Long road leads Texas Christian Coach Gary Patterson to the Rose Bowl

Gary Patterson began scheming football plays when he was about 5 years old. His playbook was a piece of paper. His players were made of metal and vibrated all over a metal field when it was electrified.

“He’d write out those plays on that piece of paper, then he’d arrange both sides and he’d turn on the football game,” said his mother, Gail, 72.

Gary’s brother, Greg, usually was his opponent. They played so often that the game wore out, more than once.

“When the electricity finally quit on the board, we’d just tap it to get the players to move,” Greg, 48, said.

When they weren’t indoors, they could be found in the backyard at their one-story, three-bedroom, two-bathroom brick home, where Gary would carefully plan every play of a passing game played among cherry and apple trees.

From his childhood in a no-stoplight southwest Kansas farm town of fewer than 200 people, one whose commercial and residential listings constitute just three pages of the local phone book, Gary Patterson has come a long, hard way.

He held low-paying assistant coaching jobs for more than two decades at 11 schools, including stints at UC Davis and Cal Lutheran.

He lived in basement apartments, washed uniforms, cooked meals and slept in the backs of cars on recruiting trips when budgets were tight.

Texas Christian gave him his first head coaching job. He has held it for 10 seasons and has been wildly successful, winning at least 10 games in seven of his last nine seasons, with consecutive undefeated regular seasons.

On New Year’s Day, the Horned Frogs will play in their second consecutive Bowl Championship Series game, meeting Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl.

But Patterson, who has garnered numerous national coaching awards while taking mid-major TCU onto a major stage, asserts that for as far as he has come, he doesn’t forget where he started: this town.

“That’s my driving point, and I haven’t forgotten that driving point,” he said.

He still thinks of the lessons he learned here, from a farmer who taught him to properly clear a bean field and from another man who noticed that Patterson had put too much oil in his pickup truck one day when he was a teenager.

“It was probably a quart low,” Patterson said, “but I don’t know what a quart means then, so I got this gallon jug and I pour it in and I’m driving down the road and this guy pulls me over and says, ‘You’re smoking out your tailpipe and you’ve got oil leaking. Did you just put oil in?’

“So he climbs underneath the pickup and lets out about three quarts of oil.”

Every time a head coaching job opens at a powerhouse program, Patterson’s name is mentioned, which always worries TCU Chancellor Victor Boschini.

“We just hope we can hold on to him,” Boschini said.

But every time, even when programs such as Auburn, Tennessee, Minnesota and Iowa have called, Patterson’s answer is, simply, no thanks.

He said he likes Fort Worth, what he’s building there, and he doesn’t want to leave only to find himself in someone else’s shadow.

“A guy wrote an article a while back that said no matter who’s at Alabama, it’ll always be Bear’s house,” Patterson said. “You go through it and, for me, we’re within 11 or 12 victories of being the all-time winningest staff at TCU.”

Patterson then pointed to an eight-year-old picture in his office that shows him sandwiched between Joe Paterno of Penn State and Bobby Bowden of Florida State.

“Coach Paterno, he still calls me kid, and that’s where my place is,” said Patterson, a stocky 50-year-old with a boyish face

Cordial off the field, Patterson is best known for his sideline intensity, which often causes him to sweat through his shirt by halftime.

“He just flips a switch,” said star linebacker Tank Carder, who, like many of TCU’s players, was not highly recruited. “It’s Coach Patterson at his best. He’s going to be hard on you, he’s going to yell at you, but he knows that’s what he’s got to do to have a great program for all his kids.”

That fiery attitude was something Patterson displayed as an all-state linebacker and fullback at Pawnee Heights High and at Kansas State, where he walked on as an undersized strong safety and linebacker after two seasons at Dodge City Community College.

“He’d hold his teammates accountable back then,” said Bob Majeski, a teammate at Kansas State when Patterson played there in 1980 and 1981. “He’d get after them, same as he does now. That’s the backbone of who he is.”

His former neighbor Ed Taylor, 54, calls Patterson a “hell of an athlete,” but he was quite the musician too.

In grade school, he was the lead singer and guitarist for a band named Walk On Easy, and his mother said he later sent songs to Nashville, where she said he might be today if that career had panned out.

All of his shouting has left Patterson’s singing voice raspy, but the guitar lessons he took when he was young haven’t left him. Neither have the hard times he endured to reach this point.

“No one has given it to him,” Greg Patterson said. “He’s earned every bit of it.”

Gary Patterson’s future looks bright, especially with TCU moving to the Big East Conference, which has automatic qualification status with the BCS, in 2012.

But right now he is savoring his chance to lead his team in the Rose Bowl, a game he used to watch at home, on a few occasions cheering for USC tailback O.J. Simpson to break free.

When the game is over, Patterson plans to redecorate a back wall in his office, which is lined with photos of TCU’s Sun Bowl win against USC in 1998, when he was the Horned Frogs’ defensive coordinator.

That win, he said, is what changed things for TCU. It beat the type of program he hopes to build in Texas — a private-school power. And since he considers the Rose Bowl to be a second home for USC, well, photos of his team in that classic game will make for a perfect fit.

baxter.holmes@latimes.com