HOLLYWOOD — Marvin Teale, who coached football at Hollywood High School for twenty-six seasons and spent four decades disputing, in writing, the official history of a foot of dented brass, died July 19 at his home in Mount Washington. He was 88.
His son Everett said the cause was heart failure.
Mr. Teale arrived at Hollywood High in 1968 as a physical education teacher and an assistant on a staff of three. He took the head job in 1974, kept it until 1999, and finished with a record his players remember better than he did: 143 wins, 118 losses, six ties, three league titles and one stretch between 1981 and 1988 in which the Sheiks won 11 games total and he was, by his own account, asked to resign twice and offered a transfer once.
He declined all three. He explained why in an interview with this newspaper in 1994, in a sentence his former players have quoted at two reunions and now, this week, at a funeral home.
“You do not leave a program in the years it needs you and then come back for the years it doesn’t,” he said. “Anybody can coach a good team. A bad team is where the job actually is.”
The drought years are the ones his players talk about. Mr. Teale ran, in the middle of them, a program with 31 players on the roster, no assistant coaches for one full season, and equipment he repaired himself with a sewing awl he kept in his desk. He drove a school van to away games. He arranged, through a friend at a market on Western, for a case of oranges every Friday, because a number of his players were not eating lunch and he had worked out which ones.
“He never said a word about it. There were just oranges,” said Ambrose Whitcomb, who played for him from 1983 to 1986 and is now a middle-school principal in Pomona. “I was twenty-six years old before I understood what I had been watching.”
He won the crosstown preseason game against John Marshall nine times and lost it eleven, a record he described as “about right for a rivalry, which should hurt both ways.” The trophy at stake — a foot of brass on a walnut base, kept for a year by the winner — is the subject of a disagreement between the two schools that Mr. Teale did more than anyone to keep unsettled.
Hollywood’s booster history, in a binder in the athletic office, holds that the trophy was commissioned in 1961 by a downtown alumnus and that Hollywood won the first meeting 14–6. Marshall’s backers hold that the thing began life as a bowling-league prize somebody found in a garage, that the first game ended in a scoreless tie nobody could break before dark, and that Hollywood simply took it home and started keeping records.
Mr. Teale believed the Marshall version. He said so in 1979, in a letter to this newspaper, and in 1988, at a district athletic meeting, and in 2004, at a banquet held in his honor, where he used most of his remarks on it.
“He was the only man in the history of that rivalry who argued for the other school’s story,” said Delroy Fenwick, the Sheiks’ current head coach, who was hired in 2021 and who met Mr. Teale three times. “He told me, ‘If we made it up, it’s a better trophy for having been made up. Somebody wanted the game to matter, so they invented a reason. That’s the whole of high school football.’”
Marvin Teale was born in 1938 in Bakersfield, played guard at a state college, and taught for one year in Kern County before coming south. He married Loretta Achebe in 1963. He kept every roster he ever coached in a filing cabinet in his garage — 26 of them — and after he retired he began, in his seventies, calling the players on them, working alphabetically, at a rate of two or three a week. His family estimates he got most of the way through 1991.
His wife died in 2016. He is survived by his son Everett, of Mount Washington; a daughter, Corinne, of Sacramento; five grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
The crosstown game this year is at the end of August. Mr. Fenwick said the Sheiks will wear a decal, and that he intends to put the 1988 team’s record — 1 and 9 — on the locker room wall for the week, with no explanation, because Mr. Teale would have found an explanation unnecessary.