Whether you’re writing a work of fiction, creating a stage play, or crafting a mascot, character development is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. Today, Dave Raymond, the original Phillie Phanatic mascot, joins us to discuss how he crafted the personality for this iconic character and what things storytellers need to keep in mind as they work through the character development process.
Episode Transcription
Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.
Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us a very unusual career-back person. If you don’t know him, his name is Dave Raymond and you will very quickly recognize him. Dave, I thought about wearing a magnetic Phillie Phanatic on my shoulder for this, but I didn’t do it.
It’s sitting right there. I could have, but I see you have it over your right shoulder, too. Before we jump in to your relationship to that character, give us a little bit of background for your family, your education, your career, so that people get a sense of who you are as we jump in.
Dave Raymond:
Yeah. Well, I grew up, you know, just such a wonderful life. In part because of my father, who was the head football coach at the University of Delaware. The fighting Blues. My hero in my youngest memory is I wanted to go play football for him. I wanted to be him.
And, I mean, he won 300 games. He was at Delaware for almost 50 years. He was a head coach for 36 years. And in the bucolic small town of Newark, Delaware, we went to the Methodist Church on Main Street, which is still there. And it was a beautiful, wonderful life and all framed by athletics.
And it ruined a number of relationships in my young life when I couldn’t get folks that I was forming a relationship to understand that Delaware football wasn’t just a game. Because if dad lost, we might have to leave Newark, Delaware. So to say sports was important to us. I mean, it was a life blood, right?
It was like oxygen to us. And my brother Chris and I ate it up. My sister Debbie, who was our oldest, and was going through what they used to call the generation gap, which is still continuing today. And she was connected to the love of sports too. In a young woman who you wouldn’t normally think in those in those days in the 60s that you would have a young girl like Debbie to be so enthused about Delaware football.
So it brought us all together. And it was a wonderful life. And truly, everything that I’ve done in my life today was started on the foundation of the University of Delaware and Delaware football. They are one of three families I have. I have my family with my mom, dad, my brother and my sister. And then of course, now it’s an extended family. I have the Phillies family. And I have the University of Delaware family, so I’m very blessed.
Marlin Detweiler:
Very good. Well, you went to work for the Philadelphia Phillies organization. And one of the things that happened was your father told you to do whatever they ask you to do. Not really having a well-defined job. That turned into some interesting things that have really not only been a blessing to you, but a blessing to millions in a very leveraged way.
You were the original Phillie Phanatic, and Sports Illustrated says you were the best mascot in history.
Dave Raymond:
Yeah, well, I did say that I was blessed. And the thing that’s so great about it, I mean, I wanted to be a football coach. I wanted to play football for my dad. My dad was, you know, you talked to all of his football players, especially the really the big linemen, and say, I don’t understand how a little guy, five foot eight, 160 pounds could strike the fear in the heart of these big, giant men.
But he knew what you needed before you did. So he knew that he was ready to help me be a football coach, but he knew I was really sensitive. And he said, listen, David, I’ve been so successful. And they yell at me every single day. So if that’s the life you want, I’ll help you.
But he said, look, it’s your sophomore year. I’ll help you get a job with the Phillies, because the owners of the Phillies were the Carpenter family. Who? There are two buildings on the Delaware campus named after Bob senior. So that’s how dad knew them. And they had a lot of the Phillies players coming into the Sports Performance Center, where they were doing the first ever high film photography of athletes.
So dad was connected with them on many levels. And so I had access and so on 1976 and 1977. And you were kind when you said it. He said it to me with some firmness. He said, you go do whatever they tell you to do. True. Prove your value, then you’ll be valuable.
Marlin Detweiler:
I didn’t have the availability of tone, but I do understand the difference. That’s funny.
Dave Raymond:
Yeah, and it was wonderful. And then the best thing he said after that was, you’ll never know who you will meet and what might happen. So blissfully, I walked into that job and after two weeks I went, I don’t want to be a football coach. I didn’t there was no sports marketing degree that you could get in college.
I was studying physical education. I was going to be a teacher. I wanted to influence and affect the hearts and minds of young kids. I wanted to start teaching at elementary school and get them enthused about physical activity, because I also taught high school in my practicum teaching, and those kids were not enthusiastic about physical education. I would start in elementary school and then I could coach at the high school level, and that’s what I was going to go do.
But I was done with that. I’m like, I could get paid working for my hometown baseball team. My dad was really a baseball guy. He was the captain of the Michigan baseball team; he was the catcher. So he was more enthused about coming to Delaware to be the head football and baseball coach, first as the assistant backfield coach.
So it was wonderful to be there and meet the players and get to know them over two summers. And I left there and they sent me back to finish my degree and they didn’t offer me a job. I thought, oh my gosh, I must have done something wrong, you know, because I’m Tubby’s son, friend of the owners.
And they said, hey, go finish your degree and give me. We’ll have a job for, you know, and it was Bill Giles who, on just it’s so bummed about the fact that he just passed away two weeks ago, and he was my first mentor, but also outside of my parents and my first adult friend.
And he was just amazing. And he called me at my fraternity house and said, look, we’ll give you another summer. You need to go to New York and get fitted for the costume.
Marlin Detweiler:
So what year is this?
Dave Raymond:
So this is moving into 1978, early, early spring of 1978. Because I worked 76 and 77.
Marlin Detweiler:
So 1978 the Phillie Phanatic comes to life.
Dave Raymond:
Yeah. April 25th.
Marlin Detweiler:
25th. Okay, well, that’s not even opening day. What?
Dave Raymond:
No.
Marlin Detweiler:
First couple weeks of the season.
Dave Raymond:
Well, that. Well, number one, the costume was delayed in construction. I’ve learned this business. No costumes are ever delivered on time. And I didn’t see it or try it on until that very day. And I was being told by Mr. Giles, we’re just going to show up because they didn’t. They were glad that it wasn’t ready.
And if it was, I don’t think they would have gone out on opening day, because that’s a huge day that Bill Giles really build up as a special day. And he said, I didn’t know this was going to work. I thought this was going to fail.
Marlin Detweiler:
Didn’t want the failure and didn’t want the distraction if it was successful. Yeah.
Dave Raymond:
Yeah, exactly. So we’re going to sneak him out. There was his concept, but just no fanfare. You’re just going to show up, which became one of the best enlightened leadership hacks ever. Because he allowed that to happen. He allowed that to do whatever I wanted to do as long it was he said, go have fun. And then he quickly, after realizing he told a college student that my focus was to have fun, he said, G-rated fun.
Marlin Detweiler:
So well, I watched probably you and certainly your success for successor as recently as this summer, and the idea of just showing up is no longer the case for the Phillie Phanatic. How quickly did you develop the personality that is perpetuated? I thought it hilarious. I read this and I think you said it to me when we talked about doing this episode that you call yourself the first inhabitant of the Phillie Phanatic. You might even want to explain that first.
Dave Raymond:
Well, truly in the beginning. So for anybody that is an entrepreneur or anybody who’s a leader and we’re all leaders is to recognize that trust, and then some space, to give that trust to allow something to blossom is a wonderful way to start something creative. So, Bill was a brilliant man in this regard. This stuff came to him naturally. So he said, ” You go and have a good time.”
Marlin Detweiler:
What was his title?
Dave Raymond:
He at the time was head of, what we call ballpark entertainment. Okay. Now. So he was in charge of all the silliness, right? You know, the ostrich races, Willenda skydiving in with the first ball, and anything else you could imagine that would distract somebody who didn’t understand baseball to get them in there and then see what a beautiful game baseball was.
And Bill did everything with a family atmosphere. He said, I use fun to build a family, not a business. It’s hard to capture how amazing he naturally did these things. So for me, I’m like, I can’t make a mistake, and I saw him giving me trust. So knowing that from my dad’s perspective, I’m not going to betray that trust.
So I went out and did G-rated entertainment. So for me, it was Daffy Duck, The Three Stooges, Foghorn Leghorn, and I was allowed just to go out and do things. And through the first couple nights, he was right on the phone with me down where I was. The phone was behind home plate, and the ground crew would say, hey, Mr. Johnson, phone.
He said, hey, why don’t you go out in the fifth inning and just see what happens when you mess with the ground crew? And that turned into a fifth inning routine that is still going on today. Everything that we did in regard to the Phanatic going out and just going out for ten, 15 minutes and then leaving so that people didn’t have access to the Phanatic all the time, otherwise he wouldn’t be special.
So he was like a foul ball. So I had a full year. I say within six months it took me before I would see Dave Raymond disappear and see the Phanatic appearing. And then within a year I put that costume on and quite honestly, and I think this was good for my mental health later. Was it took over and yeah, my personality was there kind of floating around.
But you know, the synapses were clicking for the Phanatic is going to go do this. The Phanatic will do that. Oh, the Phanatic will always do this. The Phanatic will not do that. And this is who the Phanatic is going to go interact with. And it was driven by that. And it got to be within the second year that I was kind of on autopilot.
I mean, yeah, creatively, I was working hard, trying to do different things, working on my dance skills, which I learned. You’ll appreciate this so that all my buddies in high school were having some adult beverages before they did, and I just didn’t do that. So the girls loved it when I danced with him because I wouldn’t throw up on their shoes.
So I learned to dance very, very early on and loved doing it. I love music; psychologically, music is a connector. It lifts us up. It’s actually good for our happiness. And so I just played on everything that I liked and what made me laugh, I infused it into that personality. And the things that didn’t work just kind of flaked away as if, you were getting better from some sunburn.
It just flaked away and it fell off. And the things that work just stay there. And people weren’t expecting anything. So I also was given a lot of space for the audience. They were just amazed that this green muppet was running around. They didn’t care what the Phanatic did early on. It was just, “Look at that! What? What’s that?” So I really had an amazing mentor in Bill, and he had built that whole culture inside of the group that I was working for this ballpark entertainment. And it just. And immediately it caught on.
Marlin Detweiler:
It really did. Just it was as recent as 78, I would have probably guessed a few years before that, but that’s fascinating. Now, a number of things developed over the years. Of course, the way you interact, interacted with people, the personality that you worked with or displayed through the character. But I got to ask you, how dangerous was it to drive that vehicle that fast?
Dave Raymond:
Well, in the beginning, this is this how old I am; In the beginning, it was a three-wheeler. It was a brand new vehicle.
Marlin Detweiler:
Oh, boy.
Dave Raymond:
Yeah. And Honda came out with it, and it was so much fun. It was easy to ride. It wasn’t very dangerous, but they took it out of production and made the four-wheeler within, I’d say, two years, because kids were getting hurt on it because it looked like something a kid could ride.
Marlin Detweiler:
You could flip it.
Dave Raymond:
Yeah, you could flip it over easy. And the tires were all big bubble tires. So if your foot slipped off the peg, the back tire would actually grab you and throw you on the ground.
Marlin Detweiler:
Oh my goodness.
Dave Raymond:
And it happened a couple of times in costume and it looked funny. So I said okay, well I and it was hard to really get hurt badly on it was just a bump or a bruise and I love that. And then the four Wheeler came along and I learned how to ride that proficiently.
And you could pop wheelies and do all kinds of things. And for me, here was the beautiful thing, you know, for the first, you know, I didn’t get that probably until late in the first year. And I was introduced to it by going to an appearance at a new Honda dealership that happened to be in Newark, Delaware. And they wanted me to learn how to ride it. And then, of course, Bill buys it for me immediately. And then I’m realizing I can get from point A to point B, and I’m not tired.
Marlin Detweiler:
So but your feeling has got to be restricted to, isn’t it? Your field of vision has got to be restricted in the costume?
Dave Raymond:
Well, that was the brilliance of having the Muppet people create a costume. You could see really, really well in that it wasn’t very protective. The performers face is right under the nose, and it’s just a mesh screen that lays across your little. I had good peripheral vision. I could see well. And frankly when the four-wheeler was going, the wind just kind of parted, you know the pieces of yarn. So I could see even better. I do believe there was some divine intervention.
Marlin Detweiler:
This is some fun inside scoop.
Dave Raymond:
Yeah, I just I had I was a kid with toys and I talk about the transfer between me and the gentleman who is the best friend of the Phanatic now Tom Burgoyne, he’s a brother from another mother. He was my backup best friend for five years before I left the Phillies. And I say in a normal human way, if you describe this well, you were you created something.
It was you were getting all the credit for it. It was a fabulously popular. And then suddenly you would have to retire and give this to another human being. Your human thing would. Well, I don’t want them to be too good too early. But that’s not what happened. We were so tight and so close that when I turned it over to him, he took off.
But here’s where the jealousy comes in. Sorry. The jealousy comes in because he’s got all the good toys. He has a palatial dressing room with a welcoming area, washer and dryer, a shower, a place for everything.
Marlin Detweiler:
You’re probably changing in a bathroom somewhere?
Dave Raymond:
I had a hole in the wall. Yet, we were such good friends. The documentary just came out called Big Fan about the Phanatic and all of what we’re discussing. So we were able to be together for the last few days to talk and reminisce about all of this. So it’s fresh and cool.
Marlin Detweiler:
So that’s a documentary that’s available to us.
Dave Raymond:
Well, it’s at the Philadelphia Film Festival in its premiere. And part of the documentary business is they put into a film festival. Hopefully you’ll get good responses, which we’ve had unbelievable responses from the premiere last Saturday. There’s a second screening they put in specifically because everything was sold out this Sunday. And then that’s where you’re able to promote it and market it for it to go on a stream.
So I’m hopeful, but I also have great confidence that it’s going to be on a streamer where everybody can see.
Marlin Detweiler:
A Netflix or a Prime or something like that. Sometime soon.
Dave Raymond:
Yes. There’s a lot of potential for it.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, I enjoy seeing that. Tell me, before we move into how you leverage this into helping a whole lot of other people create mascots, tell me a couple of the funniest things that happened while you were in the costume.
Dave Raymond:
I will not discount, but put on the side all the heartfelt moments where the Phanatic would be going to funerals. They’d be walking into hospital, we’d be walking to hospital rooms, and when the Phanatic would come to those places, both of them, it would be a big celebration. So that’s why I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on, but that’s what we’ll get to later.
But, you know, he just was so powerful in that way. But so I’ll tell you, obviously, the Tommy Lasorda dust up is one of legend. You go to the YouTube video and put versus the Phanatic and you’ll see it.
Marlin Detweiler:
Now are you at all voicing anything in those things that people couldn’t hear? But you and Tommy might have been interacting?
Dave Raymond:
Well, Tommy did.
Marlin Detweiler:
What he did.
Dave Raymond:
He was an artist in stringing expletive deleteds together. I’ve never him and Larry Bowa, two people that if they gave an Academy Award for that, they would have dozens of them. But it in the beginning I had a long relationship with him. He was very kind to me. And then you know it.
I guess the simplest way to describe it was he was okay with all of this and enjoyed it until he wasn’t on that one night. On the one night, he went nuts and beat up a muppet in front of 30,000 people. And for me that is the most memorable. And the one thing that most everybody, even if they don’t remember the Phanatic and you were to tell them, well, the Phanatic was a character. That got in a fight with Tommy Lasorda, they would go, oh, well, so it really travels well.
Marlin Detweiler:
So this is real anger and this is real upset. Oh my. I had no idea.
Dave Raymond:
On the one night on that one night, everything else was a cauldron.
Marlin Detweiler:
Choreographed of sorts.
Dave Raymond:
Yeah. He loved to see his players laugh at him getting angry at somebody else. And then he was getting angry at a muppet, and then he was screaming. He called me Dave. He didn’t call me. Hey, Phanatic. He said, Dave, you blip, blip, I’m going to blip. And the players are hearing this and they’re going, well, he’s not yelling at us. This is great.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.
Dave Raymond:
Let’s let him yell at the Phanatic.
Marlin Detweiler:
That is true.
Dave Raymond:
Steve Sax, their second baseman, was the one who kept getting me his jersey. And on that particular night, he was so frustrated with everything he told his clubhouse manager, “When we go to Philadelphia on that trip, I’m only taking one jersey. It’s going to be the one I’m wearing.” And the first game of three, Steve Kennedy said, the old man’s going crazy.
He only has one jersey. And so I went out and bought a Los Angeles Dodgers jersey and then had our seamstress put Lasorda on it. So when I came out that night, he first wanted to kill his clubhouse manager, and he couldn’t get his hands on him. So then he that’s when he went out and the whole thing started.
And then, of course, his plausible deniability was, well, the Phanatic is violent. He’s defaming the Dodger blue. You know, I’m not going to stand for that. Meanwhile, he comes, you know, I’m violent, but he comes out and beats up a muppet. So the whole thing was just phenomenal.
Marlin Detweiler:
Oh, that’s great.
Dave Raymond:
But I think the one heartfelt story, my favorite was the World Series parade in 1980, which was the Phillies first world championship. And I went to the staging area and Mr. Giles said, you’re going to be up there with the families and the players on one of these two flatbeds. And they were all set up for seats and little areas.
And I said, oh, Mr. Giles, the Phanatic really smells awful. It been like, you know, three weeks of the World Series.
Marlin Detweiler:
And you hadn’t been able to send the suit out there to clean it.
Dave Raymond:
It was a mess. Yeah. And so he put me on a flatbed that was put there in case any flatbed broke down, and it was an empty flatbed. And I was at the back of the parade. So I’m watching the sea of humanity. Probably 400,000 people were came all the way down Broad Street and then populated JFK Stadium, which is now a park next to where the Sixers or where the Eagles play.
And so I’m seeing all this activity and I’m kind of losing my focus on being the Phanatic because I’m just enjoying this. And there’s a guy that’s trying to hand me something. He’s got his kid in his shoulders and he can’t tell that his kid, who is about four years old, is crying.
He’s like scared to death by all the noise and the police on horses and all that. So I went and just grabbed what he was trying to hand me and he gave me a thumbs up. Started to fall back in the crowd. I see that he finally took his son off and was consoling his son. I’m thinking good.
Then I look at what he gave me. He gave me his Pennsylvania driver’s license because his name was David Raymond. So this whole it was an analogy of everybody just wants to make a connection. They’ve won this world championship. Everybody wants to say, I was there. Hey, I really am connected. My name is the same name as the best friend of the Phanatic.
And I just saw a police officer come riding up on his horse because he saw the whole thing. He said, “Hey Phanatic. Give me that. I’ll get it back to him.” So because now this guy is giving it to me and then he gets swallowed by the crowd, he’s like, oh geez, I gave my license to the Phanatic.
There’s no telling where it will be at the end of the day. So that capsulizes the beauty of sports, the love and affection for our home team, striving to be the best in the world, or your conference or your little league. Everyone is trying to sit on that pinnacle once and what’s nice about those two stories, there are millions of moments of joy that we would never be able to go over all of them.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, I want to make a note here now for our listener. You and I talked about this, and we’re going to do another episode following this one. That will be about the way you have taken what you’ve done and turned it into a real, a real way to spread joy and happiness in a very intentional way.
And I look forward to that conversation, too. But what you’ve done with mascots is remarkable. My understanding is at this point, you have helped to create and train 175 mascots in professional sports, and maybe mascots like this beyond professional sports, I don’t know. You have to tell me.
Dave Raymond:
Yeah, there have been a number of corporate mascots, but I think my sweet spot are some collegiate characters, but there are a ton of minor league programs that really need this sort of thing. They invest in it. I mean, a general manager in the minor leagues is not the gentleman or young woman that is getting talent on the field.
They are building the fun things in the stadium to draw fans, and they don’t care that much about wins or losses. They just want the experience to be great. So a character design, a character, what we call character branding program is one that’s got great value and can drive great amount of revenue.
I learned from the best, right? I learned from Bill Giles and the Phillies family, which was all about leveraging that fun into teaching people how to fall in love with baseball. So a lot of non-fans and with Veterans Stadium in the early days there, you could get almost 6,000 people there for baseball. So 25,000, that would look like the that citizens Bank Park was pretty close to being full.
It would look like no one was at the ballpark, at Veterans Stadium. So what we teach simply are some basic rules about what they need to do in order to reach a great success and great success for small market team means that you and I may not have ever heard of that character, but in that town it’s very well known or like Gritty when I worked with the fliers.
So I feel like I’ve got two great bookends to a long and wonderful life and career. Is the Phanatic in the start, not knowing what we were doing that was right. Learning that process and then being able to teach all these people, all these organizations to deliver something for their fans that are not only valuable for giving moments of joy, but financially too.
And Gritty was just as wonderful of a character and grew just as fast as the Phanatic and maybe even faster because of the social media of the day. May can amplify that much more quickly than we could back in 1978. So I, you know, we just share some principles that if and it might surprise you what the most important thing is and what the least important thing is.
And maybe that’s, well, what everybody would think would be the most important is what is it? What does it look like? What’s it going to be? That’s the fourth most important thing on the list; the first one is that you’re going to care that you’re not building a person in a costume. You’re going to be building a living, breathing entity that you are going to treat like that, and you’re going to care for it like that.
That’s number one, so that the organization has to care. So if they hire me, they already care because the budget that it requires to have me do this for you puts it outside of, hey, let’s go down to the Halloween shop and buy a costume and we’ll throw some somebody with a pulse in it and we’ve got a character or I would say we have a mascot. So the second thing is you need to drive everything by an authentic story, and all you have to do is go to Disney or Henson and see what the stories meant to those people.
I mean, Walt Disney was the first one to do it, and he talked about, oh, well, you can’t create a movie, a feature-length movie in a cartoon. They’re only meant for these two minute cartoons to be shown before the movie. And he said, no, we’re going to get people to care about these characters, whether they’re animated or not.
They’re going to care about them. And the only way you can make them care about them is to give them a great backstory that has benefactors and beneficiaries and villains and drama and intrigue, urban myths and legends. So it’s easier to do it today with AI, but in the beginning our clients had to go and sit down and start sketching out storylines.
And then I would help them review it. But I can’t tell their story the way they can. And it’s ownership. It’s a history of the town. It’s the type of sport if it’s one or it’s the college and what are the things that happened that made that town, that college, that team, that organization what it is.
Marlin Detweiler:
Is in connection with the community that you’re serving.
Dave Raymond:
So let’s say if you put a scar on the characters, I people are going to say, well, why does he have a scar on his eye? Oh, you didn’t know this that the daughter of the founder of fill in the blank, our town, our college, this founder of our business. She was in a car accident when she was three.
And she lost sight in one eye. But she overcame that and became this type of person. Well, that’s a really wonderful thing to put into the character’s backstory. One of the reasons why the character either has found you or you found the character. So that is number two. That’s the most important thing. Number three is an amazing performer who’s talented, who understands how to communicate non-verbally.
Marlin Detweiler:
The athleticism I’ve seen in what you’ve done and your successor and others. Of course. I’m. I lived in Orlando for a while. We were magic season ticket holders used to watch stuff. Somebody that has a whole lot of look like the Phillie Phanatic, for obvious reason. Because you were connected to it.
Dave Raymond:
Yeah, I mean, Pat Williams was another Bill Giles in my life. Okay. And he brought me in to be and asked Dave Montgomery, who was my boss. And between me and Bill Giles for a long time, if it was okay, if I went down and inhabited the first version of stuff at Church Street Station in Halloween and it that’s a Pat wrote a whole chapter in his book about it called Making Magic, which is hysterical.
People have to go read that chapter. I had so many people around me that understood what was important. So the fourth one on that list is what it looks like. Because if you do those first three, well, it doesn’t matter what it looks like. Yeah. Then of course, you know, colors, you know, part of your brand, slick.
What we like to do is we like to create a logo for the character, and a pop of color that’s different from the brand. Because those two things are a gold mine for revenue through development of product and storylines. So. And the character then owns that logo and owns the color. And then in today’s world, that was like heresy back in the day.
You know, one color slick. That’s it. One logo. Now it’s like pink and purple and blue. Versions of your brand. And it’s been a really big financial win for sports because we’re all not buying one jersey. We’re buying five of them. You know.
Marlin Detweiler:
So it’s been genius by the sports franchises with the Friday night uniforms for baseball and other things is really sold a lot of stuff. I was at a game- the first Phillies game I was at in a while was two years ago, I think, and I felt like I was the only person not wearing Phillie gear. Everybody was. It was a lot of money. I priced it because I bought a shirt for a grandson and I couldn’t believe I paid it too.
Dave Raymond:
I mean, that’s what Bryce Harper has done for the value of the Phanatic by being authentically, connected to the character through a friendship. So he started he wears Phanatic related stuff when he plays. So the band the wick dry headband with the eyes. He started wearing that went from like a $15 item to a $26 item because Bryce Harper is wearing it.
I’m going to get that for my kid. Or everybody wants to wear that. I play a lot of pickleball, I wear them, I’ve got two of them for pickleball and believe me, I don’t get a discount anymore. You know, I get to whip out the credit card. It’s been a long time since I was with the Phillies.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, this has been great fun. And we’re going to come back and do another episode about what you’re doing, leveraging off of what you did in one career to bringing joy and happiness and understanding it’s science and it’s application in a very strategic way in our next episode. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Dave Raymond:
It’s my pleasure, Marlin, I really appreciate you.
Marlin Detweiler:
And folks, thank you so much for joining us on this really fun episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Look forward to seeing you next time.