QuickTake:
As UO and OSU prepare to resume their football rivalry, there’s new interest in the Platypus Trophy, which (supposedly) goes to the winning team. There are signs that it may make an appearance on ESPN’s ‘GameDay.’
Raphe Beck has a theory about why the Platypus Trophy has never really taken off.
“I think what’s hard about it is, we love the Duck, and they love the Beaver,” said Beck, the University of Oregon Alumni Association’s executive director, sitting at a table in the Ford Alumni Center on Wednesday, Sept. 17.
“And to make room for this other creature (that) has parts of both a duck and beaver? It could not be more perfect. And yet, am I supposed to make room in my heart for a platypus? I mean, I’m all Duck.”
If you’ve never heard of the Platypus Trophy, well, this is your lucky day.
Because, after years of disappearing, being reinvented as a water polo trophy, disappearing again, gathering dust in a closet, and then being found at the football team’s Moshofsky Center a couple of decades ago, the trophy Beck calls “Platty” is back in the news.
But the UO student who carved the trophy 66 years ago told me earlier this week that he had no idea why a representative for “ESPN College GameDay,” the network’s popular weekly pregame show, was coming Wednesday to his house in Carlton, just north of McMinnville.
“I really don’t know where all the interest came from suddenly,” said Warren Spady, 89. “I thought it was long-ago dead.”
We’ll all find out Saturday, when the “GameDay” show airs from Miami, where the show’s crew is this week for fourth-ranked Miami’s home game against Florida. (The three-hour show airs at 6 a.m. on the West Coast.)
Spady, who I first interviewed about the trophy in 2007, when he brought the recently rediscovered maple sculpture to The Register-Guard newsroom, was visited Wednesday by ESPN senior writer Ryan McGee, who spent Tuesday in Eugene and Corvallis.
Warren Spady, pictured in 2007 with the Platypus Trophy he created in 1959 as a University of Oregon art student. Credit: Warren Spady
McGee met with Beck in Eugene and then went to Corvallis to talk with John Valva, the executive director of the OSU Alumni Association.
McGee, who writes a weekly column for ESPN.com called “Bottom 10,” a tongue-in-cheek ranking of what he considers the worst 10 Football Bowl Subdivision teams in the nation that week, posted this week’s column Wednesday from Corvallis, after ranking the 0-3 Beavers seventh, listing them as “Oregon Trail State (You have died of dysentery).”
He noted that he was in the Beaver State “working on a ‘College GameDay’ feature about the platypus trophy that the Beavers and Ducks will play for this weekend.”
Well, the football teams will play, but not for “Platty.”
Beck made clear Wednesday that the trophy is simply shuffled between the alumni associations.
In other words, when the Beavers win the game (which they haven’t since 2022), Beck puts the trophy in his car and drives it north to Corvallis, and vice versa for Valva, who brought it back to Eugene in 2023, where it’s stayed the past two years as the Ducks also won in 2024.
And there aren’t too many folks who think it’s leaving Eugene anytime soon. The fifth-ranked Ducks are 35.5-point favorites to win Saturday.
A block of maple
But let’s go back to how this whole thing started, and what happened after that.
Spady was selected to create the trophy out of a block of maple in 1959 by Willard Thompson, the UO’s director of public service, because what better represents a duck and a beaver than the duck-billed Australian native that has a beaver-like tail?
Spady had only a month to get it done before the game they used to call the Civil War.
He wasn’t completely satisfied with what he produced, telling me in 2007 that the sculpture’s feet were unfinished.
He was told not to worry, the Ducks were heavily favored, and he’d get it back after the game to finish it.
After all, Oregon was ranked Number 15, and was trying to reach its second Rose Bowl in three seasons. The Beavers came into the game with a record of two wins and seven losses.
Yet, the Beavers won, 15-7, and OSU students ran off with the trophy. The Ducks got it back in 1960, despite that year’s game finishing in a 14-14 tie in Corvallis. It went back to the Beavers in 1961, when they beat Oregon, 6-2, in Eugene.
The trophy was reportedly stolen by OSU fraternity brothers from a glass case in OSU’s Gill Coliseum a year or two after that, and it disappeared until it somehow ended up in the hands of the UO water polo team in the mid-1960s.
When I saw the trophy for the first time in 2007, it still had a brass plaque on it with the UO’s claim to four water polo championships against OSU: 1964, 1965, 1967 and 1968.
Spady, who taught art and African studies at Eugene’s Churchill High School from 1970 to 1995, before moving to Redmond in 1998, spotted his work of art in a glass case at the UO’s old Leighton Pool in 1986.
It would be another 21 years before he saw it again.
The Platypus Trophy went to the winner of the annual University of Oregon and Oregon State University water polo match in the mid-1960s. Credit: Mark Baker / Lookout Eugene-Springfield
Search party
Former Oregonian sports columnist John Canzano wrote a column in 2004 saying the Civil War should have a trophy. Spady emailed Canzano to say that it does, but he hadn’t seen it in years.
Dan Williams, then the UO’s vice president — who as UO student body president in 1961, remembered walking across a muddy Hayward Field to deliver it to the OSU student body president — also read Canzano’s column and launched a search party.
UO Athletic Department personnel eventually found it in storage at the Moshofsky Center, and that’s how the tradition of sharing it between schools was resurrected.
It was Canzano whom “College GameDay” recently contacted to get Spady’s phone number, Canzano wrote in a recent column on JohnCanzano.com.
He mentioned that Spady told him in 2004 that he “never got paid” and “got no recognition.”
“Well, old pal, your 15 minutes are coming,” Canzano wrote this week.
How to watch
“ESPN College GameDay” airs at 6 a.m. PDT on ESPN.