By Ben Barnhart

Drum roll, please. He’s probably best known for smacking a tennis ball from Andy Roddick’s racquet in a TV commercial for the ESPN sports network. He also rose to second place with nearly one-and-a-half-million votes in a national mascot contest and has danced Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” on the Mullins Center floor in front of thousands. He is Sam the Minuteman, a.k.a. Josh Duboff ’07.

Despite creating enormous buzz as the Minuteman over the past few years, Duboff has remained mostly anonymous by playing Clark Kent to Sam’s Superman. About 200 people know about his double life, Duboff guesses. His professors, family, close friends. He carries his alter ego in a giant hockey duffle bag that he sneaks past nosey dorm monitors with a nod toward his “mascot” monogrammed shirt and a wink-wink, nudge-nudge. He has even developed code language for his closest friends.

“I call him Max,” Duboff said. “I’ll say, ‘I’m going to the basketball game tonight with Max.’”
Duboff was unveiled as the patriot during senior night—the final home men’s basketball game against LaSalle on February 28—when he was introduced to a standing ovation from fans and a mid-court salute from the team with two minutes left in the game.

“This is bigger than graduation,” the sport management/political science dual-major said looking across the empty Mullins Center a few hours before the game. “I’ve spent more time here than in class, in my dorm . . . more time here than anywhere.”

After sharing the role with another student his freshman year, Duboff decided to make the mascot his calling and his enthusiasm and self-promotion have largely made Sam what he is today.

“I decided that if I was going to continue to do this, I wanted to make Sam popular. Not just in Amherst or at UMass games, but I wanted people in California or Michigan or anywhere across the country to know who Sam is.”

After seeing other college mascots in commercials for ESPN’s “Sportscenter,” Duboff contacted the network’s advertising agency. He got a callback, not for a television commercial, but to appear with other college and pro team mascots at a red-carpet event at the network’s Times Square studio. This soon led to the TV spot with Roddick, and armed with these credentials, and a funny, offbeat résumé and a video portfolio that he created for Sam, Duboff was accepted as one of 12 college mascots for the Capital One All-American Mascot Challenge contest last year. He eventually finished second to Herbie Husker from Nebraska.

Although Duboff is Sam “90 percent” of the time, he does get an occasional break: He rarely appears at hockey games.

“If you see Sam on skates, it isn’t me,” Duboff said. But if you see a tall, skinny student wearing a jersey and mullet wig in the front row and yelling his heart out at UMass Amherst hockey games, that is Duboff; he moonlights as a student assistant for the hockey program. Shedding the Minuteman suit for hockey games lets him be a fan, too, and he calls himself “one of the loudest.”

“I think more people around campus recognize me from hockey games than know me as the mascot,” Duboff says.

With just a few months until graduation, Duboff is putting together a handbook with facts about Sam and tips that he’s learned during his four years on the publicity circuit to help future mascots. He’s also initiated a scholarship fund, common at other schools, to compensate students who take on the life of Sam.

Although his career as Sam the Minuteman is officially over, Duboff is now thinking of turning pro. He has applied to be a mascot for a professional sports team, but he won’t say which one.

“Let’s just say their season starts in March and they’re in spring training right now,” he says. “But they’re not the Red Sox. I’m from New Jersey. I’m a Mets fan.”