Westlake shows its love to the Max

Published 9:36 am Friday, April 1, 2016

WESTLAKE — The visitation, followed by the rosary, was scheduled to begin at 4 p.m. Wednesday at St. John Bosco Catholic Church.

That much was in our newspaper Wednesday morning in the obituary for former Westlake High School head football coach Max Caldarera.

But the hearse from Lake Charles delivered Caldarera to Westlake at 2 p.m., very much unpublicized.

Why were both sides of the town’s main drag, Sampson Street, lined with people when the fitting police escort brought Coach Max home one last time — across the Calcasieu River bridge, under the oversized “Welcome to Westlake” sign with no train blocking the way for a change?

But line the street they did, most standing respectfully, many waving, some with pom-poms, more than few decked out in orange and black school colors.

It was fitting perhaps.

It wasn’t the first time Coach Max had led a parade through the small town.

That was when the town’s pride and joy football team would return as conquering heroes, having carried the outlandish orange-and-black banner and prevailed over another small town like Iowa or Crowley or, better yet, one of the relative city-slicker schools across the bridge in Lake Charles.

That was a common site in Westlake — sometimes very late, like the time Guillory and the police escort took a wrong turn leaving Amite after a double-overtime victory and was almost to New Orleans before doing an about-face and getting the Rams pointed back toward our corner of the state.

Still, even at 3 a.m., Guillory remembered, Coach Max insisted on “lights and sirens down Sampson.”

“I told him he was answering to the mayor if there were complaints,” Guillory laughed.

There were none.

But Wednesday afternoon when the motorcade proceeded briskly down Sampson, it was still two hours before the doors to St. John Bosco were to open. Two hours before the line would stretch down the block to officially begin paying its final respects to the coach who smiled and yelled, often cried unabashedly and mostly charmed and reassured them on the sidelines for 34 years.

Who knew? How did they know to line the streets at 2 p.m. on a muggy, overcast Wednesday?

Apparently word travels fast in a small place like Westlake, where everybody knows everybody — and, for sure, everybody knew Coach Max.

And they turned out in droves, both for the visitation and for Thursday’s formal funeral Mass.

It says a lot about Coach Max.

Maybe it says even more about Westlake, the unpretentious little town with the train tracks and the huge WELCOME sign.

Coach Max didn’t grow up with them.

But the adopted son, though only 67 at his unexpected passing Monday, grew to be a father figure for several generations of not only Rams football players but civilian students as well. He was the rock of the place, the heart and soul of the high school, which of course is the center of the town’s being.

So it wasn’t just the players he touched. Coach Max always made the Westlake marching band know it was special, the cheerleaders, too, the whole school and the town folk as well.

That’s the way it is when the town’s social life revolves around the high school and the head coach is probably the best-known figure — all the better when they really LIKE him.

Just go to the local McDonald’s, which in a place like Westlake is more gossip-fest coffee shop than fast-food franchise.

The regulars there gather most every day, and the football talk is more likely to be about the Rams than McNeese, LSU or the Saints.

It can be a tricky situation with high expectations.

Coach Max wasn’t often dealing with the big egos of a blue chip list.

Oh, there would be an occasional David LaFleur or Freddie Harrison or Mike January, destined for college stardom.

But for the most part, like most small-town coaches, he was taking the boy next door, the gangly kid down the street, putting them together and turning them into a team. Your son, your nephew or maybe the kid from across the tracks that nobody ever thought would amount to much.

The whole town has a stake in such matters, and when, for instance, Coach Max took the Rams to New Orleans for the 2007 state championship game, the whole place evacuated and gave the Superdome a bright orange glow.

You’d have thought there was another shelter-in-place from one of the area’s industrial plants.

They didn’t always win.

One snakebit year the Rams went 0-10, but at least they all knew Coach Max always had their backs.

They used to chuckle at his obsession with the playing field, the rumor being that he got down on his knees and trimmed it with scissors.

Finally, he fought for — and got — a state-of-the-art artificial turf. Even had a fancy field house put at one end to give Rams a facility that would be the envy of the biggest schools.

That’s a pretty good monument to his 34 years not only as the head coach but the town patriarch.

But you only had to look at the faces of the scores of former players and town folk gathering the last few days to know he left behind something far more important than brick and mortar and synthetic turf.

He touched them, leaving his mark on all of them in one way or another.

After the funeral, there was one last road trip, en route to a family plot in Elton, where Caldarera grew up.

That may be the final resting place, but Coach Max will always be a part of Westlake.

So Friday they stood and watched the procession leave the church one more time.

Lights and sirens.

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at shobbs@americanpress.comFormer Westlake High School football coach Max Caldarera. (American Press Archives)

Westlake shows its love to the Max

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