Chas from Pitt Sports Blather has uncovered the most transparent, forced, and clumsy attempt to rig up an artificial sports rivalry via the awarding of a spectacularly fugly trophy: the River City Rivalry Trophy, awarded to--or, uh, let's say, left quickly while screaming on the doorstep of--the winner of the Cincinnati/Pitt game.
Dada is dead! Long live dada!
First, let's establish what the fuck this monstrosity might be.
1. Most obviously: a piece of sculpture from the private collection of the Marcel Duchamp estate.
2. A gynecological instrument from the movie Dead Ringers.
3. An extremely misguided attempt to make a DIY sex toy from spare parts in grandpa's garage.
4. One of the castoff trash-heap robots you see roaming around the background of Tattoine in the original Star Wars.
5. The world's wackiest beer tap.
6. Crap.
If you have better suggestions, please submit them below. How the hell players are supposed to get excited by this Satanic Dildo of a trophy, we'll never know. Other rivalries get people jacked with tangible, simple-to-grasp symbols of victory. We always liked the Keg of Nails--it just sounds so damn hard, like the two teams were playing for something called the "Pipe Bomb Trophy," the "Brass Knuckles of Victory," or the "Pennsylvania Glory Shiv."
Instead, someone made the mistake of going down to the art department on the day when they were covering surrealism and asking them to make a trophy. Or, even more likely, the committee of boosters was meeting to finalize the feeble PR campaign for the rivalry game. On the way out of the door, the head of the committee (let's call him Ed) slapped his head and screamed "Fuck! We didn't order the trophy! Honey!" Ed and his wife then proceeded to go on a glue gun frenzy for fifteen minutes with whatever they could grab sitting loose on the work bench before sprinting out the door and hightailing it to the meeting, with screeching around corners while Nancy hurriedly secures two stale gumballs to the corners of the sloppily cut sheet metal meant to represent the shore of the Ohio river while screaming at Ed to slow the fuck down you're going to kill us all. And when they get to the meeting, no one has the balls to scream "HOLY MOTHER OF GOD WHAT HAVE YOU DONE AAAAGH MY EYES!!!"
The result is the Official Fugliest Rivalry Trophy Ever. Nice work: long live Dada!
A Trophy that would make Sal proud.