There is an understanding that has governed the Oski Committee* since the late 1940s: the person inside the suit does not exist, not to the crowd, not to the roommate waiting up past midnight, and sometimes not even to the person’s own children. Oski has been the public face of Cal since 1941. The people who have given him that face have spent eighty-five years choosing, with few exceptions, to stay invisible.
In honor of Oski’s 85th birthday, the Cal Alumni Association spoke with five alums who served on the committee between the late 1960s and 2025. What emerged was not one story but five overlapping ones, each shaped by a different decade’s idea of what Oski should be.
THE BOY WHO FELL OFF THE GOALPOST
Mo Budak found his way to the Oski Committee the way a lot of his generation did: through a fraternity brother who happened to already be on the committee. When two fraternity brothers pointed him toward a Daily Cal classified ad in the fall of 1966, he applied without hesitation. He remembers dropping the application into what he describes only as a secret mailbox, then being summoned to a cramped closet on the fifth floor of the old Eshleman Hall for an interview that he is convinced he failed outright. The two friends who already sat on the committee, Howard Korn and Jimmy Klein, vouched for him anyway.
What followed was less an audition than a kind of transformation. Every performer was trained to move and gesture identically, the same walk, the same wave, so that no individual mannerism could give away the performer’s identity on a given night. Budak describes performing as Oski as something close to sensory deprivation, which is precisely what let his own personality fall away. “As soon as you put on the head, you become Oski,” he said. “I was no longer Mo Budak. It was a very interesting psychological transition.”
He learned Oski’s unwritten rules the hard way. At his very first game, the opening matchup against Oregon on September 24, 1966, the outgoing chair told him to climb the goalpost crossbar and wave to the crowd, which he managed. Coming down was a different matter. Told that using a ladder would break character, Budak swung from the crossbar and dropped, misjudging the distance inside the suit’s narrow eyeholes. He hit the ground from roughly ten feet up and sprained his ankle so badly that the team doctor had to be called onto the field. He still refused to reveal his identity. Carried off on a stretcher to Cowell Hospital while the crowd applauded as though a player had gone down, Budak waited until the campus had emptied out for the weekend before quietly catching a bus home to San Francisco, rather than let his fraternity brothers see him limping back into the house.
Jim Klein, who went on to chair the committee himself, was guarding Budak that day, staying close enough to step in but far enough to stay unnoticed, watching for anyone, including a rival mascot, who might try to unmask Oski. He remembers the scene from the other side. “He’s lying on the ground, and he’s not getting up,” Klein said. “It probably took me two or three minutes before I finally had to go over and say, are you all right?”
Budak’s committee years fell squarely inside the Vietnam draft years. The night the national draft lottery numbers were drawn, gathered with a dozen friends around a radio, Budak heard his birthday called second. He assumed the worst. That same night, still rattled, he had his friend carry a sign reading “Oski is number 2” past the friends who had watched him slump in his chair hours earlier, a small private joke folded into a much larger fear, one that being inside the costume let him carry through the crowd without ever having to explain it to anyone. (Budak did not serve in the end, he qualified for a medical deferment tied to dental school).
Budak’s connection to the role never really ended at graduation. Decades later, working as Cal Alumni Association Board member, he helped start a tradition of bringing Oski to children’s hospitals around the Bay Area, handing out buttons and bracelets that read Oski Strong and trying to see every child the nursing staff would allow. He still helps coordinate those visits today. It is, he says, the same job he had as a 19-year-old: showing up in silence and letting the character do the rest.
THE ADVISOR WHO STILL CALLS IT “THE COMMITTEE”
Mal Pacheco’s path into the Oski Committee started on a ski lift. As a freshman on a winter break trip with the campus-wide AllCal gathering in the late 1970s, he watched a costumed bear carve down the slope below him and told the stranger next to him that he would give his front teeth to be Oski. That stranger, it turned out, was on the Oski Committee. Months later, Pacheco got a call summoning him to the Greek Theatre at eleven at night, the first of three interviews conducted, by his account, almost entirely in the dark.
Pacheco, who served as the committee’s alumni advisor for nine years, is careful with his language in a way the older alums are not. He avoids saying he “was” Oski, preferring to describe his time “on the committee,” a distinction he says matters because Oski is a continuous character, not a costume any one student gets to claim.
He also carries, secondhand, one of the group’s oldest pieces of lore: how an Oski performer from the early 1960s who broke his arm falling off the goalpost, vanished into the tunnel, and reemerged minutes later to finish the performance, a story Pacheco heard so many times from earlier alums that he is no longer sure which details are exact.
Oski cannot speak, cannot explain himself, cannot correct a misunderstanding. Asked what the character taught him, Pacheco does not reach for a story about pranks or crowds. He points instead to that silence, and to what he learned from carrying it: that saying nothing can be its own kind of authority. “I do a lot of facilitation in my professional life,” he said. “It’s wonderful to be able to use silence as a tool, and to recognize: I’m going to shut up now, and let you guys figure this out.”
TWO FRIENDS, ONE SECRET, AND A WEDDING
Jack Sweeney had spent most of his Cal years deeply involved in Cal spirit before applying to the committee in the fall of his senior year, not realizing a friend of his had applied independently the same fall. He joined shortly after. The two discovered each other at the appointed meeting spot near the Greek Theatre, where they were among roughly five students in the incoming class—a moment Sweeney likens to the familiar internet meme where everyone in the room realizes they are pointing at each other.
Whatever else had changed since Budak and Klein’s era, the spirit of total devotion stayed exactly the same. Both still talk about spotting alums from their own fraternity at games, walking up in costume, and silently giving them their chapter’s secret handshake before moving on. The alums, unaware they were shaking hands with one of their own brothers, would walk away convinced that Oski somehow knew exactly who they were. Stories like that still circulate among their old chapter today.
Sweeney’s fellow committee member, who has asked to remain unnamed, describes keeping his involvement in the committee a secret as manageable mostly because social circles rarely overlapped, though one moment still stands out: after a night rally, when Oski tripped over a post. The head came loose and rolled down the street. He sprinted after it, put it back on, and kept walking before anyone nearby could see his face.
Sweeney and his friend eventually told their fraternity in a pair of graduation speeches that, by their account, stunned the room twice in one night. Sweeney went on to officiate the friend’s wedding as Oski, adding that he would perform as Oski again “if they let us” without a second thought.
THE SASH
In May 2025, a media studies major named Gavriel Curameng walked across the commencement stage at California Memorial Stadium wearing a graduation stole with OSKI embroidered on the back. He had joined the committee as a sophomore on a whim, after seeing the application link posted in a Reddit thread, and went on to chair the group, becoming the first Filipino American to hold that role in its eighty-four-year history.
Curameng describes the decision to reveal his identity as considered rather than impulsive. He weighed putting his title on the sash before settling on Oski’s signature alone, and chose the back of the fabric deliberately, so that the reveal would unfold from behind, gradually, rather than announced head-on. “I wanted them to see themselves included in these spaces,” he said, describing Filipino American classmates and campus friends who had no idea he had spent three years on the committee. He also broke with the committee’s old rule that each performer move and gesture identically, folding a Filipino gesture of respect, touching a person’s hand to Oski’s forehead as a blessing, into his own performances, so that students from his community would feel the tradition belonged to them too.
He frames the choice less as a break with tradition than a continuation of a conversation already happening inside the committee, where students had debated whether a more public reveal might help recruit students who could not otherwise picture themselves inside the suit. The committee’s official Instagram account followed with its own public farewell to graduating members the same year, the first time the group had marked an exit so visibly on social media.
Running that account was one of Curameng’s main projects on the committee, and he says it changed how a generation of students related to the character. Students used to tell him when he was performing as Oski that Oski was ‘scary’ and ‘creepy’; within a couple of years, they were instead stopping Oski to say they were fans of his social media. Curameng pushed the page toward something closer to a friend’s feed, with jokes about campus life and reactions to the news of the week. He noticed the shift mostly off the football field, in casual encounters around campus, where students who had never been to a game would stop Oski to say they followed him online.
While much changed over the years, every alum interviewed expressed that Oski belongs, briefly and completely, to whoever is performing, and that the rest of them simply have to trust what comes next.
*In the preparation of this article, the Oski Committee shared that the alums’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the current committee.
Corrections as of October 2, 2026: An earlier version of this article misstated how long Gavriel Curameng served on the Oski Committee. It was three years, not four. The article also misstated when the Oski Committee’s official Instagram account first publicly marked an exit of graduating members; it was 2025, not the following year. This version also clarifies that students shared their impressions of Oski with Curameng while he was performing as Oski.
Read more about Oski’s origins in California magazine.
