Return of the Daug

Beloved OU basketball mascot adds new source of energy to LNC

By: Chris Plank

Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in 16 years, welcome back to the Lloyd Noble enter… Top Daug!”

As those words were announced to the capacity crowd at the Lloyd Noble Center on Jan. 14 against the Kansas Jayhawks, the moment marked the official return of the beloved Sooner mascot. “

“Who Let the Dogs Out” played throughout the arena, and as the smoke cleared from the entrance ramp, there he was… Top Daug. In true form, Top Daug performed his signature ear tug, and proceeded to slide onto the court, sprint across the Lloyd Noble Center floor and launch himself into the base of the basketball goal.

The crowd roared as Top Daug, a beloved figure of University of Oklahoma basketball, was restored.

Somewhere inside the Lloyd Noble Center, Jacob Potter was watching with a huge smile on his face. There might not be a bigger Top Daug fan than Potter, who serves as the assistant athletic director for broadcasting, overseeing the operation at SoonerVision.

“To say that I’m a fan would be an understatement,” Potter said. “Top Daug was the reason why you are an OU fan if you grew up in my era during mid-80s and early 90s. It was “Billy Ball” and Top Daug was right there with it. That is what made it special.”

Top Daug’s roots did sprout on the basketball court, however, He was the idea of an OKC psychologist named Logan Wright, who was a part of the OU Wrestling Club. He dreamed up the idea of having a dog mascot for the Under Dogs. The Oklahoma Under Dogs were a group of aspiring wrestlers who wanted to make the Olympics. He called the mascot “Under Dog.”

Wright approached the basketball team during the 1979- 80 season to see if basketball would be interested in having Under Dog appear at games. During this time, a costumed Chicken was the basketball mascot but Under Dog started to attend home games.

While the name underdogs fit the basketball and wrestling program at the time, it would not last long. During the 1981-82 basketball season, the Sooners were picked last in the Big 8, but ended up in the Final Four of the NIT. The next year, with Wayman Tisdale on board, then head coach Billy Tubbs stated, “We are not underdogs any more… We are the top dog.”

It was at that point the name changed, with a minor spelling adjustment, and a legend was born.

“He was different than Boomer and Sooner,” said Doug Kennon, a student trainer from 1984 to 1988 who still owns a Top Daug costume. “He was iconic. We were so great during those years in basketball. There was just a lot of passion around the team and program. You look back on it now and it was Billy Tubbs, Wayman Tisdale and Top Daug.”

As the Sooners continued to pile up wins, the popularity of Top Daug continued to grow. The personality inside the suit was different then most ordinary mascots. There was much more personality to Top Daug. Kenny Evans was inside the Top Daug costume beginning in the 1987-88 season. Many credit Evans as the best to represent what Top Daug was all about.

“Every mascot, I’ve always given it a character,” Evans said during an interview on the SportsTalk Network. “This is a 14- or 10-year-old kid and you try to imagine how he would react.”

“I thought Top Daug was a big part of the program while I was at OU,” former Sooner head coach Bill Tubbs said. “I thought he added a lot of excitement to the game. Of course, I never really watched him because I was coaching, but I know he did a lot of tricks and a lot of fun stuff. He was a part of our team. Everyone really seemed to like and be impressed with Top Daug.”

In his 14 seasons at OU, Tubbs held a 333-132 record and helped the Sooners to nine NCAA Tournament appearances, including a Final Four and National Championship appearance in 1987-88.

“Everyone remembers a Top Daug moment, everyone,” Evans added. “You get inside that costume, and you’re a completely different person. Making people laugh has always been medicine. Laugher has no dialect. You can entertain people all over the world, everyone laughs the same.”

“We created a singular mascot that could be engaging with fans at each and every game, not just one for one sport and one for another,” Oklahoma Athletic Director Joe Castiglione said. “We had three different colors of crimson in our football uniforms when I first got here… We had several different logos including the slanted OU logo. We were going 20 different directions and … it wasn’t productive in the long run.”

So, in 2005, Top Daug was retired and the university moved forward with Boomer and Sooner.

“It wasn’t a devious plot to do away with Top Daug. It was just how it evolved,” Castiglione said. “We were trying to find a costumed mascot we could use for all of our sports.”

As time progressed, Castiglione was periodically asked about the mascot. In a wild twist, Potter, as a student in 2005, actually posted “Missing Daug” posters across campus to keep the memory of the beloved mascot alive. Potter went as far as even wearing a Top Daug shirt to every home game when he was a student.

“Any time you experience success, anything you can associate to that successyou hold on to and appreciate,” Potter said. “For the most part, Top Daug is right there with Billy Ball and Billy Tubbs. It’s hard to think anything but positive things about Billy. When you look at something successful, you think that makes sense. Let’s bring this back.”

Potter finally got his chance to bring Top Daug officially back during the off season. It happened during a meeting where many of the creative minds within the Oklahoma Athletic department sat down to come up with ways to increase attendance at Oklahoma men’s and women’s basketball games.

“We really had a variety of conversations related to continuing to build greater attendance,” Castiglione said. “We put everything on the table. We didn’t leave any stone unturned. We thought historically, we thought in creative, innovative ways, some ridiculously, out of the box ways. Just trying to think of ways we can continually strengthen fan engagement. That’s where the idea started coming from. Obviously we knew Top Daug was popular and people have asked us about it periodically each year. We have brought Top Daug back a couple of times over the years. This particular time, we decided for Top Daug to have a presence the rest of the season, not just a one game here or their deal.”

For Oklahoma Marketing Director Drew Gaschler, he knew it was going to be big and started to work on a fun and creative way to re-introduce the popular mascot.

“A lot of people were behind the scenes on this one, our AD Joe Castiglione understands what it takes to get the crowd going. He’s a former marketing guy. He cleared the way for all of this and allowed us to be creative with this,” Gaschler said. “We had countless meetings throughout the summer and in early fall as we tried to figure out the best way to bring him back and that’s where we came up with the Twitter take over and it kind of took off from there.”

TOP DAUG HACKED THE OKLAHOMA MEN’S BASKETBALL TWITTER FEED

“We all sat and thought the image of a dog with his paws trying to type on a text message was really funny. I remember thinking about that in my head, and I couldn’t get the hilarious nature out of my mind,” Potter said.

As a couple of jumbled tweets were sent, many speculated. Initially some thought it was a tweet that was mistakenly sent by OU Men’s Basketball SID Ben Coldagelli. Coldagelli had about 20 messages from media members and friends alerting him to the fact that either he had been accidentally tweeting or his young son had captured his phone. Neither was true.

Norman Transcript writer Joe Beuttner even came up with a way to decipher the tweets as some sort of code announcing the return of Top Daug. But, there was not a code at all.

“I’m pretty sure we picked random letters and just threw them out there,” Potter said of the social media reaction.

The social media campaign was a rousing success. Everyone was talking about Top Daug and to show support for his return, the crowd for the Oklahoma basketball showdown with Kansas was the biggest of the 2019-2020 college basketball season to date.

“I knew he was beloved. I didn’t know so many people loved him as much as I love him,” Potter said. “I didn’t realize there were that many Top Daug fans to my level.”

“I’ve been in Norman for five years now. The first year I was here, they started talking about bringing him back, so I got to know the history,” Gaschler added. “But even I was surprised it got the response it did. We knew he was a staple of Oklahoma basketball. We didn’t know he would create that much excitement going into this.”

For former Top Daug Kenny Evans, it was exciting and necessary in his mind to see Top Daug return.

“He adds the 12th man essentially,” Evans said. “Watching games on TV there is no energy in the crowd. Bringing Top Daug back will be something where a lot of fans will be bringing their kids out to see the game.”

TOP DAUG IS BACK

“It is an emotional thing for OU basketball fans. Top Daug elicits an emotional response from a lot of fans,” Potter added. “The pictures they took at OU basketball games when there were kids with Top Daug and the memories were with Top Daug, and we felt like we could bring that back … to the LNC and bring some energy and excitement.” – BSM