Colleague Jeff Shelman points us toward this little bit of fun. Seems Pat Forde over at ESPN.com performed as the Stanford Tree at a recent basketball game. While this doesn’t constitute Pedro Gomez in a Barry Bonds dumpster type of investigative work, it is commendable still.

There are three basic rules for Tree Week:

Don’t light yourself on fire. (There is folklore about one aspiring Tree who — this being Stanford — wrote a five-page paper detailing how he could light himself on fire without actually being injured. He didn’t win.)

Don’t go to jail.

Don’t go to the hospital.

Pretty much anything else goes. This year’s Tree, Whipple, helped secure the job last spring by affixing leeches in the shape of the Tree on his back. He still has a scar on his lower back from one particularly tenacious leech.

Our question, then, is this: any secret mascot fantasies out there? Wait, let’s rephrase that. Oh, never mind.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.