Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy was the prize given to the NFL champion every year from 1934 through 1969. Unlike the Lombardi Trophy that replaced it, this was not something a winning team got to keep. Each champion held it for a year, then handed it off to the next. It worked like the Stanley Cup in hockey or the Grey Cup in Canadian football. Behind that tradition was a man most people had already forgotten how to spell. And at the center of the trophy's strange afterlife is a cardboard box, a Green Bay photo from 1962, and a mystery that took decades to unravel.

• 2. The Man Behind the Trophy

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  Ed Thorp was a referee, a rules expert, a sporting goods dealer, and a friend to many of the NFL's earliest owners. He was not a player or a coach. He was someone the league's founders trusted and relied on. When Thorp died in June 1934, those same owners commissioned a large, traveling trophy in his memory later that year. The trophy's name was meant to honor him permanently. Yet within a few years, replicas were being struck with his name misspelled as Thorpe, most notably on the trophies the Green Bay Packers won in 1936 and 1939. That small error, etched in metal, is telling evidence that Thorp's name was not widely recognized even at the time the trophy was made.

• 3. A Trophy That Traveled

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  Six individual smaller trophies were awarded to championship teams outright, five of them during NFL president Joseph Carr's lifetime. Those went to the 1934 and 1938 New York Giants, the 1935 Detroit Lions, the 1937 Washington Redskins, and the 1936 and 1939 Green Bay Packers. A sixth was later given to the 1961 Green Bay Packers, though its different shape initially led researchers to doubt it was part of the same series. The main traveling trophy, by contrast, was passed from team to team each season with each winner's name inscribed on it. The Green Bay Packers won it eight times in all, more than any other franchise. The Chicago Bears won it five times, and the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions each won it four times.

• 4. Disappearance and Superstition

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  The Minnesota Vikings were believed for years to be the last team to hold the trophy, having won the NFL title in 1969. When the league moved to the Lombardi Trophy the following year, the Thorp Trophy was assumed lost in the transition. A rumor took hold that the spirit of Ed Thorp had cursed the Vikings, because they lost the very trophy named for him. The Vikings went on to lose Super Bowl IV to the Kansas City Chiefs, which only fed the legend. The Thorp Trophy was not the first NFL prize to vanish under similar circumstances. The Brunswick-Balke Collender Cup, awarded to the Akron Pros after the 1920 championship, had also gone missing after being designated as a traveling trophy passed from champion to champion.

• 5. Rediscovered in Green Bay

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  In 2015, the trophy turned up not with the Vikings but at the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame, along with two other copies. When it was put on display, researchers noticed the engravings on it only ran from the 1934 New York Giants to the 1951 Los Angeles Rams. The names of every champion from 1952 onward were missing, which deepened the puzzle rather than solved it. Then, in 2018, a fan donated a Green Bay Press-Gazette photograph from 1962, and a separate trophy base was pulled from the bottom of a cardboard box at the Packers Hall of Fame. That base carried the engraved names of winners from the 1952 Detroit Lions to the 1967 Green Bay Packers. Packers historian Cliff Christl eventually confirmed in June 2018 that the trophy on display was the same one given to the Packers in 1961, which was in fact the traveling Ed Thorp Trophy itself.

• 6. Gaps in the Record

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  Reattaching the base to the trophy completed the list of winners from 1934 through 1969, with three exceptions. The 1960 Philadelphia Eagles are the only champion from that entire stretch with no engraving anywhere on the trophy, though a space was left for them. The 1968 Baltimore Colts and the 1969 Minnesota Vikings, both of whom lost their respective Super Bowls, also have no engravings. It had previously been assumed both teams were awarded the trophy in the usual way, but the physical record contradicts that assumption. The Cleveland Browns took a different route to recognition: in 2004 they commissioned a replica trophy for their 1964 championship and put it on display in the lobby of their team facility. The Washington Commanders replica, meanwhile, is on display at FedExField.