Top Daug: Why OU mascot's return prompted some detective work
The first evidence of a dauggie dilemma surfaced before my breakfast digested.
Mid-morning Tuesday, an email popped into my inbox from Tom Moore, a regular reader. He had seen my column about OU bringing back the beloved Top Daug mascot and one of the last people to fill the costume full-time before Top Daug was retired in 2004 — and Moore said it was wrong.
Top Daug didn't retire in 2004.
Moore knew because his niece had been Top Daug after that.
My first thought, honestly, was that Moore must have had the years mixed up. It was almost two decades ago, so it would've been easy to do. But just to make sure I hadn't gotten my own wires crossed, I went to Oklahoma's athletics website and checked the athletic department's story about Top Daug returning to the Lloyd Noble Center.
“Top Daug retired from the LNC baseline in 2004,” it read.
I hadn't gotten the wrong year. Whew.
But when Moore sent me another email saying he'd just talked to his niece and she'd verified she was Top Daug beyond 2004, I decided there was going to have to be some Top Daug detective work.
I started reaching out to folks at OU, hoping to find someone who could say for sure when Top Daug retired. Someone in the communications office. Someone who worked with the spirit squad.
In the meantime, I got another email. This one was from Moore's niece.
Her name is Ashlee (Ley) Buchanan, and she said she was Top Daug in 2004-05 before the Boomer and Sooner horse mascots debuted during the 2005 football season.
“I know,” she said, “because I was the first Boomer.”
Listen, I am not one to dispute someone who says they ran around in a big, furry costume. If they said they did it, I have a hard time telling them otherwise. But I emailed her the information from OU's website with the 2004 retirement date and told her I was trying to get some verification from people at OU.
“I'm just trying to square how all of this fits,” I said.
Over the next 24 hours, there were more calls, more emails, more sleuthing.
I even reached out to Seth Prince. He is a longtime buddy — he used to be a sports newspaper guy in Oregon — and now he teaches journalism and advises student publications at OU. I had gone through The Oklahoman's archives and found no definitive evidence of Top Daug beyond 2004, so I asked him if he saw anything in old yearbooks that would offer some clarity.
He looked and found nothing certain but said he would flip through old copies of The OU Daily and see if anything popped out. What a Prince. During the noon hour Wednesday, he texted me a photo of Top Daug at a home OU basketball game vs. Nebraska from the Feb. 17, 2005 edition of The Daily. A dated photo. Cold-hard evidence. (Is this what being Nancy Drew felt like?)
Next came a call to Ben Coldagelli, OU's top-notch media-relations guy for men's basketball. I wanted to wait to call him until I was 99.9% sure Top Daug didn't retire in 2004.
“I think I know why you're calling,” Ben told me when we connected.
Apparently, he'd gotten some of the same emails about Top Daug's 2004 retirement being wrong. Ben hadn't questioned it before then, even giving it to ESPN for their broadcast Tuesday night and using it in the intro to bring Top Daug back onto the Lloyd Noble Center Court.
“For the first time in 16 years … ”
So, what had happened?
Ben told me all the historical information he'd found in the time before OU announced Top Daug's return had the retirement year consistently listed as 2004. Because the athletic department was working diligently to keep the mascot's return a secret – it did a masterful job in that, by the way – Ben didn't want to start calling a bunch of people and asking random questions about Top Daug.
That's a good way to get people suspicious and spoil the surprise.
But Ben suspects what happened is that people didn't think much about the fact that basketball seasons span two calendar years. They start in one and finish in another. So, yes, Top Daug's last season was 2004, but more accurately, it was 2004-05.
“I hope this didn't cause you too much trouble,” Ben told me before we hung up.
No, my friend, it didn't cause trouble.
Just a little dauggie detective work.