Hear Him Roar: Kenn Solomon Is Ready to Talk About Thirty Years as Rocky

As the final seconds of game five 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 first donned the uniform of Rocky, the mountain lion mascot he made famous, in 1990. But this game, which earned the Nuggets the team’s first-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 business, Kenn, 58, is finally 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 transition very rocky indeed.
Kenn Solomon was born in 1966 to Ned and Georgiana Solomon. The middle child of five, Kenn describes himself as the “goofy kid” in school and around his suburban Las Vegas neighborhood.

“I never really felt the overwhelming urge to fit in, and I kind of leaned into my fun and my weirdness,” he recalls.

Kenn and his siblings had an active, adventurous 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 flip 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 entertainment 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 office all the time. He had the heads of Caesar’s Palace and on and on and on,” Kenn says.

When he was fifteen, 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 helicopter descend onto the field. 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 fingers while looking at the game,” he says.

"I never really felt the overwhelming urge to fit in, and I kind of leaned into my fun and weirdness."

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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 revamped the costume, creating a mask from a plaster mold of Kenn's face. “I wanted to go be a mascot after that,” he says.

Kenn also competed on his high school’s ballroom dance team, specializing in Viennese waltz contests. His skill earned him a ballroom dancing scholarship at Ricks College, now known as Brigham Young University-Idaho.

He got a gig as the school’s mascot, Thor. But while Kenn thrived as a Viking, he wasn’t keeping up his grades. He left school to go on a two-year Mormon Church mission on the east coast of Canada. When he returned to Ricks, he landed a scholarship to continue portraying the mascot. But he had his eyes on bigger things.

Kenn auditioned to become the mascot at Brigham Young University, University of Nevada-Las Vegas and others; most lowballed him with scholarship offers. When Utah State University offered him a full ride, he gladly accepted and became the school’s mascot, Big Blue, performing in front of thousands of fans.

At USU, Kenn studied communications and journalism. That’s how he landed in the distribution department of the Rocky Mountain News for a summer internship, overseeing paper delivery boys and girls.

Kenn hated sitting at a desk, though. So he called up the Denver Nuggets, which didn’t have a mascot.

“He was like, ‘I want to be your mascot,’” recalls Lisa Whittaker, the director of game operations for the Nuggets at the time. “It was right when we were developing the mascot.”

The two stayed in touch and, in 1990, when the Nuggets were ready to move forward with tryouts for this new mascot, Whittaker called Kenn.

Although many people submitted applications, only five or so landed in-person auditions. Wearing a gorilla costume, they each had six minutes to wow a panel of judges that the Nuggets had put together. The man who played the Atlanta Hawks mascot oversaw the tryouts.

“I dunked, I danced, and I brought every prop that you could ever imagine a mascot using. I did everything,” Kenn remembers. “I almost threw up.”

The routine was a hit. “He dominated,” Whittaker says. “He was by far the best.”

Soon, the Nuggets called Kenn to offer him the role. He managed to negotiate a starting salary of $26,500 and dropped out of USU. All that he needed now was to learn what character he’d be portraying.

“‘It’s going to be a mountain lion called Rocky," Nuggets managers told him.
The Rocky character was the creation of Tom Sapp, who ran Real Characters, a mascot design agency in Atlanta.

A former advertising creative director and illustrator, Sapp had come up with the first costume for the University of Georgia Bulldogs mascot in his basement. He'd formed Real Characters in 1989, just a year before the Nuggets decided to add a mascot. “One of our very first clients was Denver,” Sapp recalls.

“We didn’t want a big blob, we knew that," Whittaker says. "We wanted somebody that could really be in the crowd.”

To prepare for a meeting with Nuggets leadership, Sapp researched the Rocky Mountain region. “It was obvious that the name was going to be 'Rocky,'” Sapp says. He identified a mountain lion as an ideal fit for the character, then created a story for the mascot, which involved a cat named Rocky, a lightning bolt that got separated from its family during a powerful storm, and a merging of the two.

That’s how Rocky got his distinctive lightning-bolt tail. The character had the “speed” and “energy” of a lightning bolt with the cleverness and strength of a mountain lion, Sapp notes.

The Nuggets sent Kenn to meet with Sapp in Georgia. Sapp placed him in the original version of the Rocky costume and took him to the Piedmont Park Arts Festival. He wanted to see how he would perform.

“Kenn did great, and people loved the character. I knew we had a fearless performer,” says Sapp, who now has built close to 400 characters around the U.S.

"Rocky is one of the few mascots you’d like to go have a beer with after the game. He’s that kind of mascot."

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Kenn made his debut as Rocky, a 5’10”, 154-pound mountain lion with a three-foot-long lightning-bolt tail, on December 15, 1990, in a game against the Phoenix Suns. Given his string of successes playing different mascots, he was confident.

But in his first few games, he struggled. “Some of the skits I did in college that were just slam dunks totally bombed. Bombed. Crickets,” Kenn recalls.

After a series of skits went sour, Carl Scheer, then a high-ranking executive with the Nuggets, called Kenn into his office. “He looks at me and he goes, ‘Kenn, this is not college. This is the NBA. Now step it up,’” he remembers.

Kenn was shaken, and decided he needed help. He called the Atlanta Hawks mascot who had overseen the Rocky auditions and asked for some mentorship. Through that, he realized he needed to simplify his approach to Rocky and focus more on moving with purpose and telling a story.

Slowly and steadily, he gained the swagger and confidence that are so characteristic of Rocky today.

“Right away, he was maybe one of the most athletic people I had ever seen,” says Paul Andrews, who was in charge of the music during games when Kenn started. “He could do anything in that suit. What he was doing inside that suit, most people couldn’t do outside that suit.”

In the years that followed, Rocky's popularity grew. Kenn entertained kids with his antics and adults with his edginess and wit. He mastered trampoline dunks, rappelled down into the arena, and performed skits that delighted the crowds first in McNichols Arena and later the Pepsi Center, which became Ball Arena.

"He's the full package. There's not a lot of people that have athleticism, comedy, improv and clever skit writing," says Scott Hesington, a close friend and business partner of Kenn's who portrayed Stuff the Magic Dragon for the Orlando Magic and Hooper for the Detroit Pistons. "He really has a good hold of all those things, which has made him really marketable in that community."

Ryan Hess, a current Nuggets season-ticket holder, remembers seeing Rocky in the early ’90s. “He was always engaging. There could be timeouts going on, and you’re curious what Rocky is doing to instigate,” Hess says. “The thing that I liked about Rocky is he could be unpredictable and would get into it with other fans.”
But Rocky — Kenn — most famously got into it with opposing players.

When Charles Barkley, the legendary NBA player and current basketball commentator, played for the Phoenix Suns, he started a decades-long feud with Rocky. In 1993, the forward punched the mascot square in the face.

“I didn’t know at first if he was playing or not, because he really punched me hard. Bloodied my lip, loosened my tooth. Bloody nose. When I found out he was playing, that’s when I turned it up,” says Kenn. Another time, Barkley punched Rocky as he was walking on stilts, causing him to fall.

In 1994, Rocky used a baby bottle to mock Dennis Rodman — then a fearsome rebounder for the San Antonio Spurs — as a crybaby. Rodman took the bottle from Rocky and pretended to suck on it, earning laughs and applause from the audience.

"He’s got a snarkiness to him, which is just fantastic," says Darren McKee, a longtime Denver sports talk-radio personality who works for Altitude Sports Radio. "Rocky is one of the few mascots you’d like to go have a beer with after the game. He’s that kind of mascot."

Andrews, who's now the CEO of the National Western Stock Show, recounts a time when Disney on Ice was performing at the arena. The ice-show staff wanted to do a promo featuring Rocky and a stuffed Mickey Mouse; the plan called for Rocky to walk onto center court and wait for an announcer to read an advertisement.

Instead, Kenn sat the stuffed Mickey Mouse at center court, ran back to the baseline, and settled down into a three-point stance like he was about to rush a quarterback. He then sprinted, dove and tackled Mickey Mouse, which exploded “into a thousand pieces,” Andrews recalls. “The Disney people in the crowd are furious. The crowd just went nuts. They thought it was one of the funniest things that they had ever seen.”

"My dad is still the guy I go to when I'm looking for a creative brain. When there's obstacles in the way, he can see past it."

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Kenn became known for his daredevil tricks. He attempted crazy basketball shots from atop tall ladders. He rollerbladed off ramps to dunk. He even put Rocky's balls on the line by landing his crotch directly on a balance beam to re-create “The Nutcracker.” And Kenn sacrificed the rest of his body, too, sometimes finishing games needing supplemental oxygen and IV drips in his changing room.

His daredevil actions came back to bite him in 1995, when, during a preseason game performance, he attempted a trampoline dunk. The trampoline slipped, Kenn landed hard on the court, and he broke his back.

After a hospital trip, Rocky landed on the injured reserve.

“The town really rallied. The news kept asking and kept wanting to do interviews. I think it was Channel 9 that actually interviewed me in the hospital. I put the head on and I spoke,” Kenn says. “At that point, I realized this was a little bit bigger than playing dress-up.”

After missing a few games, Rocky returned, much to the delight of the crowds who had really missed their mascot.

During the ’90s, the Nuggets put together some truly bad teams. In the 1997-98 season, Denver won just eleven games. But Rocky kept the show going.

“Through all those really terrible Nuggets years, he’s what people talked about. He was the entertainment,” Lisa Whittaker says.

As part of that entertainment, Kenn added a backwards half-court shot to his repertoire. “I started sinking some, and then it became an every-game thing. And then from there it became a sponsored thing. That meant that I had to do it every game,” he recalls. “That had some real pressure.”

But even with companies sponsoring the backward half-court shot, which helped keep fans in their seats as games were winding down, the real money came from wagers on whether Rocky would sink the shot.

“Players were betting on it, fans were betting on it, coaches were betting on it,” Kenn says, noting that he usually finished the season hitting the shot in more than 50 percent of the games.

"That half-court shot is so iconic," says Altitude's McKee, who frequently films and tweets out videos of Rocky performing the shot. "The fact it ever goes in just blows me away. ... I hope people don’t take for granted how difficult that shot is to make."

And Rocky did have some dry spells. Kenn remembers one season in which he missed the shot eleven games in a row. “I would get so booed. And one game, I actually lost it. Like truly, I’m just pissed. And so as I walk off the court, I grab somebody’s popcorn and I threw it,” he says.

Kenn acknowledges that he could be difficult to work with. His desire to entertain the crowd often took precedence over what a sponsor might have wanted or what his bosses said was acceptable. But more often than not, his approach worked. His supervisors would crack up at his edgy skits, and the crowd would go wild.

“I got in a groove to where I was just having fun,” he says.
Outside the suit, Kenn was getting in the groove, too. He and his then-wife had three boys: Garett, Drake and Cade. Each became members of Rocky’s pride before they could crawl.

“They have been on the court with me since they were each two weeks old,” Kenn says. “Sometimes they were Santa’s elves. Sometimes they were little Rockys and we were all the Village People.”

“Growing up, our life kind of revolved around Rocky. We were dropped off to school in the Rockymobile. We went to sporting events and soccer games in the Rockymobile,” says Cade Solomon, now 29, referring to his father's car, which was always decked out in Rocky decals.

As the Nuggets dribbled into the 2000s, Rocky continued to reign supreme in the mascot world. The team drafted Carmelo Anthony in 2003 and became a strong competitor in the Western Conference.

At the same time, Kenn's sons were getting more involved in the sports world. Cade worked as a ball boy for the Nuggets while he was in high school, later becoming Rocky’s assistant. Garett, now 31, tried portraying a mascot in high school and felt like he was a dud. But performing was in his genes. He earned a mascot scholarship to help pay for college before ultimately landing a role as Moondog, the mascot of the Cleveland Cavaliers. He's now Hooper, the mascot of the Detroit Pistons.

"My dad is still the guy I go to when I'm looking for a creative brain," says Garett. "When there's obstacles in the way, he can see past it."

Drake, now thirty, took a job with the Nuggets right after high school, joining the team's promo squad, which is best known for throwing out T-shirts during game breaks.

On the rare occasion that his father couldn’t attend an event as Rocky, Drake suited up. “I stepped in at nineteen, and that’s when I kind of fell in love with Rocky. From nineteen years old on, I’ve always been backup for my dad,” he says.

Drake has stepped into plenty of other famous mascot suits, too. When mascots celebrate their birthdays, the other NBA mascots come to town. When one can't make it, someone fills in. That gave Drake the chance to play Clutch, the mascot bear for the Houston Rockets, as well as Boomer, the cat mascot for the Indiana Pacers, and other characters.

Eventually, Drake worked his way up to becoming his father’s assistant during both games and appearances. The plan to have him take over for Kenn one day began forming.

“And then the announcer said, in kind of a cracked voice, because he knew what was going on, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for your SuperMascot, Rocky.’”

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Professional sports teams typically go to great lengths to keep the identities of their mascots secret. And mascots of Kenn's generation usually oblige, as that was part of the mascot code.

"It was for the benefit of the character, the benefit of the brand," says Scott Hesington, who points out that professional mascots today do a much better job of promoting themselves both inside and outside the suit. Recognizing their value, mascots in recent years have demanded that they be allowed to promote themselves. But Kenn didn't attempt to do that while filling Rocky's paws. And the Nuggets tried to keep everything about the person inside the suit as quiet as possible.

“We’ve always had to keep it secret,” says Cade. “We’re all pretty quiet people. We don’t go showing that off to everybody. But word got around just naturally.”

There was that time in first grade when his teacher made him stand up in the middle of class and tell everyone what his dad did for work, for example. “So, of course, in elementary school, people just kind of knew,” Cade says.

If there was any pretense that Rocky's identity could stay secret, that vanished early in the 2002-2003 NBA season when Kenn was arrested in Arapahoe County, after what he calls an “argument” between him and his ex-wife led to his being arrested on charges of trespassing and harassment.

The Associated Press reported the incident: “Sheriff's deputies said Solomon arrived unexpectedly at the doctor's office and asked to be present while the doctor saw his children. He and the doctor argued, and Solomon's former wife left with the children, authorities said. Solomon allegedly followed them to their home and entered the garage before his former wife could close the door, deputies said.”

Since the arrest was for charges categorized as domestic violence, Kenn spent the weekend in jail...and his name and role as Rocky were blasted out everywhere. “I thought my career was over,” he recalls. “I thought that to save face, they would have to fire me.”

But the Nuggets stood by him. As part of a plea agreement, prosecutors dismissed the harassment charge, and Kenn received a two-year deferred prosecution sentence for the trespassing charge, according to Eric Ross, a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office for the 18th Judicial District. In 2005, that trespassing charge was dismissed.

“That’s a little stain on Google, but I can honestly say I can sleep at night. I didn’t do anything wrong,” Kenn says.

Rocky made the news again in 2013, after Kenn passed out while being lowered onto the court; a costume mishap caused the collar to yank on his neck as he was descending. “It was like an MMA chokehold,” he says. He hit the ground, motionless.

“When I got down, the rope loosened up and blood started flowing. I came to pretty quick,” Kenn recalls. Nuggets employees prevented him from continuing that night. But after an MRI and a full medical screening, he was able to start back up a few days later.

Rocky made the news in a more awkward way just before the start of the NBA season in 2014: “Nuggets’ mascot Rocky surprises bosses with GOP rally appearance,” a Denver Post headline announced.

Kenn explains his presence at the GOP rally as a nuanced situation. He was “working the crowd beforehand” and not actually present for the rally itself, he says; since he had gotten permission in 2012 to attend an event before a Mitt Romney rally as Rocky, he thought it would be okay.

The Nuggets weren’t happy. And Kenn didn't attend a partisan political event after that.
In 2014, the Nuggets drafted Nikola Jokic, a center out of Serbia, in the second round of the NBA draft. Two years later, the team drafted Jamal Murray, a guard from the University of Kentucky. The two players began forming the core of what would turn into a powerhouse team, catapulting the Nuggets to the top of the NBA.

Even as the Nuggets began growing into a winning team, Kenn's bosses approached him about his retirement. “How about you retire in 2019 or 2020?” he remembers them saying.

Kenn made a good living working a job he loved. Periodically during his career, he'd leaked word to a local reporter when his contract as Rocky was ending and he wanted the Nuggets to pay up or he would walk.

"He was one of the first mascots to know how to market himself in the company. He was a trendsetter in that way," says Hesington.

But generally, Kenn kept quiet about his role.

Aside from his regular mascot work at games, he was also paid to make appearances as Rocky around the world. News stories have reported that Rocky made $625,000 a year. “I’m neither going to confirm nor deny,” Kenn says of that figure. “But I think the point is, the Nuggets always took care of me.”

Now eyeing retirement, he saw an obvious replacement in Drake, and he says the Nuggets liked the idea.

COVID delayed those plans, though, so Kenn stayed on as Rocky through the 2020-2021 season. Because of pandemic safety restrictions, Rocky stayed in one place during every game. As a result, Kenn says, his final season felt like a flop.

Then the Nuggets were eliminated after a series sweep by the Phoenix Suns. “I stood there with tears running down my face. And all of a sudden, the crowd, still sticking around, trying to take in the last part of the season, all started chanting ‘Rocky,’” Kenn recalls. “And then the announcer said, in kind of a cracked voice, because he knew what was going on, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for your SuperMascot, Rocky.’”

"I told them that it was a win-win. Be honest with the fans again; they’re not stupid."

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The summer after that disappointing end to what Kenn thought was his final season, Drake contracted a serious case of COVID, landing in the hospital for five days.

“I was on oxygen. I was getting pumped full of steroids,” he says. After getting out of the hospital, Drake, who remained on oxygen for two more weeks, developed pain in his legs from what was diagnosed as acute arthritis.

But he recovered in time to try out to become Rocky. It was a closed tryout, with just Drake auditioning. “They’ve known me for ten years, and they know I’ve been working toward this,” he says. “They wanted to still go through a tryout process. They wanted to make me feel like I earned it.”

During the tryout, Drake performed five skits, dunked, shot from half-court, walked on stilts and danced. A week later, he got a call from the Nuggets that he had the gig.

With his lungs still recovering from COVID, the Nuggets offered Drake a contingency employment agreement, which lasted until December 31 of that year. “Just to make sure that I’d be able to handle it and I was going to fulfill the duties,” he notes.

But Drake's first night went off without a hitch, and the weeks that followed went well, too. By the end of the year, the Nuggets had offered him a regular contract, without any contingencies. “And then the rest of the season went really well," he says. "I had some really good skits."

Kenn was still employed by the Nuggets, serving as an official mentor for Drake as he got comfortable in the Rocky suit, accompanying his son to games. “Drake was miles ahead of where I was when I first started. He was pro material first day. I was still college material when I jumped in there,” Kenn recalls.

Cade signed on as Rocky’s assistant. “His first year, he crushed it. And we had a lot of fun doing it,” Cade says.

During Drake’s first season as Rocky, word began to trickle out that Kenn Solomon, the man who'd portrayed Rocky since 1990, was no longer in the suit, replaced by his son.

"I felt very strongly that the public should know. ... They didn’t even have to say my name," Kenn says. "I really felt it was important for the new guy, because I’ve seen turnover so much over the years and how hard it is for the individual filling the costume to come in and fill the shoes of an established character. I just wanted the best scenario for my son."

Contacted by Westword in November 2021, representatives of Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, the parent company of the Nuggets, refused to confirm that a switch had been made.

“It definitely felt different,” says fan Hess. The COVID version of Rocky had seemed weird because the mascot was required to stay in one place in the arena, but Rocky still seemed off to some fans. The vibes and mannerisms were less familiar, and the mascot seemed to struggle with the backward half-court shot.

“That’s all anything anybody ever talked about, was the half-court shot,” Drake says. “Anytime I missed, whether it was fans or my bosses or whatever, it was like, ‘Well, your dad always made it.’”

Drake worked hard on that half-court shot, practicing on the University of Denver basketball court; he thought he had a pretty good percentage his first year.

But there were bigger challenges ahead.
Drake felt confident going into his second season as Rocky. Fans had high hopes for the Nuggets, too.

A few weeks into the season, however, Drake began feeling pain in his right hip, which he chalked up to routine muscle soreness. “After a while, it turned into a daily pain," he says. "Sometimes I would get out of bed and my leg would give out. I wasn’t able to walk."

The pain got so extreme that in January 2023, Drake went to see a doctor, who diagnosed him with avascular necrosis: Drake’s femur bones weren’t getting enough blood flow, causing them to degenerate. Doctors speculated that negative effects from the steroid treatment Drake was given when he contracted COVID might have contributed to the bone degeneration.

Drake told the Nuggets what was happening and came up with a plan. He would spend a few more games as Rocky before going under the knife. Once he landed on the injured reserve, Kenn could step back into the Rocky suit for the rest of the season.

Since Kenn's official final season as Rocky had been a COVID dud, he was excited to suit up again.

“That’s when a lot of the magic all came together for me," he recalls. "I was no longer doing it because I had to for a job. It was purely because I wanted to. It was purely just for the joy of it. That’s when things were just clicking."

Drake had surgery that March, undergoing a bilateral core decompression, an operation designed to draw blood into his femurs by drilling holes into his bones. After a week of recuperation, he began working again, scheduling appearances for Rocky and answering emails, getting around on crutches or in a wheelchair.

He also attended games to catch his father as Rocky.

“I saw it as a good opportunity to watch my dad as much as possible and just remind myself of what I know and also how he does Rocky, and all the stuff he does and all the little gimmicks he does, all the mannerisms,” Drake says.

For Kenn, those final months as Rocky were a dream. After more than thirty years with the team, the Nuggets won the NBA championship. He got to celebrate with the players and ride in the championship parade.

It was a fitting swan song for a man Hesington calls the "Michael Jordan" of mascots.

"If we have a Mount Rushmore of mascots, Kenn is on everybody's list," Hesington says.
After the championship season ended, Drake still felt pain in his hips. Physical therapy didn’t help, nor did any over-the-counter remedies. Still, he stepped back into the Rocky costume last October.

The pain worsened. Drake began limping; he was slower and couldn't run. Unable to generate power from his lower body, Drake tried to transform the backwards half-court shot with a new form that placed less pressure on his lower body. But the pain was unavoidable.

“I’d have tears in my eyes under the costume,” Drake says. Some of the half-court shots wouldn’t even make it to the hoop. “It was rough,” he adds.

Fans noticed that Rocky wasn’t just different; he was struggling.

“This person isn’t even hitting the rim. This can’t be the same guy that has been doing it for decades,” Hess says, recalling what he and other fans were saying at the time.

In February, Drake headed back to the doctor’s office. He learned that his femoral heads had collapsed. Doctors told Drake he could finish the season in severe pain and be limited physically or get a double hip replacement right away in order to be ready for the next season. Drake opted for the latter option.

He told the Nuggets, and soon learned they'd be putting someone else in the Rocky outfit.

Kenn protested this decision. “I advised them to just put him on the injured reserve," he says. "I told them that it was a win-win. Be honest with the fans again; they’re not stupid. And they again chose not to. They put a kid in there to just go out there and wave.”

"I never really felt the overwhelming urge to fit in, and I kind of leaned into my fun and weirdness."

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"He wasn't doing skits," says Drake, who got his double hip replacement in April. "He was just basically showing up for intros and the half-court shot, and that was it. He did the bare minimum just to make sure that Rocky was still out there."

Drake recuperated fast. His x-rays looked great, he recalls, and he was able to move around sooner than most patients. But he never got back into Rocky's suit.

“I’m unable to comment on the way things ended with the Nuggets at this time,” Drake says.

While Drake was still healing, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment posted a job listing for a mascot performer that clearly described Rocky. The salary range was listed at $70,000 to $130,000.

Kroenke Sports & Entertainment declined a request to talk about Rocky and the tenures of Kenn and Drake Solomon in that mascot suit.

"KSE is deeply appreciative of the contributions made by all of our employees over the years. However, as a policy, we do not comment on specific former employees," says Jim Mulvihill, a spokesperson for Kroenke Sports & Entertainment. "We also don't comment on Rocky the SuperMascot, except to say that we can't wait to see him back at Ball Arena this season!"

Rocky will be back at Ball Arena at the end of the month. But for the first NBA season since 1990, a Solomon will not be in the mountain lion suit.

Cade, who is also no longer with the Nuggets, isn’t sure what he plans to do next, but he enjoys video production. Kenn has been working on his own podcast, Between the Fur, in which he interviews and talks with former mascots and athletes. He's also working with Hesington in the international mascot world and will be traveling soon to Azerbaijan to perform as Luigi, a mascot monkey, during a European gymnastics tournament.

And while Drake wants to stay in the entertainment world, he thinks he’s done with professional sports.

“They don’t want to take risks…it’s not like it used to be,” he says.

Still, he's happy to be honest with fans at last, he adds: “It’s kind of nice to tell my story finally.”