Last night, the Minnesota Vikings inaugurated their new stadium with a 17-14 victory over the Green Bay Packers. Deadspin celebrated the team’s rich history by buying a commemorative “Legacy Brick” in the plaza outside the stadium, and asking readers to find it.
Just a few hours after the challenge was issued, Vikings fan Nate Schimelpfenig found our brick.
The inscription reads “To My Beloved, The Minnetonka Queen,” and it is our tribute to a classic Vikings moment that the team has inexplicably failed to honor in a stadium complex otherwise full of nods to Vikings history.
In October of 2005, during the team’s bye week, several Vikings players, joined by many, many prostitutes—had a boat party on Lake Minnetonka, one of Minnesota’s most popular lakes for recreational boating, fishing, and sex partying. Many sexy things happened on the two houseboats rented for the occasion. The happenings were, in fact, too sexy, in the eyes of the law and the NFL: Daunte Culpepper, Bryant McKinnie, Moe Williams, and cornerback Fred Smoot, the alleged organizer of the party, were all charged with misdemeanors, and Smoot and McKinnie were fined by the league.
One of the rented boats was The Minnetonka Queen, which eventually ended up in Iowa, rechristened The Scandalous. But now The Minnetonka Queen lives on, enshrined, appropriately, in the Vikings’ “Legacy Ship.”
Congratulations to Nate, who will receive a leftover Deadspin Awards trophy and the chance to face Deadspin staffers in daily fantasy.