For 28 years, Bob Hollender has been the Massillon Washington Tigers mascot handler.
From an outsider’s perspective, it might be hard to figure out who has the most enjoyable job at Massillon Washington High School. That is until one visits Massillon’s Paul Brown Tiger Stadium during a football game.
While crowds, which have numbered into the tens of thousands in recent years, cheer the players for touchdowns and hail the coaches for championship seasons as well as wins over archrival Canton McKinley, one man is sure to be a name people mention when talking about their experience at a of Massillon Tigers football game.
That man is Bob Hollender.
For 28 years, Hollender has been the Tigers mascot handler in charge of escorting “Obie,” a real Bengal tiger cub to all the football games and different activities during the football season.
“They asked some dummy to do this job,” Hollender joked as to how he became the mascot handler. “The president of the booster club asked me if I’d be interested in helping with Obie and I jumped on it.
“I liked the way it turned out and I’m still doing it,” he added. “It’s fun. I thought I’d enjoy it because I like animals. I had seen one of the other guys bring it around and stuff and I thought, ‘Man, that’d be nice to have a little tiger.’”
Massillon borrowed the idea of the having a live tiger on the sidelines from a trip to a football game in Louisiana some 40 years ago.
“There was a guy called Wilbur Arnold,” said Hollender. “He had seen the LSU Tiger at their games and said, ‘Why can’t we have a tiger?’ So, he went and got a tiger and we’ve had one ever since every year.
“We don’t go to a zoo,” he added. “We go to an individual, Stump Hill Farm in Richfield. That’s where we deal. We deal with her and she gets us one every year. We get a new one every year in August. This one started at about 20 pounds and (in) the playoffs, it’s probably over 100.”
Since the idea came to fruition, Massillon has had 40 different Obies. The name Obie comes from the team’s colors: orange and black.
As with every player on the team having different attitudes, likes and dislikes, each tiger has their own traits. At the end of the season, Obie goes back to Stump Hill Farm.
“They’re all nice,” Hollender said. “They’re all pretty. They’ve all got their personalities. They’re all good. Some of them kind of get rambunctious once-in-a-while, but everybody does that. You get real attached.”
Obie does not just sit in his cage during the football games; he goes around to different places paying visits to the citizens of Massillon and keeping their spirits high throughout the late summer and early fall months.
“We go to every grade school and nursing homes too,” Hollender said. “We go to parades, too and sometimes, the state police. The cameras come out; cameras come flying out. They just love it. Everybody loves Obie.”
When the Massillon-Washington Tigers play the Glenville Tarblooders in the Ohio High School Athletic Association Division I state semifinals at The University of Akron’s InfoCision Stadium Saturday night, Obie and Hollender will be there to support the team and get everyone ready for playoff football.
Matt Florjancic currently works as a freelance reporter and sports show host for WOBL and WDLW.
