I walked the Butler bulldog through Madison Square Park and he is perfect

MANHATTAN — Butler Blue III is waiting for me in a very wet snowstorm with his managers on the corner of 26th and 5th. Trip — that’s what he goes by, Trip — is wearing one of his Butler University basketball jerseys. He owns about ten Nike uniforms, fifteen Halloween costumes, one tuxedo, and a lab coat, all custom made to fit his wide, sturdy, currently-soggy frame. When you’re a celebrity, everything is bespoke.

In order to look Trip in the eye, I must kneel down, because he is a bulldog. His magnificence compels you to kneel, to pat him, to gush over his square head and rectangular body. Trip is probably more famous than your dog, and almost certainly more famous than you. The business of being Butler University’s live mascot comes with a huge platform, one solid enough to support all 65 pounds of this muscle-y, brindled beast. With his great power comes the great responsibility of representing an entire institution. He bears it on his wide shoulders with grace, if not humility.

“He has a huge ego,” says Michael Kaltenmark, the director of external relations at Butler whose most important position is being Trip’s handler. “It all goes right to his head.”

It has indeed. Trip barks — the sound of sand paper that took voice lessons and learned how to project — to express his disdain for the peasant dogs we walk by in a park near Madison Square Garden. Butler is playing its first game of the Big East Tournament at MSG on Thursday night, and Trip flew up on the charter plane with the team. He thinks he owns the plane when he gets on it. He thinks he owns this park as he strides (well, waddles) through it with the confidence of a college athlete about to get drafted high in the first round. He’s right. He does. All of New York City now belongs to him.

I wrap the leash splashed with the Butler insignia around my hand twice. Kaltenmark and Evan Krauss, a recent graduate whose entire job is managing Trip’s marketing and schedule, instruct me to. They also say I can’t hurt Trip by yanking on his leash. I’m not sure why they’re telling me this until I take the reins and feel this dog move through the world with the forward velocity of a bowling ball.

The Commodores wrote “Brick House” about this dog. This dog’s bones are made of steel. This dog could bench 350 pounds with only his back right leg while smoking a cigarette. This dog invented CrossFit and then quit because it wasn’t hard enough. This dog is what happens to normal dogs when they keep their New Year’s resolutions. This dog is elite.

This dog also has to poop. Kaltenmark grabs the leash from me because he can tell, and lifts the big, meaty boy over the fence surrounding a tree so that Trip can do his business.

“I have to pinch myself that this is my job,” Krauss, who graduated from Butler in 2016, says. “It’s a dream come true.”

Trip was born in 2011. He lives with Kaltenmark and his family (he’s good with kids). He’ll probably retire after next year, even though he loves this job, and the players, fans, students, and alumni love him back. So much. Definitely more than he loves them.

Butler Blue II, Trip’s predecessor, worked until he was nine, then died of heart failure almost immediately after retiring. Bulldogs usually live between eight and 12 years, but they shouldn’t really even exist at all. Bitches must be artificially inseminated, and puppies are delivered via C-section, because the dogs’ heads are too big to fit through the mothers’ birth canals. Trip has a lot of energy for his breed — he once walked five miles in one day — but that’s rare. His friend Jack, the Georgetown bulldog who was supposed to be here today but didn’t end up traveling with the team, can’t always keep up.

Lots of colleges have bulldogs as their mascots: Butler, Georgetown, Georgia. They’re the perfect choice. First of all, you can bring a live one to games without having to write a special law into the legislature, the way mascots like LSU’s Mike The Actual Real-Life Goddamn Tiger required. Second of all, everyone loves dogs. Third of all, bulldogs are everything you need a mascot to be — aggressive without being overly threatening, goofy without being undignified, fuzzy without being too cuddly.

But there’s something else about a bulldog, and you can’t really define it. A bulldog is ... I mean, look at that face, right? Those squishy cheeks, that underbite, those rolls around the neck. That tongue hanging out. A bulldog is as ridiculous and glorious and illogical as college sports themselves. Slap a t-shirt on a bulldog and you’ve got the physical manifestation of what it looks like to care about a school’s team.

Trip has finished his business. Kaltenmark lifts him out of the dirt and puts him back on the pavement, handing him off to me before going back to clean up after the celebrity. We continue splashing through puddles; he’s Gene Kelly and I’m Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ In The Rain, but with a significantly more noticable height difference.

Three people are walking near us, smiling the way you smile when you see a dog with an underbite wearing a jersey in the middle of a snowstorm. We pass them. They keep smiling, laughing a little bit, pointing at Trip.

“This is a famous dog!” I yell at them. One of the women furrows her brows, the other takes a step back, and the man they’re with kind of nods. They say nothing and keep walking. They must be star struck.

We have fully circled the park by now, and Trip has to leave. He has a big day tomorrow — Butler doesn’t play until 9:30, but Kaltenmark and Krauss are renting a car and driving the dog out to New Jersey to see kids who’ve been admitted to Butler and hopefully convince them to matriculate. The University has a big pharmaceutical school. If these students decide to go down that path, someday they may walk across the stage wearing lab coats beneath their gowns and caps. They will pass a Butler bulldog on stage, who will also be wearing a lab coat, but his will have been made specially for him.

It won’t be Trip by that point, of course. The poor guy probably won’t even be alive when the class of 2022 graduates. But his spirit will live on in Butler Blue IV, who will also have a face that melts your heart, and will also own 15 Halloween costumes, as well as any room he walks into.

I unwrap the leash from my hand and give Trip back, reluctantly, to Kaltenmark. The living mascot stands in a puddle and barks. People walk by, staring at him from under their umbrellas. They might not know who he is, but they know he’s something special. He glows. He is an immortal, drooling legacy. He is the embodiment of the glory of the nonsense of sport.

He is perfect.