Mongelluzzo was key part of Donora coaching staff
Rudy Andabaker enjoyed a great deal of success on the gridiron as a standout for Donora High during the school’s glory years back in the 1940s, as a Pitt Panther, as a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and later as a high school coach for Bethel Park and Donora.
In fact, he served as one of just three head coaches for the Dragons over a span from 1915 through the school’s final season before the Ringgold merger. A big part of his success has to be attributed to his longtime right-hand man, assistant coach Rich Mongelluzzo, a man who had also served under a Mon Valley legend, Jimmy Russell.
Mongelluzzo coached with Andabaker for 11 years, including a two-year period from 1967-68 in which Donora went 16-0-1, and enjoyed a streak of 15 consecutive wins. Over that time frame he helped coach stars such as Bernie Galiffa, who shattered Western Pennsylvania quarterback records set by Joe Namath of Beaver Falls, as well as 1968 co-captains, Ken Griffey, who scored 25 touchdowns over this two-year stretch, and Malcom Lomax, who scored 124 points as a junior then followed that up with 138 more points the following season.
Of course, just prior to the string of Dragon domination there was a period of despair for the football program, losing game after game after game.
“We were in a lot of ball games,” Mongelluzzo remembered, “but we were in Double-A. We’d be in a ball game up until the third quarter, then we’d get out-powered. We played Elizabeth-Forward and those teams that had 70, 80 kids on the team; we had 35. They’d beat us in the fourth quarter; and we’d lose eight games, nine games a year. And Rudy said, ‘Hey, we can’t do this. We’ll never survive.’ So he petitioned the WPIAL, saying we wanted to drop down a classification. We dropped from Double-A to Single-A, and that’s when we went undefeated two years in a row. We were playing in our class.
“We only had 35 kids on the football team, and yet we went undefeated two years in a row.”
The veteran coach was proud that, under Andabaker, the team’s philosophy was “to never cut a kid. As many years as Rudy coached football, he never cut a kid off the team. Never. A kid came out for football, and he was a part of the team. The only way he left the team was if he got hurt or he quit.”
Mongelluzzo also delighted in the fact that Western Pennsylvania has produced so many football stars and attributed much of the credit to the guidance the athletes received.
“It’s because of their upbringing,” he said. “It’s because of schools like Donora High — we were a small school, but I tell you what, those days are precious to me, even today as I look back. I think that reflected on the kids who were in that school. It was just a great place, and it started with the parents and carried over to the teachers.”
Like many others, he believes many of the immigrants who settled down in the Valley were hell-bent on the concepts of discipline and hard work.
“Absolutely,” he continued with a chuckle. “I always say if it wasn’t for my dad, I probably would have wound up in jail somewhere. I was more afraid of my dad than I was of the police. And not just me, it was the same way for all of the other guys that I ran around with. And the teachers knew my dad and my uncles. You just didn’t do [bad] things because you’d shed a bad light on the family. You didn’t want to do that.”
Mongelluzzo says he was fortunate to have seen Joe Montana play for Ringgold. He added that though mutual connections, “I got to know Joe fairly well. He was one helluva quarterback with God-given athletic ability.”
Mongelluzzo said the only time he got to see Montana in action was when Ringgold met Mt. Lebanon in the playoffs at Monessen’s mammoth football stadium. He recalled the bitter defeat for the Rams on a night in which the weather was just as bitter, absolutely nasty.
“Ringgold was supposed to beat them, but if you remember, the right end on Mt. Lebanon came crushing down on Montana, and he couldn’t get his passes off,” Mongelluzzo said.
Naturally, different coaches have different systems and styles, so it’s interesting to speculate on how Montana would have performed in high school if he had played under Andabaker and Mongelluzzo — although there is no doubt he would have excelled if his head coach had been nothing more than a school’s spelling bee advisor.
Mongelluzzo didn’t want to take anything away from the coaching staff Ringgold employed back then, including head coach Chuck Abramski.
“Don’t get me wrong about Abramski,” he said. “He was just a different type of coach than what we were. Every coach has his own philosophy on how to handle kids, but we would have run a different offense than what Ringgold did.
“First of all, we ran a pro offense [starting around 1967]. We had two setbacks, we had the flanker and the wide outs. Rudy was good friends with an assistant coach of Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys, Jim Garrett, who is the father of the Cowboys present day coach. He had played ball in the service with him. Rudy called him and asked for the Dallas playbook. Back then, it was hush hush, but he sent it.
“We copied everything from it then sent the book back. Most of our pass plays were Cowboys pass plays, and they were the most prolific passing team in the NFL then. Every other day we put new pass plays in.”
That alone would have pleased a young Montana to no end.
Tomorrow, more on Mongelluzzo and his football memories in Part Two.