POCATELLO and MOSCOW, Idaho — In distant stretches of I-84 between Boise and Pocatello in southern Idaho, the velocity restrict is 80 mph. It would not be uncommon to set the cruise management to 90 and never fear a couple of dashing ticket. However in 2023, when Maclane Westbrook was a scholar at Idaho State, he blew previous a state trooper sitting within the median and his speedometer learn triple digits.
“I did not even attempt to decelerate,” Westbrook mentioned.
Westbrook was driving an ISU-issued automobile — with college insignia on the aspect — and was on his approach again to campus from a board of educators assembly within the state capital and was shortly pulled over.
As Westbrook looked for an evidence that may probably get him out of the ticket, a puzzled look overtook the trooper’s face. Sitting on the lap of Westbrook’s good friend using shotgun was a bald, silver-colored potato carrying a dry human smirk.
“You bought a pottery undertaking there?” the trooper requested.
That is how Westbrook discovered himself telling the story of the King Spud trophy — a long-lost relic within the Idaho-Idaho State rivalry — on the aspect of the freeway, with hope its lore would encourage the trooper to challenge only a warning. The story didn’t have the specified final result, and when the trooper retreated to his automobile to put in writing the ticket, Westbrook’s good friend seen King Spud’s crown had been sitting on the ground mat. Whereas they waited, he fastened it again on the trophy’s head.
When the trooper returned, he was perplexed but once more.
“Hey, he wasn’t carrying a crown after I was right here the primary time,” he mentioned.
For Westbrook, it was an ungainly visitors cease. For King Spud, it was simply one other chapter in an already weird existence. As a result of someday round 1979, lengthy earlier than a duplicate of the unique trophy discovered itself within the entrance seat of an Idaho State fleet automobile, baffling a state trooper, the unique King Spud quietly and mysteriously vanished fully. And for many years, nobody appeared to care.
Born as a unusual artwork undertaking on the College of Idaho within the early Nineteen Sixties, the trophy’s vanishing act is without doubt one of the stranger mysteries in school sports activities. Over the previous 4 a long time, others have tried to trace it down. This yr, ESPN set out by itself journey by Idaho’s small cities and school campuses, following a long time of faint clues to find out what actually occurred to the misplaced King Spud — and whether or not it would nonetheless be on the market.
THE QUEST BEGAN in early August at Buddy’s Italian Restaurant in Pocatello, the place former Idaho State sports activities info director Glenn Alford steered we meet. Buddy’s opened its doorways in 1961, and its weathered exterior suggests the constructing hasn’t modified a lot within the a long time since.
Alford, 83, has been eating right here since he was employed in 1967, and he was fast to suggest the spaghetti and meatballs. He appeared excited to satisfy with an out-of-towner embarking upon an uncommon treasure hunt. A Stanford-educated historian, Alford spent 31 years as Idaho State’s sports activities info director. Nobody was higher to ship a first-hand account of the trophy’s place in historical past.
Within the first half of the twentieth century, Idaho-Idaho State wasn’t a lot of a rivalry. The faculties are situated on reverse sides of the state, and they’re separated by a couple of nine-hour drive that covers almost 600 miles. Moreover, from 1922 to 1959, Idaho performed within the Pacific Coast Convention with USC, UCLA, Stanford and different giant West Coast universities. The 2 faculties performed solely twice in soccer previous to 1962, however when the Massive Sky Convention shaped in 1963, they began enjoying yearly, and as many as 4 occasions a yr in basketball.
“Idaho bought its butt kicked usually, as a result of what within the hell had been they doing enjoying USC and UCLA?” Alford mentioned. “However they took nice pleasure in being a [Division I] college and ultimately sanity reigned there they usually determined that was unsustainable. So, they joined the Massive Sky, and no person within the convention favored their perspective about, ‘We’re extra vital than everyone else.'”
The Vandals remained within the Massive Sky till 1996, once they left for the Massive West and for 20 years tried to make soccer work at what’s now the FBS stage. However the geography — amongst different causes — did not permit it to work. Idaho returned most of its sports activities to the Massive Sky in 2014, and soccer returned to the convention in 2018, the place the college once more competes with extra pure friends.
In 1968, Alford was making ready to hit the highway for a neutral-site basketball recreation in opposition to Idaho in Twin Falls when he was approached by his boss.
“He says, ‘You have to take the King Spud trophy with you.’ And I mentioned, ‘What’s the King Spud trophy?'” Alford remembers. “I might by no means seen it. By no means heard of it.”
The King Spud trophy was commissioned by the Moscow Chamber of Commerce in 1962 with the concept it will be awarded yearly to the winner of the Idaho-Idaho State males’s basketball recreation or collection.
For at the least 17 years, that is what occurred, with the trophy bouncing forwards and backwards between Moscow and Pocatello.
The state was not precisely a basketball mecca throughout this era, however the Bengals delivered one of many nice moments in Massive Sky historical past in 1977 once they beat UCLA within the Candy 16 of the NCAA males’s basketball event. The upset ended the Bruins’ run of 10 consecutive journeys to the Last 4 and sits alongside Idaho State’s 1981 Division I-AA soccer nationwide title as the best achievement in class historical past.
Alford admits he did not have an affinity for the King Spud trophy, nor did anybody else the way in which he remembers it. He by no means wrote about it in information releases, and it was one thing of a nuisance due to how heavy it was — Alford estimates it weighed about 25 kilos — making it tough to lug round.
When Lynn Archibald arrived as the top coach after the NCAA event run in 1977, he additionally did not take care of the trophy. After shedding to Idaho in 1979, he informed reporters: “The trophy ought to go to the shedding workforce, not the profitable one. It is the ugliest factor I’ve ever seen. The one good factor that occurred final weekend was shedding it.”
After that, the trophy merely drifted out of public consciousness. There was no announcement of a retirement, no information experiences that it had gone lacking, no campus legend a couple of theft. One yr it existed — lumpy, metallic, ugly sufficient {that a} coach needed to offer it to the loser — after which it was gone.
The best clarification might be the most probably, he thinks. It was left behind attributable to forgetfulness and even discarded.
The dialog inside Buddy’s did not result in any robust King Spud leads, solely a sense of nostalgia for the Idaho State that lived in Alford’s tales.
THE OBVIOUS PLACE to start the bodily search is Idaho State’s ICCU Dome.
On a Tuesday morning, Idaho State sports activities info director Jon Match was ready just some steps from the place the soccer workforce was training. Match was pleasant and useful, however sensible: King Spud has been lacking for greater than 4 a long time, and nothing in regards to the Dome suggests it holds many secrets and techniques. Nonetheless, he mentioned, there are storage rooms and dusty closets within the constructing to sift by. If the trophy someway survived, that might be the place to give attention to looking.
We stroll by the concourse — the place many of the Bengals’ most treasured keepsakes are displayed in glass trophy instances — right into a room that hardly ever has guests. Cardboard containers are crammed with outdated stuff: jerseys, photos, 80-year-old trophies, folders and a binder labeled “bbq sauce/highway journey.” In the back of the room there’s a hatch that leads right into a darkish crawl area below the bleachers — Alford had thrown out the chance King Spud could possibly be in there — however the danger/reward evaluation determines it is not value venturing various toes previous the opening.
After working by a couple of extra storage areas, it turns into clear that no matter secrets and techniques the Dome holds, none of them resemble our elusive potato.
Idaho State athletic director Pauline Thiros additionally appears politely amused by the seek for King Spud. Thiros is from Poky, performed volleyball for the Bengals and has labored within the ISU athletic division since 1995, starting as a volleyball coach and turning into AD in 2019.
“I really was not conscious of King Spud till a few years earlier than I grew to become athletic director,” she mentioned in her workplace. “I heard about it with a scavenger hunt and King Spud — if you happen to discover King Spud, you are just like the grand champion. And it was actually only a joke.”
Thiros was disenchanted when King Spud did not flip up throughout a renovation undertaking a couple of years in the past, however a observe trophy from 1917 was found below the bleachers.
She did not rule out the chance the royal russet was someplace nonetheless on campus, however she wasn’t optimistic.
“I feel any person thought it was so ugly that they tossed it,” she mentioned.
The final feeling about King Spud modified dramatically within the years after it pale into obscurity, nonetheless, and after a King Spud account was created on Twitter in 2022, a brand new technology of Idaho State college students was launched to the trophy in a extra optimistic method.
“The scholars grew to become weirdly obsessive about King Spud,” she mentioned, affectionately. “They’re those that finally labored with Idaho college students to deliver it again.”
A kind of college students was Maclane Westbrook. He grew up in Oregon and did not arrive in Pocatello with any sense of native custom. He remembers King Spud as a imprecise picture at first — a photograph he might need seen someplace on-line — till a 2021 Idaho State Journal story pulled it into focus.
Throughout a detour from ISU as a scholar at Faculty of Jap Idaho, he seen how little campus id a group school can have. So when he returned to Idaho State, King Spud appeared much less like a joke and extra like a possibility. He bought concerned in scholar authorities and began pitching the concept of bringing the trophy again.
“Each time I introduced it up, I felt like I needed to be cautious about it,” he mentioned. “I used to be afraid I’d simply begin speaking about King Spud and somebody [would think] I used to be insane. So I used to be making an attempt to watch out every time I began speaking about it or telling folks about it. However every time I did, everybody was fairly smitten by it. ‘That is actually cool.’ ‘That needs to be introduced again.'”
Westbrook put collectively a presentation, walked right into a Wednesday night time scholar senate assembly and made his case. Everybody was all for it. When the coed authorities in Moscow was looped in, it was equally enthusiastic.
Particulars about funding had been comparatively straightforward to kind by, however there was a query about the way it needs to be awarded. Ought to the trophy be tied solely to males’s basketball, because it as soon as was, or shared with the ladies’s groups?
“There was additionally a dialogue for doing a Queen Spud trophy, which I assumed would’ve been the good factor to do,” Westbrook mentioned. “Have a King Spud and a Queen Spud. After which the purpose is to attempt to win them each, so you’ll be able to unite the monarchy of the spud.”
Ultimately, simplicity gained out. King Spud can be a mixed competitors involving all 4 annual males’s and ladies’s basketball video games. If both college gained at the least three of the 4 video games, it saved the trophy for the yr. If the collection ended 2-2, the tiebreaker can be complete level differential.
Within the first season of the reboot in 2023, the tiebreaker was in play because the Idaho State ladies’s workforce wanted to win or lose by seven factors or fewer. The Bengals trailed by 21 at halftime however had lower the deficit to eight with 1:17 left. At this level, Thiros’ rooting curiosity shifted from the sport to what equated to some extent unfold.
She was watching on tv as the ultimate seconds ticked down.
“I’m not pondering we have to win this recreation,” Thiros mentioned. “I am pondering we have now to attain a basket.”
A late jumper lower the deficit to 6, guaranteeing King Spud would spend the following yr in Pocatello.
“After the sport, I am congratulating Coach [Seton Sobolewski],” Thiros mentioned. “I am like, ‘Yeah, I do know we needed the W, however hey, you bought it, you are bringing house King Spud.’ And he was like, ‘What are you speaking about?’ He was nonetheless pissed in regards to the loss.
“He did not care about King Spud the primary time. He cares now. It was hilarious.”
Idaho State additionally gained the newest collection for the 2024-25 college yr, so a go to to the coed union — the place the brand new King Spud is displayed — was additionally so as. College wasn’t in session, so the constructing was empty. On the second ground, in a vertical glass case, sat the fashionable King Spud.
It was … underwhelming. For all the passion college students had poured into resurrecting the custom, the show did not totally seize that vitality. There was no plaque, no signal explaining its historical past or its odd place within the Idaho-Idaho State rivalry. Only a unusual, side-eyed silver potato carrying a gold crown, trying vaguely aggravated to be sitting alone in an empty scholar union.
The final cease in Pocatello was a pawn store about 7 miles away on the sting of city. “Pawn Stars” has tricked me into believing that is precisely the form of place the place miraculous discoveries occur. The cinderblock constructing with barred home windows sat alone behind a patch of gravel. Inside, I approached a person with a dolly and requested if he was the proprietor.
“Is dependent upon what you are promoting,” he mentioned.
I gave him the short King Spud spiel and he additionally had by no means heard of it. That was that, and I left Pocatello no nearer to discovering the unique King Spud than when the journey began.
WITHOUT ANY LUCK in Pocatello, the hunt moved north to Moscow. If there may be one constructing within the nation that could be hiding a 60-year-old potato in some forgotten nook, perhaps it will be the state’s different dome. The Kibbie Dome.
For many years, the constructing has been a private curiosity — half soccer stadium, half indoor observe, half architectural experiment, half fever dream. Assistant athletic director Jerek Wolcott weaved us by halls that felt extra just like the underbelly of a ship than the heart of a stadium. He unlocked a cement-walled room tucked behind one of many finish zones. Mud coated every little thing. Cardboard containers had been crammed with trophies relationship again to the Thirties. No spud.
We climb a hidden set of stairs and a ladder into the rafters, the place we will peer by the slats within the roof onto the sector beneath. There’s, in fact, no logical motive King Spud can be right here, however frequent sense has lengthy been misplaced. And the view of the Palouse from the roof finally ends up being definitely worth the climb.
With no luck contained in the Kibbie Dome, the following logical step was to satisfy with the one who helped resurrect King Spud within the first place.
Casey Doyle is a professor of artwork and design on the College of Idaho, and through a quiet summer season a couple of years in the past somebody from the library approached him with an uncommon request: Might he re-create a long-lost potato-shaped rivalry trophy so the college might show it within the library?
The undertaking was exterior his regular inventive lane. He is not a sports activities fan, and Doyle’s background blends conventional sculpture with performance-based work and nontraditional supplies, however the thought of re-creating a decades-old trophy born from scholar folklore was fascinating sufficient for him to take it on.
Doyle started with the few images that exist of the unique King Spud. Working in clay made essentially the most sense given the price range and his experience. He blocked out a strong clay potato first, shaping its rounded kind, then step by step carved within the signature parts: the smirking face, the rounded head, the bottom beneath it and the easy crown that when sat atop the unique.
As soon as the outside kind appeared proper, he lower the sculpture cleanly down the center and hollowed it out so it would not explode throughout firing. The bottom was thrown individually on a pottery wheel. After firing, it grew to become the brand new bodily reference level for the trophy’s rebirth.
The library then had Doyle’s sculpture 3D-scanned so it might produce small reproduction keychains. Doyle assumed that was the extent of its use. Till we met within the library a couple of toes from the place his clay model is on show. Doyle had no thought it had additionally been 3D printed to be put again in circulation as a rivalry trophy.
By this level, the mission had shifted. Discovering the unique King Spud felt unlikely; understanding its lore was important. And in Moscow, there was just one place to go for that — the Nook Membership, the city’s legendary sports activities bar.
In the midst of a weekday afternoon, the place was empty. Marc Trivelpiece, the proprietor since 2007, stood behind the bar wiping down glasses. One of many King Spud keychains is on show and one other depiction of the trophy is on the wall.
Trivelpiece did not want a lot prompting to dive into the thriller. His idea in regards to the lacking trophy mirrored the commonest one: Somebody tossed it a long time in the past.
“The place else wouldn’t it have gone?” he requested. “We have been searching for it for years — at the least we have now. I do not know the way a lot effort Idaho State put into searching for it.
“It might have been any person took it house after which it bought put behind a closet they usually handed away and their youngsters did not know what it was. They removed it. Who is aware of.”
At Nook Membership, the lore of King Spud lived on. And perhaps that must be sufficient.
A HANDFUL OF follow-up calls after the Idaho quest did not uncover something new. Sooner or later, the odyssey stopped being about discovering a lacking object and have become a query about why anybody would care this a lot a couple of decades-old potato trophy within the first place.
Perhaps the reply is easy: Rivalry trophies are enjoyable. Even the clothes firm Homefield Attire has embraced the lore, promoting a King Spud T-shirt. Trophies could be quirky, tangible excuses for faculties to argue about bragging rights, to inform outdated tales, to let a soccer recreation or basketball collection really feel prefer it carries just a bit extra weight than the standings say it does.
That grew to become clearer when Idaho State revived not simply King Spud, however a trophy it did not even comprehend it had misplaced. Within the wake of King Spud’s resurrection, Thiros requested Westbrook if he had some other concepts within the spirit of King Spud.
“Nicely, there’s the Prepare Bell Trophy. It is down at Weber State gathering mud,” he mentioned.
The bell wasn’t lacking a lot as forgotten, tucked away someplace at Weber State because it was final awarded in 1973.
“So for 2 years we sort of had discussions with Weber State about, let’s deliver again the Prepare Bell,” Thiros mentioned.
Lastly, Idaho State stopped ready. The college introduced unilaterally that the Prepare Bell Trophy was returning, and when the Bengals gained in Ogden, Utah, for the primary time in 40 years, the offensive line lugged the heavy bell to a roaring ISU scholar part.
The identical sample repeated itself within the Idaho-Idaho State soccer rivalry. Since 2018, the colleges had performed for the Battle of the Domes Trophy, however a company sponsorship change led to its quiet retirement after the 2022 season. All of a sudden, soccer had no image in any respect.
For the 2023 assembly, then-Idaho head coach Jason Eck refused to let the sport go trophy-less. He cobbled collectively a brief Potato State Trophy by attaching a Mr. Potato Head to the Battle of the Domes base. It was goofy and earnest.
Final yr, Wolcott created a everlasting repair. He carved the official Potato State Trophy out of north Idaho Douglas fir, an easy, sturdy alternative for a rivalry that has by no means taken itself too critically. Idaho gained final yr, however on Saturday the Bengals beat the Vandals 37-16 to say the trophy, uniting it with King Spud for the primary time.
The unique King Spud stays lacking — perhaps in a landfill, perhaps really gone. If something, the hunt for one thing misplaced ended up bringing extra traditions again into the sunshine. Rivalry trophies survive not as a result of they endure, however as a result of folks maintain deciding they nonetheless matter.