The big opening-game question for the University of Colorado football team isn’t who will start at quarterback — or any other position — Sept. 3 against Hawaii.
Instead, it is: Will assistant coach Brian David Kealiihaaheo Cabral break out the trademark lavalava?
"That’s the question of the season right now," Cabral acknowledged. "I hear it pretty much every day now."
Small wonder, since it is a homecoming of sorts for the 1974 Saint Louis School graduate, as well as a return to Aloha Stadium, where he initiated the tradition of wearing a lavalava on the sidelines in the 1998 Aloha Bowl.
Cabral is something of an institution at Colorado, second in seniority perhaps only to Ralphie the buffalo. Cabral enters his 27th season — four as a linebacker and 23 as an assistant coach — sandwiched around a nine-year NFL career.
During that time he has been the Buffaloes’ point man on recruiting Hawaii in particular and Polynesian players in general. It was the family of the late quarterback Sal Aunese that gave him the first lavalava in appreciation of their friendship.
Cabral said he wears it around his office on Fridays. Then-head coach Rick Neuheisel suggested he wear it for the Aloha Bowl game against Oregon. When the Buffaloes pulled out a 51-43 victory, the lavalava became a rallying point. After some trial and error, Cabral said, he now picks one game a year in which to wear it and has gone 5-2 since.
"It is a feel thing," Cabral said. "I just have a feel about a (particular) game and decide to break it out. It is kind of an attitude thing. The players never know when I’m going to pull it out, but they love it. When they see it, they know it is on."
For the most part, Cabral has saved the lavalava for games at Boulder’s Folsom Field, even enduring some late-season cold weather to do it.
Being in Colorado in the winter, much less wearing a lavalava there, was hardly something Cabral said he could have imagined when he was a senior at Saint Louis School.
"I didn’t know the difference between Colorado and Colorado State then," he said.
The hope then was to follow in the spikes of his father, Walter, and play at Notre Dame, where his dad (1951-52) was one of the first of Hawaiian ancestry to play under the golden dome. But the Fighting Irish didn’t come through with a scholarship offer and Colorado did.
It paid off for both of them: Brian was a captain his senior year, helping Colorado to a Big Eight title. He then went on to an NFL career that included a Super Bowl victory with the Chicago Bears.
Now, with a new coaching staff trying to end the Buffaloes’ streak of 18 consecutive losses outside the state of Colorado and the game to be televised by ESPN, speculation around Boulder is that Cabral will haul out the lavalava for the opener. The fact Colorado has five players from Hawaii and plans to continue to extensively recruit here would also seem to support the theory.
Each year on picture day, Cabral said, the Hawaii players on the roster take a group shot in lavalavas. This year, "They were excited about me possibly wearing it (in Hawaii) and asked me about it."
But Cabral isn’t giving up anything, yet.
"Everybody will just have to stay tuned," he said.
