The sun shone brightly in a winter blue sky Saturday in Provo, the same way Patti Edwards smiled — joyfully, warmly and lovingly.
It was exactly the right day to lay to rest the first lady of BYU football.
So those brilliant boys from the 1984 National Championship team and many of the others who won 257 games under the leadership of LaVell and Patti Edwards gathered to say goodbye just a half mile up the hill from the stadium that carries his name.
It wasn’t the kind of funeral where people cry. Patti Edwards died on Feb. 13, a month before she would turn 94.
In fact, the mantra she passed down daily to her children and grandchildren in floods of text messages was “Enjoy the now.”
So it was the kind of funeral where people laughed, celebrated and shared the love they’d received from a remarkable woman. Still, the separation stung.
“It’s the end of an era for many of us,” said one of the 1984 players, defensive end Jim Herrmann. “Coach was gone” — he died in 2016 — “but we could still connect with him through Patti.”
The chapel of the Provo Married Student Housing Stake Center filled with football eminences like four-time Super Bowl champion Andy Reid and the man Patti Edwards helped talk into staying as BYU’s head coach this fall, Kalani Sitake.
Over there was quarterback Robbie Bosco and wide receiver Glen Kozlowski. On the other side was another quarterback, Elder Gifford Nielsen, and tight end Chad Lewis. Quarterback Brandon Doman sat in the back. Wide receiver Ben Cahoon was accompanied by his father-in-law, former Utah Gov. Gary Herbert.
BYU athletic director Brian Santiago sat on the stand. The man he succeeded, four-time Super Bowl champion Tom Holmoe, was nearby. Two of their predecessors sat side by side farther back, Rondo Fehlberg and Val Hale.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent its newly ordained apostle, Elder Clark G. Gilbert. He carried a message from one former BYU and NFL star who didn’t make it.
“LaVell and Patti raised thousands of us, not just the young men who came to play football at BYU, but their wives as well,” wrote Elder Vai Sikahema, who is on assignment in Johannesburg, South Africa, as a General Authority Seventy.
And all of it almost never happened, a grandson revealed. Patti Edwards didn’t want LaVell to leave his head coaching gig at Granite High School and take a job as a BYU assistant coach in 1962.
“I-15 was paved with me dragging my feet from Salt Lake to Provo,” she once told her grandson, Dylan Edwards Cannon.
“Can you imagine if Grandpa caved to my short-sightedness?” she said. “All the lives we touched through football wouldn’t have happened. I’m so grateful your Grandpa didn’t listen to me at that time, but he had no doubt what he needed to do.”
Part of the appeal of LaVell and Patti Edwards was their homespun goodness.
Patti Edwards was a Wyoming rodeo queen who stood up to bullies to protect her classmates.
“We imagined her with a tiara on the brim of smart Stetson,” said her daughter, the former Deseret News columnist Ann Edwards Cannon.
They were subject to delightful malapropisms, too. In fact, soon after they met at Utah State University, she mistakenly introduced LaVell to friends as Ladell Andersen, who was a basketball star at the school.
Patti and LaVell didn’t go to Costco, they went to Costco’s. Patti also always misnamed Provo’s iconic Indian food restaurant.
“She took me weekly to the ‘Bamboo House,’ which actually was the Bombay House,” Dylan Cannon said. “I never bothered correcting her, because I knew it would never make a difference.”
The very best of the couple, married 65 years before he died, was found in their love affair and their devotion to the gospel of Jesus Christ, friends and family said.
A basket at the funeral offered a Hershey’s almond chocolate bar bound in a blue ribbon for everyone who came on Saturday. It was the same gift LaVell brought Patti after every road game, something she could save for the moments she missed him most.
A battered “triple combination” — the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price — sat on a table. A water-stained inscription from LaVell inside the first page said:
“Patti — You are the only person I have ever known that has actually worn out (through use) a triple combination. This and so many other traits make you the very special person you are. Happy Birthday 1980. I love you more than anything in the world. — LaVell."
The couple loved the temple, and they wholeheartedly believed that because they were sealed in marriage there that they would be married eternally. Their heavenly reunion was a frequent subject Saturday.
“It is because of our Savior, Jesus Christ, that Patti will live again,” Elder Gilbert said. “It is because of our Savior, Jesus Christ, that LaVell and Patti had a joyful reunion this week. It is because of Jesus Christ and the covenants that LaVell and Patti entered that their marriage and their family will last forever.”
Here are some of the most tender and fun ways Patti Edwards was remembered Saturday:
The ‘grand dame’
Elder Sikahema’s message from South Africa said Patti Edwards knew each of the players’ wives by name, how they met their husband, the high school they attended and whether they were cheerleaders or played volleyball.
“She taught our wives to be graceful when someone was booing her husband or calling the postgame show to demand his benching,” Sikahema wrote. “She taught them how to add water to the soup or add a few potatoes to a Sunday roast. When stragglers appeared for dinner, she was an amazing missionary and ministering sister. The list of wives who joined the church or were reactivated because of Patti Edwards is long.
“Perhaps more than anything, we all know she loved us. We all acknowledge we were part of that most intense, elite leadership training program which is BYU football. And she was the grand dame of the whole program.”
The gatherer
Patti Edwards connected powerfully to other coaches’ wives, a remarkable transformation for a woman who confessed on their honeymoon that she’d never watched any of her husband’s games. She repented and became a huge football fan.
One year when she accompanied LaVell to the yearly coaches convention, she told two other women they needed their own association. The co-founder later served as president of the American Football Coaches’ Wives Association.
“It’s an organization that’s now about 1,000 strong and is still very, very powerful,” said her son, James “Jimmy” Edwards. “She saw something that wasn’t there. In knitting terms, a lot of us see just yarn, but my mom saw sweaters.”
She’d basically been doing the same thing at BYU for years.
“I’m not surprised that she started the wives college group because she’s a gatherer,” said Michele Fellows Lewis, a BYU volleyball star who married tight end Chad Lewis. “Her love for everyone was really incredible.”
Fellows Lewis remembers the first time she met Patti was at a players’ wives dinner at the Edwards home.
“She gave us a little talk about how important it was to love our husbands when they came home from practice,” Fellows Lewis said, “because they were probably going to be in bad moods sometimes, and probably going to be upset about this or that. She said it is just so valuable to love our husbands as much as we could during those playing years.”
The best advice Patti Edwards gave Fellows Lewis came as the Lewises were graduating, which meant Chad playing in the NFL.
“Michele, do everything you possibly can with Chad, even if it means leaving your kids at home sometimes,” Patti said.
“It’s been such a strength to our marriage that I put him first,” Fellows Lewis said, “and it was because she asked me to. I’ve thought about that on a weekly basis for the last 30 years.”
LaVell and Patti’s NIL contract
Elder Gilbert wondered aloud in his talk how the Edwards would respond to college football today with its Name, Image and Likeness deals for players.
“They had their own NIL contract,” he said. “Name, image and likeness for them stood for the name of Jesus Christ in all the world. Image stood for his image in their countenances. And the likeness stood for them striving to be like him in every way.”
Elder Gilbert said Patti Edwards lived a life that gave peace to her family and many others.
Oak Hills 1st Ward Bishop Andy Collins and Santiago, who is a counselor in the Oak Hill Stake Presidency, said Edwards was a constant positive force in their neighborhood.
“Her convictions were contagious,” Collins said.
“She was so full of good advice and wise counsel,” Santiago said. “She’d always be thankful for things like tickets to games. I’d say, ‘Patti, you are the franchise. LaVell’s name is on the stadium.’ But that’s just who she was.”
Santiago was the bishop of the ward when LaVell died and said he had sacred experiences with Patti during that time.
“I got to see the private side of Patti and LaVell,” he said. “The letters that would show up for people who needed it, including my own kids. They had all the reasons to be above others, but they always remained servants of our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ.”
Emojis and love
Patti Edwards was consistent. She read the Book of Mormon every night. She sent text messages to grandchildren every day. Her texts always included long, seemingly random strings of emojis.
Her texts to her grandkids carried three chief messages: One, you are loved. Two, enjoy the now. Three, the emojis. Her obituary carried one string of them, and a grandson “read” the emojis in his talk Saturday: 🍕🌭🍔🎁🍟🎂 ❤️🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ 🙏❤️🙏.
Each week during the season, she made a game-day stew. When the family returned home, it was ready to eat.
“Quiet. Faithful. Reflective. One day at a time,” her son John Edwards said, describing her constancy. “In a world that celebrates big gestures, my mom lived in small stitches done daily.”
Born in 1932 in Big Piney, Wyoming, Patti Covey Edwards was an award-winning writer, a crossword guru and a knitter extraordinaire.
She loved to hold sisters lunches on Wednesdays, when she and the sisters, daughters and granddaughters would go out to a Mexican restaurant.
She regularly shared a quote from the movie “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”: “Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.”
She loved to gather people around food. She loved her dogs. And she loved people.
“She embraced differences,” John Edwards said. “She embraced different personalities. She embraced different opinions. She embraced different stages of life. She embraced different backgrounds, and she knit them together.”
And she knew how to laugh.
When a Sports Illustrated writer described LaVell as a large, lumpy chap who was something of a poetic and a romantic, he asked her what that meant.
“It means you’re a fat daydreamer,” she said.
Her love prompted 19 grandchildren and spouses to go to the pulpit and share short memories.
“She taught me that life is not one, but a series of personal odysseys,” said her daughter, Ann.
“There is sunshine in my soul today,” her son Jimmy said, “and there is a song of spring in my soul because of my mom’s example of living the gospel, reading scriptures and guiding the way.”
Grandson Nick Edwards echoed his grandmother’s text messages in a message to her during the funeral.
“Grandma,” he said, “remember you are loved.”
