‘He’s like Superman.’ The story of a high school football mascot who at age 67 exudes joy
Poised at the 10-yard line on a molten mid-August evening, Daryl Hawkins drips sweat and shoos gnats in the moments before kickoff at the gridiron opener for the Peach County High School Trojans.
Hawkins is cloaked in a black cape ringed with gold sequins, a plastic toy sword zip-tied to his hip.
He has tugged a No. 1 jersey over the shoulder pads strapped to his chest and crowned himself in battle headgear he fashioned from an old football helmet.
He is roasting alive. Even so, he stands ready.
At age 67, Hawkins, a 1974 Peach graduate, is seconds from his grand entrance, the start of his 31st full season as his alma mater’s sports mascot.
He is not known as simply the Trojan, but rather as the Trojan Man.
Larger-than-life spectacles are sometimes afforded monikers requiring the reassuring descriptors that they are, in fact, human: the Goat Man, the Bird Lady, the Peanut Man. Sightings of them are somehow gratifying, comforting, perhaps in that such characters exist at all.
Drums thump. An announcer’s voice booms. It’s game time. Hawkins bursts upfield at full gallop.
On what is no longer a Friday night of his youth, Hawkins, legs motoring, sprints ahead of boys half a century his junior, chugging headlong into a Friday night of his youth.
With the school flag hoisted high, Hawkins veers toward the home crowd.
The team surges onto Trojan Field behind him to begin its 2023 campaign.
“It keeps me young being around them boys,” he says. “People light up when I run down that field with that flag.”
‘He defines tradition’
Hawkins, in his paying job, works for the Peach board of education’s maintenance department.
He has missed but three football games since volunteering his mascot services at the state championship game in December of 1992. One of the absences came when his father died.
Hawkins dons his Trojan Man alter ego because three decades back he grew bored as a fan in the stands. He wanted, he says, “to do something.”
Channeling hometown pride for high school football, Hawkins has come to embody why we cheer our local teams: They are us; we are them.
Looking on near the Trojans’ bench, Michelle Masters, the school system’s head of administrative services, says of Hawkins, “He defines tradition.”
Hawkins’ presence is not unlike that of a professional wrestler who has committed to his sequined costume. But Hawkins is more ambassador than trash talker, more coach than commando. He looms powerful, majestic even.
His outfit shines golden, the reflection off his cape as bright as the band’s tuba section, glinting in the very stadium lights that he himself, as maintenance man, has turned on earlier. “So nobody would forget,” he says.
Watching Hawkins from the sidelines as he works the crowd, the county schools’ director of communications, Minnie Booker, says, “He’s like Superman to us. He’s the energizer.”
Hawkins doesn’t know how many miles he logs during games. He fires up spectators by charging down the track that circles the field, hauling with him every so often that giant flag emblazoned with the letters “PC” for Peach County.
“The nights we score a lot of touchdowns,” he says, “it’s hard to get up the next morning.”
‘It gets them pumped’
At one point, a woman’s voice beckons from the bleachers.
“Daryl. ... Daryl. ... Daryl!”
Hawkins does not hear his name over the stadium din.
The voice belongs to his wife, Melaine.
The two will celebrate their 46th wedding anniversary the next day. But on this night, a high holy of late-summer eves in these parts, Daryl’s focus is on football. On all its glories. On shaking the hand of every member of the marching band. On low-fiving the refs. On fist-bumping players, win or lose.
Melaine tries again. This time she shouts.
“Trojan Man. ... Trojan Man!”
This gets his attention. He has a phone message from work, but it doesn’t interrupt Daryl’s Trojan Man duties.
Melaine will later mention how she and Daryl can be at store or somewhere in public and one of the ballplayers or students will recognize him: “Trojan Man!”
“They know him,” Melaine says. “No one knows me. I’m just the Trojan Man’s wife.”
Asked what compels her husband to dress as a mythical soldier and parade about season after season, Melaine ponders the question.
“Joy,” she says. “Seeing joy on the boys’ faces when he comes running out.”
Melaine and Daryl share a word at the foot of the home stands before she hikes alone back to Row S.
They have season tickets up there, seats Daryl never occupies.
But then the sidelines are his home, and there the Trojan Man roams.