Ed Snider could be as prickly and combative as an NHL enforcer, so it's no coincidence that the Age of Gritty dawned when the Flyers' founder was terminally ill.
"Ed was an old-school guy," said Dave Raymond, the original Phillie Phanatic and a consultant during the process that led to Gritty's spectacularly successful September launch. "He didn't want this."
For Snider, who died in April 2016, there was no place for furry creatures in the man-to-man battles he and the team that mirrored his personality so regularly fought.
"I used to ride my four-wheeler over to the Spectrum for Sixers playoff games and one night I decided to go over for a Flyers game," Raymond, who stepped down as the Phanatic in 1993, recalled recently. "The next morning the Flyers called my bosses. They said, 'Don't ever do that again. We don't want him anywhere near us.' "
No mascot, not even the Phanatic, ever triggered a phenomenon like the one that followed Gritty's Sept. 24 introduction. In a single day, his demented-goblin visage and social-media snarkiness transformed a mocking response into campy adoration. The fat and fuzzy mascot intended to attract youngsters became a hard-edged Philly hero.
There was Gritty live on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." There he was being ridiculed on HBO's "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver," on "Saturday Night Live," on national newscasts. There he was tripping on the Wells Fargo Center ice, trolling his Pittsburgh Penguins counterpart on Twitter, swatting a display of toy sharks off the Adventure Aquarium's gift-shop shelf.
Suddenly, fans of a team that always spurned mascots and embraced its bad-boy image were going gaga over a goofy orange monster. Gritty had 28,000 Twitter followers 12 hours after his rollout and 60,000 at the end of his first day.
