Stanford Axe
The trophy consists of an axe-head mounted on a large wooden plaque, along with the scores of past Big Games.
The Axe made its second appearance two days later on April 15, 1899, at a Cal–Stanford baseball game played at 16th Street and Folsom in San Francisco.
Miller described what happened next in a letter he wrote in 1912: As we approached the Ferry Building I saw several policemen and the President of the Student Body at Stanford searching the boys.
(The boats of the ferry connected with a railroad line, commonly called "narrow gauge" because the rails lay closer together than standard width.)
[2]Recent research indicates it is possible Miller may have used the historic Southern Pacific steam ferryboat Berkeley (Maritime Museum of San Diego) as the getaway boat.
[3] From there Miller took the Axe back to Berkeley where it was first stored in a fraternity (Chi Phi), and later in a bank vault.
This group became known in Stanford lore as the Immortal 21 (including Gerald Bettman and Ed Soares); Cal partisans call them the Immoral 21.
[4] Cal's protection of the Axe at the time was intense—it was kept in a Berkeley bank vault and brought out, in an armored car, only for spring baseball and Big Game rallies.
The Stanford group decided that their best chance would be right after the spring Axe rally, held that year on April 3 at Cal's Greek Theatre [5] After the rally, four Stanford students posing as photographers temporarily blinded Norm Horner, the Grand Custodian of the Axe, with camera flashes.
[5] For three years after the raid on Berkeley the Stanford Axe lay in a Palo Alto bank vault while both universities decided what to do with it.
On January 28, 1978, a group of Cal students paraded a carefully constructed replica of the Axe across the court of Stanford's Maples Pavilion during the Cal-Stanford basketball game.
Despite this practice, the official score (California 25-20) must be on the Axe prior to the start of each Big Game, no matter who has it at the time.
Currently, California has possession after winning the 127th Big Game on November 23, 2024 by the score of 24–21, continuing their four-year hold on the Axe.
