The Gators are wearing throwback uniforms on Saturday against Vanderbilt, topped by an orange helmet with the interlocking UF logo. (Photo: Jordan Herald/UAA)
Gators' Homecoming Helmet a Bridge from Past to Present
Thursday, October 7, 2021 | Football, Scott Carter
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — He doesn't doodle much these days. Gary "Bear" Briggs is retired and living in a suburb of Salt Lake City.
"Now, I just draw for my grandkids,'' Briggs said over the telephone this week.
Once upon a time, a visitor to Yon Hall, Florida's former athletic dormitory, could check out various pieces of Briggs' artwork hanging on the walls. A student trainer for the Gators in the late 1960s and early '70s, Briggs was a talented caricaturist.
Briggs used the players and their nicknames as inspiration. They called Jack Youngblood "Worm." Carlos Alvarez the "Cuban Comet." Robert Harrell "Hot Dog." Tommy Durrance "Pigeon." Briggs would pull out his sketch pad and pencils and start drawing, creating cartoonish images of the players he spent the rest of his time bandaging, taping and stretching in his duties as a trainer.
A former player at Chamberlain High in Tampa, an injury forced Briggs to consider other ways to become involved with the University of Florida football team when it was time for college. He arrived at UF as an advertising art major but soon switched his interests to athletic training.
"I didn't like the deadline stuff,'' he said. "That's when I taped my first ankles."
Former Gators student trainer Gary "Bear" Briggs, shown with NBA player Al Jefferson in 2013, spent 33 years as the head athletic trainer for the Cleveland Cavaliers and Utah Jazz. (Photo: Russ Isabella/USA TODAY Sports)
The change in direction paid off for Briggs, who after finishing his degree at Morehead State in Kentucky, served there as a graduate assistant trainer for a season. He moved to a high school in Canton, Ohio, for five years after that, and then made a stop at Troy State in Alabama. While in Canton, he met a local character/coach named Don "Boot" Buttrey, who was a friend of NBA coach Bill Musselman. When Musselman's Cleveland Cavaliers needed to hire a trainer, Buttrey called Briggs to gauge his interest.
The rest is history. Briggs retired in April 2015 after 33 years in the NBA, 18 with Cleveland and the final 15 with the Utah Jazz. He left UF long ago, but Briggs owns a piece of Gators lore that is being revisited on Saturday when the No. 20-ranked Gators host Vanderbilt on UF Homecoming.
The Gators are wearing throwback uniforms, including an orange helmet with the vintage interlocking "UF" decal. The decal made its debut in 1968 on Florida's white helmet in the season opener against Air Force in Tampa.
Briggs is the one who created it.
"I had always done a lot of cartooning,'' he said. "In fact, I was doing the scouting-report covers for each game and when they were starting to talk about coming up with a new helmet decal, I started throwing some stuff together. I had probably seen it somewhere around the country, but I just kind of threw it together and showed it to Coach [Ray Graves] and they liked it and went from there."
In an era when throwback uniforms have become popular with fans and players across professional and college sports, the Gators have joined the party in recent years under Athletic Director Scott Stricklin, who has introduced a tradition of wearing a vintage look in the Homecoming game.
What makes any wardrobe change more pronounced for the Gators is that they own one of the most iconic helmet logos in college football, the "Gators" script decal. The "Gators" replaced the interlocking "UF" marker in 1979 when head coach Charley Pell took over the program. Florida played its first game under Pell against Houston at the Astrodome, losing 14-10 in helmets adorned with the interlocking "UF." The next week, in a 7-7 home tie against Georgia Tech, they debuted the "Gators" script design that has been synonymous with the program for the past five decades.
There's a story there, too.
While UF introduced a new logo in the spring of 1979 for athletic apparel, a round image with a "U" and "F" carved out on the right side and a snarling Gator on the prowl above an image of the state of Florida on the left – designed by Bud Manning, the creative director of a Gainesville advertising firm at the time – the logo was not for everyone.
Longtime Gators equipment manager Bud Fernandez did his own doodling on a notepad, and with the help of Tampa Tribune cartoonist Lamar Sparkman, who designed the original "Bucko Bruce" logo of the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the more modern "Gators" script logo was born.
First, Pell asked for input from some of the team's upperclassmen before the decal was placed on Florida's orange helmets.
The Gators unveiled their script logo helmets against Georgia Tech in Charley Pell's first home game as head coach in 1979. (Photo: Courtesy of the St. Petersburg Times via Newspapers.com)
"We sat in the stands with Charlie Pell showing us logos and we voted is what I remember,'' Cris Collinsworth, the NBC analyst and former Gators receiver, shared in an email exchange with several members of the team from that era provided by Bill Feinberg, a member of the equipment staff at the time.
"There was a small group of seniors that he got together and he let us see the different options they were looking at for the new helmet logo,'' said Phil Pharr, the executive director of Gator Boosters and former UF offensive lineman. "He let us decide. He probably knew the answer before he let us decide or let us be involved in the decision. It was just a cool process to be a player and actually have someone administratively to ask your opinion on something. There were some goofy ones, but the script 'Gators' just stuck out.
"Here, 40 years later, it's one we still get to use. It makes me feel good."
For much of Gator Nation, the "Gators" script logo is all they knew until the team wore a throwback helmet in 2006. In the years since the Gators have accumulated a wide array of uniform combinations on game day, including orange, white and blue helmets, jerseys and pants.
Jeff McGrew, the Gators' current equipment manager, has been working on a helmet project the past two years to display in the team's new football facility set to open in 2022. He has tracked down most of the helmets used over the years from former players, fans and collectors. While everyone has their favorite look, he understands the impact the "Gators" script logo has had on the program.
"You're not going to mistake who it is when you see the orange helmet with the 'Gators' script,'' McGrew said. "It's very easily identifiable. There's a lot of teams out there that have different helmets and you can turn on the TV and might not be sure at first who exactly is playing. It's pretty easy to tell when the Florida Gators are out there. It has become a very iconic and traditional look for the Florida program."
Added Pharr: "It's just one of those visual things. It said who we were. UF could be Furman University, could be the University of Fresno. It had that visual hook to us as a group. It kind of stuck. This one was just so obviously the one we needed to go with."
Meanwhile, for the first time since in 42 years, the Gators will take the field Saturday topped by a blast from the past.
Briggs remains a close observer of the Gators and will take a trip down Memory Lane as UF faces Vanderbilt with an old but familiar helmet.
"We had some good memories," Briggs said. "Carlos [Alvarez], [John] Reaves and those guys. Glad I was there."
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