The Stanley Cup: An Enquiry into the Essence of Monumentality

The Stanley Cup is the trophy assigned annually to the winner of the National Hockey League (aka the NHL). The cup is a small silver bowl measuring 18.5 centimetres in height and 29 in diameter. The bowl rests on a gigantic stepped, cylindrical base with a lower diameter of 43.8 centimetres. Altogether the cup is 89.5 centimetres high and weighs 15.5 kilograms. The Stanley Cup is by far the best trophy design in contemporary sports. It is certainly much more interesting than the simply adequate UEFA Champions League Cup; impossible to compare with the provincial wannabe-classicism of the Copa Libertadores; totally opposed to the sad modernism of the FIFA World Cup or the UEFA Europa League Cup; entirely free from the naivety of the FIFA Club’s World Cup and the NBA’s Larry O’Brien trophy; miles away from the souvenir-like irrelevance of the MLB Commissioner’s Trophy or the Invasion of the Body Snatchers aesthetic of the NFL’s Lombardi Trophy. Among today’s trophies, only the Venus Rosewater Dish (a silver dish measuring 48 centimetres in diameter and decorated with figures from mythology which is given to the Wimbledon Ladies’ Singles champion) possesses a comparable quality, but its beauty is definitely of another kind. The dish is elegant, polite, literally subtle, whereas the Stanley Cup is symmetrical, heavy, outspoken, monumental.