BraiN

From The Brain of the Giant Head

Go Rally Monkey!

The World Series, my favorite sports platform, begins this week and is a battle of two incredibly different teams: Disney’s Anaheim Angels versus Barry Bonds. This might not excite you but it tickles me. Barry Bonds is a shmuck. He is the player you either love or you hate or, like me, you love to hate. And he will lose because Anaheim has one thing the Giants don’t possess -- The Rally Monkey.

What is the Rally Monkey?

Apparently the legend of the Rally Monkey began back on June 6, 2000. The Angels were losing by four runs late in the game to none other than Barry Bonds’ San Francisco Giants. A couple of young video crew members were bored. While working hard on the job, they had just finished a game of Hungry Hungry Hippo when they flipped on TV and saw the movie "Ace Ventura, Pet Detective." They saw the monkey in the movie and spliced him out, using very technical equipment that I will call ‘scissors.’ They shot images of him jumping up and down and put colors around him using wax-coated design instruments I will call ‘crayons,’ and they flashed their creation on the jumbo-tron. The fans in Anaheim started chanting. The chant got louder and louder. Finally, the whole stadium was chanting in unison.

Anaheim Angels Fans: "What the hell is that? What the hell is that?"

Well, I never said people from southern California were bright.

The video guys took their crayons and wrote the words "Rally Monkey" underneath the simian and flashed him back on the screen. Finally, the crowd got the picture and began chanting, "Rally Monkey, Rally Monkey."

The Angels rallied to win that game against the Giants and the Rally Monkey was born.

This spur of the moment instinct by these video guys has led to an unexplainable phenomenon in Anaheim. Now everyone in the city owns a Rally Monkey -- Kids, adults, grandparents, elephants. Don’t believe me? Check out these pics at RallyMonkey.com. The Rally Monkey has even been arrested a couple times for getting unruly. But is he the greatest mascot in sports?

With the Rally Monkey hype, fans of the Calgary Flames of the National Hockey league decided they needed something to get their team fired up as well. On Thursday night a man took off all his clothes, climbed over the glass and ran across the ice in the nude. The man got cheers from the 15,000 fans in attendance as he ran to the center of the rink. Not surprisingly, this genius forgot that ice is slippery and fell, conked his head on the frozen mat and knocked himself unconscious. So this guy passed out in the middle of a hockey rink, naked in front of 15,000 fans. While embarrassing, he emerged as the leader in team spirit by inventing The Nude Dude.

So I’m encouraging all you hockey fans to take to the ice in nothing but your socks. Wear your team enthusiasm loud; just don’t wear it on your body.

After thinking this over, I decided The Nude Dude has more spirit than any other fan of any other sport, including the Angels. And while I predict Anaheim will win the World Series in seven games, the Naked Fan in Calgary might have taken team enthusiasm to a whole new level. Anaheim can take great comfort in one thing, though.

They’ve never gotten frostbite on their Rally Monkey.