“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a mascot,” says Gunnersaurus Rex, Arsenal’s beloved mascot since 1993. But his path to becoming an internationally recognized symbol of all that is good and pure and baffling about sports was fraught with obstacles. “My parents didn’t want it, my teachers couldn’t see it… and then there was Gary.”
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Even today, it’s clear that the name of his childhood nemesis holds power over Gunnersaurus.
“Gary,” he says, with a gravitas you might not expect from a giant, green, doe-eyed dinosaur with a friendly grin permanently affixed to his bulbous face. “Gary was perfect. And I wasn’t.”
Gunnersaurus was an Arsenal fan from birth. His parents, actors who met on the set of the poorly received 1981 film Caveman starring Ringo Starr, weren’t football fans, but his paternal grandfather was a lifelong Arsenal supporter who made sure Gunnersaurus would be, too.
“My parents couldn’t decide between naming me Steveasaurus or Alan,” Gunnersaurus explains. “So they left it to my granddad, who was a massive Arsenal supporter, and he said, ‘He’s Gunnersaurus.’ Both my parents hated it, but they couldn’t decide on anything else, so Gunnersaurus it was. And I’ve been grateful to my granddad ever since.”
Attending matches with his grandfather at Highbury, Arsenal’s former home, was where Gunnersaurus first hatched his dream of one day becoming the club’s mascot. He was encouraged by his grandfather, Jackasaurus, who pulled some strings to get Gunnersaurus enrolled at the Plushton School—Britian’s most exclusive mascot academy—where Jackasaurus had taught a popular course in high-fiving for many years. A number of the country’s most famous mascots attended Plushton. Willie, mascot of the 1966 World Cup, is an alumnus, as is Manchester United’s Fred the Red and Chelsea’s Stamford the Lion. The Phillie Phanatic even studied at Plushton during his year abroad.
It was at Plushton that Gunnersaurus met Gary the Gunner and faced a common refrain whenever he told anyone that he wanted to be the mascot for Arsenal, a club that had a cannon on its badge and was named after the east London armaments manufacturer for the British royal army: “But you’re a dinosaur.”
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“It’s what my parents said when I told them my dream, it’s what my teachers at Plushton said when I told them my reason for being there and it’s what Gary said when I met him on the first day of school,” Gunnersaurus explains.
“Everyone knew that Gary would be Arsenal’s mascot one day,” says Fred the Red, a classmate of Gunnersaurus’ at Plushton. “I mean, he was literally a cannon. There were rumors that his great grandfather was the model for the cannon on Arsenal’s crest. He was perfect and everyone looked up to him. Gunnersaurus—yes, he also had ‘Gunner’ in his name, but he just… he was an odd duck. Or dinosaur. Sometimes you’d catch him staring at you during class, then he’d try to quickly look away and act like he was doing something else. He did it all the time. It was super weird. But Gary was so outgoing—even the teachers who supported Spurs were charmed by him. And he dated a netball mascot who was two years older. Everyone wanted to be like Gary.”
But while everyone else at Plushton was admiring Gary, Gunnersaurus was caught up in his own vision of the future.
“I would often daydream during school,” Gunnersaurus says. “Being amongst the crowd at Highbury, high-fiving supporters as Arsenal win title after title. Using a T-shirt launcher. I couldn’t help it. I just wanted to be Arsenal’s mascot so badly. And no matter how many people doubted me, I knew I could do it better than Gary—regardless of whether I had a tail or a fuse.”
As their time at Plushton went on, Gunnersaurus began to prove himself as a legitimate challenger to Gary for the Arsenal job. He worked day and night on his dancing, visited local children’s hospitals on weekends instead of attending the debaucherous parties thrown by his classmates and began work on his innovative research into the effects matchday mascot interactions have on player performances. He also put in countless hours of practice with the T-shirt launcher. His first challenge was learning to operate the device in spite of his chunky paws and soft, four-inch claws. After endless hours of frustration, he built a modified trigger customized to his unique grip. Then he perfected his aim. Before long, he was confident he could reliably launch a T-shirt around the reach of an overzealous adult and into the hands of a deserving child 99 times out of 100.
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“It was the early ’90s and people were starting to become a bit more open-minded about mascots,” says Fred the Red. “The culture was changing and people were more accepting of mascots that didn’t fit the traditional archetypes.”
Once it became clear that Gunnersaurus wouldn’t back down from his dream—he was encouraged by a chance meeting with then-Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood at the U.K. premiere of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park—Gary intensified his efforts to claim the job he saw as his birthright.
“To be quite honest, I thought Gunnersaurus would be laughed off the park if he ever tried to be Arsenal mascot,” Gary tells The Athletic in a phone interview. “What do green dinosaurs have to do with Arsenal Football Club? Absolutely nothing at all. I felt a bit sorry for the lad, but I thought he’d be doing children’s birthday parties his whole life while I did proper mascot work at the highest level. But when the club didn’t immediately dismiss the notion of having him, I knew I had to get serious. I broke things off with several of my girlfriends and started paying attention in class. My parents even hired Naranjito (mascot for the 1982 World Cup) to give me private lessons. However, he didn’t speak English, so that didn’t last long.”
After Gary and Gunnersaurus graduated from Plushton, Arsenal brought both of them in for a trial ahead of the 1993-94 season. Whoever impressed the club’s board the most would get the job as Arsenal’s mascot on a permanent basis.
“I remember they had us out for a youth tournament at Highbury and the kids just instantly loved Gunnersaurus,” Gary says. “During halftime of the first match, he set up as if he was going to take a penalty kick. He took a big run up to the ball, then purposefully failed to make contact with it and landed on his backside. The whole place erupted with laughter. So, being a cannon, I decided to follow that by showing what I could do. I put the ball in my barrel and fired it straight into the net. Absolute rocket of a shot. Well, the keeper was only nine years old and the sound of the blast startled him, so he began to cry. I knew right then that Gunnersaurus had the job.”
The club came up with a backstory about finding a dinosaur egg under the stadium in order to justify Gunnersaurus’ presence and, on August 20, 1993, he made his debut during a Premier League match against Manchester City, which Arsenal won 3-0. The impossible dream he had held since childhood—one that was only supported by his grandfather, who had passed away a year before Gunnersaurus graduated from Plushton—was now a reality. The oversized No. 99 shirt was his.
“After our trial, I never heard from Gary again,” says Gunnersaurus. “Years later, in April 2004, I spotted him at Highbury during a scoreless draw against Birmingham City. It looked like he was there alone. I wanted to say hello and tell him there were no hard feelings after how he treated me at school, but he was gone before I could reach him. Of course, we finished that season undefeated, but the moment I saw him and realized he was just another fan while I was representing the club in my Arsenal cap and collar—that’s what stands out about that year for me.”
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Gary the Gunner decided against pursuing a career as a mascot with a different club. He says he spent the mid-90s touring the world with Oasis as their stage manager, but the rock-n-roll lifestyle took its toll and his time with the band came to an abrupt end in 1997, when he headbutted singer Liam Gallagher after accusing him of stealing his “gunpowder.”
“That wasn’t me,” Gary says. “I looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognize the cannon looking back at me. I knew I had to make a change.”
No longer on speaking terms with his family after his failed Arsenal trial, Gary went back to school and got an MBA in international finance, paying his own way by working children’s birthday parties on the weekends. He is now deputy governor of monetary policy for the Bank of England, and says he has no regrets about the unexpected trajectory his life has taken.
“I’m fine with how everything worked out,” Gary says. “I don’t think I would’ve been satisfied mucking about at the football, especially given all the difficult years Arsenal have had over the last decade-plus. In my job now, I have a very real impact on the country and the world. I have three wonderful children and a beautiful wife and, believe it or not, they all support Spurs. So I’ve been at White Hart Lane more than the Emirates over the years, if I’m honest. Perhaps it was best that Gunnersaurus got the Arsenal job. Do give him my regards. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting with the prime minister that I truly must get to.”
The Athletic later confirmed that Prime Minister Theresa May did not have a meeting with Gary the Gunner on her schedule that day.
(Photo by Thananuwat Srirasant/Getty Images for ICC)
Brooks Peck is a managing editor for U.S. soccer at The Athletic. As co-founder and editor of the award-winning blog Dirty Tackle, his work has previously appeared on Yahoo Sports and in Howler Magazine. Follow Brooks on Twitter @BrooksDT
