7 OCTOBER 10-16, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | As the fi nal seconds of game fi ve of the 2023 NBA Finals between the Denver Nuggets and Miami Heat ticked away, Kenn Solomon paced along the baseline at Ball Arena. After the buzzer sounded and confetti began raining down, he joined Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray and the other players celebrating on the court. “It was all just magic,” he recalls. The oldest athlete in the group, Kenn had fi rst donned the uniform of Rocky, the moun- tain lion mascot he made famous, in 1990. But this game, which earned the Nuggets the team’s fi rst-ever NBA championship, would be his last. After a career that earned the plaudits of everyone from Charles Barkley to local schoolchildren, he was hanging up the suit, handing off the mascot role to his real-life son, Drake. It was a perfect ending... or so he thought. Now retired from the NBA mascot busi- ness, Kenn, 58, is fi nally ready to share the story about turning the upstart mascot of a struggling basketball franchise into the legendary Rocky. But he and Drake also want Nuggets fans to know how a series of unfortunate injuries made the Rocky transi- tion very rocky indeed. Kenn Solomon was born in 1966 to Ned and Georgiana Solomon. The middle child of fi ve, Kenn describes himself as the “goofy kid” in school and around his suburban Las Vegas neighborhood. “I never really felt the overwhelming urge to fi t in, and I kind of leaned into my fun and my weirdness,” he recalls. Kenn and his siblings had an active, ad- venturous childhood. But he didn’t excel at the sports many boys his age were playing, such as football and wrestling. Instead, he loved gymnastics, practicing at home with his parents and attending YMCA programs over the summer. The knack for performing these types of stunts was in his genes: His father was a member of the cheerleading squads at his high school and at Brigham Young University. “The front fl ip that I do over the dancers, I started that in third grade, showing off for my girlfriend,” Kenn says. Kenn also grew up exposed to the enter- tainment and gaming side of Las Vegas, since Ned Solomon served as the business license director for Clark County for many years. “He was in charge of licensing all the businesses, hotels, gaming. He had mobsters in his offi ce all the time. He had the heads of Caesar’s Palace and on and on and on,” Kenn says. When he was fi fteen, he and his father went to a Las Vegas Stars minor league baseball game. That’s when the mascot bug really bit Kenn. He remembers seeing a he- licopter descend onto the fi eld. Out jumped the San Diego Chicken, a mascot that looks like the love child of Big Bird and NBC’s peacock logo. The Chicken army-crawled and wiggled, all to the crowd’s delight. He couldn’t take his eyes off the mascot: “I watched him the whole game. I couldn’t tell you what happened at the baseball game to save my life.” Kenn and his dad went to another Stars game the following night. This time, he brought a notepad. “One of the things I wrote down is that he never stops moving. Even when he’s resting, he still wiggles his fi ngers while looking at the game,” he says. Kenn had found his calling. He persuaded the assistant principal at his high school to let him don the school’s wolf mascot costume, which he describes as looking like “roadkill Chuck E. Cheese.” He performed at basketball and football games during his junior year. And when senior year rolled around, his parents re- vamped the costume, creating a mask from a plaster mold of Kenn’s face. “I wanted to go be a mascot after EVAN SEMÓN continued on page 8 HEAR HIM ROAR AFTER MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS AS THE DENVER NUGGETS MASCOT, KENN SOLOMON FINALLY TELLS THE STORY BEHIND THE SUIT. BY CONOR MCCORMICK-CAVANAGH
