The search for one of the ugliest rivalry trophies in college sports: King Spud

POCATELLO and MOSCOW, Idaho -- In remote stretches of I-84 between Boise and Pocatello in southern Idaho, the speed limit is 80 mph. It wouldn't be unusual to set the cruise control to 90 and not worry about a speeding ticket. But in 2023, when Maclane Westbrook was a student at Idaho State, he blew past a state trooper sitting in the median and his speedometer read triple digits.

"I didn't even try to slow down," Westbrook said.

Westbrook was driving an ISU-issued car -- with university insignia on the side -- and was on his way back to campus from a board of educators meeting in the state capital and was quickly pulled over.

As Westbrook searched for an explanation that might possibly get him out of the ticket, a puzzled look overtook the trooper's face. Sitting on the lap of Westbrook's friend riding shotgun was a bald, silver-colored potato wearing a dry human smirk.

"You got a pottery project there?" the trooper asked.

This is how Westbrook found himself telling the story of the King Spud trophy -- a long-lost relic in the Idaho-Idaho State rivalry -- on the side of the highway, with hope its lore would inspire the trooper to issue just a warning. The tale did not have the desired outcome, and when the trooper retreated to his car to write the ticket, Westbrook's friend noticed King Spud's crown had been sitting on the floor mat. While they waited, he fixed it back on the trophy's head.

When the trooper returned, he was perplexed yet again.

"Hey, he wasn't wearing a crown when I was here the first time," he said.

For Westbrook, it was an awkward traffic stop. For King Spud, it was just another chapter in an already bizarre existence. Because sometime around 1979, long before a replica of the original trophy found itself in the front seat of an Idaho State fleet car, baffling a state trooper, the original King Spud quietly and mysteriously vanished entirely. And for decades, no one seemed to care.

Born as a quirky art project at the University of Idaho in the early 1960s, the trophy's vanishing act is one of the stranger mysteries in college sports. Over the past four decades, others have tried to track it down. This year, ESPN set out on its own adventure through Idaho's small towns and college campuses, following decades of faint clues to determine what really happened to the lost King Spud -- and whether it might still be out there.

It's estimated the original King Spud weighed about 25 pounds. Argonaut/University of Idaho

THE QUEST BEGAN in early August at Buddy's Italian Restaurant in Pocatello, where former Idaho State sports information director Glenn Alford suggested we meet. Buddy's opened its doors in 1961, and its weathered exterior suggests the building hasn't changed much in the decades since.

Alford, 83, has been dining here since he was hired in 1967, and he was quick to recommend the spaghetti and meatballs. He seemed excited to meet with an out-of-towner embarking upon an unusual treasure hunt. A Stanford-educated historian, Alford spent 31 years as Idaho State's sports information director. No one was better to deliver a first-hand account of the trophy's place in history.

In the first half of the 20th century, Idaho-Idaho State wasn't much of a rivalry. The schools are located on opposite sides of the state, and they are separated by about a nine-hour drive that covers nearly 600 miles. Additionally, from 1922 to 1959, Idaho played in the Pacific Coast Conference with USC, UCLA, Stanford and other large West Coast universities. The two schools played only twice in football prior to 1962, but when the Big Sky Conference formed in 1963, they started playing annually, and as many as four times a year in basketball.

"Idaho got its butt kicked regularly, because what in the hell were they doing playing USC and UCLA?" Alford said. "But they took great pride in being a [Division I] school and eventually sanity reigned there and they decided that was unsustainable. So, they joined the Big Sky, and nobody in the conference liked their attitude about, 'We're more important than everybody else.'"

The Vandals remained in the Big Sky until 1996, when they left for the Big West and for two decades tried to make football work at what is now the FBS level. But the geography -- among other reasons -- didn't allow it to work. Idaho returned most of its sports to the Big Sky in 2014, and football returned to the conference in 2018, where the school again competes with more natural peers.

In 1968, Alford was preparing to hit the road for a neutral-site basketball game against Idaho in Twin Falls when he was approached by his boss.

"He says, 'You've got to take the King Spud trophy with you.' And I said, 'What is the King Spud trophy?'" Alford recalls. "I'd never seen it. Never heard of it."

The King Spud trophy was commissioned by the Moscow Chamber of Commerce in 1962 with the idea it would be awarded annually to the winner of the Idaho-Idaho State men's basketball game or series.

For at least 17 years, that's what happened, with the trophy bouncing back and forth between Moscow and Pocatello.

The state was not exactly a basketball mecca during this period, but the Bengals delivered one of the great moments in Big Sky history in 1977 when they beat UCLA in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. The upset ended the Bruins' run of 10 consecutive trips to the Final Four and sits alongside Idaho State's 1981 Division I-AA football national title as the greatest achievement in school history.

Alford admits he didn't have an affinity for the King Spud trophy, nor did anyone else the way he remembers it. He never wrote about it in news releases, and it was something of a nuisance because of how heavy it was -- Alford estimates it weighed about 25 pounds -- making it difficult to lug around.