Every school needs a mascot, a nice animal who embodies school spirit, leads cheers at sports games and looks nice on school sweatshirts and coffee mugs. That’s why we here at Ryerson have Eggy the Ram.
While many students today know Eggy as just some dude sweating to death in an oversized ram suit, many year ago, there was an actual living, breathing ram named Eggy. He strolled the campus and attended major school events, such as convocation.
Actually, there were more than one of those rams. You see, rams don’t really live that long. The life of a school mascot is tough and filled with risk, excitement and danger, more than the average ram can take.
Back in the day, as soon as one Eggy would die, a new ram (who just happened to be named Eggy as well) would be brought in as a replacement. The dead ram would be sent off to a taxidermist who would gently remove the ram’s head, stuff it, and mount it to be hung in the campus pub. Over the years, Ryerson acquired several dead mascots. All of their heads were preserved in the manner described above.
Unfortunately for the dead Eggys, reality soon set in. Students are, by nature, always looking for a good deal. Free stuff is always great, and what looked like a row of free dead rams’ heads must have been too much to resist for the average pub going student.
It wasn’t long before school officials noticed the heads were disappearing from the pub. They decided to take the remaining heads and move them to safety. Since that time, the heads have been kept under lock and key in a secret room, deep within the bowels of Ryerson, near one of the dungeons where engineering students used to turn lead into gold.
I thought it would be a good story idea to try to talk to one of these rams to find out what Ryerson school spirit is about from its point of view, to find out where Eggy thinks Ryerson is headed in the future and to put things into perspective for us as we being a new millennium of Ryerson tradition. An interview was arranged and a transcription follows.
N: So, Mr. Eggy, you were Ryerson’s mascot back in 1975. Can you tell me a little about what the school was like back then? Did the students all wear really ugly shirts and awful shoes?
Eggy: (no comment)
N: … I see. Okay, maybe that wasn’t such a good question. Well, back then, Ryerson wasn’t even a university. It was still a polytechnical institute. Do you think that the change from institute to university has affected school spirit at all? I mean, we no longer have a live ram as a mascot, but we still find people high or drunk, happily rolling around the hallways. That’s sort of like school spirit, isn’t it?
Eggy: (no comment)
N: Hmmm…didn’t like that one either, eh? Alright, well what about tuition then? Do you think students should really be paying as much as they do today to attend a school that doesn’t even have a live ram as its mascot anymore?
Eggy: (no comment)
Seeing that Eggy was being un-co-operative, I decided to cut the interview short. Eggy did not seem to care, or even notice. So much for the embodiment of school spirit. Eggy’s an asshole.
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