Why Do Iowa and Minnesota Play For A Statue Of A Pig? 🐷

This week I had a rare “pinch me” moment. 

Admittedly, I don’t do a great job appreciating the surreal career I’ve stumbled into, so every once in a while I need a slap in the face. This week, that came in the form of walking into the New York Times building in Manhattan to speak on a panel. 

A place dripping in history, significance, and prestige asked me, a TikToker, to speak with their sports team about content and media. 

If that’s not a positive forward-looking indicator for this profession, I don’t know what is. 

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: Why Do Iowa And Minnesota Play For A Statue Of A Pig?

📉 Biggest Loser: Who’s Really Paying for the Dallas Stars’ $1 Billion Arena?

🏆 Winner’s Circle: What Actually Happened To Nike’s Red Contact Lenses?

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Why do Iowa and Minnesota play for a statue of a pig?

The short answer: the real one was sold for $50. But the full story actually reveals one of the most heated rivalries in sports that no one seems to know about.

Bad Blood: Heading into their 1935 matchup, the Gophers and Hawkeyes were both undefeated and carrying the tension from the year prior. That season, Minnesota players had been accused of “roughing up” Iowa star Ozzie Simmons so badly that he had to leave the game early.

This led Iowa governor Clyde Herring to stoke the anger among his own fans by saying, “If the officials stand for any rough tactics like Minnesota used last year, I’m sure the crowd won’t.”

Clearly alarmed that this statement could encourage violence against his state’s team, Minnesota governor Floyd Olson tried to lighten the mood by telegramming Governor Clyde Herring a playful wager: “a Minnesota prize hog against an Iowa prize hog that Minnesota wins.”

The Wager: Iowa’s governor accepted, and after the Gophers beat the Hawkeyes 13-6 in what was described by both teams as a clean and fair game, an award-winning hog from Rosedale Farms in Iowa was delivered to Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson’s mansion, where he was appropriately named “Floyd of Rosedale.”

But the story doesn’t end here.

Because clearly upset with the outcome of the game, a disgruntled Iowa fan tried to get a federal criminal warrant against both governors for illegal gambling, a charge Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson defended as nonsense since “Iowa had no chance of winning.”

But what ever happened to the real Floyd the pig?

In Memoriam: After being donated to the University of Minnesota, Floyd of Rosedale wound up being sold for $50 to be bred, but unfortunately he died a year later of cholera. Leading Governor Floyd Olson to commission a 98-pound, 21-inch-long, 15-inch-tall bronze statue of the pig, which has been exchanged between the two schools for the last 90 years.

The craziest story in sports right now is one you definitely haven’t heard about, and one team is spending $200,000 to keep it that way. Let me explain.

Big Move: Earlier this year, the Dallas Stars announced their plans to move from their current arena, the 25-year-old American Airlines Center in downtown Dallas, to a new, $1 billion arena 30 minutes north in Plano.

Now, on election day this November, residents of Plano will be voting on multiple new taxes that will help fund $700 million of the proposed $1 billion arena, including increased taxes on:

Puck PACs: Even though some community members are angry about the city’s tax contribution to the new arena, the Stars have already spent over $200,000 on a PAC to urge residents to vote ‘yes’ on the proposition, calling it “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Still, that’s not actually the crazy part of this story.

School Spending: Instead, the crazy part is that, through some clever political maneuvering, the Plano School District will contribute $250 million to help fund the cost of this new arena.

And trust me, this deal is somehow even worse than it sounds.

Like most school districts around the country, Plano collects property taxes from its residents to fund its schools. And in Texas, districts with high property values send part of their tax revenue back to the state, where it’s then used to help fund public education in poorer districts.

But now, under this new agreement with the city, the Plano School District will instead be contributing up to a quarter of a billion dollars it collects from its residents over the next 18 years not to buy textbooks, improve schools, or pay teachers more around Texas but to fund the Dallas Stars’ new arena.

Payoff: And what do the Plano Schools get out of it, you might be asking?

Well, according to Plano Mayor John Muns, the school will now get to host graduation ceremonies at the arena, which apparently is “a big deal” to him.

I guess everything really is bigger in Texas, including how much money taxpayers give to billionaires.

What the heck happened to those red Nike contact lenses?

Well, though you’ve probably seen that they were “banned” over 10 years ago, the real story is actually a lot more complicated than you might think.

Tinted Idea: In 1993, Nike hired an optometry professor from Pacific University, Dr. Alan Reichow, to help lead its new “Nike Vision” department. Their goal was to create the lightest, highest-performance sunglasses on the market for Nike’s top athletes, but after several failed attempts, Dr. Alan and his team realized that to achieve the best results, they had to put something on an athlete’s eye.

So, starting in 1997, they started researching the possibility of tinting an actual contact lens, and what they stumbled upon almost broke the sports world forever.

The Science: By blocking light with a contact lens instead of sunglasses, athletes could now avoid:

Not to mention, the contacts would actually do a better job controlling the amount of light that hit the eye. And as a result of over 7 years of research, Dr. Alan developed two colors of lenses:

Instant Hit: When Nike launched these newly named Nike MaxSight contacts in 2005, athletes loved them. In fact, within the first few years, over 100 MLB players wore them, along with players in the Premier League, the NFL, and countless other sports.

So what happened?

Plot Twist: While it is true that Nike discontinued the product in 2008, it wasn't because the MLB, NFL, or any other league “banned” them. Instead, as Dr. Alan told me in a recent interview, Nike pulled the product because of a contaminated cleaning solution.

And at that point, Nike decided it wasn’t worth the time or money to redevelop the contacts into a single-use design.

Still, that doesn’t mean the product went away forever. In fact, Dr. Alan just sent me a box of his new, single-use red and green color contacts, and I may have to test them out for a story.

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

People often ask me how, as a creator, they can best support my work. I always tell them the same thing: pull up one of my TikToks, and let it play on repeat all night!

Honestly, just watching, interacting with, and messaging me when I cover a topic you find interesting means the world to me. As creators, we often lose sight of the fact that our “audience” is just a collection of real people, with interests similar to our own.

So, a sincere thank you for reading this newsletter. However you found it, whether it be through TikTok, LinkedIn, or from a friend, none of these “pinch me” moments would be possible without you.

P.S. Did you know Times Square is named after the New York Times Headquarters?