A deep dive into the mysterious Platypus Trophy of the Oregon-Oregon State rivalry

EUGENE, Oregon -- College football is ultimately just one big trophy case. Every lobby of every team facility greets visitors with awards and placards of all sorts, be they crystal footballs, actual bowls from bowl game victories or old oaken buckets and brass spittoons.

But on Saturday (3 p.m. ET), when Oregon and Oregon State square off in Eugene, there will be no official postgame award exchange. No reluctant turning over of a rusty memento from years gone by with some elaborate sort-of-true backstory. Not even some modern corporate-sponsored Lucite or aluminum monstrosity.

That makes no sense. Not for a game that is being played for the 129th time, the most of any rivalry in the western half of the country and the fifth most all time in the entire FBS. Ducks vs. Beavers has history, stars, drama, all of it. It just doesn't have a trophy.

Or does it?

The answer is yes. Well, partially yes. There is a trophy. It is not officially official, but it is officially real. And its relatively new realness reveals one of those elaborate trophy backstories that is totally true, though it sounds totally made up. Just like the animal it emulates. The one any visitor to the University of Oregon's alumni relations office can see for themselves.

It's the Platypus Trophy, and precisely like its namesake, it has spent the past 66 years stealthily burrowing its way in and out of obscurity along the 44 miles that separate Corvallis and Eugene. And, like any real platypus, it even found its way into the water.

"It's a weird animal. It's weird. It doesn't actually come from a duck and a beaver, but it sure looks like it does," explains Raphe Beck, executive director of the University of Oregon Alumni Association and current keeper of the trophy. "I'm no zoologist, but my understanding is it's just this weird mishmash animal. Also, it's only in Australia, so it's sort of a funny thing for Oregonians to adopt."

"Of course we adopted it," adds John Valva, Beck's Oregon State counterpart. "It's weird, and Oregonians love to embrace their own weirdness, so it's a great fit. I just don't think those people know about this trophy like they should."

In 2004, no one knew about it at all. That November, in the days leading up to the game formerly known as the Civil War, a question was asked that flushed our shy duckbilled friend out into the open, presented in The Oregonian by John Canzano, the sportswriter laureate of the Beaver State.

"Like, where's the trophy? Somebody forgot something. This game needs a trophy. That's a low-hanging fruit column," the writer and radio host confesses. "So, immediately after I file the column, an email pops up from a man named Warren Spady. 'Hey, there is a trophy. I sculpted it.'"

"Well, first of all, I don't think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a sculptor. It's different. It's a manly thing," Spady says, laughing in his living room near Carlton, Oregon. Today, he is an 89-year-old retiree, a former longtime art teacher, sitting in a living room that is decorated with his sculptures. In the fall of 1959, he was an Oregon undergrad art student.

"The idea was not mine," he remembers. "The idea was developed by two administrators, one from the University of Oregon and the other from Oregon State College, which didn't become a university until a year later. I think they'd had a lot of beer.

"But anyway, they came up discussing ideas for something, you know, for a trophy, because, you know, all the other teams had one. So somehow, during one of these meetings, they came up with a platypus."

They approached several graduate students to bring their idea to artistic life, but they all passed. So the task fell to undergrad Spady. He chose Oregon maple as his medium and went to work, seven days a week for a month, right up to kickoff of the big game. That led to an artistic decision.

"I wasn't going to have enough time to do its feet, so I decided to put the platypus in mud. And if I had time, I'll clean that mud off the feet," he recalls thinking. "We were a touchdown favorite in that 1959 game, but I never had a chance to fix it because they lost. The trophy went to Oregon State. Then they won it again in 1960." (Actually, that game ended in a 14-14 tie.) "Then I left school. So, he's still in the mud."

He is, after all, a platypus. OK, let's call it an impressionistic interpretation of a platypus, with very little when it comes to features but very much when it comes to being a smooth, boomerang-like piece of wood with four legs, no feet and a head that looks an awful lot like its tail.

The pale maple mammal is mounted atop a wooden pedestal that is adorned with a brass plate decorated with the logos of Oregon and Oregon State, separated by the words: "RIVALRY GAME PLATYPUS TROPHY." However, that is not the only plaque. There is a smaller one fastened to the short side of the base, reading "Exchanged between the OU and OSU Alumni Associations. Reinstated at the 111th Rivalry Game, December 7, 2007."

But wait, there's a third sign, too. Hidden on the opposite side of the first but just as large. It also has the school crests, but they are divided by the words: "PLATYPUS WATER POLO CHAMPION."

Huh?

The Platypus Trophy has been stolen more times than Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece. Oregon students, presumably angry over their upset loss, stole the trophy from Corvallis in 1959. Over the next several years, it was lifted and moved multiple times, ultimately vanishing for good after only three years of being awarded following the football game.

In 1986, Spady, at this time an art teacher in Eugene, was walking through the university aquatic center when he spotted his long-lost trophy behind glass. As it turned out, the Oregon water polo team had happened upon it, and during the mid-1960s made it its own personal web-footed pat on the back for winning four consecutive meets against State.

Spady was in a hurry that day and hustled past the trophy, vowing to return and "fix it up." But there were also plans to fix up the aquatic center, and when it was torn down, the trophy was presumed lost.

Then came Canzano's column ... and Spady's email ... and Canzano's follow-up story ... and a renewed hunt for the platypus. It was literally a door-to-door search, led by Dan Williams, an Oregon administrator who in 1961 was the Oregon student body president tasked with handing the trophy over to the Oregon State student body president. It was finally found in a closet at Oregon's McArthur Court, the basketball arena located next to, yes, the school's Museum of Natural and Cultural History.

Rescued and cleaned up, the trophy was presented to the schools' athletic administrators as a candidate for official game reward status, but they declined. "I think they thought it was too weird looking?" Spady surmises.

So ownership and postgame trading duties were handed over to the alumni associations, who happily volunteered for the gig.

"We're lucky that our schools have two animals that could combine like that," Beck says. "I don't think there are a lot of college football rivalries that have mascots you can combine. You have the front end of a duck and the back end of the beaver."

Responds Valva to being the, ahem, butt of a joke: "They would think that way. But in Beaver Land, that back half has a tail that you don't want to mess with."

That's true, a fact verified by Kathryn Everson, a professor at Oregon State's Department of Integrative Biology and a specialist in animal hybridization. "The Latin name for it is ornithorhynchus, which means bird-nosed, and then anatinus, which is duck-like. It has a bill that looks a lot like a duck, but actually if you touch it, it's a little more fleshy. It kind of feels like suede to the touch."

She explains the bill is packed with electro-sensory organs. When looking for food, a platypus will close its eyes and let the bill do the work.

"It also has webbed feet. It has a very beaver-like tail covered in fur," she adds. "But unlike a duck and a beaver, the platypus is venomous. It actually has a spur on its back, feet that are hollow, that can inject venom. So, there you go."

There you go, indeed. An animal not to be messed with, especially after decades of safely hiding and now, possibly, to be showcased in front of tens of thousands of college football fans. Maybe.

As far as anyone can recall, "Platy" as Valva and Beck lovingly call the trophy, has not been inside Oregon State's Reser Stadium since 1960, if that happened at all. It has most definitely never darkened the doors of Oregon's massive space age green and gold Nike-built football facility. That was obvious as soon as OU head coach Dan Lanning was shown a photo of the trophy this Tuesday. He said it was the first time in his four years as lead Duck he had laid eyes on it.

"It's an interesting-looking trophy," said the coach of the nation's sixth-ranked team. "But I'll tell you one thing, we want to win it."

If his Ducks do win it (as of Thursday night they were a 34.5-point favorite), they in theory could become the first Oregon team to carry the Platypus Trophy off the field. But they won't do that. They never do that. Because the trophy is still not officially recognized by either school. There doesn't appear to be any reason to believe that will ever happen, which seems to be just fine with the alumni associations but is puzzling to Spady and his former classmates who remember when it was the recognized reward for winning the game, as short-lived as that might have been.

At the moment, Oregon-Oregon State, like a platypus, is difficult to define. Next year the game won't be played for the first time since World War II. Even as current athletic administrators have expressed their dedication to its return, many in Eugene and Corvallis fear for the rivalry's future.

It no longer has its old nickname. It no longer has its old conference, the Pac-12. Perhaps what it needs is an old trophy.

"It's a Duck and a Beaver. It's middle ground," Canzano says, still hoping his Indiana Jones find achieves official status. "People here, they love and they live. It's the perfect symbol."

But for now, as this rivalry waddles into its uncertain future, college football fans must keep their eyes open -- or close them and use their electrical beaks -- to spot two alumni directors and their subtle postgame exchange. Sitting in a bar somewhere between their two campuses, just like the men who first conjured up the trophy idea so many years ago.

"Oh, there is no ceremony," Valva says, chuckling. "There is no champagne that goes with Platy. Platy is a couple of us with a couple of beers and we hand it over and say, see you next year."

Adds Beck: "We drive it on the I-5 and drop it off. Strapped into the backseat."

Of what?

"A Subaru, like all Oregonians."