I've only been to 2 viking games in person, neither in minneapolis.

Game 1- Oct 2002 in Seattle. Shaun Alexander scored 5 TD's in the first half. We left at halftime. It was brutal.

Game 2 Vikings at Dallas Thansgiving 2001. Pregame the crowd knew what was coming Dallas fans were nervous They were worried Moss was gonna torch them, again. He did. In Jerruhs house the Vikings handled the cowboys. It was a wonderful day.

badgervike wrote:

I may be the only one on this board that doesn't have to plead for just once to watch the Vikings win a Championship.
1969...NFL Championship game at the Met Stadium. Bud Grant was the coach. Joe Kapp was the QB. I was 8 years old. It was cold...around zero (maybe less with the windchill). Vikings beat Cleveland 27-7 to claim the last NFL title before the merger. They won the Ed Thorpe trophy which was a traveling trophy given to the NFL champion. Somehow the Ed Thorpe trophy ended up in Green Bay (likely because they were the previous winners and just failed to send it to MN since the non-merged league didn't exist anymore)...and was replaced by the Lombardi for Superbowl 1..you can't hate the Packers enough.. It pisses me off every time I go to Lambeau that the earned Vikings trophy is in their Museum.

Wait, what?

How the hell did that end-up in Lamblow and why isnt it at USB this very day?

purplefaithful wrote:

Wait, what?
How the hell did that end-up in Lamblow and why isnt it at USB this very day?

I don't have a Strib subscription any more but I know some do. Here's a article from several years ago. Maybe someone can post

https://www.startribune.com/vikings-won-the-1969-nfl-championship-game-but-never-clutched-the-hardware/561004522

The Ed Thorpe trophy is proudly displayed at the Packer Hall of Fame. The champion Colts ('68) and Vikings ('69) are not listed on the trophy. The last team listed is the Packers who claimed to lose the trophy...before finding it and displaying it in their Hall of Fame.

badgervike wrote:

I don't have a Strib subscription any more but I know some do. Here's a article from several years ago. Maybe someone can post
https://www.startribune.com/vikings-won-the-1969-nfl-championship-game-but-never-clutched-the-hardware/561004522

The Ed Thorpe trophy is proudly displayed at the Packer Hall of Fame. The champion Colts ('68) and Vikings ('69) are not listed on the trophy. The last team listed is the Packers who claimed to lose the trophy...before finding it and displaying it in their Hall of Fame.

Vikings won the 1969 NFL Championship Game but never clutched the hardware

The Ed Thorp Trophy never quite made it to Minnesota, the last NFL champion before the merger with the AFL.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2019 AT 7:26AM

Mark Craig

Who was Ed Thorp and how in the world is he connected to this weekend's 50th anniversary celebration of the Vikings' 1969 NFL championship team?

Good question.

"Ed who?" asked Gary Larsen, one of the famed front four forever known as the Purple People Eaters.

Ed Thorp. A friend to several NFL owners in the early '30s. A referee. Ran a sporting goods store. The league loved him so much it created the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy upon his death in 1934.

Much like the Stanley Cup in hockey, the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy was supposed to be a traveling trophy first awarded to the Giants in 1934. Presumably it should have been awarded to the Vikings, who beat the Browns 27-7 at Met Stadium in the final NFL Championship Game before the AFL-NFL merger in 1970.

"I ain't never seen it," said Lonnie Warwick, the leading tackler on that 1969 team.

You're in good company, Lonnie.

"I don't even know what you're referring to," said Bud Grant, the Hall of Fame coach who took the Vikings to four Super Bowls in eight seasons from 1969 to 1976.

For years, it was assumed the Vikings had misplaced the trophy or lost it after the merger. But there was no visual evidence of the Vikings ever receiving the trophy.

"We'd have people calling us wanting to know if it was in a closet somewhere at Winter Park," said Bob Hagan, Vikings vice president, football and media communications. "But no one around here has ever seen it."

There's a reason for that. According to Packers historian Cliff Christl, who set out to solve the mystery for an article he wrote last year, the trophy never made it out of Green Bay after the Packers won it for the record eighth time in 1967. The Packers' Hall of Fame discovered in 2015 that it had the trophy, which is now on display in the Packers Hall of Fame.

"Maybe they'll loan it to us," Grant joked, kind of. "We got a trophy room now in our new Vikings Museum."

Or at least call off the supposed Super Bowl curse that Thorp's ghost was said to have cast upon the Vikings when it was rumored the team had lost the trophy. In fact, not only didn't the Vikings receive the trophy, they're one of three teams whose names aren't on the trophy.

The 1960 Eagles aren't on the trophy, although there's a spot where they were supposed to have been listed. The 1968 Colts and 1969 Vikings are the other missing teams, which further suggests the trophy never made it out of Green Bay.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, the celebration will go on. The Vikings are hosting 124 former players at their annual Legends Weekend. The 1969 team will be honored at halftime of Sunday's game against the Raiders at U.S. Bank Stadium.

"My favorite memory isn't a very good one because we didn't win the Super Bowl," said Warwick, referring to the 23-7 loss to Kansas City in Super Bowl IV.

"But that was one great team," Larsen said. "We really came together that year and were a different team over the next decade."

NFL Films once named the 1969 Vikings as one of the five best teams not to win a Super Bowl.

In the franchise's ninth season and third year under Grant, the 1969 team featured six future Hall of Famers while boasting the league's best defense and highest-scoring offense.

Led by the Purple People Eaters of Jim Marshall, Larsen and Hall of Famers Alan Page and Carl Eller, the defense gave up just 133 points, a record then. Meanwhile, with blue-collar quarterback Joe Kapp, two future Hall of Fame linemen in Ron Yary and Mick Tingelhoff, and hard-nosed running backs Bill Brown and Dave Osborn, the offense scored 379 points.

"People forget how many points we scored that year," Larsen said. "Joe Kapp doesn't get enough credit."

In their 59-season history, the Vikings have scored 50 or more points six times. Three of them came in 1969, when they beat Pittsburgh 52-14, Baltimore 52-14 and Cleveland 51-3 in what remains a team record for biggest margin of victory.

"I remember getting three interceptions in that win over Cleveland," said cornerback Bobby Bryant, who had eight interceptions before a season-ending knee injury in the ninth game. "One of them was against [Hall of Fame receiver] Paul Warfield. We both went up for the ball. I have three pictures of that play. We're upside down, but there's a white hand holding the ball. That's my hand. After that, Warfield didn't like me that much."

The Vikings went 12-2, beat the Rams 23-20 for the Western Conference title, plowed through the Browns and were 13-point favorites vs. Kansas City.

Warwick admitted the Chiefs confused the Vikings defense with motion out of multiple formations. Meanwhile, the Vikings' vaunted running game was stonewalled by a five-man line that put massive Curley Culp, a future Hall of Famer, directly across from Tingelhoff.

But the Vikings did actually win an NFL championship. And there actually was a trophy that went with it. Sort of.

Strib

badgervike wrote:

I don't have a Strib subscription any more but I know some do. Here's a article from several years ago. Maybe someone can post
https://www.startribune.com/vikings-won-the-1969-nfl-championship-game-but-never-clutched-the-hardware/561004522

The Ed Thorpe trophy is proudly displayed at the Packer Hall of Fame. The champion Colts ('68) and Vikings ('69) are not listed on the trophy. The last team listed is the Packers who claimed to lose the trophy...before finding it and displaying it in their Hall of Fame.

Here's a Pioneer Press Story:

Ever heard of the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy? It was allegedly given to the National Football League champion from 1934 to 1969, the final year of the NFL before it merged with the American Football League.

The last team to win the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy was the Minnesota Vikings. Yes, the Viking were champions of the NFL in the 1969 season and were allegedly given the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy.

So what does this mean? The short version is the Vikings allegedly lost what was a “traveling” trophy given to the NFL champion each year and since have been cursed.

One thing is true, the trophy is not in the Vikings’ possession. It’s not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame either, where it probably should be.

Four Super Bowl losses, six straight defeats in the NFC Championship and countless other playoff and regular season horrors, among other things, certainly suggest the Vikings franchise is cursed.

But is it legit? Or are the Vikings being haunted and their fan base tortured unfairly?

The Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy was named after Ed Thorp, a referee and friend to many of the early NFL owners. He died in the summer of 1934. The trophy in his honor was supposed to stay with the NFL champion yearly until a new one was crowned.

As the story goes, the Vikings were allegedly given the trophy following their 27-7 win over the Cleveland Browns in the last official NFL title game Jan. 4, 1970. Minnesota took on Kansas City two weeks later in Super Bowl IV and were upset 23-7 by the underdog Chiefs.

The NFL and AFL officially merged at the start of the 1970 season.

The Vince Lombardi Trophy is now given to the Super Bowl winner, starting with Super Bowl V. The first four Super Bowl winners are still regarded as Vince Lombardi Trophy champs, but before 1970 the big game was dubbed the “World Professional Football Championship.”

It was renamed in memory of Lombardi, who led the Green Bay Packers to victories in the first two Super Bowls (1967 and 1968), before his death from cancer in the fall of 1970. The winners of the NFC and AFC Championships now get the George Halas and Lamar Hunt trophies, respectively.

So Ed Thorp, the trophy, where is it? Did the Vikings really get the trophy after beating the Browns and lose it? That doesn’t seem to be the case.

There were replicas made of the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy. According to Packers’ team historian Cliff Christi, there were two replicas of Green Bay’s early championships and both are in the Packers Hall of Fame, a nonprofit organized in the 1970s separate from the Packers’ organization.

One of the replicas is spelled wrong: Thorp has an “e” on the end it. But that’s not big news here. According to Christi, the Packers Hall of Fame also has the original Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy.

Yes, the original, the same one the Vikings supposedly lost.

Christi said there are only 18 team names on the original trophy because there was no more room after the Los Angels Rams won the title in 1951. But if the trophy was a traveling one, then wouldn’t Rams have it since no more teams were added after they won the NFL title?

How do the Packers have it? Was there a second trophy made with the winners inscribed on it from 1952 to 1969?

According to Christi, there are only six Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy replicas in existence. The Packers Hall of Fame has two (1936 and 1939), the New York Giants have two (1934 and 1938) and the Detroit Lions (1935) and the Washington Redskins (1937) each have one.

It sure doesn’t seem like a second traveling trophy was ever made. It doesn’t even appear the first one was properly handed out to the new NFL champion each year either.

According to Christi, “wide-ranging searches of newspapers.com and newspaperarchive.com produced no mention of any Thorp Trophy presentations from 1940 through 1969. Additionally, a scan of NFL minutes at the Ralph Wilson Jr. Pro Football Research and Preservation Center at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, failed to uncover mention of the trophy after 1939.”

Does the ghost of Ed Thorp know this? For all he knows, the Vikings lost it – the prevailing charge that doesn’t seem like it would hold up in court.

Christi added: “If the trophy was ever awarded between 1940 and 1969, it never shows up on a search of the Chicago Tribune, hometown newspaper of a team [Chicago Bears] that won five NFL titles during that period; or either The Philadelphia Inquirer or Philadelphia Daily News, hometown newspapers of Bert Bell, NFL commissioner from 1946 to 1959.

“Nor for that matter were there any matches in the Inquirer or Daily News after the Eagles won NFL titles in 1948, 1949 and 1960. Or in the Minneapolis Star Tribune over the 12 months after the Vikings won the 1969 title.”

If that doesn’t prove the Vikings didn’t lose the trophy, then how about this.

According to Christi, “the only mention of the NFL presenting a championship trophy over that 30-year period was found in the [Green Bay] Press-Gazette’s coverage of the “Lombardi Testimonial Banquet.”

In May 1962, the Press-Gazette ran a picture of then NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle handing Lombardi what the paper twice referred to as the “Jim Thorpe Trophy” in its story about a banquet held the previous night at Green Bay’s Elks Club.

Jim Thorpe is not Ed Thorp. But Jim Thorpe is considered one the greatest athletes of all time, including playing professional football in the early 1900s. Christi also reported that there’s no mention of how or when the Packers Hall of Fame acquired the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy.

So doesn’t it seem like the Vikings’ longtime curse is the fault of the Packers to some degree, either directly or indirectly? It sure doesn’t seem like the Vikings lost the trophy. It doesn’t seem like a second one was made either.

But it sure looks like the Vikings and their fans are paying the price for allegedly losing the original trophy, when it appears to be sitting in the Packers Hall of Fame as Christi suggests for more than 50 years.

Source: https://www.twincities.com/2018/02/01/are-the-minnesota-vikings-being-cursed-unfairly/

purplefaithful wrote:

Vikings won the 1969 NFL Championship Game but never clutched the hardwareThe Ed Thorp Trophy never quite made it to Minnesota, the last NFL champion before the merger with the AFL.
SEPTEMBER 22, 2019 AT 7:26AM
Mark Craig
Who was Ed Thorp and how in the world is he connected to this weekend's 50th anniversary celebration of the Vikings' 1969 NFL championship team?
Good question.
"Ed who?" asked Gary Larsen, one of the famed front four forever known as the Purple People Eaters.
Ed Thorp. A friend to several NFL owners in the early '30s. A referee. Ran a sporting goods store. The league loved him so much it created the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy upon his death in 1934.
Much like the Stanley Cup in hockey, the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy was supposed to be a traveling trophy first awarded to the Giants in 1934. Presumably it should have been awarded to the Vikings, who beat the Browns 27-7 at Met Stadium in the final NFL Championship Game before the AFL-NFL merger in 1970.
"I ain't never seen it," said Lonnie Warwick, the leading tackler on that 1969 team.
You're in good company, Lonnie.
"I don't even know what you're referring to," said Bud Grant, the Hall of Fame coach who took the Vikings to four Super Bowls in eight seasons from 1969 to 1976.
For years, it was assumed the Vikings had misplaced the trophy or lost it after the merger. But there was no visual evidence of the Vikings ever receiving the trophy.
"We'd have people calling us wanting to know if it was in a closet somewhere at Winter Park," said Bob Hagan, Vikings vice president, football and media communications. "But no one around here has ever seen it."
There's a reason for that. According to Packers historian Cliff Christl, who set out to solve the mystery for an article he wrote last year, the trophy never made it out of Green Bay after the Packers won it for the record eighth time in 1967. The Packers' Hall of Fame discovered in 2015 that it had the trophy, which is now on display in the Packers Hall of Fame.
"Maybe they'll loan it to us," Grant joked, kind of. "We got a trophy room now in our new Vikings Museum."
Or at least call off the supposed Super Bowl curse that Thorp's ghost was said to have cast upon the Vikings when it was rumored the team had lost the trophy. In fact, not only didn't the Vikings receive the trophy, they're one of three teams whose names aren't on the trophy.
The 1960 Eagles aren't on the trophy, although there's a spot where they were supposed to have been listed. The 1968 Colts and 1969 Vikings are the other missing teams, which further suggests the trophy never made it out of Green Bay.
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, the celebration will go on. The Vikings are hosting 124 former players at their annual Legends Weekend. The 1969 team will be honored at halftime of Sunday's game against the Raiders at U.S. Bank Stadium.
"My favorite memory isn't a very good one because we didn't win the Super Bowl," said Warwick, referring to the 23-7 loss to Kansas City in Super Bowl IV.
"But that was one great team," Larsen said. "We really came together that year and were a different team over the next decade."
NFL Films once named the 1969 Vikings as one of the five best teams not to win a Super Bowl.
In the franchise's ninth season and third year under Grant, the 1969 team featured six future Hall of Famers while boasting the league's best defense and highest-scoring offense.
Led by the Purple People Eaters of Jim Marshall, Larsen and Hall of Famers Alan Page and Carl Eller, the defense gave up just 133 points, a record then. Meanwhile, with blue-collar quarterback Joe Kapp, two future Hall of Fame linemen in Ron Yary and Mick Tingelhoff, and hard-nosed running backs Bill Brown and Dave Osborn, the offense scored 379 points.
"People forget how many points we scored that year," Larsen said. "Joe Kapp doesn't get enough credit."
In their 59-season history, the Vikings have scored 50 or more points six times. Three of them came in 1969, when they beat Pittsburgh 52-14, Baltimore 52-14 and Cleveland 51-3 in what remains a team record for biggest margin of victory.
"I remember getting three interceptions in that win over Cleveland," said cornerback Bobby Bryant, who had eight interceptions before a season-ending knee injury in the ninth game. "One of them was against [Hall of Fame receiver] Paul Warfield. We both went up for the ball. I have three pictures of that play. We're upside down, but there's a white hand holding the ball. That's my hand. After that, Warfield didn't like me that much."
The Vikings went 12-2, beat the Rams 23-20 for the Western Conference title, plowed through the Browns and were 13-point favorites vs. Kansas City.
Warwick admitted the Chiefs confused the Vikings defense with motion out of multiple formations. Meanwhile, the Vikings' vaunted running game was stonewalled by a five-man line that put massive Curley Culp, a future Hall of Famer, directly across from Tingelhoff.
But the Vikings did actually win an NFL championship. And there actually was a trophy that went with it. Sort of.

Strib

@purplefaithful ~ I knew you would follow through. Thanks!

MaroonBells wrote:

Damn, you are old. 😜 My first NFL game was a couple years later at Soldier Field. Preseason game between the Bears and Jets. Richard Todd was the Jets QB. Tickets were $9 EACH. My dad was horrified at the cost.

Tickets to that NFCC were iirc, wait for it....13 bucks apiece. What are they nowadays, a thousand?

My dad: the same horrified reaction. But I asked to go for my birthday and so the horror was overcome.

Only been to 3, loss to TB back when they were in the division, Millard blew out his knee. Had great seats but they lost. Went to game in Seattle when AD almost took it to the house, I think Percy melted down that game. Another loss.

So best was Jeff George's first game blowing out the 49ers. Flew in to MN to meet my brother. Turns out he didnt get the tickets he thought he had lined up. So we found a scalpers just before game time for a decent price.

Ok, when I first read it I didn't think I had to actually be at the game.

It's either 1988 at Buccaneers; AC goes wild and we score 49 points.

or 2017 Rams; when Thielen catches a quick pass and races about 50 yards to a clinching TD.

I live in upstate NY. My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, is a die hard Bills fan. In 1997 they had a train that ran from central NY to Buffalo on game days. The Vikings were playing the Bills on opening day, 8/31. I remember it well because as we were sitting on the train, news broke that Princess Diana had died.

All that I remember about the game was that the Vikings won, Robert Smith broke off a long TD run in the second half to seal the victory & the train ride home was long & silent.

Cricket wrote:

@purplefaithful ~ I knew you would follow through. Thanks!

Damn packers keeping our trophy.

One of my more memorable ones was in the new US Bank Stadium on a beautiful fall day (October 15th, 2017) where they opened the doors to let a slight breeze come through. The stadium was electric and absolutely beautiful with the sun shining down and you felt like you were outside, but had the perfect temperature still inside. The Vikings won easily 23-10.

We played the pack and Keenum played terrific, but the most memorable part was Barr hitting Rodgers while throwing a pass and breaking his collar bone.