CU BUFFS 2005:

Sugar and Spice: CU's "Little Girl"

By Mary Jarrett

In CU's homecoming queen of 1971 was a statuesque brunette. With her bright black eyes and wind-tossed brown hair, weighing in at around 1,300 pounds, Ralphie the buffalo won the crown in a vote that poked fun at establishment traditions.

That was Ralphie I, the University of Colorado's first bison mascot, who charged around Folsom Field for 13 seasons, from 1966 to 1978. Since then three other female bison have held the job, each serving for 10 or 12 years. Crown or no crown, they are bombshells and people love them. Local fans are proud of Ralphie because she stands out as the nation's coolest mascot—just ask ESPN. Some fans, including many who think of her as male, glory in the surge of her triumphant wild-animal power. And others love her… just because.

“She is a very special animal. The spacing of her eyes—it's just a little different from other buffalos,” muses Marti Ingraham, a former president of the Buffalo Belles women's booster group. Known as “Ralphie's grandmother,” Ingraham met the orphan calf “when she came down here [from Montana] the size of a St. Bernard. She was just a little thing and she needed a grandma.” Ranch hands had found the month-old calf “munched around the neck by a coyote” on a ranch belonging to media mogul Ted Turner. Efforts to reintroduce her into the herd didn't work, so she was bottle-fed by women on the ranch—but she needed a permanent home. Hearing that CU's third buffalo mascot had just died, Turner donated his orphan to the university, solving two problems at once.

Ralphie IV, whose real name is Rowdy, now lives in an undisclosed location south of Denver, perhaps to protect her from Nebraska players who are said to feast on buffalo before CU games. Both of her caretakers, cousins Kevin Priola and Ben Frei, are former members of the Ralphie Runners program, the varsity team they co-direct and coach. This season's team includes nine men and two women who are responsible for exercising, transporting, grooming, harnessing and showing the buffalo on practice days and home-game days. They take turns on game days, working in groups of five. In addition to the high-profile job of running Ralphie on the field right before the CU team comes out and at halftime, the young handlers drive her around the Hill in her trailer to stir up the fans heading toward the stadium. Fans can see Ralphie up close, even touch her, when the runners set up her portable pen inside the stadium about half an hour before kickoff and during games. Some fans, mostly women, confide to the handlers that their very favorite thing about a Buffs game is seeing Ralphie.

Meghan McCarthy, a three-year Ralphie runner, graduated in 2003. She came to love Rowdy, paradoxically enough, after a serious accident (the team's only one) at the end of her rookie season: Rowdy tossed her “like a bale of hay,” leaving permanent scars from her horns. McCarthy responded by visiting Rowdy every day that summer and was rewarded in time with a sense of greater trust, plus grunts and snorts of recognition. She's been known to kiss Rowdy's “big snotty nose” and still dreams about her, but she knows at least as well as anyone else that the bison is nobody's pet and isn't tame.

“She runs like the wind at practice, but twice she hasn't run at games,” says Ingraham. “People said, 'Ooh, she broke her leg' or 'Ooh, she's in heat,' but she just wasn't in the mood. When Kevin Costner made Dances with Wolves, they threw Oreos out to make the buffaloes run. We don't do that. She runs when she wants to run.”