He walked into homes of high school football recruits in the early 1970s with a caramel tan, biceps that didn’t lie, and a shock of black hair that appeared borrowed from the baddest man in the mob, smelling like cologne and cigar smoke and winning.
If you want to define how winning looked and smelled in that era, Pat Collins was your man.
During a eulogy so appropriate for Coach Collins in February, his former player Denny Duron remembered with joy and a lingering amount of reverence that picture, that smell, that scratch ’n’ sniff memory of a young and slick Pat Collins coming to Duron’s humble home in Shreveport to sign the receiver from Captain Shreve.
“Wait,” Duron remembers thinking, there in the Durons’ little den with Denny’s parents and a prep senior and an undersized former lineman and current Louisiana Tech defensive coordinator who filled up every room he ever walked into.
“Wait,” Denny remembered thinking. “Just … wait a minute. I’d never … this is the coolest guy I’ve ever seen.”
But Denny wasn’t going to college. Was going straight to seminary. Seminary, then the pulpit. Except …
“Maybe you should just go over to Ruston and … check it out,” his dad said.
“Just go see,” mom said.
Coach Collins could do that to you. Just his presence. Some sort of electricity that hit you either positively or negatively. There was no neutral ground with the guy his peers called “Collie.” But if you bought in, no matter how wild the ride, it seemed always to end up with both of you holding a trophy.
When Denny and some of his friends had finished playing in 1974, they’d switched the receiver to quarterback, the Bulldogs had gone 44-4, and Collie, sometimes suave and debonair, sometimes sweaty and profane, had fired up more than one national championship cigar.
Smelled like cologne and cigar smoke. And winning.
He’d go on to a nasty break with Tech, to a national championship at Northeast (now ULM), to a Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame career. Lots of stories in between, many of them shared at that February service celebrating his 84 years.
In The Pentecostals of the Twin Cities sanctuary in West Monroe, three or four really good football teams were there, just older. During the coffee drinking and storytelling and handshaking and backslapping, no fights broke out between the Tech and Northeast players — but had that happened, it wouldn’t have been totally inappropriate. It might have even been a bit nostalgic, and everyone would have smiled and bearhugged at the end because it had been the same leader of the band, the man being honored, who’d taught both sides to carry that edge.
Some of us there that bright afternoon had played for him or alongside him. Some of us had worked for him. Some of us had coached with him. Some of us had written stories about him and his teams.
Some of us had walked with him to old Parkview Elementary School on Laurel Street, to Queensborough Middle, to Fair Park High. Two of us had called him daddy, and several of the younger ones had called him granddad. One of us had been married to him, for 65 years.
Who knows how many others would have been there if they could have.
So while they couldn’t hear Elvis’ recording of “Amazing Grace” as we did, while they couldn’t hear Kenny Chesney sing “Coach,” while they couldn’t hear the preacher remind us of Job’s testimony — “the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”— a good word to spotlight the joy of promises fulfilled in a world not yet perfect, most of those whose lives were touched by Coach Collins could hear, as we did, his voice, his booming, sometimes gravely, always demanding and encouraging voice.
Because of all the coaches and teachers and mentors in a life, there is always That One Voice that you hear most clearly when the chips are down, when it’s time to get it done. And for most of us there, it is more likely than not the voice of Coach Collins that booms in our heads more than the voice of any other.
It was his voice then and it is now, and surely always will be.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu
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