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Voices of Faith gospel choir

Photo/Matt Cashore

Michael Brown knows that the first time people see him on the sidelines many will do a double take. It's not every day you see a black leprechaun.

It's never happened at Notre Dame.

Brown, who'll be a junior in fall of 1999, won the high-profile role of leprechaun for next year's football and men's basketball games by outperforming eight other applicants in the annual spring interview and tryout process.

Since the leprechaun became Notre Dame's official mascot in the mid-1960s, there have leprechauns not of Irish descent, including at least one Hispanic leprechaun. But Brown, the22nd student to portray the folklore character at football games, is the first African American.

"I think there may be people who look at me and wonder," he said a few days after his selection was announced on campus. "But I think then they'll see how fired up I am, and they'll get right into the game."

Brown said it was his freshman year roommates who first suggested he try out for leprechaun after they saw how fired up he got at football games.

In high school he didn't cheer for the football team, he played on it, starting at quarterback his last two years at Vincent High School in Milwaukee. He led the team to the state quarterfinals as a senior.

Brown said he was encouraged to apply to Notre Dame by an alumnus, Michael A. Peterson, whom he met while serving an internship at M&I Data Services in Milwaukee the summer before his high school senior year. Brown is majoring in management information systems (MIS) at Notre Dame. He's also played intramural football, basketball and inner-tube water polo and sings with the Voices of Faith Gospel Choir. He is the founder of a multicultural music and dance group on campus called the First Class Steppers, patterned after the internationally known percussion performance group Stomp.

Jo Minton, ND's cheerleading coach and member of the leprechaun selection panel, said Brown made an impression on her months before the leprechaun tryouts when she saw the First Class Steppers perform at halftime of a women's basketball game.

"He grabbed the mike and he grabbed my attention right away, saying something like 'OK, crowd. Let's get cheering for the Irish.' He had the whole crowd rocking, and he wasn't even in this position [leprechaun] yet."

Minton said the selection committee had no hesitancy about selecting an African American to portray the leprechaun. "I really don't dwell on it," she said. "He has blue-and-gold blood just like the rest of us."

Aspiring leprechauns attend three weeks of cheerleading workshops before the rigorous one-day tryout. On selection day applicants are interviewed individually by the committee then lead a mock pep rally and undergo a simulated media interview.

This year's selection committee consisted of Minton, cheerleading assistant coach Brian Egendoerfer, Alumni Association Executive Director Chuck Lennon, former leprechaun Andy Budzinski (now a project manager for Golden Dome Media), 1998-99 leprechaun Matt Bozzelli, and a representative from the office of Academic Services for Student-Athletes.

A student can serve as leprechaun for more than one year but has to triumph in the selection competition each time.

There are actually two leprechauns selected each year: one for the Varsity cheer squad, which performs at football pep rallies and football and men's basketball games; the other for the Olympic squad, which cheers at men's and women's soccer, volleyball, women's basketball and sometimes hockey games. Both groups also make scores of appearances annually at schools, retirement centers and other venues as ambassadors for the University.

Next year's Olympic squad leprechaun, junior-to-be C.J. Lanktree, is more traditional ethnically in that he's Irish-American and red-haired. But he's possibly the tallest leprechaun ever at about 5-foot-9.

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