The Stanford Axe: A Trophy With a Criminal Record Going Back to 1899
It started as a prop at a baseball game, it has been stolen by both schools more than once, and since 1933 it has belonged to whoever wins the Big Game.
Most rivalry trophies are invented by a committee and handed over at midfield while nobody watches. The Stanford Axe isn't that. The Axe has a rap sheet.
It turns up in 1899, when a Stanford yell leader named Billy Erb brought an axe to a baseball game against Cal, apparently as a prop for chopping up blue and gold ribbon. Cal students took it. That was the beginning, not the end. For decades afterwards the Axe was less a trophy than contraband, changing hands through raids, disguises, staged accidents and a level of planning that neither school's engineering department should be proud of.
Order arrived in 1933, when the two schools agreed the thing would simply go to the winner of the Big Game. It has worked that way ever since. The axe-head sits mounted on a wooden plaque with the scores of past meetings recorded alongside it, so the trophy is also the ledger. You don't just lose the Axe. You get your loss engraved onto it and then hand it to the people who beat you.
That's why the Big Game doesn't need a manufactured narrative in a week when neither team is going anywhere. Two programmes can be having miserable seasons and the last Saturday still decides who spends a year looking at a plaque with everyone else's results on it.
The theft years deserve their own telling. This wasn't undergraduates walking off with a souvenir. There were organised operations on both sides, groups who planned for months, staged distractions, used tear gas on one famous occasion, and treated the recovery of a piece of sporting hardware as a matter of institutional honour. Two universities that pride themselves on producing serious people spent decades running heists against each other over an axe.
The 1933 agreement is what turned a running crime into a tradition. By handing it to the winner automatically, the schools converted an object that had to be stolen into one that had to be earned, and in doing so gave the Big Game a stake beyond the standings. It's a small piece of administrative genius, and it's the reason the trophy still means something ninety-odd years later while most rivalry prizes are forgotten sponsorship props.
There's a lesson in it for every athletic department that has tried to manufacture a rivalry trophy in the last twenty years. You can't invent this. The Axe works because of the century of bad behaviour behind it, not in spite of it. A trophy is only as good as the trouble people were willing to get into over it.
Where it's sitting today. Palo Alto. Stanford won the 128th Big Game 31-10 in November 2025 and took the Axe back for the first time since the 2020 season, ending four straight years of it living in Berkeley. The plaque now carries that 31-10 alongside everything else, which is the part that stings: Cal has to look at it for a year before getting a chance to take it back.
The 2026 edition, the 129th meeting, is on 21 November in Berkeley. Whichever side leaves with it, somebody is going to write about a lateral from 1982 within about ten minutes of the final whistle. Our Cal and Stanford coverage runs all season.
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