Before Floyd, there was a quagmire

Most Hawkeye fans know something about Floyd of Rosedale — a bronze pig trophy taken home by the annual winner of the University of Minnesota and University of Iowa football game. Most fans also know that Floyd was a real pig and was the first "trophy" for the 1935 contest.

The porcine prize was introduced as a way to defuse heightened tensions between Gopher and Hawkeye fans that threatened to spill over into violence. Now the Floyd game is a platform for fun rather than a cause for fisticuffs. The victorious team takes the pig home and gets interstate bragging rights for a year. But the greatest outcome of this yearly scrimmage had nothing to do with a pig and happened 101 years ago.

In 1922, the game took place on Nov. 11 in Iowa City. The Hawkeyes won 28-14. There was a torrential downpour after the game. I don't know if it was like the 2022 rainstorm that made the Nevada vs. Iowa game last seven hours, but it caused universal havoc.

Unpaved roads were still the norm in Iowa. The precursors to I-380 heading north to Minneapolis and to I-80 heading east to Davenport became certifiable mud pits. Five hundred cars alone were stranded between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Same story on the way to Davenport. In all, 1,500 in total travelers were stuck.

(A farmer made $90 in two hours pulling stuck autos from the mud. That $90 today equals $1544. Holy Hayden Fry, Batman.)

Some fans slept in their cars. Some found lucky shelter in farm houses. Some traipsed through the muck to reach the interurban railroad track. None were happy.

Iowans and their Legislature had been reticent to move the dial on paved roads. The age-old foot-dragging excuses were offered. Too expensive. Infringement on individual rights. Government overreach. Sound familiar?

The stranded Hawkeye travelers changed this public sentiment.

The next year, the Iowa Legislature yielded its resistances and permitted counties to issue bonds to create modern roads. Voters in Iowa counties yielded their resistances as well and approved these bond votes for sleek highways.

It's immeasurable hyperbole to claim the tipping point for concrete thoroughfares happened on the 50-yard-line at Kinnick Stadium in 1922 (ignoring the fact that Kinnick did not yet exist) but it's kind of poetic.

Today I know people who get up at obscene hours on Saturdays and drive obscene distances from the far corners of Iowa to make it to the stadium. The ease and speed of their travel would not have been possible in 1922, a year almost one quarter into the 20th Century. I'm sure by now, in 2023, we would have long arrived at paved roads without the need for a post-football game quagmire to spur us on. But in 1922 paved roads were neither a certainty nor an impending advancement.

It took the frustrations of soaking wet and muddied Gopher and Hawkeye fans to bring home the first trophy of the Minnesota/Iowa contest — hard-surfaced roads — thirteen years before Floyd waddled, grunted, and oinked upon the scene.

Patrick Muller lives in Hills.