I don’t need Sunday’s Hallmark holiday to remember the Mother of all Coaches.
She knew how to get the best out of me, which I admit was no easy feat.
A penchant for daydreaming often turned my dreams of athletic greatness into a nightmare.
The teachers at my high school mostly just shook their heads when I stared out the window instead of at the classroom blackboard.
The old-school coaches of the early 1970s, however, gave no such pass.
They were more likely to slap the side of my head.
Each had his own way of commanding attention.
The football coach liked to snatch the chinstrap off the helmet of another player, sneak up from behind and whack my helmet with the strap’s metal buckle.
The ringing in my ears made it tough to hear the referee’s whistle the rest of the game.
The basketball coach was once enraged by my failure to block out a 6-foot-8 opponent when he tipped in his teammate’s miss.
“What a beautiful stroke, sweetie! Just bend your knees a little and those terrific shots will lift right over the net!”
Rita Patton Robinson
Coach called an immediate timeout … and it most assuredly was not to diagram the next play.
He grabbed a handful of my jersey instead, pushed me backward into the lap of a startled spectator in the gymnasium’s front row, and threatened to knock MY block off.
I suddenly wished I was still wearing that football helmet.
Our scholarly baseball coach, who also taught literature at the school, crushed me in a more subtle way after I’d taken a strike-three call to end a game.
He had me read the final stanza of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” in class the next day.
“This is the way the world ends,” I recited meekly. “Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
It could’ve been worse.
He could’ve been a math teacher, directing me to compute my plummeting batting average on the blackboard for one and all.
Fear and criticism and humiliation are attention-grabbers, for sure. But they mostly just grab you around the throat.
And that’s often how an athlete chokes.
Different Strokes
Nobody clutched my wandering attention better than my first tennis coach.
She didn’t quote poems about hollow men and wastelands. She preferred spiritually uplifting messages.
And she never threatened violence.
She got physical only to give a hearty hug after a halfway decent shot — a warm fuzzy that endured much longer than even the green felt of the tennis balls.
She influenced me more than anyone else who ever wore a whistle.
She was, after all, my mom.
Rita Patton gave tennis lessons all over town, from Muni to Oak Park to the old Pershing Park’s cracked, cement courts.
The countless balls that I whacked into Pershing’s nets of steel mesh made an ugly racket.
But that would be followed by the most wonderful sound a child can hear.
“What a beautiful stroke, sweetie!” Mom would say. “Just bend your knees a little and those terrific shots will lift right over the net!”
I got lifted up right along with them.
An old hobo would occasionally emerge from the bushes to watch.
She once retrieved her spare racket and asked if he cared to play. He was soon clomping around with us in his old, weathered boots.
When he tried to hand the racket back after we’d finished, she pushed a new can of balls into his hands instead.
“They’re yours,” Mom said. “Just remember us to the queen when you play at Wimbledon.”
I let her know on the drive home that I wasn’t happy to share my mother with a hobo.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked. “He’s just a bum.”
“We’re all God’s children,” Mom replied. “Don’t you think He wants us to treat all of His children like our own?”
I was struck by those words of wisdom every time I saw the hobo back on Pershing’s courts, clomping happily in the same boots, hitting the same balls with the same old racket.
Positive reinforcement is virally infectious. I’ve heard it in the voice of my brother Greg, who won the NCAA Men’s Tennis Coach of the Year Award at both UC Irvine and Boise State.
He’d often lighten a player’s mood during an intense moment by using a silly phrase or giving him a goofy nickname.
My sister, Colleen, nephew Garrett and niece Chelsea have also followed Mom’s footsteps into tennis coaching, and they’ve all approached it with the same joyous aplomb.
The only time Mom ever scolded me on the court was when I cursed after a missed shot.
“God won’t want you in heaven if you talk like that,” she told me.
I once caught her muttering a four-letter word of her own after an opponent called “Out!” on her serve during a game of doubles.
I pounced upon the opportunity as though it were a lob floating atop the net.
“Mom!” I declared devilishly as she walked past me back to the service line. “Now you can’t get into heaven!”
“Nah,” she said without breaking stride. “God could see that it was in.”
Mom for All Seasons
Rita Patton became a single mother of seven kids, ages 6 months to 18, when Dad died of cancer at age 45.
She remarried about a decade later — a good man and doubles partner, of course, named Richard Robinson.
But for the years in between, she was forced to cobble an income to support us all. She gave lessons in piano, voice and — of course — tennis. Jerry Hatchett gave her some hours at his Montecito tennis shop.
Marymount, an all-girls high school at the time, also hired her to teach physical education and coach its tennis team.
Mom’s experience dated back to her days as a teenager in Waukegan, Illinois, working as a counselor at a summer sports camp.
Marymount liked her coaching style so much that it asked her to also take over the basketball team.
Her only experience in that sport had come from watching her sons play the game, but the girls of Marymount hung on her every word.
“What a beautiful stroke, sweetie,” she’d say after a missed a shot. “Just square up to the basket next time and it’s sure to go in!”
Mom continued her coaching career at Santa Barbara City College in the late 1970s when it started a women’s tennis program.
It brought her back to a Pershing Park that had been reborn with a new tennis complex. Only the chattering on the courts was the same.
“Great shot, sweetie!”
She stepped down at SBCC when my two youngest sisters, Colleen and Maureen, came up through the junior ranks.
But when Maureen took her turn with the Vaqueros in 1992, new coach Ingrid Schmitz asked Mom to return … as a player. All she had to do was take 12 units.
Mom balked at the suggestion, unsure of what my sister would think about having her mother as a teammate. But Ingrid was so determined to make it happen that she called her to find out.
“Maureen was so happy that she just started screaming,” Schmitz said.
The Western State Conference championship that Mom and daughter helped SBCC win that year came with its own form of melodic celebration:
“Rita would sing for us on all the van rides,” Schmitz said.
She and Maureen were at the genesis of Schmitz’s tennis dynasty at the school, which led to a state championship in 2001 and her upcoming induction into the Vaqueros’ Hall of Fame on May 31.
Mom’s enrollment at SBCC did lead to the most unusual eligibility check ever conducted by its former athletic director, Bob Dinaberg.
“I called the athletic office at Northwestern, which she attended in the ’40s,” he said. “When I asked if she’d played there, they said, ‘Are you kidding?’”
Perfect Harmony
SBCC had already showcased Mom’s ability to astonish eight years earlier.
She was a trained lyric soprano who often sang the national anthem before Santa Barbara Dodger and UC Santa Barbara sporting events.
She was also the daughter of immigrants — a Swedish-born father and Polish-born mother — and knew the Polish national anthem by heart.
Mom was asked to sing it when Poland’s National Men’s Volleyball Team came to SBCC’s Sports Pavilion to play Team USA in an exhibition match before the 1984 Olympics.
It was a fretful time for the Polish players. Their country’s move toward independence had prompted a threatening response from the Soviet Union.
The players were all looking down and fidgeting when they lined up for the anthem. But their heads all rose in unison when Mom began singing each note with resonant emotion.
When she finished, they rushed up to embrace her as though she’d won them all an Olympic gold medal.
Mom also knew curse words in both Polish and Swedish. She said my grandparents used them during their arguments so the other wouldn’t know enough to be offended.
I heard her use one about a decade before her death in 2012. She declared “Sha klef psia krew!” (pronounced shaw-cleff-a-letta) after a call went against her during a match.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
She just smiled and said, “You don’t need to know, sweetie.”
I discovered later that it translates in Polish to “Dog’s blood, damn it.”
I wondered at the time why the Poles consider it such an offensive curse, but I get it now.
They take stock in the old saying that all dogs — God’s creation of loyalty and unconditional love —go to heaven.
And I celebrate this holiday knowing that Mom is right there with them.
