Bulldogs, Gridirons, and Saturday Afternoons The story of a mascot and its team.

Vince Dooley owns somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 bulldogs. He knows this because not long ago he gave two of his grandchildren the job of counting them up. There are bronze bulldogs, ceramic bulldogs, wooden bulldogs, plush bulldogs, some tiny, some life-size, some pricey, some cheap. They cover the shelves in the office at his home in Athens, Georgia, where he coached football at the University of Georgia from 1964 to 1988. UGA’s mascot is the bulldog. You have figured this out by now.

Fans have given him most of them. His family has taken care of the rest. After he retired as coach, he developed an interest in horticulture. He has turned his yard into a beautiful tree and flower garden. So now, when his kids need to buy him a gift, sometimes they get him a plant. If they can not find him a good one, they fall back on a bulldog.

Soul singer James Brown wrote a song about Vince Dooley. More to the point, he wrote it about Dooley’s defense, which assistant coach Erk Russell had named the Junkyard Dawgs. (A bulldog is not usually the kind of dog you find around a junkyard. Just roll with it.) The Godfather of Soul was a UGA football fan–he grew up in Augusta–and decided he wanted to cut a record about the Junkyard Dawgs. A former UGA football radio commentator named “Happy” Howard Williamson sketched out some lyrics, and Brown made up some more in the studio, and the band vamped behind him, and Polydor Records released “Dooley’s Junkyard Dogs” as a single in 1975. The label identifies James Brown as MINISTER OF NEW NEW SUPER HEAVY FUNK. It is, in fact, a damn funky track.

         They’ll hit ya

         They’ll knock ya

         They’ll haul right off and sock ya …

By the time I arrived at UGA in 1982–the final season of the Heisman Trophy running back Herschel Walker–you would hear “Dooley’s Junkyard Dogs” over and over every football weekend. You still hear it now. In fact, a lot of what happens on game day feels like just like it did 35 years ago. Fans still stream down to the bowl of Sanford Stadium wearing Bulldog hats and Bulldog T-shirts and Bulldog polos, except for the fraternity boys in their blazers and Bulldog ties, and the sorority girls in their dresses with Bulldog patterns. Inside the stadium everybody still looks for a fan called Big Dawg, a bald guy who paints a bulldog face on the top of his head. (The most recent Big Dawg died in January. His son has said he will carry on the tradition.) The fans still chant a long unbroken Goooooooooooooo in the moments before kickoff, following up, the moment toe meets leather, with:

Dawgs! Sic ‘em! Woof woof woof woof woof …

All those rituals are as much a part of me as my thumbs.

That image of not just a bulldog, but a junkyard dawg–tough and protective and a little mean–is cemented in the minds of every UGA fan. Even in the years when our defense lies down like a lamb to Alabama or Florida or Tennessee, we still conjure that ideal tenacious bulldog in our heads.

Mascots in sports–especially animal mascots–can do that to people. They create a vision that fans imagine as reality until it becomes tradition. In a time when we are all so scattered, so mobile, so fragmented, a team is one way we find identity. A mascot symbolizes that identity. It is a stand-in for how we see ourselves, if only for three or four hours on a Saturday.

•  •  •

UGA is part of the Southeastern Conference, otherwise known as the SEC. The SEC is the best college football conference in America, and its fans are the most invested and the most obsessed and–I say this with love–the nuttiest. The SEC built an ad campaign around the slogan “It Just Means More.” This is objective truth in SEC country. Every detail of SEC football is blown up in giant capital letters with multiple exclamation points. This is absolutely the case with the mascots.

Louisiana State University goes by the Tigers, and they have a real tiger named Mike, in a 15,000-square-foot enclosure with a waterfall. (The latest Mike died of cancer last year; LSU brought a young tiger to campus this summer as a potential replacement.) The University of Tennessee’s mascot is a bluetick coonhound named Smokey; the brothers of the Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity take care of him. Tusk, a Russian boar, attends the home games of the University of Arkansas Razorbacks. Sir Big Spur, an Old English red-breasted black gamecock, represents the University of South Carolina Gamecocks. (The old railroad cars outside Williams-Brice stadium, now turned into tailgating palaces, are called Cockabooses.)

Auburn University’s teams are the Tigers, but the school’s battle cry is “War Eagle”—there are four or five different stories as to how that came about—and so before every home game, a live eagle does a free flight over the stands of Jordan-Hare Stadium before returning to its handlers on the field. You heard that right. A school lets loose a live raptor to fly over its own screaming fans before every football game, and everybody pretty much approves of this.

It just means more.

The UGA mascot was not always a bulldog. When the school played its first football game, against Auburn in 1892, the unofficial mascot was a goat. Later on, the basketball team was briefly called the Wildcats. But the bulldog had always been somewhere in the mix, and in 1938 the school officially designated it the UGA mascot. That year, at the homecoming game, the school crowned a bulldog named Count instead of a homecoming queen.

(This began an enduringly awkward situation with the mascot and women, especially when UGA started women’s sports. The women’s basketball team is officially the Lady Bulldogs, shortened by most fans into Lady Dogs. You can imagine what some of the opposing fans call them.)

The mascot thing did not get off to a smooth start. Count reigned for just one year, and then the school forgot to name another mascot for eight years. A mascot named Butch escaped from his pen in Warner Robins, Georgia, a two-hour car ride from Athens, home of UGA, during the offseason, went wandering the streets and was shot to death by a policeman. A dog named Mike died of natural causes after just four years as mascot. But then, in 1956, Sonny Seiler and his wife, Cecilia, got a puppy.

Sonny Seiler had been a varsity swimmer at UGA. In ’56 he was going to law school there and working in the ticket office for the UGA athletic department. A family friend gave the Seilers a white English bulldog as a belated wedding present. A classmate of Sonny’s suggested the name Uga–pronounced UH-guh. That fall, before Georgia’s home opener against Florida State, Cecelia bought a child-sized red T-shirt, sewed a black G on the front and put it on Uga. The Seilers walked him down to the game, and the ticket-takers were so tickled that they let him in.

Dan Magill noticed. Magill, best known at UGA as the longtime tennis coach, was also sports information director at the time. He told football coach Wally Butts about the bulldog that had shown up at the game. Butts called Seiler into his office. That day, Uga became UGA’s official mascot.

That was 61 years ago. Sonny Seiler has owned and raised the UGA mascots ever since.

(Most of this backstory, by the way, comes from Seiler’s book Damn Good Dogs!, co-written with Kent Hannon. If you love UGA football, or just want to browse multiple photos of adorable bulldogs, I can not recommend it enough.)

That first dog is now known as Uga I. We are now on Uga X. The history page on georgiadogs.com lists the football wins and losses for each Uga’s era–Uga VI, for example, went 87-27 between 1999 and 2008. When an Uga dies, it joins the others in a mausoleum at the west end of the stadium. Each dog gets an epitaph, such as the one for Uga 1: DAMN GOOD DOG.

Before games on a football Saturday, Uga hangs out in his kennel under the stands while fans come by to get their pictures taken. (Collectively, Uga might be the most photographed creature–human or otherwise–in Georgia history.) During the game, Uga spends most of his time in an air-conditioned doghouse on the sidelines. If it is hot, he spread-eagles on top of a 10-pound bag of ice.

Uga even played a role in the book and movie Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil. Seiler, who has spent his career as a lawyer in Savannah, defended Jim Williams in the famous murder case at the center of the story. But he still found time to look after Uga ?–Uga IV at the time of the trial, although the mascot was played by Uga IV’s son, Uga V, in the movie.

The story goes that Clint Eastwood, who directed the film, got down on the floor and played with Uga V when they met. “I’m going to make you a celebrity,” Eastwood said.

“Excuse me, Mr. Eastwood,” Cecelia replied, “but Uga is already a celebrity.”

•  •  •

If you went to the homes of diehard Georgia fans, and toured all the UGA gift shops, and scoured the football websites, and counted up all the photos you found on all the walls and the shelves the screens, there would be one clear winner. It is a photo taken by Patricia Miklik Doyle of the Montgomery Advertiser, during the first quarter of the Georgia-Auburn game in Auburn on Nov. 16, 1996.

An Auburn receiver named Robert Baker had just caught a touchdown in the front right corner of the end zone. His momentum carried him through the side of the end zone and into the path of Uga V, who was being held on a leash by Charles Seiler, Sonny and Cecelia’s son. Baker ran right up to where Uga V stood–and as he got there, the dog lunged for Baker’s crotch. Baker slammed on the brakes as Seiler hauled back on the leash. The photo catches the perfect moment: Uga V up on his hind legs, Baker looking down as he starts to spin away. It looks like a valiant beast defending its turf against an intruder. Which is sort of true.

(The Georgia defense was not exactly the Junkyard Dawgs that day, but the offense made up for it, and Georgia won 56-49 in the first overtime game in SEC history. As a Georgia fan, I am obligated to mention this.)

Georgia fans flooded the Montgomery paper with requests for prints. So did fans of Alabama–Auburn’s most hated rival. ESPN named it the play of the year. A few months later, Sports Illustrated put Uga on the cover as the No. 1 mascot in sports.

There is a term in psychology called self-actualization–the quest to realize your full potential. In that frozen moment in Auburn, it was as if Uga self-actualized. It fulfilled the meaning behind the mascot. It stood in for those of us who identify as Dawgs.

Of course, actual dogs do not generally worry about such things. They seem to be fairly self-actualized just being dogs. Lewis Grizzard, the late humor columnist and diehard Georgia fan, used to tell a joke about two fans sitting in the stands at a game. They watched as Uga led the team out on the field, plopped down on the 50-yard line and began vigorously licking his crotch.

One fan turned to the other and said, “Dadgum, I wish I could do that.”

The other one turned to him in shock and said, “Man, that dog would bite you …”

•  •  •

Georgia is not the only place that saw the bulldog as a worthy symbol. Dozens of other schools go by the Bulldogs, including Mississippi State in the SEC. The Marine Corps has had the bulldog as a mascot since World War I, when (according to legend) the Germans called American soldiers teufel hunden, or “devil dogs.” The bulldog still serves as the unofficial mascot for all of Great Britain–at least partly because Winston Churchill looked like one.

All these institutions identify with the bulldog for its toughness and tenacity and warrior spirit. The funny thing is, the modern bulldog has almost none of those qualities.

Hundreds of years ago, bulldogs got their name from the cruel “sport” of bull-baiting–owners would loose their dogs on a bull, and the winning dog was the one that could latch onto the bull’s nose and ride it to the ground. Bulldogs were taller then, with longer snouts. But as breeders transformed them into pets, bulldogs acquired the squat bodies and flat faces we know now. English bulldogs, especially, became mellow and playful, good around kids. Uga V’s lunge at Robert Baker was a brief DNA flashback to what the bulldog once was.

All that breeding brought a new set of problems. In 2011, The New York Times Magazine published a long story by Benoit Denizet-Lewis called “Can the Bulldog Be Saved?” It detailed how breeding bulldogs for looks and temperament had caused them to have breathing trouble, hip issues, even difficulty mating on their own. Sonny Seiler was featured in the story, which mentioned how Uga VII died of heart failure at age four, and Uga VIII died of lymphoma at age two. (Uga IX lived to 11, and Uga X—the current mascot—is almost 5.)

Our symbols are not always what we make them out to be. Sometimes they are like those subdivisions that are named after all the things they destroyed to build the subdivision. (You can bet that Whispering Pines no longer has any whispering pines.) They do not make much steel in Pittsburgh anymore, but the Pittsburgh Steelers football team brings to mind all those rough hands and strong backs that helped build America in the era of Carnegie and the steel mills. Fans can still connect with those days just by putting on a Steelers jersey. It does not matter that the modern bulldog is a waddling little buddy instead of a beast that latches on and refuses to let go. What we want is not so much the reality as the ideal.

Sports, at least for the fans, is one big proxy. My team from my place plays your team from your place, and the winner gets to believe his place is the better place for a while. One of the reasons we love sports so much is precisely because of all this pretending, because sports is a fight without (much) actual fighting, a war without guns and bombs and death. Pro athletes play for whoever will pay them, college athletes pick a school because they like the coach or they want a shot at a title or maybe a booster slips them a few bucks. But if you are a fan, they are playing for you. When some of us watch sports we have the same feeling we get when a movie is so good we forget it is a movie–that suspension of disbelief. In the middle of a big UGA game, if the suspension of disbelief kicks in, you can actually feel like the players on the field were meant to be Bulldogs, that they were bred with tenacity and a fighting spirit, and that because you are a Bulldog fan, there is some of that in you.

It is a beautiful illusion, better than anything magician David Copperfield could ever pull off. It is also hard to explain to all those people who wonder why fans care so much about a silly ball game.

•  •  •

Vince Dooley has a few bulldog stories. He used to ride with Uga in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Savannah every year, taking care to stay upwind from the dog, away from the slobber and flatulence. He remembers going to Nashville for a game against Vanderbilt, and how the Vanderbilt people were so proud of their new artificial turf that was going to be seen for the first time on national TV. The day before the game, as Georgia went through a light practice, Uga waddled out onto the field and left a steaming pile of dog poo right in the middle of that new turf.

But Dooley did not deal with Uga much during the season. He had players to coach. They came from all over the South and all over the country, black and white, from rich homes and broken ones, some good enough to be All-Americans and some barely good enough to take the field. His job was to make them into a team, to give them common goals and help them reach those goals. He was not above using a metaphor now and then. History and tradition (and James Brown) had given him a good one.

“They all knew about the Junkyard Dawgs,” he says. “At times we’d talk to the teams about the tenacity of the bulldog. It was a good symbol for us to use in teaching. Everybody knows what a bulldog is like. When you say somebody is a bulldog, that’s a kind of shorthand. It resembles what we want to be.”