By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
There has never been a more accurate title of an SEC Storied documentary than the one currently playing on the SEC Network about former LSU gymnastics coaching legend D-D Breaux.
“The Fighting Tiger” debuted last Friday at 9:30 p.m. on the SEC Network, so the high target audience of LSU gymnastics fans – sort of a family friendly cult really – could get home in time from that night’s LSU gymnastics meet at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center and watch. No. 2 LSU beat No. 17 Auburn that night, 198.325 to 196.825, to improve to 6-1-1 under coach Jay Clark, who replaced Breaux after the COVID-shortened 2020 season.
And what a documentary they saw. Breaux, 73 and a native of Donaldsonville who was a top youth gymnast and at Southeastern Louisiana, had to fight with LSU athletic directors Paul Dietzel (1978-82) and Joe Dean (1987-2000) to keep the program from being killed after LSU athletic director Carl Maddox (1968-78) hired her in 1977 to start the sport at LSU in 1978.
“Then everything changed when Skip Bertman became athletic director,” Breaux told Tiger Rag Monday. “Before that the LSU athletic department had made the decision twice to get rid of the program.”
HOW TO LISTEN TO TIGER RAG RADIO
Breaux will lead off the statewide Tiger Rag Radio Show Tuesday at 6 p.m.
The show is available online here at https://station.voscast.com/64cd62be67664.
Or listen on one of the following radio stations:
WBRP Talk 107.3 FM in Baton Rouge … Live
KKND 106.7 FM The Ticket In New Orleans … Live
KLWB 103.7 FM The Game in Lafayette … Live
KFNV 107.1 FM in Ferriday … Tape delay at 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesday
KLCJ 104.1 FM in Lake Charles … Live
WAKH 105.7 FM in McComb, Mississippi … Live.
KASO 1240 AM in Minden … Live
KRLQ 94.1 FM in Ruston … Tape delay at 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesday
WSLA 1560 AM in Slidell … Live.
WGSO 990 AM in New Orleans … Tape delay at 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. on Saturday
KBZE 105.9 FM in Morgan City … 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday
And at midnight Tuesday, leading into Wednesday, you can watch the documentary and at 6 a.m. Wednesday. The hour-long, moving film airs again at 1 p.m. Friday. And LSU fans going to see the Tigers host No. 1 Oklahoma (10-0-1) on Friday or watching it on television (8 p.m., ESPN2) can also catch the documentary at 9:30 p.m. Friday and again at 9 a.m. on Saturday.
The film premiered on Feb. 4 at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
“I was very pleased with it,” Breaux said. “It told a true timeline. I thought it caught the essence of me – just a small town girl from Donaldsonville.”
Breaux’s family appear with her discussing their childhood days and how Breaux’s mother got her a doll on Christmas, and a young Breaux told her, “Really?”
But she also had a balance beam for her in the yard.
“My mother was my Title IX,” Breaux said.
The documentary opens with an interview of former LSU national champion gymnast Livvy Dunne, whom Breaux recruited and signed, and Dunne’s parents. LSU women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey is also interviewed. And so is former LSU football coach Nick Saban, whom Breaux asked in person to be interviewed for the documentary while attending the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame ceremonies in Natchitoches last summer in which Saban was inducted.
“She was one of the most well liked in the athletic department,” Saban said.
Bertman provides some of the more poignant interview moments.
“I have tremendous admiration for D-D,” said Bertman, who faced some of the same athletic department hurdles while building the LSU baseball program from the ground up – but not as many as Breaux did.
“D-D was victimized, and there really is no other word. But yet she survived,” Bertman said “And she had wonderful abilities as a coach and motivator.”
Breaux finally had enough with how gymnastics was being treated by the 1990s.
“There was no regard for the safety and well being of our athletes,” Breaux said. “So many inequities. It was awful.”
The gymnastics team practiced in a corner of the fieldhouse with a set of dismount bars attached to a wall that clearly put the gymnasts in danger.
Breaux explained some of these issues in a letter to Dean. When she explains what happened after Dean got the letter, it provides one of the most dramatic moments in the film.
“One of the darkest, worst memories I have,” she says. “One of the assistant athletic directors comes storming in the gym, and I’m standing there with my team. And he took that letter, and he put it in front of my face. And he said, ‘I just want you to know if you ever write another letter like this, the athletic director says you’re going to be fired.’ And he took the letter, and he crumpled it up, pulled (the bottom of) my shirt out and threw it in my shirt. I’m like, ‘I can’t believe you just did that.'”
The documentary also explores Dean’s infamous quote in which he told Breaux and others he was considering starting women’s soccer at LSU instead of bringing back softball because he thought the “soccer girls looked cute in shorts.”
And that was it for Breaux.
“He said that,” Breaux says. “And I was like, ‘Oh, we’re done.'”
But soon, Dean was done with Bertman replacing him, and Breaux was just getting started.
With Bertman taking over as athletic director in 2001, LSU gymnastics soon began to thrive under Breaux as a national power with fifth place national finishes in 2008 and ’13, a third in 2014 and three national runner-up finishes in 2016, ’17 and ’19 along with three of her four SEC titles from 2017-19. Miraculously, Breaux won her first SEC title in just her fourth year in 1981 with the team practicing amid dangerous conditions.
Then four years after her retirement, her hand-picked replacement, Jay Clark, won LSU’s first gymnastics national title in 2024.
“D-D is in that generation of female coaches who fought so hard,” Mulkey said.
She was and is a “Fighting Tiger.”
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