The Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy was the trophy awarded to the Champions of the National Football League from 1934 until 1969. The trophy was named after Ed Thorp, a noted referee, rules expert, sporting goods dealer and friend to many of the early NFL owners. Thorp died in 1934, and a large, traveling trophy was made later that year. It was to be passed along from champion to champion each season with each championship team's name inscribed on it. Unlike the modern day Lombardi trophies, the Ed Thorpe Memorial Trophy did not become the possession of the winning team, but instead spent a year with the winning team before being passed on to the next year’s champion, much like the Grey Cup in the Canadian Football League or the Stanley Cup in the National Hockey League. In addition to their year with the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy, though, teams were also awarded a smaller replica of the trophy, which they were allowed to keep.
The current location of the trophy is unknown. The prevailing theory is that the Minnesota Vikings, who were the last to win the Trophy in 1969, somehow lost it when the league switched over to the Lombardi Trophy the following year. The Vikings after winning the Thorpe Trophy went on to face the American Football League champion the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFL-NFL World Championship Game (which is more commonly referred to as Super Bowl IV). The spirit of Ed Thorp is also rumoured to have cursed the Vikings, since they lost the trophy that was named in his honor. To date, the team has lost four Super Bowls.
A similar incident occurred to the first trophy that was awarded to the NFL Champions, the Brunswick-Balke Collender Cup. In 1920, after the Akron Pros were awarded the league championship, that trophy also went missing (like the Thorp trophy, it too was initially to be passed down to each successive champion). The Washington Redskins replica of the Thorp Trophy is on display at FedExField.
Read more about Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy: List of Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy Winners
Famous quotes containing the word memorial:
“I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have given themselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)