It's 20 degrees and dropping and a northeast wind is blowing off hats and bending trees. A rough coat of ice grips the ground beneath three inches of new snow. It's a dark winter night in Reading.
Tom Burgoyne, age 28, a 1988 Drexel graduate, is undressing in the back of a van outside the Sheridan-Berskhire hotel. He strips to his shorts and T- shirt, slips into a green, $15,000, six-piece, 35-pound costume, then bursts out the door onto the parking lot and waddles quickly to the hotel
entrance - a clever, mischievous furry green creature that has become one of the best-loved mascots in all the sports world.
Meet the Phillie Phanatic. The new Phillie Phanatic. After 16 years, the zany Phillies toy has a new battery. Burgoyne, a five-year backup apprentice, has taken over the star role vacated by Dave Raymond, the one-time Phillies gofer who first breathed life and charm into the childlike Phanatic personality in 1978 and turned it into a national celebrity.
Raymond, a fresh-faced 22-year-old out of the University of Delaware when he began entertaining baseball crowds at the Vet, left the Phillies after last season to join a new venture called Acme Mascots. He soon will be seen across the country as Sport, a newly designed costume created by the makers of the Phanatic - Bonnie Erickson and her husband, Wayde Harrison. Sport is under construction and is scheduled to make its first public appearance sometime early this month.
Burgoyne, a Jenkintown native who was the Hawks' mascot and self-proclaimed class clown at St. Joseph's Prep, is one of Philadelphia's wackiest sports fans. (That was Burgoyne atop the baseball statue at the Vet the night the Phillies clinched the pennant in 1980, and that was Burgoyne in tuxedo and Dr. J T-shirt at Julius Erving's 30,000th-point celebration at the Spectrum in 1987.)
He majored in marketing at Drexel, worked at the Philadelphia stock exchange and sold Halloween costumes and computer supplies, but never gave up his high school dream of someday becoming the Phillie Phanatic. He was looking in the classified ads for a job in management - under the M's - when he saw the ad that changed his life: Mascot wanted. One of about 40 applicants, Burgoyne got the job without knowing or caring about salary or hours. He has since become, according to Raymond, by far the best of the six backups in the Phanatic's history (No. 7 just completed auditions).
