A throttled wolverine and a 40-year MSU tradition
The poster hanging on the glass wall that separates the Michigan State University registrar's office from the lobby of the Administration Building shows a wolverine with frightened eyes, a helpless expression and a thick Spartan hand around its neck.
It says "The dazed and blue" across the top, "Go State!" along the bottom, and it is one of MSU's most enduring and least known sports traditions.
It has been hung up in the Administration Building before every football match-up between MSU and the University of Michigan every year for four decades.
"We've always put it up," said Marcia McConnell, an assistant registrar who has worked at MSU for 50 years and the official keeper of the poster. "It kind of pumps us up for the game. It gets everybody going in the building."
Just how the poster ended up at the registrar's office is unclear.
"The previous registrar couldn't remember," McConnell said.
But identity of its creator is known. That's Robert Schefman, who drew the poster before MSU's crushing loss to Michigan in October of 1973, when he was an undergraduate art student.
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"The poster that never dies," is what Schefman calls it. He's still an artist, a painter who has exhibited around the country and a professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
The genesis of the poster was "just a little school spirit," he said. He finds the fact that it has become a fixture of sorts "absolutely so funny."
But the school spirit hasn't gone away. Schefman went on to attend two other Big Ten schools, "but my allegiance is green," he said.