Texas Christian Coach Gary Patterson disagrees with officials during a game earlier this season. (Tony Gutierrez / Associated Press / September 18, 2010)
Reporting from Rozel, Kan. —
Gary Patterson began scheming football plays when he was about 5 years old. His playbook was a piece of paper. His players were made of metal and vibrated all over a metal field when it was electrified.
"He'd write out those plays on that piece of paper, then he'd arrange both sides and he'd turn on the football game," said his mother, Gail, 72.
Gary's brother, Greg, usually was his opponent. They played so often that the game wore out, more than once.
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"When the electricity finally quit on the board, we'd just tap it to get the players to move," Greg, 48, said.
When they weren't indoors, they could be found in the backyard at their one-story, three-bedroom, two-bathroom brick home, where Gary would carefully plan every play of a passing game played among cherry and apple trees.
From his childhood in a no-stoplight southwest Kansas farm town of fewer than 200 people, one whose commercial and residential listings constitute just three pages of the local phone book, Gary Patterson has come a long, hard way.
He held low-paying assistant coaching jobs for more than two decades at 11 schools, including stints at UC Davis and Cal Lutheran.
He lived in basement apartments, washed uniforms, cooked meals and slept in the backs of cars on recruiting trips when budgets were tight.
Texas Christian gave him his first head coaching job. He has held it for 10 seasons and has been wildly successful, winning at least 10 games in seven of his last nine seasons, with consecutive undefeated regular seasons.
On New Year's Day, the Horned Frogs will play in their second consecutive Bowl Championship Series game, meeting Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl.
But Patterson, who has garnered numerous national coaching awards while taking mid-major TCU onto a major stage, asserts that for as far as he has come, he doesn't forget where he started: this town.
"That's my driving point, and I haven't forgotten that driving point," he said.
He still thinks of the lessons he learned here, from a farmer who taught him to properly clear a bean field and from another man who noticed that Patterson had put too much oil in his pickup truck one day when he was a teenager.
"It was probably a quart low," Patterson said, "but I don't know what a quart means then, so I got this gallon jug and I pour it in and I'm driving down the road and this guy pulls me over and says, 'You're smoking out your tailpipe and you've got oil leaking. Did you just put oil in?'
"So he climbs underneath the pickup and lets out about three quarts of oil."
Every time a head coaching job opens at a powerhouse program, Patterson's name is mentioned, which always worries TCU Chancellor Victor Boschini.
"We just hope we can hold on to him," Boschini said.
But every time, even when programs such as Auburn, Tennessee, Minnesota and Iowa have called, Patterson's answer is, simply, no thanks.
He said he likes Fort Worth, what he's building there, and he doesn't want to leave only to find himself in someone else's shadow.
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