Funny Business After years as the Phillie Phanatic, Dave Raymond bececame an entrepreneur with a corporate mentality. But don't ask him to wear a tie. Delaware Today, March 2003 It's Family Day at the University of Delaware's Ice Arena. Dave Raymond is there, and so are his two young daughters, Madison and Carly. Most fathers at Family Day are dressed in thick jackets or heavy sweaters. Raymond is dressed as a 7-foot-tall purple ball of fur named Reggy. Reggy struts and skips around the ice arena, funk-dancing, slapping high fives, and giving lots of great big smooches. He catches one giggly girl in his mitts, lays one on her, and announces, "I like her! She tastes good!" The Reggy voice is half Bobcat Goldthwait, half Bert from Sesame Street. That's Dave Raymond the larger-than-life cartoon character. But in his tiny dressing room in the Ice Arena's back offices, he pops off Reggy's head, rubs his face with a towel, and becomes Dave Raymond the father. His daughter Madison, 5, takes a break from ice skating to visit him. Her father sits on a plastic folding chair, hunched over and taking deep breaths and sips of water. From above the waistline, he's a 47-year-old businessman with gusto who reads books on corporate management philosophy. But it's hard to think of Raymond as all business. He's still wearing his puffy purple, yellow and green leggings. He changes his T-shirt, which in 20 minutes of performing has already become saturated with sweat, and runs back out to the crowded ice rink. When he's partying with the crowd, he interacts as if he's lived in the costume all his life. But this sort of appearance has become rare for Raymond. In his heyday as the Phillie Phanatic, he darted around to more than 100 appearances a year, not including the Phillies games themselves. But now, he only gets suited up when his principal performer is unavailable. Family Day is the first time he's been in costume in nearly two months. It's a bittersweet retirement from performing. When he was with the Phillies, Raymond had no plans to start his own business. After all, the Phillies paid him a six-figure salary for something he loved to do anyway. "Journalists would always ask me, 'How long are you gonna do this?' I'd say, 'Well, five more years' — that was my standard answer." Slowly, though, he realized there was a reason they were asking the question. The flips, the round-offs, the stunts on his four-wheeler — they didn't come as easily as when he was in his 20s. Would he still be able to carry off his intensely physical act at 45? 55? "I used to do a dead fall," he says. "I'd kiss somebody and then, boom! I'd fall right to the ground. I can't do it anymore. I get bruised up." Even if he gave up performing as the Phanatic, he knew he could stay with the Phillies as an events coordinator. But having never had a real boss — the Phanatic enjoyed an autonomy unlike any other employee in a Phillies uniform — Raymond questioned whether he could get used to taking orders. That's when he handed in his Silly String and left the Phillies in 1993 to start his own business, Acme Mascots. Acme produced a mascot named "Sport," a generic character not associated with any particular sports team. Raymond, as Sport, made appearances at minor-league ballparks around the country and made a name for Acme. However, he quickly fell into the same hole as with the Phanatic: He spent all his time performing as Sport, leaving no time to train anyone else to take over. Frustrated, he said goodbye to his Acme partners and created small business No. 2, Raymond Entertainment Group. A year beforehand, he had led a weekend-long mascot training camp at his alma mater, the University of Delaware, and he clicked with one of the trainees, Chris Bruce. When Bruce graduated in May 2002, Raymond hired him as a full-time performer for Raymond Entertainment Group's core mascot "Reggy." Finally, Raymond had found someone to fill his giant orange and purple shoes. Free to work outside the mascot costume, he moved on to a new aspect of his career: Dave Raymond, the businessman. To hear Raymond talk about business requires a split consciousness. On the one hand, he's constantly worrying about how to improve gross revenues and how to expand branding opportunities. On the other hand, he's constantly worrying about whether Reggy's french-fry hair needs a shampoo. He approaches both problems with the same intensity. His office has a "no neckties" rule and before he asks "Is it profitable?" he always asks "Is it fun?" He's proud of his company's core product — custom mascots for sports teams and other businesses — but he's not satisfied with just that. He's developing a new line of products, Cyber Characters, designed to interact with an audience in the JumboTron world using computer- and blue-screen technology. He also wants to move into the business of corporate training, teaching executives nonverbal communication skills and morale-boosters using his mascot training camps, which he now conducts annually. In fact, before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he had been in discussion with MBNA to have some of their sports marketing executives participate in a mascot camp. "I think we're on the precipice of really jumping off into the type of company we want to be," Raymond says. After a quick breather in his dressing room, Raymond towels himself off and dons his Reggy head again. Rob Burns, his handler, carries a bucket of ice shavings that he packs into snowballs. Reggy slides on the ice, and the rink clears to make way for the Zamboni machine. As the Zamboni wets the ice, Reggy tip-toes around the rink, armed with one of Burns' snowballs. He lobs a snowball and it smashes into the side of the machine. He quickly grabs another snowball and tosses it halfway across the arena. It smacks the driver's jacket. Reggy, wanting to be fair, timidly gives the driver a snowball. A second later, the driver pegs Reggy in the back, and the crowd erupts in applause. While he now spends more time making phone calls and shaking hands than making snowballs and pinching tooshes, Raymond relishes the act. He's had to make a few adjustments, though. When he performed as the Phanatic, his body language had to do all the work. "As my performances got less physical," he says, "the voice became more important." At first, Raymond felt hesitant about speaking in costume and trying to tell jokes — his forte had always been physical, slapstick comedy. "I thought, 'I'm gonna say something that's not funny,'" he says. But then he remembered he was dressed as a giant purple thingamabob with floppy ears and french-fry hair. "Even 'hello' is funny." Raymond scurries back to his dressing room for another quick break, another towel-off, and another T-shirt change. Then Reggy dives back into action. He sits at a booth to sign autographs and his daughters run up to hug him. Madison stops at a table where Reggy's scribbling away at his autographs and tugs at his Koosh-ball tail. She whispers to Burns, the handler: "My dad's inside there." After 20 minutes, Reggy wraps up his autograph session, dances his way to the dressing room, and the head pops off again. Raymond's hair is slick and his T-shirt drenched. "I'm tired," he sighs. He strips off the costume and sits down to rest before packing up the head, the shoes and the bulky purple body into a duffel bag. He's feeling like he's just run a few miles on a treadmill, he says — a nice, solid work-out. But, he adds, "I'm not physically capable of doing this every day." A younger man, a protege, now wears the french-fry hair. Nowadays, Raymond's content with applause from his family, rather than a capacity crowd. "You're a good thrower," Madison says, still laughing about the snowball stunt. "I know," Dave says, reaching back to rub his shoulder. "My arm hurts." Shaun Gallagher is Delaware Today's managing editor.