Greenville’s Dean Cox says he never set out to become “The Hat,” a Clemson superfan with thousands of social media followers who is a fixture at athletics events.
The bright orange cowboy hat once belonged to the late Grady Miller, an Upstate businessman who bought the hat and wore it to the 1981 Orange Bowl—Clemson’s first national championship in football.
Years after Miller’s death, Cox took possession. “I didn’t even set out to buy the hat. The hat was just part of a box. What I went to buy is right here,” Cox says, popping out of his chair in the Clemson-festooned basement room of his home to point out the framed IPTAY booster club card, circa 1946 and signed by coaching legend Frank Howard, hanging on a wall a few feet away.
“When Dabo [Swinney] became the head coach, I got more involved and went to everything . . . that’s when I started wearing the hat,” Cox says.
Hundreds of games later, Cox is unsure whether he’s wearing the hat or it’s wearing him. “People don’t know me, but they want to see the big orange hat.”
Peruse Cox’s social media pages, and you’ll see Dabo Swinney smiling beneath the hat’s brim along with the likes of ESPN’s Lee Corso, Clemson President Jim Clements, and legendary players Ben Boulware, C.J. Spiller, and Hunter Renfrow, to name a few.
The last Clemson athlete to wear it? Softball player Valerie Cagle. “A sweet and very humble young lady,” Cox says.
But not all the attention has been positive.
Missing in Action
Before the 2019 National Championship game against LSU in New Orleans, Cox says a wealthy LSU fan offered a $5,000 bounty to anyone who could bring him the hat. As a result, Cox went to the game, but the hat stayed home.
“I got down there to Bourbon Street, and everyone was asking, ‘Where’s The Hat?!’” he laughs. And, because Clemson lost the game, a lot of friends blamed him. “They say, ‘If you’da wore The Hat, we’da won!’”
Cox, 61, says he did not attend Clemson and, from time to time, is criticized as a band-wagoner. He brushes it aside. “There’s always the haters.”
What critics may not realize is how Cox has leveraged the hat’s notoriety to serve others—like raising tens of thousands of dollars for a Laurens County school playground, on the one hand, and rallying the Clemson community around a young Clemson fan and kidney transplant patient named Aaron Ritz, on the other.
In the meantime, Cox says his wife, Cindy, keeps his feet on the ground. “She says, ‘When it goes to your head, and you think you’re bigger than Clemson, it’s gonna stop.’”
Cox says he’s in no danger of forgetting who he is.
“‘The Hat’ is ‘The Hat.’ I’m just Dean Cox.”
Follow “The Hat”:
Facebook – The Hat (3,500 followers)
Instagram – @Dean.Cox_thehat (2,200 followers)
Twitter – @TheHatDean (1,300 followers)
Photos by Jack Robert Photography.
