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In the beginning there was darkness. Then professional sports said: let there be colourful uniforms, animal-based team names and bizarre-but-lovable mascots.
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Almost every professional sports team in the world now has a mascot, but few leagues have embraced them as enthusiastically and wholeheartedly as the NRL. Its hodgepodge pageant of muscle-bound animals and newly invented superheroes puts Super Rugby’s dull and listless line-up to shame. Every club in the league has at least one, and most have about 10 if you take into account all the sponsors’ mascots like Hogster the Hog’s Breath Cafe hog. It has worked hard in recent years to create a consistent standard of official club mascots. Here they all are, illustrated for the 2015 NRL Community Carnival.
Of course, some are still better than others. Here are the 100% definitive rankings of all 16 NRL club mascots.
16. Scorch (St George-Illawarra Dragons)
Scorch seems to have been forced upon a reluctant St George by the NRL just so that every team would have a suitable child-friendly mascot that could be whacked on some toddler merch. The bright red dragon looks like a rejected concept from a stage production of The Paper Bag Princess and is frequently overlooked in favour of the green St George Bank dragon (pictured, with club legend Wendell Sailor) at home games and Dragons events. Scorch is the NRL’s worst mascot.
15. Claws (Penrith Panthers)
The elusive Claws (sometimes referred to as ‘Tryton’) is meant to be a panther, but the costume looks more like some kind of weird black dinosaur. Inexplicably wears yellow-rimmed ‘speed dealer’ sunglasses and his Twitter account (“The #1 Mascot in the NRL is on Twitter!”) hasn’t been updated since 2012. Extremely dodgy.
14. Blade (Gold Coast Titans)
The Titans’ colour combination of aqua and golden yellow is one of most aesthetically displeasing colour combinations in all sport. They were doomed from the start trying to make a Titan look good in those colours. Blade has his own Twitter account, but seems to spend more time watching V8 Supercars than rugby league.
13. Rocky (Sydney Roosters)
There’s something not right about a rooster proudly wearing a shirt with Steggles logo on the front. Rocky has turned his back on his own species. A sporadic tweeter, he mostly seems to use his Twitter account to send fanatical tweets to Australian cricket captain Steve Smith. Hard to like.
12. Novo (Newcastle Knights)
The big-chinned Knights mascot only got his name in 2013, when Kurt Gidley decided that of all the names suggested by fans ‘Novo’ was the one he liked the most. But what was he doing pre-2013? Just running around Hunter Stadium without a name? That’s unbelievable mascot negligence from the Knights.
11. Egor and Ellie (Manly Sea Eagles)
Are they brother and sister or husband and wife? Sea Eagles mascots Egor and Ellie are the White Stripes of the NRL, a mysterious male-female duo on the Brookvale Oval sidelines. According to the Sea Eagles website the pair “like to spend their spare time watching highlights from [Manly’s] past eight premiership victories.” Whatever their relationship, there’s something mildly sad about that image.
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10. Buck (Brisbane Broncos)
The mascot situation in Brisbane is confusing as hell. There are at least three different versions of ‘Buck’ the Bronco, one of whom is an actual horse who “enjoys the job of cantering around the field to celebrate each time the Broncos score a try.” That’s extremely cool. The two versions of the official costumed Buck – a friendly but idiotic-looking young steed, and a terrifying anthropomorphic version of the Broncos crest – don’t come close to the real thing.
9. Spike, George and Brutus (Canterbury Bulldogs)
Another club with real live animal mascots, Spike and George are a pair of bulldogs who lead the team out onto the field before every home game. The costumed mascot, Brutus, tends to fly under the radar, but made an exception during the finals series last year when he ventured into ‘Roosters territory’ and had his photo taken drinking a latte at ‘Skinny Dip Cafe’ and cocking his leg outside the Eastern Suburbs Leagues Club. Spike and George are obviously great mascots, but there is something deeply untrustworthy about Brutus.
8. Timmy (Wests Tigers)
Wests mascot Timmy the Tiger has his own Man Cave gloriously decked out in orange and black – he loves his footy club and the feeling seems to be reciprocated by the Leichhardt Oval regulars. He doesn’t do anything too fancy, but ticks all the boxes a good honest mascot should tick. A credit to the NRL.
7. Tiki (New Zealand Warriors)
At first glance Tiki is the least imaginative of the NRL mascots – it’s just the club crest made into a mask and popped on top of a Warriors uniform. But to the Warriors’ credit they have written Tiki one of the most thorough and detailed mascot bios in professional sport. He’s a much more appealing proposition once you know he reads five or six books a week. He’s also an above-average dancer, but is frequently humiliated by Warriors sponsor’s mascot Bendon Man.
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6. Sparky (Parramatta Eels)
Blue and yellow eel Sparky is the only NRL mascot with his own website with Sparky’s Brigade, a fan club for under-15s offering, among other things, free entry to three home games a season. That’s a great deal – it seems safe to say Sparky is the NRL’s most generous mascot. He has a wife, Mrs Sparky, who sometimes appears alongside him.
5. Bluey (North Queensland Cowboys)
Huge credit to the Cowboys for thinking outside the square and making their mascot a cool cattle dog instead of a dumb ol’ cowboy. Bluey is probably the NRL’s friendliest-looking mascot and maintains a consistently good-humoured Twitter account. Shares the sideline at 1300SMILES Stadium with a slightly deranged-looking dairy cow called Miss Moo.
4. Storm Man (Melbourne Storm)
A superhero whose only superpower seems to be ‘being a classic Aussie larrikin,’ Storm Man looks like he could drink David Boon under the table and loves nothing more than to ride a quad bike around the perimeter of AAMI Park. Easily the most risque of a largely child-friendly NRL stable of mascots, he survived an unsuccessful coup a couple of years ago by the truly pathetic ‘Boom’. Storm Man now reigns as the one and only Melbourne Storm mascot.
3. MC Hammerhead and Reefy (Cronulla Sharks)
A beautiful coalescence of rugby league’s past and present, the Sharks have two mascots after a fan campaign to reinstate the club’s horrifying original MC Hammerhead saw him return to the Shark Park sideline alongside the less-scary Reefy. Sharks fan David Innes, who volunteered to don the MC Hammerhead costume, drives a six-hour round trip to every home game and says he and Reefy have become “very good friends” since Hammerhead’s reintroduction. An incredibly heartwarming tale.
2. Reggie (South Sydney Rabbitohs)
The oldest mascot in the NRL, the only one with his own Wikipedia page. Reggie provided the NRL with its most heroic ever mascot moment in 2013 when club stalwart Charlie Gallico suited up to perform his mascot duties despite his wife having passed away just days before. He was carried off the field at the end of the game on the shoulders of Isaac Luke and Adam Reynolds. ”I was crying inside the suit,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald. “That’s when I knew what respect was all about. To me it meant more than anything in the world.”
1. Victor (Canberra Raiders)
Victor the Viking has been the Raiders’ mascot since the club’s first season in 1982. Quite simply he’s a perfect mascot – funny, rousing, and extremely dedicated to his club. Spectacularly, it’s been the same bloke inside the suit the whole time – Tony Wood survived a heart attack in late 2015 but has returned this season and is narrowing in on his 600th game in the suit. A stone cold Aussie legend – long live Victor the Viking, the NRL’s best mascot.
Dishonorable mention: Hogster (Hog’s Breath Cafe)
The worst.
