For almost every day of the 27 years that Donald Lee Patterson coached the Ringgold High School football team, he was known as anything but an emotional roller coaster.
"Very level," Lee Shell, the school's assistant athletic director and head junior varsity football coach, said Tuesday afternoon. "Coach Patterson didn't yell a lot. I've called him a gentle giant and he was."
But one opponent could elevate Patterson's blood pressure. It's the school the Tigers will host this Friday night: longtime rival Lake-view-Fort Oglethorpe.
"Him being a Ringgold grad, playing Lakeview-F.O. was never a typical game," the 48-year-old Shell added. "You'd see a little more fire in his eyes that week. It might not seem as much like it now, but back then (Shell graduated from Ringgold in 1986) that game was like Georgia-Georgia Tech or Alabama-Auburn. It was a big deal."
For more than a few folks around northwest Georgia, Patterson's absence will be a big issue Friday night. The former University of Tennessee standout died July 22 after a long struggle with Alzheimer's. He was 78.
Due to his illness, he hadn't recently attended games, though he remained a fixture around the school long after his retirement in 1998.
"As a person, Don Patterson was solid as a rock," recalled Chattanooga Christian football coach Mark Mariakis, who completed his student teaching requirement at RHS during his senior year at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and later coached at LFO.
"He was also the athletic director, and his character carried into all programs at Ringgold. Win or lose, he was a top-notch, first-class competitor. I've never heard anyone say a bad word about him."
How could they? When longtime Ringgold coach and administrator Danny Vest delivered Patterson's eulogy, he recalled meeting a woman in one of his classes at UTC when he was completing his masters.
"She asked me, 'Do you work with Don Patterson?'" Vest said. "I said yes, that Coach Patterson was my football coach. She then said that she was at UT the same time that Coach Patterson was and that he was the most respected student on that campus."
That never changed. The young man who started from 1958 to 1960 at UT as both an offensive and defensive lineman for coach Bowden Wyatt, the young man who often hitchhiked back and forth to Ringgold from Knoxville to remain close to his family and friends, came back to his hometown for good in 1961.
By then he'd already married his hometown sweetheart Norma Lane (Miss Lakeview High School) at Burning Bush Baptist Church, where he became a deacon and Sunday School teacher. They remained a couple until her death in 2013.
Said daughter Donya of his Big Orange football career, perhaps the highest praise one could heap on any Volunteer: "Daddy never lost to Alabama."
The Vols also beat a top-ranked LSU squad during his time there and played in two bowl games when that was still special.
But that's not really why the playing surface at Ringgold's stadium is known as Donald L. Patterson Field, or why there's a granite monument near one end zone that's highlighted by a handsome bronze plaque bearing his likeness.
To return to Vest's heartfelt eulogy: "He always told us to treat our athletes the way we wanted to be treated. I had an incident early in my career which made this teaching personal. I had a player who made a big mistake. It was my decision on how to handle this. I (told Patterson) that I was going to kick her off the team.
"He cleared his throat, put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'You would be justified in doing that and I will back you up, but remember if you kick them off the team you can no longer influence them in the right way.' He said this in that soft voice that he had, but the message was as loud to me as thunder. I learned a valuable lesson on how to treat people. You can be as hard on people under your control as you need to be, as long as they know you love them and want the best for them."
No one coaches 27 years, runs an athletic department at that same school for 28 years and has the field dedicated in his honor a second time after tornadoes ravaged the school in 2011 without treating people the right way.
This is not to say he never chose tough love as a disciplinary tool. When Vest, then a Ringgold ninth-grader in 1963, once talked while Patterson was out of the room, "He lit me up, and I never needed to be paddled again."
Yet the soft side won out far more often, especially when he was dealing with those less fortunate, such as special needs student John Moss, whose brother David was arguably the best Tigers basketball player ever before later losing his life to cancer.
It says a lot about Patterson that a few feet down from his monument stands a nearly identical one of John Moss.
"It is said the measure of a man is how he treats the defenseless," Vest said in his eulogy. "Coach Patterson's treatment of John added to John's quality of life more than anyone could ever measure. He made John a member of the coaching staff and a member of the football team. John's favorite saying was 'Coach Patterson is my daddy.'"
For that reason and many others, if there's not fire in the eyes of the Ringgold fans looking out on Donald L. Patterson Field on Friday night, there might be something in them more the consistency of rain.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.