Trophy cups are mankind’s most useless objects
NOT being a particularly athletic person, I have never suffered from a surfeit of trophies. About the only trophy I ever earned was a large, shiny affair on a heavy marble base which my friend Ben van den Berg and I won jointly for travelling the furthest distance to attend a Vespa scooter rally in Groningen in Holland.
Once we owned it we had the problem of lugging it all around Europe with us on the carriers of our scooters. We grew to hate it with a passion and it eventually ended up gathering dust in my garage until it was mercifully stolen in one of my burglaries.
The vase was never seen again, but I found the marble base some distance from my house and used it as a door-stopper. I often wondered what the burglar used that shiny trophy for.
I have always thought trophy cups to be about the most useless objects ever devised by mankind.
A friend owns several cups won by her late father who was a keen racing walker. She also has some cups presented to thespian friends for their performances in amateur plays. The athletic club has nowhere to display them and the dramatic society that presented them went bankrupt about 20 years ago. She has tried to present them to local museums, as they represent a part of local history, but her offers have been firmly rejected.
What happens to them now? They are no good as drinking vessels, not much use as flower vases, the wrong shape for pencil holders or tooth mugs and too unstable and tall to be used as chamber pots.
The older ones are electroplated nickel and the newer ones are made of some cheap metal coated with shiny stuff, so you can’t even melt them down to recast as jewellery.
My late father owned a couple of trophies he had won in rifle bisleys. (He was an excellent marksman.) For years they were used in his workshop to hold assorted screws and washers, but eventually they were replaced by more practical glass jars.
I wonder what happened to the cups. I notice one of our local charity shops has a rather forlorn collection of trophies cluttering up their shelves, probably donated with relief by the descendants of the heroes who earned them.
My guess is the trophies were sneaked in among useful stuff while the volunteer sales staff were looking the other way.
The thousands of ceramic salt-and-pepper sets, the chipped glass salad bowls, the crocheted toilet roll covers, brass nutcrackers and the cracked photo frames come and go.
They all find homes eventually. The collection of trophies stays and grows steadily. As the ancient Romans so wisely said: “Sic transit gloria mundi.”
Last Laugh
According to Jerry Seinfeld, the biggest insult in athletics is to win a silver medal. It shows you were the biggest of the losers? Of all the losers, you were the first. Nobody in the losing group was a better loser than you. Nobody lost ahead of you.