Whoever won the Heisman Trophy on Saturday night will sign his share of autographs, and one thing more.
“We established four years ago a waiver form that players sign saying that they won’t sell the trophy,” says Rudy Riska, executive director of the Heisman Trophy Trust. “It’s the same thing with the Oscar people and their trophy.”
Ah, Hollywood, where fame always has its price. Did you know that actor Charlie Sheen once bought a Heisman Trophy for $184,000 and then turned it over again for an undisclosed amount?
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The trophy originally belonged to Southern Cal tailback Charles White, who earned it in 1979 but gave it up 21 years later to settle his tax debts.
“For me, it was just collecting dust,” White told the Orange County (Calif.) Register. “It was just not in the forefront of my life anymore. And the bottom line is, I’ve got to take care of Uncle Sam because he can make life miserable for you.”
It needn’t be so crass, of course. Notre Dame legend Paul Hornung called a New York memorabilia collector a few years back to find a price for his 1956 Heisman Trophy. The $250,000 Hornung got in exchange was used to endow athletic scholarships for Notre Dame students from his hometown of Louisville.
Hornung’s trophy, once stored in his garage, is displayed today at the Stadium bar and restaurant in Garrison, N.Y., along with the 1936 Heisman won by Larry Kelley of Yale.
Kelley, who survived a stroke and underwent heart bypass surgery, committed suicide at 85 but not before carefully settling his affairs. Part of that was auctioning his trophy for $328,110, a Heisman record, and dividing the money among 18 nieces and nephews.
As a result, it no longer can be said that Ohio State’s Archie Griffin, winner of college football’s ultimate individual award in 1974 and 1975, is the only man with two Heismans.
Joseph Walsh, who acquired both Hornung’s and Kelley’s trophies to serve as the centerpieces of his sports-themed restaurant, owns twin Heismans too. They cost him $578,110 altogether, but the value of a Heisman fluctuates wildly depending on the name recognition of its owner and the air of desperation surrounding its sale.
O.J. Simpson’s trophy was auctioned for $230,000 after a wrongful-death verdict required the 1968 Heisman winner to pay $33.5 million in civil damages to the victims’ families.
Billy Sims, on the other hand, probably would have taken much less for his 1978 Heisman four years ago when he spent 30 days in prison for failure to pay $32,900 in child-support payments.
The former Oklahoma star said recently that the trophy is at his house, but a dispute over its ownership has been dragging through the courts ever since Scott Goodman, a Boynton Beach, Fla., businessman, offered it for sale in 2000 and then abruptly canceled a scheduled auction.
Bob White, a lifelong friend of Sims’, said at the time that the trophy had been handed over to him as collateral on a $50,000 loan. Federal agents, too, sought to take control of the trophy because of child-support payments Sims owed.
“My client had it and Mr. White wants it,” Goodman’s attorney, Erroll Friedman of Texarkana, Texas, said recently. “There’s an active case in Florida and a suit in the state of Texas that’s on appeal. Where the trophy actually is, I have no comment on that. I really couldn’t say.”
For every note of mystery in the occasional Heisman hunt, there are a dozen more common accounts of winners cherishing their trophies beyond any mere monetary value.
It takes a fairly substantial piece of furniture to support the 55-pound piece, which consists of a cast bronze figure on an ebony base. Herff-Jones, a company best known for making class rings for students, manufactures and donates the trophies to the Downtown Athletic Club in return for promotional rights.
“The casting itself is of multiple molds that actually are soldered together,” Herff-Jones spokesman Tom Green says.
Michelangelo might have done it differently, but then he wasn’t usually working in volume. A minimum of two Heisman trophies are made each year, one for the recipient and another for the trophy case at his school, in addition to replicas used on various promotional tours.
Steve Spurrier started the tradition of awarding trophies to the schools when he turned to former University of Florida President J. Wayne Reitz during the 1966 acceptance speech and asked him to accept the trophy on behalf of the entire student body.
The Heisman aura permeates each player’s psyche in a different way.
Johnny Rodgers of Nebraska was so impressed with the Downtown Athletic Club in 1972 that he returned to stage his wedding ceremony there. The trophy itself, however, has slipped out of Rodgers’ hands a couple of times, including once when he brought it to a 1987 sentencing hearing as something of a silent character witness.
“I was trying to impress upon the judge,” Rodgers says, “that it’s not possible to earn one of these things and not be worthy of something.”
The judge, unswayed by the presence of the Heisman Trophy on the defense counsel table, sentenced Rodgers to six months in jail. As Rodgers was being led away, his attorney collected the Heisman and kept it for more than six years as a guarantee that he would collect his legal fees.
Another time, in 1998, Rodgers brought the trophy to an Omaha hotel for a Tom Osborne celebrity roast that attracted eight other Heisman winners and was organized by Rodgers himself.
At the conclusion of the event a pair of sheriff’s deputies confiscated the trophy because of Rodgers’ failure to pay a $6,000 food-vendor debt that had been growing with interest for 10 years. The next day he paid up and took the trophy home, wheeling it away in a custom case he had built for transporting it to shows and fundraisers.
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Leon Hart, the 1949 Heisman winner from Notre Dame, attempted to auction off his trophy online in 2000. There were no bids at the minimum opening amount of $100,000. Hart died at 73 in September. If his family does not still possess it, Irish sports information officials can’t say who else might.
Notre Dame has been busy enough lately getting a replacement for a generic Heisman replica trophy that was stolen from the school’s Football Hall of Fame on campus. That happens, too, like the time during Simpson’s murder trial when USC’s 1968 Heisman duplicate trophy, the one presented to the school in Simpson’s honor, was stolen from a case at the athletic facility. Whoever took it simply removed some screws and walked away with the entire display.
Frank Sinkwich’s 1942 Heisman was similarly lifted from a campus display at Georgia in 1985 and then recovered a few days later when an anonymous caller told police where to find it. Herschel Walker’s nearby 1982 Heisman was untouched.
How, though, do you successfully fence a stolen Heisman? It’s not the sort of item one ever expects to find at a pawn shop or flea market. So far the greatest indignity to the trophy itself has been an occasional dent or scratch.