It Will Be a Sad Moment When Saukko Rides Off Into Sunset

Oklahoma is coming to town in two weeks for USC’s football season home opener, and Richard (Socko) Saukko will be ready. He will wear his helmet. So will the players. He will wear his padding. So will the players. And, he will carry a sword. Perhaps the players should, too, considering the kind of football Oklahoma usually plays.

Saukko is hoping to have a better day for the Trojans than he did last time the Sooners were in the Coliseum. He slipped and fell that day, on some wet paint on the oval that surrounds the football field, and was pretty shook up.

Or, rather, Saukko didn’t fall.

His horse did.

Saukko, see, is the guy who rides the Trojan horse. For 28 years now, he has been bolting out of the tunnel and around the Coliseum track on Traveler, the USC mascot, the magnificent white steed that circles the premises to the accompaniment of “Conquest” after every Trojan touchdown.

Saukko, 68, is about to ride off into the sunset, though. This will be his last season aboard Traveler, because he is ready to sit and watch football games like a normal person, rather than sit astride a hard saddle all day.

“I’m getting older and the horses are getting more and more ornery,” Saukko said. “Or maybe it’s the other way around.”

For the horses themselves, the hoofbeat goes on. Making his official debut for USC against Oklahoma--his maiden race, as it were--will be Traveler IV, a handsome, 7-year-old white Arabian gelding who stands 16 hands high and is descended from the original half-Arabian, half-Tennessee walker who was the brother of the Lone Ranger’s Silver.

Saukko first rode Traveler I at a USC game in 1961, wearing the same outfit and helmet that had been worn by Charlton Heston in the film “Ben Hur.” USC’s director of special events that year, Bob Jani, had spotted Saukko in the Tournament of Roses parade. He asked Saukko, a retired paint company executive who now raises horses on his Saugus ranch, to become the university’s official Trojan warrior, aboard the brave and trusty Traveler.

Other animals had filled the bill before. There was a white horse at a USC game as early as 1927, and later a palomino, and eventually another white horse named Rockazar in the ‘50s. For a while, there was even a dog named George Tirebiter, who was always chasing cars. In 1947, UCLA students kidnapped George, but USC got him back.

Three years later, a car got George.

Saukko, or just plain Socko to his friends, will miss some of the pageantry of USC football. He will miss the thrills, the chills.

Just not the spills.

“A couple of years ago, the horse slipped on a banana peel,” he said.

A banana peel?

“Yeah. I didn’t find out until a year later that it was a banana peel. I wasn’t sure what it was. People were always throwing things out of the stands, especially people from Stanford and Cal and UCLA. One day, somebody finally came up and said, ‘I’m the guy who picked up that banana peel your horse slipped on last year.’

“It was scary sometimes. You come out there at a full-blast run, and you can’t be sure what to expect. I was always worried about the horse getting hit in the head with something. I’ve seen people throw bottles out of the crowd, whole beer bottles. They finally created a law that said you’d be jailed if you got caught throwing something, so things haven’t been so bad since then.”

Saukko missed the entire 1979 season when he broke his back. Five years later, he broke a hip when the Air Force band came up from behind in a parade and scared his mount. Horses can be hazardous to your health.

Then, at this year’s Rose parade, he suffered a dislocated shoulder, just before the parade, when Traveler IV reared before being bridled and knocked Saukko into a truck. He rode in the parade anyway, and the shoulder popped back into place while he was in the saddle. The football team’s doctor gave him a pain pill in time for the USC-Michigan State game that afternoon.

Arabian horses, like humans, turn gray and then white, the older they get. Not just their manes, though. The whole horse.

Traveler IV, for instance, was born a bay, and remained dark for his first four or five years. Gradually, he turned gray, and today he is completely white, except for one little gray patch. A little white Grecian Formula could take care of that.

His daddy, Traveler III, was a professional show horse as well as USC’s mascot, but he is 18 years old now. Trojan students are just starting out at that age, but Trojan horses are tuckered out by that age.

Saukko, too, is tired of the grind, and since he has basically charged only his expenses, he hasn’t exactly made a Willie Shoemaker-like fortune riding Traveler around the track. Already he has been breaking in his stand-in as well as his new steed, and the younger man probably will ride Traveler IV for at least half of the Oklahoma game.

When the game begins on Sept. 24, however, Socko Saukko will be out there, in the chest plate and feathered helmet somebody at the 20th Century Fox studio donated to the cause a few years ago. The sword, he made himself.

“It takes more than just being able to ride a horse,” he said. “You have to be ready for anything. These TV cameramen and photographers on the sideline, for instance, they never pay a damn bit of attention where they’re going. You have to make sure not to run one down. It can get tough out there.”

Still, as the Greeks once said, it’s nice to have a Trojan horse around when you need one.