Coe: Herald sports will miss Nick Patterson

A few months ago, my phone buzzed, and I saw Nick Patterson’s name displayed across the screen.

Nick Patterson?

The guy who’d been covering sports at The Daily Herald for over 20 years? Why would he call me?

I wondered who could have died. Who could I know that would be of interest to him? Was it just a dialing error?

I felt pretty certain the call wasn’t to ask how the fam was doing or to talk about the weather.

Nick is a man of few words — but the right words — and he got straight to the point as always.

“You might hang up on me,” he said, “but is there a chance you’d consider coming back to The Herald?”

He explained that he was the new sports editor, and that he thought maybe I had a few game stories left in me to write — even though I’d left The Herald in 2005 to become a teacher. He explained that the hours were bad and the pay was worse, but that we could maybe do some good things together for the paper.

It was the first of many recent stunning events.

A few days after that first conversation, I informed him that I was interested. He then started into what I believe to be the same series of interview questions he was asked when he was hired for a part-time position at The Daily Herald in 1995. It’s worth mentioning that Patterson also uses the same stat sheet he created in the mid-1990s to keep stats during football games. He denies rumors that he uses a ditto machine to copy them.

Why mess something up if it still works? Maybe that’s what he thought about me.

Fortunately, he decided I was still good enough to get the job done, and I started the following week.

Never did I imagine, however, that a few months later I’d be taking his place. Per his Aug. 9 post on x.com, Patterson said that he had been “moved into a different role in the company. It’s been real.”

As is always the case — whether during a conversation or one of his thousands of sports stories — he didn’t waste many words.

I can’t say that I knew him well, but I sure will miss that guy.

I first met Patterson while we covered high school sports at different Heralds around the turn of the millennium — The Daily Herald for me and the Skagit Valley Herald for him. Sometimes after a game up north, I’d interview an athlete while probably talking too much. Patterson would quietly walk up behind with his reporter’s notebook and take notes without saying a thing until I was done with my rambling questions. I used to amuse myself by thinking of him as the “sidler” character from the TV show “Seinfeld.” This is the first time I’ve mentioned this to him or anyone else. Sorry, Nick.

Then, when I was done babbling, he’d ask the athlete a question. I’d stop and think, “Why on Earth didn’t I ask that?”

He’s not one to interrupt or interject. He simply always does things the right way.

Patterson and I haven’t worked together for long, but we’ve both served two stints at The Daily Herald. He was hired as a sports clerk in 1995. He left for the Coeur d’Alene Press in 1998, and then moved to the Skagit Valley Herald before returning to The Daily Herald in 2003 to cover the Everett Silvertips, which was a Western Hockey League expansion team that year.

He’s pretty much done it all since then. Patterson has been a beat reporter for The Silvertips, the AquaSox and the Seahawks in addition to writing columns and covering all the other Seattle pro teams and countless college and high school events. If a sport has been played in the Puget Sound area, he’s probably covered it at least once. If he’s ever made a mistake, I missed it. Patterson is one of the rare people in this business that could have stories printed without needing an edit. There wasn’t going to be anything to fix.

As has been published, the dust is beginning to settle at The Daily Herald after some shakeups here. I was hired in April and received a layoff notice in June. Now I’m the new sports editor. I wish Patterson were still here to give me some ideas. If you’ve got any, please email aaron.coe@heraldnet.com. I’ll need all the help I can get taking over for an Everett sports writing legend.

If there’s a mistake in this piece, it means Patterson wasn’t the one to edit my writing. If he was the one, it’ll probably just say “It’s been real.”