Overview:
Bishop Diego High and UCSB graduate ranked fourth all-time with 808 coaching victories when he retired from college tennis
I am a night person. I can’t fall asleep before midnight.
I say it’s because of my chosen profession — the late hours that go with covering sports. But I know better.
It’s really all because of my older brother.
Sports were also the center of Greg Patton’s universe. He’ll be inducted into the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table Hall of Fame on Monday night.
He earned this place of honor by coaching 808 men’s tennis victories before his retirement at Boise State five years ago.
The total placed him fourth all-time in NCAA Division I history. He won NCAA Coach of the Year honors at both UC Irvine in 1987 and Boise 10 years later.
Greg and his wife, Christa, also raised two children, Chelsea and Garrett, who were inspired enough to follow him into tennis as college athletes and coaches.
A younger brother, however, is a tougher sell.
We fought the typical sibling rivalry. But I admit that his prodding and pushing and sometimes even punching helped mold me from the lump of sofa-lounging clay that I could have remained.
We shared bunk beds — I got the upper berth — and he spent a good part of our evenings yapping about what he planned to do with his life.
He’d prattle on one night about saving the world as president of the United States. The next night it would be about saving a World Series game as a baseball pitcher.
I dismissed his bedtime stories as “Brother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes.”
But Greg couldn’t be shaken from his ridiculous expectations of becoming the next John F. Kennedy … or the next Jerry West … or the next Gandhi.
I kept hoping he’d become the next Marcel Marceau and just shut up. But whenever he’d sense me nodding off, he’d give my mattress a kick from below without breaking sentence.
I’ll still sometimes jerk to attention when I doze, half-expecting a foot to be coming up through the cushion.
Daytime was worse. Greg would drag me away from TV cartoons for one-on-one games of basketball, or to body surf at Hendry’s Beach, or to camp out somewhere in the backcountry.
He had us on the move at all times.
Once that meant eluding the bear that we’d startled at the foot of Mount Lassen. Another time it was to sprint from the angry hornets whose nest we’d cracked open in Los Padres National Forest.
He got his motivation from underdogs. He considered Rocky to be an instructional film. I was more interested in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Brothers in Arms
Greg was 23 months older than me and the eldest of seven kids in the family of Santa Barbara News-Press sports editor Phil Patton.
He was the typical big brother. He was my biggest antagonizer and my greatest protector.
I once suffered a bus ride home from La Cumbre Junior High School during which an older bully kept slapping my head from behind.
Greg tackled the brute once we got off at the next stop. When the bully scrambled to his feet, he knocked him down again with one punch to the nose.
“Don’t ever pick on my brother again!” Greg declared as the bully made his retreat. “I’m the only one allowed to do that!”
He was as ambitious as he was fearless. But he was also more likely to break an ankle than a record. His body was a lightning rod for bad luck.
Once, as we played a game of army in a creek bed with a neighborhood buddy, a kid from another street declared war.
The three of us had him outnumbered, but our sticks were no match for his BB rifle.
He began firing down at us from a bridge. I thought it was a kick, dodging those tiny metal peas as they pinged at my feet. But somehow, one of the BBs drilled Greg right through his right eyeball.
He was totally blind for months — the shock of the injury also affecting his left eye — and he never regained use of the injured one.
His nickname around the neighborhood became “Deadeye,” and it wasn’t because his basketball shooting reminded anyone of Jerry West.
But even that couldn’t shut up Greg at bedtime. The dreams continued unabated.
His jump shot now went awry, and he could no longer hit the curve ball. It would disappear outside the periphery of his damaged vision.
One of them failed to curve and blindsided my brother in the side of the helmet. It was his last season of baseball.
Courting a New Love
He was still determined to make a name deserving mention in our father’s sports section. He finally found the right racket to pursue when our mother suggested the game of tennis.
Mom was a player in her own right, and she dutifully trained Greg on the courts of local parks.
He soon graduated to center court at Municipal as the protégé of Mike Koury, Santa Barbara’s longtime tennis pro.
Greg and a few of his buddies helped create a 1970s tennis dynasty at Bishop Diego High School. He also started a school newspaper and became student body president.
By age 19, he was playing tennis for UC Santa Barbara.
By 20, he was running for City Council. He nearly won a seat even though his only affordable tool of advertising was his silver tongue and the size-13½, Adidas Stan Smith tennis shoes that he’d stick into every doorway while campaigning.
By 22, he was in Ghana, setting up recreational programs as a Peace Corps volunteer.
If he couldn’t be the next JFK, at least he could help serve the martyred president’s mission to save the world.
But like that 1-in-a-million BB shot, an African parasite targeted my brother. Greg contracted a near fatal case of dysentery.
The doctors in Accra had to medivac him to an American military hospital in Germany. It in turn medivacked him to a hospital in the United States after failing to eradicate the parasite.
The doctors there soon advised Mom to summon a Catholic priest to Greg’s bedside.
Instead of giving last rites, the friar found himself listening to my brother’s plans for the future.
A Call to Coach
Within months of his recovery, he was back on the courts as a city tennis instructor. He moved up from there to become an assistant to UCSB men’s tennis coach Gary Ogden.
When Ogden stepped down unexpectedly, Greg became the Gauchos’ head coach at the tender age of 24.
Our father had died of cancer five years earlier, so he also became the life coach for all his siblings. He molded two of them, Colleen and Maureen, into nationally ranked tennis players.
I could hear our mother in his positive voice of reinforcement.
“You’re going to be the next Chrissie Evert!” he’d tell my sisters while pounding tennis balls their way.
Greg never became the next Rod Laver, but he did help several generations of tennis players become the next Pete Sampras and Jim Courier. He coached them both on the U.S. Junior National Team.
He also took Team USA to Fidel Castro’s Cuba for the 1989 Pan American Games. The idea of taking on JFK’s old nemesis fired him up with even greater fervor.
Greg also coached World TeamTennis for 13 years, earning its Coach of the Year Award in both 1993 and 1995.
He’d even put a positive spin to his defeats, once shrugging off a loss in the WTT finals with the Newport Beach Dukes.
“At least now I won’t have to feel guilty about all the rioting that would’ve taken place during the celebrations in Newport Beach,” he joked.
My brother never met a metaphor he didn’t like. He called himself “The Johnny Appleseed of Tennis” when the United States Tennis Association hired him as a national junior coach.
“I’m to spread the seed of tennis and then hope there’s a lot of fertilizer,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
Nobody spread it better.
One of Greg’s biggest sales efforts was to bring the Davis Cup to Boise, Idaho. He pestered the International Tennis Federation enough times that it finally relented and awarded the city a 2013 quarterfinal match between the United States and Serbia.
Only my brother could get the likes of Novak Djokovic to play a high-stakes tennis match inside Boise’s Taco Bell Arena.
His return to Santa Barbara this week included the celebration of his son’s wedding. During his toast at Saturday’s reception, he expressed hope that Garrett and Alaina would someday give him a grandchild to coach.
He’s got a few more bedtime stories he needs to tell.