Every loss is an ugly one with this `award'.

Byline: CIVIL WAR By Mark Baker The Register-Guard

This bucktoothed beaver needs a dentist - badly.

Doug Waters is just hoping he doesn't have to take it today.

The annual Civil War football game between the University of Oregon and Oregon State University has seen OSU students descend upon Skinner Butte to paint the Ducks' `O' orange. It's seen the winner go - as will happen today if the Beavers win - to the Rose Bowl five times in 111 previous matchups, and even sent the loser (UO) once in 1957. And it's seen the resurrection of the Platypus Trophy presented to the winning school's students last year.

But this might be the first you've heard of the Dead Beaver Duck Award.

The what?

"I wrapped it up in a brown paper bag and I put a note on it saying we should start this trophy of giving the dead beaver head back and forth to the loser of the rivalry," says Ken Luse, a 1971 OSU graduate.

Luse, 66, wearing an orange OSU sweatshirt and sitting in his Ferry Street Bridge area home, was talking about that fall day in 1973 when his sister, Nina Hipperson, found the beaver skull. She and her brother's family were walking along their parents' property on the Little Deschutes River in central Oregon when they uncovered the remains.

The tradition between Luse and his good friend Waters, a 1964 UO grad, began in 1975. That year, the Beavers, and thus Luse, lost in the first edition of this rivalry.

After beating the Ducks 10 out of 11 years from 1964 to 1974, the Beavers wouldn't win another Civil War football game until 1988, although they did manage to tie the Ducks 0-0 in the infamous "Toilet Bowl" game of 1983.

So, if not for the two men also using the results of men's Civil War basketball games to decide who gets the trophy, Luse would have been stuck with the award for the first 13 years of the tradition.

As it stands, though, the trophy has bounced back and forth between the two Eugene men's homes for 33 years now.

After Luse gave Waters the skull - and its rotted, orangy (go figure) teeth - Waters, 68, stuck it on a piece of wood with a copper plaque and gave the trophy its name.

Waters got it last fall, after the Beavers' 38-31 Civil War win over the Ducks at Autzen Stadium. But he gladly returned it to Luse after the Ducks beat OSU 79-63 in basketball on Feb. 2 at Mac Court. Oregon followed up by beating the Beavers in hoops a month later in Corvallis.

The Beavers, of course, are favored by a field goal today in Corvallis in what OSU fans like Luse are expecting will end with an OSU win and its first Rose Bowl appearance since Jan. 1, 1965. Luse, therefore, is quite confident he'll be saying "buh-bye" to the Dead Beaver Duck Award once again. And he won't have far to go to make the exchange. Waters will be right there watching at the home of Ken and Patti Luse with about 20 other people, a Civil War party that's become an annual tradition.

Last year, however, Waters went to the game at Autzen, then made the trek over to the Luses' home to pick up the trophy once again.

"I was wet and bedraggled and ticked because the Ducks lost," Waters says.

And where must the loser display the trophy?

"Prominently in your home," says Waters, who was Luse's best man when he married Patti, herself a 1965 UO graduate (the Luses' welcome mat is orange and green and says "A House Divided"), in 1969.

"People notice it," Ken Luse says of the award. "They say, `What is that?' So then we tell them the story."

Luse and Waters met at the UO during the 1960-61 school year when Luse was a freshman. Yes, he actually started out as a Duck. He only attended for a year, though, running out of tuition money. He joined the Navy in 1963 and ended up in the South China Sea during the Vietnam War. He eventually went back to school at Lane Community College in 1968, then transferred to OSU a year later.

He's been a Beaver fan ever since.

Luse grew up in McMinnville, leaning toward the Ducks. "But I think that the real reason I'm a Beaver is because he's a Duck," he said, laughing and gesturing toward Waters.

After years of working at Borden Chemical and Chembond in Springfield, and as a self-employed chemical consultant, he's now retired. So is Waters, who retired from Borden Chemical in 2000 after 37 years with the company.

But they still have the Civil War rivalry. Even if their trophy has no dead duck head on it.

"We would have liked to have had that, where we could exchange the skull and put a duck's head on it," Waters says. "But we didn't have anything quite so ugly as a dead beaver."