HOLLYWOOD — The trophy is a foot of dented brass on a walnut base, and the two schools that have spent six decades trying to win it cannot agree on where it came from.
The Hollywood High Sheiks and the John Marshall Barristers meet again this fall in a preseason rivalry game older than any coach on either sideline, and the run-up has already revived the quarrel that gives the series its flavor: the disputed history of the trophy itself. The winner keeps it for a year. The loser tends to claim it was ugly anyway.
Hollywood tells the story one way. According to a booster history kept in a binder in the athletic office, the trophy was commissioned in 1961 by a downtown alumnus who wanted the crosstown game to carry stakes, and Hollywood won that first meeting, 14–6. Marshall keeps no such binder, but its longtime backers tell it differently: that the “trophy” 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 the thing home and started keeping records.
“There is no first game on paper that both sides accept,” said Marv Sinclair, 77, a Marshall alum who has attended the rivalry since the Eisenhower administration and considers the whole dispute the best part of it. “Every few years someone swears he’ll settle it in the county archives, and every few years he comes back with nothing. I hope they never find it. The argument is better than the answer would be.”
There is also the matter of the missing years. The trophy vanished for most of a decade in the 1980s — stolen, misplaced, or, in one telling, buried under the Hollywood bleachers by a graduating class as a prank — and turned up in a storage room with two years of engraving simply absent. Both schools claim they were winning during the gap.
The game itself, when it finally interrupts the folklore, looks competitive. Hollywood returns a senior quarterback, Xavier Poole, who threw for better than two thousand yards last season and spent the summer, his coach said, mostly trying to get bigger. Marshall counters with a defense that returns most of its front and a new coordinator brought in to make it meaner.
Both head coaches were careful, in the way rivalry coaches are, to say almost nothing. “It’s one game in August against a good program, and we’ll know a lot more about ourselves after it,” said Hollywood’s coach, Delroy Fenwick, declining three separate invitations to talk trash. His Marshall counterpart, Bill Haney, matched him line for line, adding only that his players “know exactly what week it is.”
The trophy, for now, sits in a case at Hollywood High, its brass dull and its base scratched, the disputed early engravings too worn to referee. Someone has added a strip of white tape beneath the oldest plate and written on it, in ballpoint, a single question mark.