Go to any sporting event at the Ohio State University, and there’s a good chance you’ll encounter Brutus Buckeye. The crowd-riling character is famous for his energetic headbanging and carefully balanced headstands.
But 60 years ago, the Ohio State icon didn’t exist.
At the time, OSU student Sally Lanyon remembers talking to her then-boyfriend Ray Bourhis, who hailed from New Jersey, about the school’s lack of a mascot.
“Ray had this outside perspective and he said to me one day, ‘It's really strange Ohio State doesn't have a mascot.’ And I went, ‘Oh yeah, right, it really is.’ Because I was a Mansfield Tyger — a T-Y Tyger — and I knew how important mascots were to the whole health and well-being of a school,” she said. “And so it was immediately like, ‘Oh yeah, we got to do something about it.’”
The birth of Brutus Buckeye
The university had adopted buckeyes as an official nickname by the time Lanyon and Bourhis attended Ohio State.
So Bourhis had envisioned the mascot to be a play on words: a buck’s eye.
Lanyon disagreed adamantly.
“I said, ‘No, no, no, you were not raised here. You do not know that the buckeye is a tree. It's the state official tree and it has a nut and we call that a buckeye,’” she said. “I mean, I just stopped him in his tracks about doing a buck’s eye.”
As she envisioned watching a football game as a fan high up in the bleachers, she knew what the mascot had to be.
“You need something that you can see,” she said. “And so, okay, a big round nut is what it's got to be. It was pretty obvious to me.”
She made the first prototype of the mascot on her sorority house lawn with a wooden frame, chicken wire and papier-mache.
A homecoming game debut
Lanyon’s creation made its debut at the 1965 Ohio State homecoming game.
She and Bourhis recruited a cheerleader to wear the costume, and Lanyon remembers waiting in the stands in anxious anticipation for the papier-mache Buckeye to make an appearance.
“It was popular at the time for people to streak across football fields and then they would be tackled by the security people and taken off the field. And all I could think of was: What if he comes out and the security detail decides that he should not be here and take him away to jail and then they're going to find out who was involved and I was going to go to jail? I just awfulized it. I made it a catastrophe in my brain,” she said.
“But no, that did not happen. And it really was amazing. People got it right away. That's a buckeye.”
Sixty years on, the nut has a name – Brutus – and it has evolved from a papier-mache costume to a fiberglass figure to the fabric-headed mascot fans recognize today.
Lanyon and Bourhis wrote a book about the mascot’s evolution, “The Autobiography of Brutus Buckeye,” and Lanyon created the Brutus Blog to tell the stories about the people who brought the mascot to life.
Still to this day, she says she gets butterflies when the famous buckeye makes an appearance.
“I'm such a proud mother,” she said. “There's two reasons that I like to watch Ohio State football: One is the band and the other is Brutus.”
“Oh, and by the way, they have a fabulous team, too,” she added with a laugh.
