Author Tom Kashalk wrote about the one of Cleveland’s fiercest high school rivalries in the August 26, 2026 edition of The Neighborhood News (page 4).
With the new football season approaching, I decided to revisit one of Cleveland’s fiercest high school rivalries. No, not St. Ignatius and St. Edward. A rivalry whose prize was a slab of pig iron bolted to a wooden plaque. But that wasn’t all that plaque held. Each year the winner of the South High–Holy Name football game had its name engraved on it, and took the trophy home to display proudly at their school.
Let’s go back to Depression-era Cleveland, 1932. The Broadway area was a bustling commercial and residential neighborhood, and a working one, with the rolling mills running around the clock at Broadway and Jones, right between the two schools that would come to define this rivalry. Many students from both schools worked those mills all summer. So when officials from both schools sat down in 1932 and decided the rivalry needed a trophy, they didn’t reach for a gold cup or a marble obelisk
