Six years ago, the Orange Coast College Pirates baseball program suffered a terrible tragedy when their head coach John Altobelli passed away in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, Calif on Jan 26, 2020. The loss of Coach Altobelli was unimaginably painful and his wife Keri and daughter Alyssa being killed in the accident made the crash even worse.
Back in those dark days, John’s brother Anthony “Tony” Altobelli had to respond to plenty of media inquiries for him to be interviewed about the tragic death of his older brother. As the current Sports Information Director at OCC, Tony stated that “there’s not a day that doesn’t go by where somebody doesn’t ask me about him”, referring to his brother who has been immortalized on the campus of the Costa Mesa, Calif institution where the baseball park bears the name “John Altobelli Park”.
Having worked at Orange Coast College for the past 20 years, the younger Altobelli said that continuing to work at the place where his brother coached for almost 30 years is “a hard act to follow, to say the least”.
“And for him, it’s something that not only has not lessened over the course of six years, sometimes time can do that. I think it’s only intensified. People want to keep talking about him. People come up to me and tell me stories”, Altobelli said.
One of the positive traits that Tony Altobelli remembers about his brother was that “he just led by example, he was just that big brother who always seemed to do everything right”. Being born eight years after John, Tony added that he tried to “pattern my life around him whenever I could, whether it was the kind of music we listened to growing up or playing baseball or whatever”.
The favorite baseball player of John Altoblli when he was growing up was Pete Rose, the Cincinnati Reds legend and all-time MLB hit leader.Tony said that his brother loved Rose’s “gritty determination and style” and that Rose’s “no-holds-barred, grind it out” mentality carried over to the senior Altobelli’s coaching career.
In terms of the four California Community College Athletic Association titles that the OCC Pirates baseball program won under his brother’s leadership, Tony said that his favorite championship of them all is the first one won under John’s leadership in the 2009 season.
The younger Altobelli stated that the 2009 OCC baseball season “deserves a movie all upon its own” due to the wild circumstances and off-field events that occurred during it. Most specifically, Tony mentioned the tragic death of a redshirt sophomore player on the team named Jourdan Watanabe, whom Altobelli claimed “took his own life and died”.
The passing of Watanabe at only 20 years old on Feb 27, 2009 was an extreme gut punch to the entire Pirates baseball program, similar to what the tragic helicopter crash that killed John Altobelli would be like 11 years later to the whole OCC community.
But the team carried on “in honor of Jourdan” and they went all the way to the state championship game, which they had to play without Coach Altobelli managing them because he was suspended for the last 17 games of the season due to him getting “kicked out of too many games”. But the Pirates won the title game 10-7 over San Joaquin Delta College to win their first state championship as a program at the time in nearly 30 years.
In his 17th season coaching the Pirates, Coach Alto was finally a champion and Tony felt that the title was also special due to it happening a few years after their mother passed away. “I remember hugging John for the first time and we’re both on the verge of crying. Then I said ‘God, Mom would have loved this’”, Altobelli said.
Three more championships would be won by the Pirates under Coach Altobelli, including in the 2019 season that turned out to be his last year as a coach at Orange Coast College.
Six years after the passing of John Altobelli, the OCC baseball team has been coached under current head coach Nathan Johnson, who stepped into the role of head coach at the young age of 30 years old in place of his deceased 56-year-old mentor.
Tony Altobelli said that he is confident that Coach Johnson is going to get the Pirates baseball program “back to where it belongs”.
“It just takes some time to get used to it. But I’m not worried about that. I love what he does. He runs the same program that John [ran], which means you get a fair opportunity, you get no preferential treatment, but if you earn it, you are in and it’s your position to lose”, Altobelli said. “Nate always loved that about John, loved the way he ran his program, and he wants to pattern the program the same way”.
Leave a Reply