By Victoria Bourne
Once upon a time — the early 1980s, to be precise — a great, mysterious beast lurked beneath Scope Arena in Norfolk, Virginia.
With long, gnarly claws, it growled from TV screens and radio speakers, slashing basketballs in print ads. Before tip-off at basketball games at Scope, a rolling silver contraption emerged midcourt through a shroud of smoke, barely containing the beast, its red eyes glowing from within. Voiceovers warned — or promised? — that if it bit you, you’d love it.
Was it Big Blue’s ferocious alter ego? Was it a caged monster raring for a fight? Who’s to say for sure — but more than four decades later, people still remember the Big Blue Beast.
“That’s a topic near and dear to my heart,” said Frank Viverito, the University’s athletic promotions director from 1980-82. He said the Beast was conceived during the halcyon days of sports. The University had just been admitted into the Sun Belt Conference (the first time), and both the men’s and women’s basketball teams were playing well.
Viverito said there was an entrepreneurial spirit driving athletic promotions at the time, much of it spurred by limited resources and budgets. There was also an appetite for experimentation.
“God bless Jim Jarrett because he trusted us,” Viverito said of the former athletic director. “Jim had a lot of foresight and was absolutely willing to try something new.”
The Big Blue Beast was unleashed to the public in October 1982. It was aimed at non-sports-goers to help boost ticket sales to Monarch sports events, according to newspaper archives. It was also intended to promote a new initiative allowing students to attend games for free with their student ID.
The main objective was to increase attendance at Scope, said Bill Schnier, the assistant athletic director for public relations from 1979-83. Scope was home to Monarch men’s basketball then and had recently hosted ’s first NCAA women’s basketball Final Four.
The campaign cost somewhere between $12,000 and $14,000. It included billboards, bumper stickers, posters and T-shirts, as well as television and radio commercials. The design concept was led by George Fugate and Ray Rice of Redman, Amundson and Rice, an advertising agency in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and an supporter.
Dick Lovell, better known for his illustration of Busch Gardens’ Loch Ness Monster, did the artwork, according to Alum News in December 1982. Other illustrations were done by Wayne Carey. Both creatives were based in Atlanta, Georgia. The TV spot was done by Bajus-Jones of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and featured three actors and a cartoon Beast with yellow eyes.
“We got $60,000 worth of advertising for about $12,000,” Jarrett told The Mace & Crown in November 1982. The campaign was expected to increase revenue as much as $76,000 in the first year, and it came with a memorable tagline: “I was bit by the Big Blue Beast, and I loved it.”
“My initial reaction was, ‘Wow, this is really out there and it’s improper English, but let’s hear what they have to say,’” Schnier recalled from a meeting with the agency.
“We were using the word ‘roar’ as a spirit word and a tagline to capture attention and communicate energy for the program. And this was the next step of giving a form to that spirit,” Viverito said.
“Looking back at it, I don’t know how many tickets we sold, but the agency got great marks for creativity. And I give Jim Jarrett the credit for letting us go with it.”
Debbie Harmison White, who came to in 1979, was sports information director when the Big Blue Beast launched. The commercial took on a life of its own in the form of the large silver box pulled out before the beginning of basketball games at Scope. Big Blue himself rolled it onto the court with a puff of smoke and dramatic flair, according to a clip posted by WAVY[1]TV 10 on YouTube in 2012.
“We would have guest stars pop out of it, like the mayor of Norfolk. I think we had Miss Virginia pop out of it,” White recalled. “It was like, ‘Who’s in the Beast tonight?’”
Schnier came up with the idea of putting somebody inside the wheeled metal box who would present the game ball to the officials before the opening tap. He recalled the night he convinced Vic Bubas, the first commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference, to fold his 6-foot-5-inch frame into the belly of the Beast.
“He reluctantly agreed. He did it, handed the ball to the official, and when the game was going on, he pulled me over to the side. He said, ‘I am never doing that again.’”
A halftime shootout from midcourt also gave one lucky fan a chance to win a Toyota truck decked out in Big Blue Beast decals. No one ever won, Schnier said, but he occasionally got to drive the vehicle home to Virginia Beach to a chorus of honks and waves.
White, who retired in 2016, admits the campaign, which may have lasted only a season or two, was “a little off the ranch.”
“I remember fans coming up to me just saying that this was absolutely ridiculous,” she
said. “But you know, when the Beast went away, there were just as many saying, ‘When are you going to bring him back?’”
“It was all in the name of fun, which is what sports should be,” Viverito said. “We should do things that entertain and engage young people.”
Ronnie Ciampoli was working for Norfolk Screenprint Company when he encountered the Big Blue Beast. The company was approached by the University to produce bumper stickers touting the slogan “I GOT BIT BY THE BIG BLUE BEAST. (And I Loved It.)”
At the time, it was just one design job of many the company handled, but he always took pride in his work. Ciampoli has long had Monarch ties through his wife, close friends and daughter. Looking back, he said he’s grateful to have been part of this piece of marketing history, even by happenstance.
“Even though I didn’t go to school there, I had a part in that piece of time and now it’s looked at as nostalgia, which brands me as being the old guy in the room,” Ciampoli said.
“But still, I’m the old guy that did that 40 some years ago.”
Chris Decker ’95 was 12 years old when the Big Blue Beast commercials started making the rounds on local television. The spot seemed tailor-made for a boy his age, he said.
The Beast was an interesting creature, he said, cool and mysterious — something akin to Bigfoot or the Abominable Snowman. The animated part of the commercial appealed to him and the young boy cast in the ad looked roughly his age. Add a gravelly voiceover reminiscent of Wolfman Jack, a popular syndicated rock-and-roll DJ at the time, and Decker was hooked.
“This is the coolest thing ever,” he recalled thinking.
It was one of several things that piqued his interest enough to apply to years later. Remnants of the campaign could still be seen in the Field House and elsewhere when he came to campus in 1991, he said; he understood it to have been a short-lived experiment.
“My thinking is the success was long-term. I mean, obviously we’re here decades later talking about this thing that everybody said they hated, but deep down inside everybody apparently really loved.”
As one of its co-creators, Schnier said the marketing campaign did what it was meant to do. “There was a lot more enthusiasm at the games. There were more people, more students and more involvement with the fans,” he said.
“Retrospectively, the Big Blue Beast was the talk of the town, at least for that one glorious year.”
University Archivist Steven Bookman contributed to the reporting of this story.
