I pulled up to a schoolyard in Manhattan Beach where the guys played and they told me I would be a goalie. The equipment hadn’t been washed in ages and it was like a frat house was sitting in my face, and not in a good way.
The uniform and pads were cumbersome and the cup was missing. After I was all ready to go, I asked, “Now what?”
“Protect the goal.”
“How?”
“Well, you act like a bear and move like a cat.”
“Like a bearcat?”
They all laughed and called me bearcat for the day. By the time I got to work the next day, the name had stuck and I was Bearcat. My desk was barraged with Bearcat team logos and pictures of actual bearcats.
What could have been a fierce and agile animal comprised of the best qualities of two already cool animals was, in reality, the worst possible combination. Lazy and unattractive, bearcats are sloth-like mammals with scent glands that smell like warm popcorn and make high-pitched sounds when they are irritated.
Bearcats are team mascots in colleges that seem to not have any access to information on what a bearcat is, instead designing bears with cat eyes and cat claws and angry faces.
While I’ve kept the name, I’ve filed the word bearcat under disappointing animal-related compound words that describe things infinitesimally cooler than they should be, like catfish, crabgrass, fishwife, foxglove, frogman, and earwig.
B
