After 50 years, is this the San Diego Chickens last stand?

The Chicken was having internet problems.

That sounds like the beginning of a joke, and it might as well have been. For Ted Giannoulas, a chicken doing human things had long been a comic goldmine. At this moment, though, it wasn’t a set-up awaiting a punchline. ESPN wanted to talk to him — the famous San Diego Chicken, the man who donned a chicken suit on a whim and turned it into a decades-long barnstorming comedy act, who inspired just about every other sports mascot that followed — during a game broadcast last season. So, Giannoulas had carried his laptop poolside and sat there for seven innings in a chicken suit while his WiFi misbehaved.

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It was like a scene from a New Yorker cartoon (and Giannoulas has been the subject of one of those, too). “They saw me for at least one second,” he says, “because it blitzed on and they said, ‘Oh, we see you now.’ Then it blitzed off.”

The interview never happened, and that brief glimpse of him might be one of the last the world ever gets of one of the most influential sports performers ever. Giannoulas will turn 70 later this summer. He is recovering from a hip replacement that will sideline him until at least 2024. That year will mark half a century as the Chicken.

Five decades ago, a 20-year-old Giannoulas was plucked from a group of San Diego State students to squeeze into a papier mâché chicken costume for a local radio station promotion. The costume has changed over the years — better materials, different colors — but he never took it off. He wore it even when a judge demanded that he stop. He wore it at ballparks and stadiums across the country, and he wore it in court. Even now, except for one photograph published in one small town newspaper, the public has never seen his face.

Along the way, he achieved virality long before that term entered the lexicon. The Phillie Phanatic, considered by many to be the greatest team mascot ever created, was directly inspired by his example. Before April 9, 1974, when the Chicken infiltrated Jack Murphy Stadium for Padres Opening Day, few teams had costumed mascots and even fewer did anything interesting with them. Then the Chicken showed up, cracking up fans, players and umpires alike with an act that was irreverent and physical and downright hilarious. “If it weren’t for the Chicken,” says Dave Raymond, “we would not have this proliferation of mascots.”

As the original Phanatic, Raymond would know. He’s also the founder of the Mascot Hall of Fame, which inducted the Chicken in its inaugural class. But while Giannoulas set off the trend, the Chicken was unlike anything else that followed.

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Pro teams own the rights to their mascots and change performers with regularity. Raymond performed the Phanatic for 16 years before deciding he’d had enough. But the Chicken is beholden to no corporate entity, an independence Giannoulas fought hard to win and maintain. And aside from one imitator in the 1970s — whose existence led to one of the most ridiculous court cases in California history — there has never been anyone else inside the costume.

Literally millions of people have seen him perform in person. That was him on the road 250 days a year, performing at sporting events across the country. The inexorable advance of age slowed him — for the last 12 years, he knew his hip was failing — and the pandemic cooped him up for a time, but he kept climbing into the suit and sweating it out. Everywhere he went, he’d feel the addictive rumble of laughter. But more recently, he’s started to notice everything he’s missed.

Intensely focused on keeping up his hectic performance schedule, he and his wife never had children. “I didn’t want to be in absentia,” he says with some regret. He was so hooked on the thrill of performing the act he pioneered, the rest of his life passed him by. “The work was my mistress,” Giannoulas says, “and I loved it.”

He loves it still, but after nearly half a century, Giannoulas has found a growing peace with the idea of putting it away for good. Fifty years will mark a big, even number, a fitting time to go out. Maybe the character will continue beyond him and maybe it won’t, but Giannoulas’ days as the Chicken are nearing a close. For a man who never met a bird pun he didn’t love, it turns an old joke on its head.

Not Why did the Chicken cross the road, but What happens when he reaches its end?

For a guy who spent the rest of his life as a chicken, wearing the suit was initially a means to a much more conventional end.

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The student radio station at San Diego State was roughly the size of a walk-in closet and as a sophomore in 1974, Giannoulas had squeezed into it just in time. An alumnus who worked at KGB, a local rock radio station, showed up on the hunt for cheap labor. KGB needed someone to wear a chicken outfit and hand out Easter eggs for a local promotion. It paid $2 an hour. Many volunteered, but at 5-foot-4, Giannoulas was most likely to fit into the costume.

A journalism major, Giannoulas saw himself as a future disc jockey or broadcaster. He’d do the chicken detail and then, he thought, he’d work his way up the ladder until he’d earned himself an on-air career. “It was about opportunity,” he says. “If the opportunity meant you had to start in the chicken suit, great.”

Out of that eagerness, an indelible character was born. Wouldn’t it be great, he suggested to his bosses, if the Chicken showed up in the stands at a Padres game, the station’s call letters worn across his chest? Go for it, kid, they responded. Thus, a be-chickened Giannoulas showed up at the Murph, ticket in hand, and then vamped around the concourse. He danced and wiggled and mugged and put a hex on the opposing pitcher. The crowd laughed. Every gag he improvised seemed to work. The Padres were coming off a 102-loss season and were destined for another, and the Chicken seemed like a good attraction. The team asked him back.

For the next several years, Giannoulas was a staple at every San Diego sporting event. He had them rolling in the aisles at Padres games. He stalked the floor at Clippers games back when the franchise was playing in San Diego. That’s Giannoulas fainting in shock in the background of the infamous Holy Roller play that vaulted the Raiders over the Chargers in 1978. His presence even caused a mild international incident when the Soviet Union’s national hockey team played the San Diego Mariners of the World Hockey Association. The Soviets refused to take the ice for 20 minutes until someone explained to them that the KGB on the Chicken’s chest was the station’s call sign and not a reference to the U.S.S.R.’s secret police.

All the sports world was a stage, and Giannoulas quickly realized he loved playing to the crowd. A Canadian son of Greek immigrants who moved to California as a teen, Giannoulas had been a quiet comedy nerd, enthralled by classic acts like the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. Reserved in his own skin, he took comedic flight in feathers, “a cartoon in real life,” he says. His repertoire of gags quickly expanded. The Chicken brought out an eye chart for the umpires. He beat up a fake ump. He challenged players to boxing matches. He channeled Pete Rose, running around the bases and diving into third.

Suggestions and participants came from all angles. Longtime umpire Frank Pulli suggested a gag that sees the Chicken nearly run over the umps on a dirt bike. Tony Gwynn was one of many who volunteered his children for the Baby Chicks bit, a fan favorite in which the Chicken leads a string of costumed tykes past the umpires, each stopping to lift a leg in a urinary salute. (“My dad laughed so hard,” says Tony Gwynn Jr., “because my sister lifted up the wrong leg.”) Joe West — whose umpiring career started around the same time the Chicken hit the scene and lasted nearly as long — was often a willing foil.

A bit West loved involved the Chicken attempting to bribe umpires with a $20 bill on a fishing line. One time, West made a show of rebuffing the advance, leading Giannoulas to toss over his wallet. “So, I stole his wallet,” West says with a laugh. “I had it in my ball bag the rest of the game.” He and Giannoulas became fast friends, so much so that West insisted the Chicken be present two years ago when he broke the major-league record for the most games umpired.

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Giannoulas was so enjoying being the Chicken that upon his graduation in 1976, he no longer looked toward a career in journalism. The Chicken thing was going gangbusters, and he figured he’d take it as far as it would go.

But five years after he first put on the costume, the radio station fired him and sued for the rights to the character. If there was a time to give it up, this sure seemed like it. But his aspirations had changed in that half-decade. When he’d first put on the suit, he’d been planning a way out of it. Now someone wanted to take it away and he didn’t want to take it off.

He was the Chicken, and he wasn’t letting go without a fight.

The judge’s ruling could not have been more clear. Until KGB’s lawsuit against him was resolved, Giannoulas could perform as any animal he wanted. He could even appear as any egg-laying winged creature. Except a chicken. If he did that, it would mean being found in contempt of court and potential jail time.

In his first performance after that ruling, Giannoulas came back as a chicken.

It was 1979 and at stake was the issue of who owned the character. What Giannoulas was doing was so new, there didn’t seem to be an obvious answer. He expanded the Chicken’s footprint, and thus the radio station’s, on his own. As his fame grew, he made appearances around the country, taking on the newly created Phanatic at Veterans Stadium in 1978. He appeared at concerts and shook hands with President Gerald Ford. He was a phenomenon.

Though the Chicken was at every Padres game, he was not their mascot. Padres president Ballard Smith once told Giannoulas that Braves owner Ted Turner had tried to trade for the Chicken, offering a backup catcher in return. He was not the team’s to trade, so Turner then turned to cash. Giannoulas still has one of Turner’s business cards, a contract offer of $50,000 a year scribbled upon it. As Giannoulas agonized over whether to accept, Turner upped the amount closer to six digits. The courtship became public, the subject of news coverage in both Atlanta and San Diego. Schoolchildren wrote letters to KGB begging the Chicken to stay. When Giannoulas announced during a Padres game that he would, the players carried him off the field on their shoulders.

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The  Turner flirtation earned Giannoulas a hefty raise at KGB, but the station worried the Chicken had outgrown it. The suit’s manufacturer was bugging the team to buy the copyright for the costume, but KGB didn’t care if there were chickens roaming Kansas City and St. Louis. The man in the beak felt differently. “We can’t allow this to become a department store Santa Claus,” he begged his bosses. Ultimately, Giannoulas paid $4,500 for the suit’s copyright himself. When KGB found out, it fired him and served him with a lawsuit that demanded $250,000 in damages.

Over two years, the resulting legal wrangling played out in absurdist fashion in newspapers across the country. Giannoulas had never publicly revealed his face and was allowed to wear a paper bag on his head as he passed through the courthouse corridors. At one point, both he and the “new” KGB Chicken appeared in court in costume to showcase the supposed similarities and differences between the old suit and a new one Giannoulas had commissioned. Naturally, Giannoulas hammed it up. In a wire-service photo during the saga, the Chicken was captured pouring himself a glass of water at the defendant’s table.

The court system moves slowly, though, and Giannoulas needed money to pay his legal bills. In late June, he announced he’d reveal himself as a new character before a Padres game against the Astros. He dubbed it the Grand Hatching and “promoted that thing like a wrestling match.” A few days before, he held a press conference from inside a five-foot-tall Styrofoam egg. Reporters had to speak to him through a small hole in one end. No, he wouldn’t reveal his new identity, he told them. Everyone would have to wait to see.

But he’d already decided: He would remain a chicken. One with different coloring and a few different features, but a chicken nonetheless. His lawyers begged him to be anything else. But Giannoulas was resolved to stand on (admittedly ridiculous) principle. “If anyone’s going to go to jail in America for wearing a chicken suit,” he told them, “I want to be that guy.”

The evening of June 29, 1979, an armored truck rolled the egg onto the field at Jack Murphy Stadium in front of a tense and curious crowd. (The egg actually had been stolen from the stadium grounds the night before, but it was returned when Giannoulas publicly offered the culprits four tickets to the game plus $20 in beer money.) Accompanied by the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Giannoulas rolled around in the infield before bursting forth from the egg as the newly christened San Diego Chicken. A sellout crowd of 47,000 cheered.

Through a deal he’d struck with the team, Giannoulas was paid $1.50 for every fan over the season average of 18,000. He cleared more than $40,000 that day, almost all of it going to his legal fees. In 1980, in a ruling that cited both Bela Lugosi and Charlie Chaplin, the state Court of Appeals allowed Giannoulas to continue performing in the new suit. The case ultimately wound up in the state Supreme Court, which ruled in Giannoulas’ favor later that year. The replacement KGB Chicken, who’d been booed by Padres fans in his first appearance at a game, faded from the scene.

Giannoulas was the only chicken in town.

To make your nest egg as a free-agent chicken takes a lot of hustle.

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The lawsuit resolved, Giannoulas hit the road in the 1980s and didn’t stop for decades. He hired assistants. He performed in minor-league towns like El Paso and Columbus, and he gesticulated courtside at basketball games in Indianapolis and Chicago. He performed relentlessly and then stayed until every last fan who wanted an autograph received one. He never charged a dime. Afterward, he usually sought out a pizza parlor, often the only place to eat that was still open. His wife, Jane, guesses Giannoulas has enjoyed mushroom pizza in every town in America.

Giannoulas met Jane in 1981 in Indianapolis. She had come to a Pacers game with her then-boyfriend, but was so bowled over by the Chicken that she decided she had to meet him. Giannoulas invited her for pizza, and she demurred. “Had nothing even come of it,” Jane says, “I would always remember it as one of the happiest nights of my life.” But a year later, her previous relationship in the rearview, she called Giannoulas before another Pacers appearance. They got pizza that night and she moved to San Diego a year later. They married in 1995.

It was a long courtship. “We were just so busy and wrapped up in the Chicken,” she says. “That was our life.” Jane threw herself into managing the finer details of the operation. She made sure Giannoulas got to each stop on time and made sure his merchandise did, too. She vetted assistants and interns. She once tried life on the road with him — Giannoulas had graduated from a grueling flight schedule to riding a charter bus — but decided it was too much. He was gone a lot, but managing the operation from home kept them tethered to each other.

For years and years, Giannoulas continued his madcap tour of the country. He was always on the lookout for new gags, but he also learned that audiences want the hits. “The Rolling Stones cannot end the evening until they sing Satisfaction,” he says. So, he whipped out the eye chart and did the Pete Rose bit and danced like James Brown. “There’s an old adage that says, ‘Don’t laugh, it only encourages him,’” he says. The iconic routines kept getting laughs, so he kept performing them.

Sometimes they got him into hot water. In the late ’90s, Lyons Partnership, the company that owned the children’s TV character Barney the Dinosaur, sued Giannoulas over a bit in which the Chicken lost to Barney in a dance-off and only to exact a violent revenge. Lyons demanded $100,000 for every time Giannoulas had performed the skit — as a fan-favorite, he’d performed it countless times — but the court ultimately ruled that the sketch was protected as parody under the First Amendment.

Other bits were equally edgy and, at times, just as capable of resulting in litigation. One in particular has aged poorly. During his showdown with the Phanatic in Philadelphia in 1978, Giannoulas improvised a Harpo Marx-inspired bit in which he plopped a chair down next to Mary Sue Styles, a woman who served as one of the Phillies’ celebrity ballgirls. The Chicken inched closer and closer, slowly put his arm around Styles and then pulled her to the turf and rolled around with her ravenously.

Raymond calls it “one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen,” but says that Phillies brass was upset about its racy nature. He also says that Styles was an unwitting and unhappy participant, and the ballgirl was later quoted as saying that “anyone but a chicken would have gotten arrested.” The news coverage at the time largely treated it as funny, although in the middle of KGB’s litigation against Giannoulas, the station’s program director told the Los Angeles Times that the bit was “indefensible.” But Giannoulas says he ran into Styles years later and they laughed about it, with Styles telling him that she turned down scores of lawyers who wanted her to sue.

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Styles didn’t sue, but another woman did after a similar skit in 1991. The Chicken had been a staple around Chicago Bulls games for years, often doing bits with the team’s LuvaBulls dancers. After one such tumble on the ground, a dancer claimed that she’d broken her jaw and elbow as a result. A similar injury claim made years earlier by a minor-league pitcher had been dismissed — Giannoulas says the pitcher tackled him, and not the other way around — but this time Giannoulas was found liable. After a lengthy court saga, a jury ordered him to pay the dancer more than $300,000 in damages.

Giannoulas was protected by insurance, and he says he doesn’t regret the occasional bawdiness of his act. Bits like that, including one in which he tempted opposing pitchers with a pin-up poster of a bikini-clad woman, got laughs. Those were his ultimate reviews, and he says he received few complaints. In the era of “Animal House” and “Caddyshack,” such humor was hardly out of step with popular tastes. But tastes, of course, change.

“Would it play today?” Giannoulas says. “Probably not.”

Laughs or not, he eventually stopped doing the ballgirl bit, as well as others that required spry athleticism. He stopped sprinting around the bases and roller-skating behind the truck dragging the infield. He no longer challenged players to fights or did the splits. The body of America’s hardest-working slapstick comic couldn’t take it anymore.

As a new millennium dawned, it was time for the Chicken to slow down.

The current century hasn’t been nearly as busy for the Chicken.

Over time, the majors became a less welcoming place, with managers and coaches less likely to play along. Once, after getting under the skin of Lou Piniella, Giannoulas and the irascible Piniella wrote dueling op-eds in the New York Daily News. A dispute with the Padres once resulted in Giannoulas being removed from the field. Even Gwynn once expressed his annoyance with the Chicken’s on-field antics after a 1996 game; Giannoulas retorted to reporters that “real men don’t whine.” As pro sports started taking itself more and more seriously, the minor leagues became the only place to see the Chicken unencumbered.

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There have been high-profile highlights since Y2K — a tee-ball game on the White House lawn early in 2001, West’s record-breaking game — but the Chicken has largely faded from the public consciousness.

For Giannoulas, it’s been a slower time by design. In recent years, he’s found himself anonymously walking the concourse out of costume and noticing all the things he’s missed. “You reflect wistfully,” he says. What would it be like to watch a ballgame instead of performing at one? “I was working these things. I was enjoying it,” he says, but there are also joys to be found outside of work. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that he and Jane got to sit on the grass and watch the fireworks on the Fourth of July. “I remember saying, ‘Have you ever done this before?’” she says, “and he said, ‘I never have. Not like this.’”

His thoughts have turned toward his legacy. At times, that has been a subject of tension. His independence was so hard-won, and his livelihood so hard-earned, that Giannoulas felt the need to fiercely protect the character he’d pioneered. Raymond has prodded Giannoulas to share the wealth, to pass along some bits and not be so offended when other mascots use them. Giannoulas feels like he’s the one that put in the sweat equity. “I took the risk to see how they might play with an audience,” he says. Many of his routines are copyrighted, and he hasn’t been shy about enforcing his ownership.

But in another way, Giannoulas has evolved. As a younger man, he’d always insisted the Chicken would die with him. Now he’s become receptive to the idea of passing on the mantle. “Somebody pointed out to me: Do Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy still exist even though Jim Henson is gone?” he says. “That makes sense. I see the point.” He can envision great things for the Chicken — animation, films, merchandise — under the right stewardship. “In broader hands,” he says, “it can grow exponentially.”

That raises the same question the courts seemed to settle back in 1980: Is it really the Chicken without Giannoulas in the suit? His admirers aren’t so sure. Longtime broadcaster Bob Costas wonders if a newer Chicken could work. The bits are old standards at this point — tired in the hands of anyone else, but vibrant when done by their originator. “When people know it’s the original Chicken,” he says, “that might make a difference to them.” West agrees. “You’re never going to be as good as he was,” the umpire says.

He is not done yet, Giannoulas stresses. Even as he looks more intently for the exit ramp, it would be against his nature to go out with anything other than a bang. He’s grounded for now as he recovers from surgery, but his mind is still working out new routines. Jane often sees the wheels turning in his head, inspired by some song or piece of pop culture. “I don’t think that switch will ever be turned off,” she says.

Perhaps, after 50 years of hiding his face, a Grand Reveal would be in order. He is recognized by few. Gwynn Jr. identified him at the induction of Ted Leitner into the Padres Hall of Fame last summer. West dines with Giannoulas whenever he’s in San Diego. Costas first met him in the ’70s. “I still don’t think if he walked in this room right now,” Costas says, “that I would know who he was.” That’s dedication to the bit.

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When suggested, the idea of a send-off unmasking admittedly tickles Giannoulas. For a second, he rolls it around in his head before deciding against it. “The Chicken is his own character,” he insists. The Wizard of Oz was just a guy once you pulled back the curtain, all of his mystique lost. So, Giannoulas’ countenance will remain anonymous.

“Let the magic continue,” he says.

For 50 years, he and the Chicken were one and the same, an association he went to court to protect. But now, as he contemplates saying goodbye, a new conclusion arises.

The Chicken is the Chicken, and he is just a face in the crowd.

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