MADISON, Wis. — Steve Malchow was hired as Wisconsin’s director of men’s sports information in 1990 during a time of great change. The athletic department faced a multimillion-dollar budget deficit. Barry Alvarez was brought on board in an attempt to resurrect a slumbering football program that had become a national laughingstock. There was, as Malchow quickly learned, a lot to clean up from the previous regime. What Malchow didn’t anticipate was how much.
Malchow began to coordinate a filing system for records and artifacts, only to discover there hadn’t been much in the way of consistent organization before his arrival. Jim Mott, the previous sports information director, was a legendary athletic department figure who had held the role for 36 years. He was also, as Malchow described, a “huge pack rat” who kept everything.
One room on the fourth floor of Camp Randall Stadium’s east side, located between the 40-yard lines, served as a prime example. An old Army barracks had been turned into a storage room for the athletics department and was littered with so many boxes and filing cabinets that nobody could actually stand inside.
“That fourth-floor closet was way upstairs and probably never seen by human eyes,” Malchow said.
By 1994, the football program had won a Rose Bowl, and athletic department budget concerns had begun to ease. But the sheer volume of old Badgers paraphernalia collecting dust had not. And so, Malchow sent student intern Will Roleson to sift through and clean out the fourth-floor room as part of a summer project.
Nearly 30 years later, Roleson admits the details are a bit fuzzy on how many hours or days he spent holed up in that room. But seared into his memory, even now, is the image of a leather suitcase sticking out from a pile of yearbooks, press releases and other publications. When he opened it up, he found a block of black walnut wood with the word “BACON” etched onto the sides and a letter carved inside a football that could read either “W” or “M” depending on which way it was flipped. On the other side were handwritten scores for Wisconsin-Minnesota football games for every year from 1930 to 1970.
“I remember how confusing it was for the people within the department,” said Joel Maturi, an associate athletic director for Wisconsin at the time. “What does it mean? Where was it? What do we do?”
That’s how the forgotten Slab of Bacon trophy was found 50 years after it disappeared — part of one of the great mysteries in the history of the Wisconsin-Minnesota series. The teams will renew the most-played rivalry in the FBS on Saturday, with the winner capturing Paul Bunyan’s Axe. But before the axe, there was the Slab of Bacon.
Paul Bunyan’s Axe has been on the line in the rivalry since 1948. (Jeff Hanisch / USA Today)
Dr. R.B. Fouch of Minneapolis created the trophy, which was first played for in 1930, with the idea that the winning team would bring home the bacon. It was presented each year through 1942. Wisconsin won the game 20-6 in 1942.
One version of the story goes that Peg Watrous, the president of Wisconsin women students, was supposed to exchange the trophy with a student from Minnesota after the 1943 game. But Minnesota fans stormed the field following a 25-13 victory, the task was never completed amid the chaos and Watrous didn’t know what happened to the trophy from there.
Another version of the story is that the trophy was presented to Minnesota that year, but Gophers interim coach George Hauser refused to accept it out of respect for World War II (head coach Bernie Bierman was ordered into active military duty during the war). Either way, the trophy never again exchanged hands because it disappeared. Upon its discovery in 1994, there was debate as to which school was the rightful owner, but it remains housed inside a glass encasing in Wisconsin’s student-athlete performance center. Alvarez famously remarked, “We took home the bacon and kept it.”
“I’ll say this,” Malchow said. “We obviously valued it a great deal. If they didn’t, we decided we would take ownership of it.”
But that’s only part of this mystery story. Because, as members of Wisconsin’s athletic department in 1994 realized over the course of their research, there was no reason for scores to be written into the trophy up to 1970 if it “disappeared” more than 25 years earlier. Yet there they were, handwritten in a darker and thicker black marker than the earlier scores. Did someone fill them in year by year or all at once? Did they stick the trophy in a briefcase and drop it off in a storage closet after the 1970 game or much later? How many people even knew of its existence.
“How does something like that get lost?” Roleson said. “The degree of importance it seemed to hold for itself up to that point, I don’t know why it would’ve ended up in the bowels of Camp Randall. Did somebody even open the case to see what it was, or did it just kind of get moved around through the years with archive material? Probably anybody’s guess.”
The Wisconsin-Minnesota game continues to serve as one of the most storied rivalries in college football, with the teams playing for Paul Bunyan’s Axe since 1948 — five years after the Slab of Bacon disappeared. The only year since 1890 in which the teams didn’t play was 1906, when the Big Ten shortened conference schedules amid a push to curb the excesses of the sport. Wisconsin-Minnesota has been deemed one of 12 protected rivalry games as the Big Ten expands to 18 teams next season, meaning the teams will continue to meet annually.
Scores mysteriously appear on the Slab of Bacon through 1970. (Courtesy of Wisconsin Athletics)
Maturi, who also served as Minnesota’s athletic director from 2002 to 2012, was instrumental in ensuring the teams played when the Big Ten moved to the Legends and Leaders divisions in 2011. He recalled league commissioner Jim Delany delivering a speech about needing to make sacrifices in the interest of competitive equity. Maturi said athletic directors were presented with three final scheduling options, and Wisconsin and Minnesota were not in the same division on any of them.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry, commissioner, I can’t do this,’” Maturi said. “‘Minnesota and Wisconsin is the longest continuous rivalry in the history of the game. We can’t stop this. I’ll lose my job.’ And Barry thankfully said, ‘He’s right,’ because of the history of how many years it was at that time. And of course, it’s continued, the most in the history of the sport. I didn’t want to lose that.”
The only thing lost over the years, apparently, was the first traveling trophy. Roleson is now the associate executive director for College Sports Communicators (formerly known as CoSIDA). In his home office, sitting mere feet from his computer on a shelf, is a Christmas ornament mini replica of the Slab of Bacon that his wife bought him as a gift: a reminder of the history he helped to unearth and the hijinks that rivalries can bring.
“Nobody could really tell the unknown of exactly why it disappeared,” Roleson said. “It always seems to come up from time to time. It lives on just for one lucky day around 30 years ago.”
