Moments after they win the National Hockey League championship, the delirious members of the victorious team invariably pass the Stanley Cup around the ice and essentially make out with the silver trophy. It's pretty gross. After all, don't these guys know that during its 116-year history, liters of backwash have sloshed around the Cup as countless players and fans chugged champagne out of this glorified keg? Don't they know that at least one dog — and a Kentucky Derby-winning thoroughbred — have slurped chow from the Cup? And that both infants and inebriated adults have literally treated the Stanley Cup as a toilet bowl? A man named Walt Neubrand, who is one of the three people in charge of chaperoning the Cup through its many misadventures, put it best. "I laugh at the people who kiss it," Neubrand once said. "I mean, would you kiss a subway pole? Hey, if you get hepatitis, don't blame me."
The Stanley Cup is, without question, the most colorful — and potentially contagious — title trinket in sports. It's hard to imagine anyone peeing on the Vince Lombardi Trophy. Stanley has so many stories — if he could talk, he'd love to tell you about that wacky night he spent at the bottom of Mario Lemieux's pool — because every year, each player and front-office member from the winning team gets to spend a day with the Cup before turning it over to their championship successors. (Of course, if the Detroit Red Wings hold on to their 2-0 series lead over the Pittsburgh Penguins in this year's Finals, they'll get to party with it for two straight off-seasons.) If you've only got a day to hang with Stanley, you'll want show him a helluva time. (See the top 10 sports moments of 2008.)
When Lord Stanley of Preston, the Governor General of Canada, purchased the Cup for $50 in 1893, he never anticipated that a goalie would use it as a popcorn bowl in a movie theater, like the New Jersey Devils' Martin Brodeur did over a century later. Stanley bought the Cup as a prize for the best amateur hockey club in Canada. The NHL took control of it in 1926, but the tradition of abuse started at the outset. In 1905, a member of the Ottawa Silver Seven drop-kicked the Cup into a canal. The boys kept the party going through the night, and rescued the Cup the next day. Two years later, the Montreal Wanderers gave the Cup to a photographer, who was tasked with documenting their title. Instead, the photog's mother turned Stanley into a fancy flowerpot. A few months later, Wanderers management retrieved the soiled prize.
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