POCATELLO and MOSCOW, Idaho — In remote stretches of I-84 between Boise and Pocatello in southern Idaho, the speed limit is 80 mph. It wouldn’t be unusual to set the cruise control to 90 and not worry about a speeding ticket. But in 2023, when Maclane Westbrook was a student at Idaho State, he blew past a state trooper sitting in the median and his speedometer read triple digits.

“I didn’t even try to slow down,” Westbrook said.

Westbrook was driving an ISU-issued car — with university insignia on the side — and was on his way back to campus from a board of educators meeting in the state capital and was quickly pulled over.

As Westbrook searched for an explanation that might possibly get him out of the ticket, a puzzled look overtook the trooper’s face. Sitting on the lap of Westbrook’s friend riding shotgun was a bald, silver-colored potato wearing a dry human smirk.

“You got a pottery project there?” the trooper asked.

This is how Westbrook found himself telling the story of the King Spud trophy — a long-lost relic in the Idaho–Idaho State rivalry — on the side of the highway, with hope its lore would inspire the trooper to issue just a warning. The tale did not have the desired outcome, and when the trooper retreated to his car to write the ticket, Westbrook’s friend noticed King Spud’s crown had been sitting on the floor mat. While they waited, he fixed it back on the trophy’s head.

When the trooper returned, he was perplexed yet again.

“Hey, he wasn’t wearing a crown when I was here the first time,” he said.

For Westbrook, it was an awkward traffic stop. For King Spud, it was just another chapter in an already bizarre existence. Because sometime around 1979, long before a replica of the original trophy found itself in the front seat of an Idaho State fleet car, baffling a state trooper, the original King Spud quietly and mysteriously vanished entirely. And for decades, no one seemed to care.

Born as a quirky art project at the University of Idaho in the early 1960s, the trophy’s vanishing act is one of the stranger mysteries in college sports. Over the past four decades, others have tried to track it down. This year, ESPN set out on its own adventure through Idaho’s small towns and college campuses, following decades of faint clues to determine what really happened to the lost King Spud — and whether it might still be out there.

THE QUEST BEGAN in early August at Buddy’s Italian Restaurant in Pocatello, where former Idaho State sports information director Glenn Alford suggested we meet. Buddy’s opened its doors in 1961, and its weathered exterior suggests the building hasn’t changed much in the decades since.

Alford, 83, has been dining here since he was hired in 1967, and he was quick to recommend the spaghetti and meatballs. He seemed excited to meet with an out-of-towner embarking upon an unusual treasure hunt. A Stanford-educated historian, Alford spent 31 years as Idaho State’s sports information director. No one was better to deliver a first-hand account of the trophy’s place in history.

In the first half of the 20th century, Idaho-Idaho State wasn’t much of a rivalry. The schools are located on opposite sides of the state, and they are separated by about a nine-hour drive that covers nearly 600 miles. Additionally, from 1922 to 1959, Idaho played in the Pacific Coast Conference with USC, UCLA, Stanford and other large West Coast universities. The two schools played only twice in football prior to 1962, but when the Big Sky Conference formed in 1963, they started playing annually, and as many as four times a year in basketball.

“Idaho got its butt kicked regularly, because what in the hell were they doing playing USC and UCLA?” Alford said. “But they took great pride in being a [Division I] school and eventually sanity reigned there and they decided that was unsustainable. So, they joined the Big Sky, and nobody in the conference liked their attitude about, ‘We’re more important than everybody else.'”

The Vandals remained in the Big Sky until 1996, when they left for the Big West and for two decades tried to make football work at what is now the FBS level. But the geography — among other reasons — didn’t allow it to work. Idaho returned most of its sports to the Big Sky in 2014, and football returned to the conference in 2018, where the school again competes with more natural peers.

In 1968, Alford was preparing to hit the road for a neutral-site basketball game against Idaho in Twin Falls when he was approached by his boss.

“He says, ‘You’ve got to take the King Spud trophy with you.’ And I said, ‘What is the King Spud trophy?'” Alford recalls. “I’d never seen it. Never heard of it.”

The King Spud trophy was commissioned by the Moscow Chamber of Commerce in 1962 with the idea it would be awarded annually to the winner of the Idaho-Idaho State men’s basketball game or series.

For at least 17 years, that’s what happened, with the trophy bouncing back and forth between Moscow and Pocatello.

The state was not exactly a basketball mecca during this period, but the Bengals delivered one of the great moments in Big Sky history in 1977 when they beat UCLA in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The upset ended the Bruins’ run of 10 consecutive trips to the Final Four and sits alongside Idaho State’s 1981 Division I-AA football national title as the greatest achievement in school history.

Alford admits he didn’t have an affinity for the King Spud trophy, nor did anyone else the way he remembers it. He never wrote about it in news releases, and it was something of a nuisance because of how heavy it was — Alford estimates it weighed about 25 pounds — making it difficult to lug around.

When Lynn Archibald arrived as the head coach after the NCAA tournament run in 1977, he also didn’t care for the trophy. After losing to Idaho in 1979, he told reporters: “The trophy should go to the losing team, not the winning one. It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. The only good thing that happened last weekend was losing it.”

After that, the trophy simply drifted out of public consciousness. There was no announcement of a retirement, no news reports that it had gone missing, no campus legend about a theft. One year it existed — lumpy, metallic, ugly enough that a coach wanted to give it to the loser — and then it was gone.

The simplest explanation is probably the most likely, he thinks. It was left behind due to forgetfulness or even discarded.

The conversation inside Buddy’s didn’t lead to any strong King Spud leads, only a feeling of nostalgia for the Idaho State that lived in Alford’s stories.

THE OBVIOUS PLACE to begin the physical search is Idaho State’s ICCU Dome.

On a Tuesday morning, Idaho State sports information director Jon Match was waiting just a few steps from where the football team was practicing. Match was friendly and helpful, but realistic: King Spud has been missing for more than four decades, and nothing about the Dome suggests it holds many secrets. Still, he said, there are storage rooms and dusty closets in the building to sift through. If the trophy somehow survived, that would be the place to focus on searching.

We walk through the concourse — where most of the Bengals’ most treasured keepsakes are displayed in glass trophy cases — into a room that rarely has visitors. Cardboard boxes are filled with old stuff: jerseys, pictures, 80-year-old trophies, folders and a binder labeled “bbq sauce/road trip.” At the back of the room there is a hatch that leads into a dark crawl space under the bleachers — Alford had thrown out the possibility King Spud could be in there — but the risk/reward analysis determines it isn’t worth venturing more than a few feet past the opening.

After working through a few more storage areas, it becomes clear that whatever secrets the Dome holds, none of them resemble our elusive potato.

Idaho State athletic director Pauline Thiros also seems politely amused by the search for King Spud. Thiros is from Poky, played volleyball for the Bengals and has worked in the ISU athletic department since 1995, beginning as a volleyball coach and becoming AD in 2019.

“I actually was not aware of King Spud until a couple of years before I became athletic director,” she said in her office. “I heard about it with a scavenger hunt and King Spud — if you find King Spud, you’re like the grand champion. And it was really just a joke.”

Thiros was disappointed when King Spud didn’t turn up during a renovation project a few years ago, but a track trophy from 1917 was discovered under the bleachers.

She didn’t rule out the possibility the royal russet was somewhere still on campus, but she wasn’t optimistic.

“I think somebody thought it was so ugly that they tossed it,” she said.

The general feeling about King Spud changed dramatically in the years after it faded into obscurity, however, and after a King Spud account was created on Twitter in 2022, a new generation of Idaho State students was introduced to the trophy in a more positive manner.

“The students became weirdly obsessed with King Spud,” she said, affectionately. “They’re the ones that ultimately worked with Idaho students to bring it back.”

One of those students was Maclane Westbrook. He grew up in Oregon and didn’t arrive in Pocatello with any sense of local tradition. He remembers King Spud as a vague image at first — a photo he might have seen somewhere online — until a 2021 Idaho State Journal story pulled it into focus.

During a detour from ISU as a student at College of Eastern Idaho, he noticed how little campus identity a community college can have. So when he returned to Idaho State, King Spud looked less like a joke and more like an opportunity. He got involved in student government and started pitching the idea of bringing the trophy back.

“Whenever I brought it up, I felt like I had to be careful about it,” he said. “I was afraid I would just start talking about King Spud and someone [would think] I was insane. So I was trying to be careful whenever I started talking about it or telling people about it. But whenever I did, everyone was pretty enthusiastic about it. ‘That’s really cool.’ ‘That should be brought back.'”

Westbrook put together a presentation, walked into a Wednesday night student senate meeting and made his case. Everyone was all for it. When the student government in Moscow was looped in, it was equally enthusiastic.

Details about funding were relatively easy to sort through, but there was a question about how it should be awarded. Should the trophy be tied only to men’s basketball, as it once was, or shared with the women’s teams?

“There was also a discussion for doing a Queen Spud trophy, which I thought would’ve been the coolest thing to do,” Westbrook said. “Have a King Spud and a Queen Spud. And then the goal is to try to win them both, so you can unite the monarchy of the spud.”

In the end, simplicity won out. King Spud would be a combined competition involving all four annual men’s and women’s basketball games. If either school won at least three of the four games, it kept the trophy for the year. If the series ended 2-2, the tiebreaker would be total point differential.

In the first season of the reboot in 2023, the tiebreaker was in play as the Idaho State women’s team needed to win or lose by seven points or fewer. The Bengals trailed by 21 at halftime but had cut the deficit to 8 with 1:17 left. At this point, Thiros’ rooting interest shifted from the game to what equated to a point spread.

She was watching on television as the final seconds ticked down.

“I am no longer thinking we need to win this game,” Thiros said. “I’m thinking we have to score a basket.”

A late jumper cut the deficit to six, ensuring King Spud would spend the next year in Pocatello.

“After the game, I’m congratulating Coach [Seton Sobolewski],” Thiros said. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, I know we wanted the W, but hey, you got it, you’re bringing home King Spud.’ And he was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He was still pissed about the loss.

“He didn’t care about King Spud the first time. He cares now. It was hilarious.”

Idaho State also won the most recent series for the 2024-25 school year, so a visit to the student union — where the new King Spud is displayed — was also in order. School wasn’t in session, so the building was empty. On the second floor, in a vertical glass case, sat the modern King Spud.

It was … underwhelming. For all the enthusiasm students had poured into resurrecting the tradition, the display didn’t fully capture that energy. There was no plaque, no sign explaining its history or its odd place in the Idaho-Idaho State rivalry. Just a strange, side-eyed silver potato wearing a gold crown, looking vaguely annoyed to be sitting alone in an empty student union.

The last stop in Pocatello was a pawn shop about 7 miles away on the edge of town. “Pawn Stars” has tricked me into believing this is exactly the sort of place where miraculous discoveries happen. The cinderblock building with barred windows sat alone behind a patch of gravel. Inside, I approached a man with a dolly and asked if he was the proprietor.

“Depends on what you’re selling,” he said.

I gave him the quick King Spud spiel and he also had never heard of it. That was that, and I left Pocatello no closer to finding the original King Spud than when the journey started.

WITHOUT ANY LUCK in Pocatello, the quest moved north to Moscow. If there is one building in the country that might be hiding a 60-year-old potato in some forgotten corner, maybe it would be the state’s other dome. The Kibbie Dome.

For decades, the building has been a personal curiosity — part football stadium, part indoor track, part architectural experiment, part fever dream. Assistant athletic director Jerek Wolcott weaved us through halls that felt more like the underbelly of a ship than the guts of a stadium. He unlocked a cement-walled room tucked behind one of the end zones. Dust coated everything. Cardboard boxes were filled with trophies dating back to the 1930s. No spud.

We climb a hidden set of stairs and a ladder into the rafters, where we can peer through the slats in the roof onto the field below. There is, of course, no logical reason King Spud would be here, but common sense has long been lost. And the view of the Palouse from the roof ends up being worth the climb.

With no luck inside the Kibbie Dome, the next logical step was to meet with the person who helped resurrect King Spud in the first place.

Casey Doyle is a professor of art and design at the University of Idaho, and during a quiet summer a few years ago someone from the library approached him with an unusual request: Could he re-create a long-lost potato-shaped rivalry trophy so the school could display it in the library?

The project was outside his normal artistic lane. He’s not a sports fan, and Doyle’s background blends traditional sculpture with performance-based work and nontraditional materials, but the idea of re-creating a decades-old trophy born from student folklore was interesting enough for him to take it on.

Doyle began with the few photographs that exist of the original King Spud. Working in clay made the most sense given the budget and his expertise. He blocked out a solid clay potato first, shaping its rounded form, then gradually carved in the signature elements: the smirking face, the rounded head, the base beneath it and the simple crown that once sat atop the original.

Once the exterior form looked right, he cut the sculpture cleanly down the middle and hollowed it out so it wouldn’t explode during firing. The base was thrown separately on a pottery wheel. After firing, it became the new physical reference point for the trophy’s rebirth.

The library then had Doyle’s sculpture 3D-scanned so it could produce small replica keychains. Doyle assumed that was the extent of its use. Until we met in the library a few feet from where his clay version is on display. Doyle had no idea it had also been 3D printed to be put back in circulation as a rivalry trophy.

By this point, the mission had shifted. Finding the original King Spud felt unlikely; understanding its lore was essential. And in Moscow, there was only one place to go for that — the Corner Club, the town’s legendary sports bar.

In the middle of a weekday afternoon, the place was empty. Marc Trivelpiece, the owner since 2007, stood behind the bar wiping down glasses. One of the King Spud keychains is on display and another depiction of the trophy is on the wall.

Trivelpiece didn’t need much prompting to dive into the mystery. His theory about the missing trophy mirrored the most common one: Someone tossed it decades ago.

“Where else would it have gone?” he asked. “We’ve been looking for it for years — at least we have. I don’t know how much effort Idaho State put into looking for it.

“It could have been somebody took it home and then it got put in the back of a closet and they passed away and their kids didn’t know what it was. They got rid of it. Who knows.”

At Corner Club, the lore of King Spud lived on. And maybe that would have to be enough.

A HANDFUL OF follow-up calls after the Idaho quest didn’t uncover anything new. At some point, the odyssey stopped being about finding a missing object and became a question about why anyone would care this much about a decades-old potato trophy in the first place.

Maybe the answer is simple: Rivalry trophies are fun. Even the clothing company Homefield Apparel has embraced the lore, selling a King Spud T-shirt. Trophies can be quirky, tangible excuses for schools to argue about bragging rights, to tell old stories, to let a football game or basketball series feel like it carries just a little more weight than the standings say it does.

That became clearer when Idaho State revived not just King Spud, but a trophy it didn’t even know it had lost. In the wake of King Spud’s resurrection, Thiros asked Westbrook if he had any other ideas in the spirit of King Spud.

“Well, there’s the Train Bell Trophy. It’s down at Weber State collecting dust,” he said.

The bell wasn’t missing so much as forgotten, tucked away somewhere at Weber State since it was last awarded in 1973.

“So for two years we kind of had discussions with Weber State about, let’s bring back the Train Bell,” Thiros said.

Finally, Idaho State stopped waiting. The school announced unilaterally that the Train Bell Trophy was returning, and when the Bengals won in Ogden, Utah, for the first time in 40 years, the offensive line lugged the heavy bell to a roaring ISU student section.

The same pattern repeated itself in the Idaho-Idaho State football rivalry. Since 2018, the schools had played for the Battle of the Domes Trophy, but a corporate sponsorship change led to its quiet retirement after the 2022 season. Suddenly, football had no symbol at all.

For the 2023 meeting, then-Idaho head coach Jason Eck refused to let the game go trophy-less. He cobbled together a temporary Potato State Trophy by attaching a Mr. Potato Head to the Battle of the Domes base. It was goofy and earnest.

Last year, Wolcott created a permanent fix. He carved the official Potato State Trophy out of north Idaho Douglas fir, a straightforward, sturdy replacement for a rivalry that has never taken itself too seriously. Idaho won last year, but on Saturday the Bengals beat the Vandals 37-16 to claim the trophy, uniting it with King Spud for the first time.

The original King Spud remains missing — maybe in a landfill, maybe truly gone. If anything, the hunt for something lost ended up bringing more traditions back into the light. Rivalry trophies survive not because they endure, but because people keep deciding they still matter.

Hitchin in Hertfordshire does well in the polls.

On the edge of the Chilterns and 30 minutes from central London by train, it’s Britain’s most expensive market town for first-time buyers. It’s also been voted one of the top 10 best, and top 20 happiest, places to live in the country.

Last summer Labour did well in the polls here too. Hitchin’s 35,000 inhabitants, with above average earnings, levels of employment, and higher education, ejected the Conservatives for the first time in more than 50 years.

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Having swept into affluent southern constituencies, Rachel Reeves is now asking them to help pay for her plans via a combination of increased taxes on earnings and savings.

While her first budget made business bear the brunt of tax rises, the higher earners of Hitchin, and those aspiring to join them, are unapologetically in the sights of the second.

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Kai Walker, 27, runs Vantage Plumbing & Heating, a growing business employing seven engineers, all earning north of £45,000, with ambition to expand further.

He’s disappointed that the VAT threshold was not reduced – “it makes us 20% less competitive than smaller players” – and does not love the prospect of his fiancee paying per-mile to use her EV.

But it’s the freeze on income tax thresholds that will hit him and his employees hardest, inevitably dragging some into the 40% bracket, and taking more from those already there.

“It seems like the same thing year on end,” he says. “Work harder, pay more tax, the thresholds have been frozen again until 2031, so it’s just a case where we see less of our money. Tax the rich has been a thing for a while or, you know, but I still don’t think that it’s fair.

“I think with a lot of us working class, it’s just a case of dealing with the cost. Obviously, we hope for change and lower taxes and stuff, but ultimately it’s a case of we do what we’re told.”

Reeves’s central pitch is that taxes need to rise to reset the public finances, support the NHS, and fund welfare increases she had promised to cut.

In Hitchin’s Market Square it has been heard, but it is strikingly hard to find people who think this budget was for them.

Jamie and Adele Hughes both work, had their first child three weeks ago, and are unconvinced.

“We’re going to be paying more, while other people are going to be getting more money and they’re not going to be working. I don’t think it’s fair,” says Adele.

Jamie adds: “If you’re from a generation where you’re trying to do well for yourself, trying to do things which were once possible for everybody, which are not possible for everybody now, like buying a house, starting a family like we just have, it’s extremely difficult,” says Jamie.

Liz Felstead, managing director of recruitment company Essential Results, fears the increase in the minimum wage will hit young people’s prospects hard.

“It’s disincentivising employers to hire younger people. If you have a choice between someone with five years experience or someone with none, and it’s only £2,000 difference, you are going to choose the experience.”

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After five years, the cost of living crisis has not entirely passed Hitchin by. In the market Kim’s World of Toys sells immaculately reconditioned and repackaged toys at a fraction of the price.

Demand belies Hitchin’s reputation. “The way that it was received was a surprise to us I think, particularly because it’s a predominantly affluent area,” says Kim. “We weren’t sure whether that would work but actually the opposite was true. Some of the affluent people are struggling as well as those on lower incomes.”

Customer Joanne Levy, shopping for grandchildren, urges more compassion for those who will benefit from Reeves’s spending plans: “The elderly, they’re struggling, bless them, the sick, people with young children, they are all struggling, even if they’re working they are struggling.”

Over and over again, in the run-up to the election and beyond, the prime minister and the chancellor told voters they would not put up taxes on working people – that their manifesto plans for government were fully costed and, with the tax burden at a 70-year high, they were not in the business of raising more taxes.

On Wednesday the chancellor broke those pledges as she lifted taxes by another £26bn, adding to the £40bn rise in her first budget.

She told working people a year ago she would not extend freezing tax thresholds – a Conservative policy – because it would “hurt working people”.

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On Wednesday she ripped up that pledge, as she extended the threshold freeze for three years, dragging 800,000 workers into tax and another million into the higher tax band to raise £8.3bn.

Rachel Reeves said it was a Labour budget and she’s right.

In the first 17 months of this government, Labour have raised tens of billions in taxes, while reversing on welfare reform – the U-turn on the winter fuel allowance and disability benefits has cost £6.6bn.

Ms Reeves even lifted the two-child benefit cap on Wednesday, at a cost of £3bn, despite the prime minister making a point of not putting that pledge in the manifesto as part of the “hard choices” this government would make to try to bear down on the tax burden for ordinary people. The OBR predicts one in four people would be caught by the 40% higher rate of tax by the end of this parliament.

Those higher taxes were necessary for two reasons and aimed at two audiences – the markets and the Labour Party.

For the former, the tax rises help the chancellor meet her fiscal rules, which requires the day-to-day spending budget to be in a surplus by 2029-30.

Before this budget, her headroom was just £9.9bn, which made her vulnerable to external shocks, rises in the cost of borrowing or lower tax takes. Now she has built her buffer to £22bn, which has pleased the markets and should mean investors begin to charge Britain less to borrow.

As for the latter, this was also the chancellor raising taxes to pay for spending and it pleased her backbenchers – when I saw some on the PM’s team going into Downing Street in the early evening, they looked pretty pleased.

I can see why: amid all the talk of leadership challenge, this was a budget that helped buy some time.

“This is a budget for self-preservation, not for the country,” remarked one cabinet minister to me this week.

You can see why: ducking welfare reform, lifting the two-child benefit cap – these are decisions a year-and-a-half into government that Downing Street has been forced into by a mutinous bunch of MPs.

With a majority of 400 MPs, you might expect the PM and his chancellor to take the tough decisions and be on the front foot. Instead they find themselves just trying to survive, preserve their administration and try to lead from a defensive crouch.

When I asked the chancellor about breaking manifesto promises to raise taxes on working people, she argued the pledge explicitly involved rates of income tax (despite her pledge not to extend the threshold freeze in the last budget because it “hurt working people”).

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Trying to argue it is not a technical breach – the Institute of Fiscal Studies disagreed – rather than taking it on and explaining those decisions to the country says a lot about the mindset of this administration.

One of the main questions that struck me reflecting on this budget is accountability to the voters.

Labour in opposition, and then in government, didn’t tell anyone they might do this, and actually went further than that – explicitly saying they wouldn’t. They were asked, again and again during the election, for tax honesty. The prime minister told me that he’d fund public spending through growth and had “no plans” to raise taxes on working people.

Those people have been let down. Labour voters are predominantly middle earners and higher earning, educated middle classes – and it is these people who are the ones who will be hit by these tax rises that have been driven to pay for welfare spending rather than that much mooted black hole (tax receipts were much better than expected).

This budget is also back-loaded – a spend-now-pay-later budget, as the IFS put it, with tax rises coming a year before the election. Perhaps Rachel Reeves is hoping again something might turn up – her downgraded growth forecasts suggests it won’t.

This budget does probably buy the prime minister and his chancellor more time. But as for credibility, that might not be recoverable. This administration was meant to change the country. Many will be looking at the tax rises and thinking it’s the same old Labour.