Don Wattigny, iconic Holy Name of Mary coach

I met him and another Holy Name alumnus, Dr. Larry Giambelluca, for a filming session during the production of “Glory Days” for WLAE. At the end of the interview, the three of us talked about the possibility of using the shuttered school to house a New Orleans Prep Sports Hall of Fame I had hoped to create. They had a key to the building.
    

At the end of the tour of the second-floor classrooms, we stopped on the way out at a small showcase near the side door of the school. In it was the Class B state football championship trophy the team won in 1955 by defeating Delhi, 34-7. They held it as proudly as parents would hold an infant, posed for a photograph, then returned it to its resting place before locking the building.
    

Wattigny, a proud son of Algiers who had placed Edna Karr on its path to football excellence from 1993, when it won the Class 3A state championship in its first year as a varsity high school program until his retirement in 2002, told me to follow him. I didn’t hesitate and was honored to share time with a man who gave so much back to his community.
    

“I want to show you something if you have time,” he said. So I followed his car to a location at Algiers Point below the Mississippi River levee.         “Take a walk with me.”  And curiously, I climbed the levee to the crest of the batture. Once there, he pointed down to the rolling river.
    

“That’s where I grew up. My house was down there and I used to swim in the river.”
    

That was Don Wattigny, a man who considered the mightiest of rivers, which passed 10 states on its way to the Gulf of Mexico, his personal swimming pool. “It was OK,” he explained, “as long as I didn’t swim out into the current.”
    

As we all must some day, the coach left us on June 7 at the age of 81. Death came mercifully, in his sleep. He left behind a loving family, many friends with countless memories and the gratitude of the many students he touched.
    

Coach Wattigny was West Bank through and through. And the somewhat remote community of Algiers was his playground. This little, diverse community had three high schools – Behrman and Holy Name of Mary Catholic school and L.B. Landry for black students.
    

Getting to Algiers wasn’t easy. There was no Crescent City Connection to cross. The nearest bridge was the Huey P. Long in Westwego. A free ferry carried travelers from the foot of Canal Street to the Algiers landing.
    

“We grew up in a unique place at a unique time,” he recalled about his youth. “Everybody knew everybody and their families. We didn’t have to lock doors, and we could walk the streets any time day or night. And before I knew what the word integration meant, the community was already integrated.”
    

Giambelluca said that before he attended Holy Name of Mary in the ninth grade, he went to All Saints School. “It was run by the Josephite priests, who run St. Augustine. We (Caucasian and African American boys) played football on the neutral ground together.”
    

But it was at Holy Name where Wattigny and Giambelluca developed their talents as athletes. And although the school was relatively small compared to Behrman, it quickly evolved into an athletic powerhouse. Its fame was fleeting, however, confined to a handful of years in the early-to-mid-’50s when the two were students.
    

Holy Name was a member of the Metropolitan League with other neophyte teams from De La Salle, Sacred Heart, St. Martin’s, Ridgewood and St. Charles Catholic. The Blue Knights, as the teams were known, won the Class B league’s football and baseball championships in 1952 and 1953.
    

By 1955, under Coach Harry Hahn, Holy Name had its finest football season. A year earlier, cross-town rival Behr­man was the state’s Class 2A runner-up to Minden. But the Blue Knights of ’55 had a roster of talented athletes that went one step further.
    

A season-opening 14-6 defeat to Class 3A Redemptorist would be the last time the Blue Knights would lose a game. Holy Name had a brand new rival in West Jefferson, a newly consolidated Class 3A school stocked with former players from Gretna, Marrero and Westwego schools that were downgraded to junior highs.
    

“We had a roster of 22 players, and (West Jefferson) had about 100,” Wattigny recalled. “Our chaplain, Father Moran, was about to lead the team in saying a rosary as he always did before a game, when we pulled into the stadium. Well, our bus and West Jeff’s bus arrived at the same time, when one of their players hollered to us, ‘Here’s where we separate the men from the boys!’  “Coach Hahn interrupted the chaplain. ‘Excuse me a moment, Father. Now did you guys hear that? What are you going to do about it?’ Then he turned the recital of the rosary back to the priest.”
    

The answer came loud and clear. Holy Name of Mary emerged with a 40-6 victory over a school whose enrollment was 20 times larger than its own.
    

The Blue Knights would roll through the season with a 12-1 record and an average margin of victory of 36-6 to become the West Bank’s first team to win a state championship.
    

The following year, Holy Name of Mary became a member of the Catholic League. And glory would come as small gifts. The Blue Knights played nine games, won six of them and finished with a 2-3 league record.
    

The most satisfying victory came in the regular-season finale when Wattigny returned a St. Aloysius kickoff 80 yards for a touchdown that cost the Crusaders the league title. Instead, Redemptorist claimed its first of two back-to-back titles. Although the star of the Blue Knights was fullback and top rusher Huey O’Connor, the coaches selected Wattigny to the All-District team.
    

Holy Name’s moment of fame ended that season. The 1957 team lost all nine games and managed just 14 points. The Blue Knights drifted into obscurity just a few years before the Archdiocese of New Orleans constructed Archbishop Shaw as its West Bank flagship high school.
    

“I took the lessons I learned from Coach Hahn with me into coaching,” He said. “He would tell us about the friendships that will last a lifetime, about going into battle together. I never forgot these things that bring players closer together. They’ve proven to be true. And I tried to instill that in the kids.”
    

Two of Coach Wattigny’s Karr teams made the state championship games in 1995 and 1999, and he was the 3A Coach of the Year in 1993. Karr is a football power today because the seeds he planted in the school’s early years have grown into mighty oaks.
    

In retirement, Coach Wattigny remained active in civic organizations, particularly the West Bank Quarterback Club in which he was a board and charter member, the 69ers Social Club and Theta Chapter of the Golden Agers.
    

Ron Brocato can be reached at rbrocato@clarionherald.org.