WA CITY, Iowa — The Heroes Trophy off the playing surface at Hawkeyes’s Memorial Stadium on Friday held high and in one piece. Later, it left Iowa’s locker room en route to Iowa City in two sizeable chunks.

What happened? The Hawkeyes’ locker room celebration got wild after their 13-10 win against the Huskers, and the 13-year-old trophy was hoisted and passed among players, staffers and position groups. Eventually, the base and the tower went their separate ways, as demonstrated in many postgame photographs.

So what happens when a traveling trophy bites the dust? At Iowa, the fixers call the equipment room to help, not the other way around.

My grandpa is getting it fixed!! pic.twitter.com/ccBNwDRnjZ

— Oliver Grunder (@GrunderOliver) November 25, 2023

Enter Ernie Rundall, a retired longtime Iowa athletics volunteer. For more than 30 years, Rundall worked alongside his brother, Gerry, on road trips with the equipment truck to ensure the football and men’s basketball coaches’ headsets worked during games. Saturday, Rundall noticed a photo from football equipment manager Greg Morris with the team managers showing one person holding the base while two others displayed the trophy tower. Friends with Morris for around 40 years, Rundall gave him a call.

“I thought, ‘Well, that don’t look right,” said Rundall, who lives about 30 miles north of Iowa City in Marion. “So I reached out to him and said, ‘Well, it looks like I need to fix the trophy.’”

It’s not the first time Rundall has put together the Iowa-Nebraska symbol of victory. Around six years ago, the ball on top had come loose so he tightened it. This time, Rundall described it as “old and dried out glue” that caused the trophy to fall apart. At his kitchen table, Rundall used Gorilla Glue to hold it together. He then drilled holes into the base and reinforced the glue with five additional woodscrews. He also found a crack in the base that he glued, and the trophy looks close to new again.

“It’s back together,” Rundall said. “I’m taking it back with me in the morning, so I’m sure it’ll be in the trophy case later tomorrow or the next day.

It’s not the first traveling trophy broken following an Iowa football game. In 2011, Iowa and Iowa State played for an interim Cy-Hawk Trophy before the departments approved the final version. When the Cyclones won 44-41 in triple overtime, the crowd stormed the field at Jack Trice Stadium and the trophy was in bits following the celebration. It was later put back together and resides at the Bergstrom Football Complex.