CALGARY — Someone has stolen a big icon from Big Rock.
The Calgary brewery says a couple of guys, one decked out in a white cowboy hat, made off with one of its two eight-foot-tall statues from the Big Rock Eddies awards ceremony held at the Epcor Centre June 7.
Aisling Tomei, corporate relations manager for Big Rock, said the statues each weigh about 110 kilograms and are believed to be made of industrial strength Styrofoam.
Designed to be caricatures of Big Rock founder Ed McNally, the statues were manufactured in the late ’90s by a company called Black Dragon, which is no longer in business. Tomei says they’re irreplaceable.
Surveillance camera photos provided by the Epcor Centre show two men leaving the facility at 11:54 p.m. that night, the one in the cowboy hat carrying the statue with him.
Tomei said brewery staff assumed someone may have thought it was funny to take the statue after a few too many beers and would return it later.
“We thought it might have been a case of a couple of guys who may have had a little too much fun and woke up the next morning with an eight-foot statue in their living room,” she said.
“We were hoping they would say, ‘Oh, we need to get this back to our friends at Big Rock,’ but that never happened and we need this thing back.”
Calgary musician Matt Blais was playing a set with his band at the Epcor Centre that night and said he saw two men pick it up and walk out, though he didn’t think much of it at the time.
He said partygoers had been taking photos with the statue all night, draping feather boas over it and hanging off of it, so he simply assumed security was putting it away to prevent damage.
“We didn’t think twice at first when two people lifted it up,” he said.
“They cut through the dance floor and we thought they were taking it to the back room or maybe to the VIP room,” he said, adding there’s not much he could have done in the middle of his set even if he had known it might be a robbery in progress.
The Eddies, which also travelled to Vancouver, Edmonton and Toronto, only had one statue to display due to the theft at the Calgary event, said Tomei.
She said Big Rock isn’t out for revenge, it just wants its iconic statue back.
“We’re not planning on pressing charges, we just want our Eddie back in one piece,” she said.
The brewery is pleading with anyone who may know the men in the photos or who may have seen them leave that night to help out.
“Someone must have seen something,” said Tomei. “It’s a guy carrying an eight-foot statue.”