Playing for the spoon

So the Springboks got the wooden spoon for their efforts in the 2010 Tri-Nations rugby competition. If coach Pieter de Villiers was sitting an exam for public speaking he might well also have seen a wooden spoon dangled in front of him in an age-old academic tradition from the University of Cambridge.

While the wooden spoon expression has become widely associated with sport, and some other competitions and is used almost exclusively as a figure of speech, it originates from a tradition in which a real spoon was awarded as some sort of booby prize.

It dates back to at least the early 19th century and was associated with the Cambridge University’s mathematics tripos exams, and was a kind of booby prize awarded by students to their fellow student ranked lowest in the final exams.

By tradition these wooden spoons were dangled in a teasing way from the upstairs balcony in the Senate House in front of the lowest-ranked recipient when he came before the Vice-Chancellor to receive his degree.

Exactly how and why the tradition found its way into the world of sport is uncertain, but one explanation is that in the early years of Europe’s Six Nations rugby championships there were many Cambridge graduates playing and they might have brought it into the game as a metaphor.

The academic-spoon tradition at Cambridge was last practised in 1909. As from 1910 students were called out in alphabetical order and it became impossible to know who achieved the lowest marks.

Unfortunately for the Springboks and others who do not meet the expectations of sport fans, an alphabetical order for sport championships has not yet been invented.

Why a wooden spoon was chosen as the booby prize is not known but a number of explanations are offered by various sources. The one which is likely to be favoured by many when thinking of the performance of the Springbok coach is that it was intended to signify to the recipient that he should rather have stayed at home to stir the porridge.