5-foot-10 Lasorda tipped the scale well past 200 pounds; he openly discussed his weight issues and signed high-profile endorsement deals with leading liquid diet supplements at the time.
Maybe, Raymond surmised, the Hall of Fame manager was hangry.
“The Phillie Phanatic is a good friend of mine,” Lasorda said. “He’s a fine young man. But he went a little too far.”
Raymond was stunned that mocking Dodgers blue would have Lasorda seeing red.
“Tommy had that dual personality,” Raymond said. “You think you knew him and then suddenly you somehow crossed some line that he thinks is sacred and he’ll eat you alive. That’s what happened.”
The duo reconciled in a chance meeting later that year at baseball’s winter meetings — the Dodgers won the World Series while the Phillies finished last in the NL East — and Raymond said they remained friends until Lasorda’s death in 2021.
It’s no Ali vs. Frazier. But the fight lives on atop the short list of great moments in mascot history.
“This was the greatest thing the Phanatic has ever done,” Raymond said. “The benefit of it was to get that reaction and everybody was talking about it.”
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