HOLLYWOOD — The box came off the shelf Monday, after the six o’clock practice, in front of the whole roster, and Delroy Fenwick cut the tape with a key.
Inside, in sheets of forty, were the decals the Sheiks will wear Friday against John Marshall and for the rest of the season, in memory of Marvin Teale, who coached this program for twenty-six seasons, died July 19 at 88, and spent four decades arguing that the rivalry’s own trophy belonged to the other school’s version of history.
The decal is a small orange.
There is no name on it, no initials, no years. The players who did not immediately understand had it explained to them by the players who did, quietly, which several parents at the fence on Tuesday morning described as the point of the whole thing. In the drought years, when Mr. Teale coached 31-man rosters with no assistants, he arranged a case of oranges every Friday through a friend’s market on Western, because some of his players were not eating lunch and he had worked out, without a word, which ones.
“His family picked it,” Fenwick said. “Everett brought me the design in July and asked if it was too quiet. I told him his father once put a 1-and-9 season on a locker-room wall with no explanation, and quiet was the family style.”
That wall, as promised, is also dressed for the week. The 1988 team’s record — 1 and 9, the floor of the drought — went up Monday on a plain white card, unexplained. Fenwick has declined all requests, including from his own players, to explain it, on the grounds that Mr. Teale would have found an explanation unnecessary. By Tuesday the roster had produced its own theories, the leading one close enough to correct that the coaching staff has let it stand: you honor the man by honoring the year that proved he meant it.
The football part of Marshall week, meanwhile, proceeds under its usual gag order. Fenwick, asked to assess Friday’s opponent, praised Marshall’s returning defensive front for the length of one sentence and then praised his own team’s punt coverage, which observers took as a message to his own team’s punt coverage. Marshall’s coach, Bill Haney, reached by telephone, was asked whether his players know what week it is and answered, “They knew in June.”
The knowable facts are these. Xavier Poole, the senior quarterback, weighed in Monday at 201, four pounds into the nine his coach ordered, and has thrown it well all camp at six in the morning, an hour at which Friday’s 7 p.m. kickoff will feel, one lineman noted, “like staying up for New Year’s.” Daniel Okotie, the sophomore who spent August ruining Poole’s mornings, will start in the nickel package, the first sophomore to start a Marshall game for Hollywood since the staff stopped keeping track of such things, which was never. The game is at Hollywood. The trophy — a foot of dented brass on a walnut base, origin disputed, engraving gapped, taped question mark still in place — sits in its case through Friday, when it goes to the winner for a year.
Everett Teale will be at midfield for the coin toss, carrying, at Fenwick’s request, one of the twenty-six rosters from his father’s garage filing cabinet. He has chosen 1988’s.
Marv Sinclair, 77, the Marshall alum who has attended the rivalry since the Eisenhower administration, confirmed he will be in his usual seat on the visitors’ side, wearing, for the first time in the series’ history, a small orange sticker on his Marshall cap.
“Teale spent forty years arguing our side of the trophy story against his own school,” Sinclair said. “A man like that gets one sticker out of me. One. Then I want the brass back.”
After Monday’s unveiling, Fenwick flattened the empty box and carried it to the recycling bin behind the equipment room. A student manager reported, and the coach later confirmed, that he then went back and took it out. It is on the shelf in his office, flat, with the cut tape still on it. He did not explain that either.