Land Grant Trophy

Penn State's Levi Brown and Chris Baker haul off the Land Grant Trophy after the Lions beat Michigan State 17-13 in 2006 at Beaver Stadium.

(PennLive/Joe Hermitt)

"I had nothing to do with the Land Grant Trophy."

The denial came swiftly from former Penn State associate athletics director Budd Thalman when informed of the purpose of my call on Tuesday. Now in happy retirement in Fredricksburg, Va., he addressed a query with the mock-dismissive tone of an evasive politician accused of wrongdoing. Actually, I hadn't even asked him a question yet.

The inside joke has been a long-running one over the years, a punch line that never gets old, shared by sports information directors, athletics marketers and reporters from not only Michigan State and Penn State but people all over the Big Ten:

What is that thing?

Why, it's the Land Grant Trophy.

There's no graceful way to tell someone they have no taste. And why would you? That's sort of the problem with the rivalry trophy between Michigan State and Penn State. If it was a person, you'd greet the Land Grant Trophy with something like, "Wow. That's an... interesting outfit."

It's big. Standing somewhere around two feet and about a foot wide on each side.

It's heavy. We don't know exactly how heavy. Thalman estimates: "It's gotta be 40 pounds, at least." Postgame celebration photos always include two linemen hoisting it.

And it's uniquely ugly. As a design, it's the sort of kitsch that art critics fight over to deliver the snarkiest one-liner. It's the female country singer who wears a denim party dress to the Academy Awards. It's the house in the neighborhood with the Snoopy's-first-prize Christmas decorations. If it was covered in carpet, it would be a model of Cosmo Kramer's apartment: "Levels. All levels."

Where did this creation come from? It was originally requisitioned by early '90s MSU coach George Perles. When PSU entered league play in 1993, he and Joe Paterno decided they needed something to juice up a fabricated rivalry between two leftover schools stuck together by the Big Ten on the last week of the season. Said Perles when reached on Tuesday:

"We wanted to make sure we had a good game the last week of the season so they'd stick around and see some college football instead of going deer hunting."

The name was the idea of then-Michigan State sports information director Ken Hoffman. It is likely the only honor of any type named after a government real estate program. Land grants were first given to universities by virtue of the federal Morrill Act in 1855 – to Michigan State and then 10 days later to Penn State – as tracts of unused rural acreage on which to raise cattle, start horticultural programs, or for any other purpose that might promote commerce and research.

Talk about getting the fans' partisan fires burning.

When Hoffman picked up the shiny new Land Grant Trophy from a local Lansing sporting goods shop in 1993, he realized it wasn't quite what he'd pictured:

"I thought, 'My God, that's big.' I'll take the blame for it being so big and heavy," said Hoffman when reached on Tuesday in Cleveland where he's in semi-retirement.

The shop owner, whose name escapes Hoffman 21 years later, had taken all of the specifications and come up with something like a paneled rec room from the 1970s with knickknacks and photos attached to it – a Nittany Lion figurine mailed by Thalman, a Sparty gladiator statuette, a generic gold football player tacked on top, photos of Old Main and MSU's counterpart building – all built into a boxy wooden structure. And it had these decks and levels built onto it, like a committee kept deciding to add more stuff.

Hoffman immediately realized the LGT was not exactly of the elegance of, say, the Stanley Cup. But, like Dr. Frankenstein, he was responsible for its creation. And no one wanted to hurt his feelings, not knowing he thought it was as ugly as everyone else.

And so began a two-decade charade where the lucky winner was forced to haul the monstrosity back to campus like a hideous family heirloom no one felt at liberty to publicly disparage.

For Thalman, it was his curse. Until his retirement in 2001, he was responsible for transporting it when the Nittany Lions beat MSU:

"I despised the thing. It was like a block of granite, for crying out loud.

"It was tough to find a case to put it in. Nobody ever wanted to take the trophy.

"Then it was always an afterthought. They're loading the equipment truck to go to the game and somebody would say, 'Do we have the Land Grant Trophy?' We'd go searching for it and inevitably we hadn't engraved the latest plaque for it. So, at the last minute, we'd have to go get the plaque engraved."

Thalman's successor and current PSU associate AD Jeff Nelson remembers one trip to East Lansing in the late '90s before which the LGT was jammed into the back of the Penn State equipment semi carrying the players' pads and helmets and all other heavy gear the team takes on the road. When everything was offloaded at the team hotel, it was discovered the shaft holding the football player on top had broken:

"We had to do a quick fix to have it available the next day. And, as it turned out, Michigan State won the game."

Quick fix?

"If I recall correctly, duct tape or athletic tape. Then we actually tried to, like, I don't know if paint is the right word. We colored it black, essentially, to help it blend in."

Thalman, who is responsible for another less than inspiring trophy – the Governor's Victory Bell given to the Minnesota-Penn State winner – bears no blame for the LGT other than the fact he supplied the small Nittany Lion figurine attached to one of the trophy's odd decks:

"I was told to send the Lion statue. Then later, I got a look at it. And I said to myself: This thing is an abomination. Everybody thought it was a running joke."

Well, not everybody. Perles kind of liked it. Asked if anyone thought it a joke in Michigan, he replied:

"No, everyone thought it was pretty serious here."

It was sort of built like him, after all. The onetime defensive coordinator for Chuck Noll's Super Bowl champion Steelers teams, now 80, is a garrulous, beefy, back-slapping promoter, a born salesman who also came up with the Motor City Bowl idea.

I asked Perles if he ever lifted the LGT before.

"Tried to."

Alas, I come to you today with a heavy heart. Because I've been informed by powers greater than I that the end may be near for the LGT. For many of us, we'll feel as if an old friend is moving away. A particularly ugly old friend. It's going to be like comedians saying goodbye to Dan Quayle.

But Penn State officials have, as officials like to say today, "reached out" to Michigan State officials about the future viability of the LGT, "moving forward." When you have a traveling trophy, it's probably best that it can be transported in something other than the bed of a semi-tractor trailer.

"It's heavy, it's unwieldy," said PSU's Nelson. "There have been parts come off or gotten loose over the course of the years."

The thing is, the last man anyone wants to offend is Perles. Michigan State athletics director Mark Hollis admitted to me on Monday that PSU had called to see if they could ditch the LGT:

"There has been some conversation about whether we can come up with a trophy that would be more representative of our past." And Hollis agreed about the LGT's unique profile:

"It looks like a bunch of bowling trophies put together."

But he was guarded in his outlook, citing Perles as someone everyone at MSU respects. No one wanted to scrap the thing without his OK and Hollis wasn't sure he wanted to broach the subject.

So, I called Perles myself and asked him if he'd mind a new trophy:

"No, whatever makes the rivalry a little more interesting is probably for the better. No, I don't have any problem with that."

And so, that apparently is that. I feel vaguely ashamed for my part in this, as if I've helped eliminate a beloved artifact, a creation so unsightly that it became a cult classic.

Next could be the Penn State-Minnesota rivalry trophy, the even more anonymous Governor's Victory Bell. Thalman does rightfully take the blame for that one. He was in charge of the design order:

"I wanted something that looked like the Liberty Bell. And what we got ended up looking like a dinner bell.

"Very disappointing. My career involvement as a trophy-maker is very sketchy."

DAVID JONES: djones@pennlive.com.