In the 1960s, it was Stan Bondelevitch of Swampscott. Later, it was John DiBiaso of Everett.
In between, there was Armond Colombo of Brockton High.
This trio might be the blessed trinity of Eastern Mass. high school football coaches. This isn’t to exclude others, such as Charlie Stevenson of Xaverian, who might try to muscle in. But Bondy, Dibs and Armond were the three most celebrated — at least since I began following it when I got to high school.
Colombo died Sunday at the age of 87 (Lord, how times flies). And while he may have started his coaching career in 1960 at Archbishop Williams, it was his tenure at Brockton, which ran from 1969 through 2002, that put him, and his school, on the map.
During that time, Colombo’s Boxers were 261-81-2. With more than 300 wins to his credit, including the 55 he had at Williams, his 316 career victories made him the second-winningest coach in state history (only Northbridge’s Ken LaChapelle has more). In addition, Brockton won nine high school Super Bowls and produced five undefeated seasons.
While Division 2 Swampscott, under Bondy, may have won the first Super Bowl game ever played (in 1972), Brockton won the Division 1 game played right after it, with future All-America Ken MacAfee on the team.
Brockton’s team name is the Boxers. If you know anything about Brockton’s history, the city produced two of the sport’s best: Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler. Colombo was Marciano’s brother-in-law, and you can be sure that when he wanted to rally the troops, he wasn’t above invoking the name and legacy of the original Brockton Boxer.
It didn’t happen often, but Colombo brought his Boxers up to the North Shore a few times over the course of his career. Most of the time, it was Brockton vs. St. John’s Prep, as Colombo, like DiBiaso, enjoyed tangling with Catholic Conference teams (his on-field rivalry with Xaverian’s Stevenson is legend).
The Boxers probably got The Prep more often than The Prep got them. But one year, in Danvers, the Eagles handed Brockton a shocking defeat in overtime. As it happened, when it came time for the Super Bowl at Boston University in December, the two teams played each other again — this time with Brockton coming out on top (Kevin Dwan, St. John’s star running back, had pneumonia during that game, but played anyway, and played well).
The other memory of Colombo was the time he coached in the Agganis All-Star Football Game in 1986. He brought his star player up to Manning Bowl, Michigan-bound Greg McMurtry, who put on a show in the game that annually commemorates and celebrates the brief life of Lynn legend Harry Agganis.
Colombo’s Boxers also tangled with Ed Nizwantowski’s Peabody Tanners as well.
Colombo could be gruff. And, like any fiery coach, he most certainly rubbed people the wrong way because it’s tough to turn those competitive juices on and off on a dime. But there was another side to him. He enjoyed competing against the best. In the early 1990s, a national high school football publication ranked Brockton No. 1 in the U.S. Former Red Sox manager John McNamara once said, famously, that writers picked the team to win the American League East as a way of getting him fired.
But Colombo welcomed the challenge. That might have had something to do with the fact that future Clemson Tiger and Tampa Bay Buccaneer Rudy Harris was terrorizing opponents that fall.
Brockton couldn’t sustain it, losing a mid-season game to Leominster. But the buzz, just from that, made following the Boxers a lot of fun.
Like Bondy before and Dibs after, teams just loved the idea of beating Armond and the Boxers. But they hardly ever did.
