It was early May and John Shulman was livid. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men's basketball coach had just seen rising senior guard Ty Patterson's grades, and they weren't good.
"I was done with Ty," Shulman recalled Monday night, a few minutes after the Mocs defeated Davidson 78-73 to break a five-game losing streak. "I told Amy, 'He let us down. He's gone.'"
Befitting a mother of three young boys, Amy Shulman wasn't about to let her husband give up so easily on one of his players.
"I told John, 'If that was one of our kids, would you do that? Would you want someone else to do that?'" she remembered. "No, and I wasn't going to let him do it to Ty."
This is why we need more women involved in everything from politics to business to sports. This is also why John Shulman climbed in his car on a Monday morning and drove directly to Anderson, S.C., to meet with Ty's father Ricky Patterson and hash out a plan to save the player's career.
"Just Coach Shulman driving down meant a lot," Ricky Patterson said. "He came all the way to South Carolina to talk about Ty. And then he stayed in touch all fall. It's all you could ask a coach to do."
Nine months later, Shulman would joke that he drove there one day too soon. His favorite hot dog stand on the planet, Skins', closes each Monday. So the two dogs covered in ketchup and mustard and the two dogs covered in mustard, chili and onions -- plus the pound cake for dessert -- that the coach orders each time he passes through Anderson couldn't be purchased.
In fact, Shulman is so addicted to the dogs that Ricky Patterson often brought him a few when he drove up to see Ty.
But there would be little socializing on this trip.
"We mapped out a plan for Ty to come back," Shulman said. "It was going to be tough on him."
Ty's whole world was pretty tough at that moment. He didn't have a car. His basketball career was in jeopardy. And Corey Roberts, one of Anderson's most respected black leaders, was in his grill.
"Corey Roberts and Ricky Patterson are friends," Shulman said. "And Corey had been so proud of Ty last year, of him helping get us to the NCAA tournament and all that. But when he heard about Ty's grades he told him, 'We finally get a young African-American that all the kids around here can look up to, and you do this?' I think Ty felt about two inches tall."
But he came back to school and worked harder than he ever had, both on the court and off, so hard that he made the honor roll for the fall semester. So hard that once his eight-game suspension ended, Ty scored 16 points during his first game back against Mississippi Valley State, then 22 against Georgia Tech.
Monday night he looked toward Amy Shulman, smiled and said, "If it weren't for her, I wouldn't be here."
Alas, it hasn't all been a fairytale return. The Mocs are only 10-11 since Patterson returned to the lineup. Though he leads the team in scoring at 15 points a game and minutes played (33 a game), he admitted late Monday that the losses have taken their toll.
"It's just great to get a win after being down so long," he said after scoring 20 points in his final home game.
How many more wins this team will get is tough to figure. Two regular-season games remain before the Southern Conference tourney begins next week in Charlotte. There isn't much time left to better UTC's current 14-15 record.
But for all those currently angry with the direction of this program, the following quote from Patterson deserves to be repeated often.
Said the Mocs' lone senior of his coach: "He's made me a better man in life."