Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  It begins with Michelle looking over her shoulder as she dribbles in a scrimmage and wondering what in blazes this woman is doing, three feet behind her, down on one knee and squatting lower and lower as if the view at sneaker level might reveal some hidden flaw, slapping the floor with her palm at her latest find, hanging on Michelle’s next decision as if life itself were riding on it, leaning right with her as she cuts and leans in for a layup, and then, daggone it, the anguished squinch of Pat’s cheeks and punch of her fist if Michelle misses, the disappointment even sharper than Michelle’s. And the thing is, that intensity never flags, not for a day or an hour or a minute. Suddenly, in the midst of a seemingly splendid practice, Pat might shout “Hold it! Stop! Everyone stop!” and stride toward Michelle, the way she strode one day toward forward Lisa Harrison.

  “Lisa!”

  “Yes, Pat?”

  “What have you done for your team today?”

  “Well, uh . . . I . . . I don’t know.”

  “That’s exactly my point!”

  Whoo boy. Who else demands that her players sit in the first three rows of their classes and forbids them a single unexcused absence? Who else finds out about every visit they make to the mall for a new pair of jeans, every trip to a restaurant or a movie, and always mentions it the next day, so that it seems they can do nothing without her knowing it? Who else, at the end of a three-hour practice, times the suicide sprints on the big scoreboard clock? Who else films every practice and then sits through it all over again, so that if a player is fool enough to question a single one of her criticisms, Pat takes her right to the videotape in her office and stops the dang thing so often to prove she’s right that it takes an hour to cover the first 10 minutes? Who carries five VCRs on road trips and watches tape of her opponents while she works out on the treadmill while she scribbles POINTS OF EMPHASIS on a notepad while she talks on the phone with an assistant—all after she has read a book to her son, Tyler, and put him to bed?

  Imagine living with that. For the longest time even Pat couldn’t imagine who could imagine it, until she found R. B. Summitt, whom she married in 1980, her sixth season at Tennessee. A man secure in his own profession as vice president of his family’s bank, a man born to the first female pilot in Monroe County, Tennessee, a man unthreatened by a woman with a life all her own. Sure, sometimes he goes off the deep end in the heat of action and yells things at opposing teams that she wouldn’t, but Pat can live with that. She knows what it is to enter another realm during a game. For her, it’s the one time when Time lets go of her, when it even seems to stop.

  Yes, Michelle could almost smell what the pair of Vanderbilt researchers found when they hooked up some visiting coaches to a cardiac monitor one year back in the ’80s. Pat’s heartbeat and blood pressure, the fastest and highest of all the coaches’ during the action on the court, plummeted when a timeout was called, to the lowest of them all. There’s no huddle you would rather be in with 20 ticks left in a tie game. First, Pat would tap the 60-plus years of coaching experience with which she surrounds herself, consulting swiftly with her staff: DeMoss, with her uncanny ability to see what all 10 players were doing on the floor; Holly Warlick, who had the game seared into her soul as Pat’s point guard in the late ’70s; and Al Brown, who could study video and spot the neck twitch that indicated that the opposing team’s forward was about to drive left. Then Pat would make her decision, kneel on a stool in front of her players and pull them into her dead-sure eyes. The Lady Vols would drink in this calm assurance and intensity. Ten players would walk back onto the court. Five of them knew that their coach had just given them the way to win.

  Michelle is determined to be one of those five, to let Pat jump down her throat and pull out her dream. To nod and chirp “Rebound!”—as every Lady Vol is expected to do when she’s corrected—louder than anyone. To look Pat flush in the eye because there’s nothing that makes the lady crazier than a player who looks away from The Look, who tries to evade those two blue drill bits digging into her skull. Pat actually dips her knees, lowers herself to catch the girl’s yellow-belly eyeballs, locks in on them and lifts them, and if that fails, she barks, “Look me in the eyes!” She wants to see the girl’s eyes blaze right back at her, to say, “All right, lady, I’ll show you!” To blaze like hers did back when Daddy would inspect the tobacco plants from which she had been pulling suckers for eight hours under a 90-degree sun and find the one damn sucker she had missed—that’s what Pat wants to see. In a critical moment, if she doesn’t get what she wants, her neck goes blotchy red, and a vein pops out, and you can look at it and see her heart kicking.

  Michelle will do anything to appease that heart. She’ll go over, under, through any obstacle and come up pumping her fist. Crash, her teammates start calling her, and the Tennessee basketball fans love her. She’ll hang out at Pat’s office like a faithful puppy, write Pat birthday and Christmas and Mother’s Day cards. She’ll stick a note on the windshield of Pat’s car a week before practice saying EIGHT MORE DAYS! I CAN’T WAIT! and make Pat grin for an hour—heck, sounds exactly like something Pat would say! She’ll do anything for Pat . . . except give up her game.

  It drives Pat bonkers. She leaves her office and jogs across campus, wondering, What is it with this girl? You keep telling her to slow down, to make better decisions, to forget the spin move, to throw the simple 10-foot chest pass instead of the blind 40-foot bounce pass, and she keeps nodding her head, but 30 seconds later, there’s the dang thing again! Never met a girl so strong-willed in my life.

  One day a man named Bill Rodgers, a Knoxville car dealer whose passion and part-time occupation he calls “performance enhancing,” looks at the results of the Predictive Index personality test he’s administered to Michelle and Pat. “It’s amazing,” he tells Pat. “It’s like looking at a young you. Michelle’s more concerned with image, with wanting to be loved, but as for almost everything else—ambitious, competitive, outgoing, leadership, stubbornness, willingness to take on all the responsibility under extreme pressure—you could literally be mother and daughter!”

  The bond between them keeps deepening. Pat just smiles. If Michelle is just like her—well, then, Pat knows just what to do. She’ll ride her harder still, harder than she’s ridden anyone before. “Defense?” Pat hollers. “You call that defense, Michelle? I thought you wanted to be a leader. How can I take you to war with me? Don’t try to tell me! I’ve been coaching longer than you’ve been alive!

  “You’re gold-digging again, Michelle! Are you going to be the showboat or be on the showboat? Well, I’ll just sit you, Michelle. Because I know you love to play and hate to sit—right, Michelle? That kills you, doesn’t it, Michelle?”

  In front of anyone, this could happen. In front of 10 strangers, Knoxville business leaders and their spouses invited into the Lady Vols’ locker room as “guest coaches” on game nights, most of them staring at the floor and praying Pat doesn’t suddenly turn on them.

  She half kills Michelle that first year. Makes her sit for half of every game as a backup shooting guard, sit and watch Tiffany Woosley run the team at point guard. Michelle’s determined not to cry in front of Pat, because Pat would never cry; when she did, her daddy only spanked her harder. Michelle digs her top teeth into her bottom lip when Pat tears into her. It’s the same thing Pat has done so many times in her life that there’s a little indent on the right side of her lower lip. Michelle turns away and grinds her teeth—how could this be happening to the girl who won the Greg Tatum Award in eighth grade as her school’s most Christlike child? She holds everything in until she gets home, then cries her eyes out. She drives her red Honda to a stream in the Great Smoky Mountains near Gatlinburg, sits and listens to the water and thinks, What is it with this crazy woman? I’m giving everything I have, but everything’s not enough for her. There’s something driving her, bigger than what drives anybody in the world. What is it?

  It’s growing mutually, magnetically, their frustration with and affec
tion for each other. If Michelle could just pigeonhole Pat as the tyrant, it would be so much easier. But Pat’s the woman you wish you could cook like and water-ski like and chat up the cashier like and toss off one-liners like. Pat’s the life of the party.

  How does she do it? How could she turn your name into an obscenity on the court, then walk off it and become your mom? How could a woman be transformed that completely, so that when you sit in her office, she leans toward you to connect with you, the flesh around those piercing eyes wrinkling in concentration, and invariably asks what you think the team needs and then, as you’re getting ready to leave, asks if you think her beige shoes go with her white skirt. Not to con you or charm you, because you would eventually sniff that out. She asks so intently that it seems the two of you are the only ones in the universe, so honestly that you smell the unsure girl beneath the awe-inducing coach.

  Then, bang, you and she are done, and her eyes are flashing to her day planner, the one she keeps gorging with duties, 10:25 appointments crowbarred between 10:15s and 10:30s. All etched in perfect calligraphy, this hand-to-hand combat with Time, with neat arrows pointing to peripheral obligations that she can attend to simultaneously, without assigning them a minute of their own, with key meetings underlined and very important appointments blinking exclamation points!!!! Soon Michelle and all her teammates are carrying day planners, opening them together at Pat’s command to fill up a stray half hour here, a vagrant hour there, even to transcribe her annual reminder in late October: Don’t forget to turn back your clocks one hour! Soon it’s an epidemic, this guilt over a moment lost.

  Where’s she from, this woman? What incubated her? Manhattan or Chicago? A surgeon daddy and a mama lawyer? No, people tell you. She’s a farm girl. A farm girl from middle Tennessee, where the sun is the clock, Nature calls the rhythm, and women know their place. How can that be? “Take me there,” Michelle asks Pat one day. “I want to meet your family and see where you grew up.” Michelle’s changing her major to psychology. She has to figure this lady out.

  “Can’t,” says Pat. “NCAA won’t let me take you. Someday we’ll do it, Michelle. When all this is done.”

  So Michelle must play detective, cobble together scraps. The memories of Pat’s former players, an anecdote from a newspaper article, the reply to a brave question she might throw at Pat. Little clues, like that scar on Pat’s left knee. Slowly—it takes years—a picture begins to appear. A fuzzy, grainy picture . . .

  . . . of a face, a young woman’s face, hair sweat-plastered around its edges. A young woman alone at night in a gym. She’s running 15 more suicides because she missed a foul shot at the end of her two-hour workout. Pat has flung off her knee brace; it’s a crutch, she tells herself, and she’s never going to wear it again. Now you can see that scar, blazing red.

  A year has passed since she tore her anterior cruciate ligament during her senior season at Tennessee-Martin. A year since the orthopedic surgeon examined the knee and told Pat, “Forget it.” It’s 1974, and many men playing big-time sports are finished after tearing an ACL. A woman? Just forget it.

  Fix it, Tall Man told the surgeon. Tall Man is what the hired help called her father, Richard. Fix it right, he said, because Pat’s going to play for the U.S. in Montreal in 1976, when women will play basketball for the first time in Olympic history. Pat swallowed hard because until Daddy said it, she didn’t know she was going to do that. When her best friend, Jane Brown, walked into the hospital room a few minutes later, Pat blurted, “That doctor’s crazy as heck if he thinks I’m not going to play ball again!” Then everyone left her room, and she hobbled to the window, drew the curtains and cried herself to sleep.

  Now she has to make Tall Man’s prediction come true. She has to lose 15 pounds, rehabilitate her knee and work out twice a day to make the Olympics . . . while she’s teaching four phys-ed courses at Tennessee, while she’s taking four courses to get her master’s degree, while she’s coaching the women’s basketball team. Three-mile run at 6 a.m., weights at 6:30, shower, rush to the gym to teach, dash to the lecture hall to take the exercise-physiology and sports-administration classes, sprint back to the gym to coach a two-and-a-half-hour practice, hop in the car to go scout a local high school player, burn rubber back to the gym for two hours of basketball training and sprints, shower again and hightail it home by midnight to study for the biomechanics midterm.

  She’s 22. She was hired to be the women’s assistant basketball coach, only to learn a few weeks later that the head coach had resigned to pursue her doctorate, so the head job’s hers. She has no assistant. She has never coached a game. She’s scared, the way she was that day when she was 12 and Tall Man dropped her off in the middle of miles of hay, pointed to the tractor and the hay rake and said, “Do it,” then drove away. What’s she going to do now, 10 years later? The only thing she knows. She’ll be her father. Her players can be her.

  At first it’s glorified intramurals, a tryout sheet posted on a bulletin board inviting women to play in front of four or five dozen fans on a shadowy floor crisscrossed by badminton, volleyball and basketball lines. Pat digs in. She sweeps floors, tapes ankles, sets out the chairs and towels, washes the uniforms on road trips. She drives the team to road games in a van, her head poked out the window to keep her awake on the drive home at 2 a.m. Behind her, her players glance at each other when the rain stops and the windshield dries and the wipers keep squeaking, squeaking, squeaking. No one musters the courage to utter a word.

  She doesn’t lose 15 pounds. She loses 27. She sits on the edge of a table, pokes her foot through the handles of a sack full of bricks and lifts till her knee screams, but never when her players are around to see her. She makes the ’76 Olympic team—a cocaptain and the oldest player, at 24, on the U.S. roster that shocks the field and comes home with a silver medal. She takes the Lady Vols to the Final Four seven months later, in her third year as coach. She gets her master’s degree in physical education. She has learned she can do it: She can overpower Nature and outmuscle Time—at least for a while, just like men do. She has learned, thanks to her father, about human will. How can she settle for filling her players with want . . . now that she knows the psychic power of expect?

  You think she’s tough now, Michelle? Oh, please, the Lady Vols with crow’s feet tell her at the annual alumnae reunions. You should’ve seen Pat back then! How about that time she found out we had that all-night party, and she set up trash cans at each corner of the court and ran us till we puked in them? How about that all-night, eight-and-a-half-hour drive home after we lost in Cleveland, Mississippi—no stops, bladders and bellies be damned? What about the 2 a.m. practice after we drove three hours back from the loss at Vandy, the game Pat’s father saw and told her he’d seen a better game the night before between sixth-graders? Yeah, ever notice how quick she was, after the games her father attended, to ask people, “What did my dad say?” What about that time we fell apart in the second half at South Carolina, went straight to the locker room when we got back the next day and had to put on those smelly uniforms that had been locked in the trunk all night, and Pat hollered, “Now you’re going to play the half you didn’t play last night!”

  Pat leads the Lady Vols to the Final Four six more times over the next nine years—and wins none of them, her teams always just a little short on talent. Forget the first Olympic gold medal in U.S. women’s basketball history, the one won by Pat’s ’84 team—heck, a half hour later Pat forgets it. Just imagine what all those fruitless Final Fours do to Tall Man’s daughter. If you’re Pat’s roommate during the early years in Knoxville, before Pat has a husband at age 28 and a child at 38, before there are videos of opponents to watch until she’s cross-eyed, you love it when another big game’s approaching. Because when you wake up, the white tornado has struck again—the whole apartment’s gleaming!

  Price tag? Oh, you bet. Don’t you think there are times, when the grease stain on the baseboard has her on her knees at 1 a.m., that she wants this
thing that’s got hold of her to let go? “Times,” as Pat’s brother Charles puts it, “when you want to knock Daddy’s head off.” Times when the pain from tension in Pat’s left shoulder grows so sharp that she must schedule a deep massage—like, five hours before every game. Times when she’s sitting on an airplane next to two women who are solemnly weighing the floral pattern against the plaid for the master-bathroom drapes, and their relationship to Time is so dramatically different from Pat’s that she feels as if she’s from another planet. Times when people talk about her as if she’s a freak, as if she’s a man.

  As if she’s, say, Bobby Knight. That’s what they say when she seizes Michelle by the front of her jersey, twists it and snarls at her during the game against Louisiana Tech in the NCAA regionals in Michelle’s sophomore year. The photograph runs in newspapers all over the country. “Spinderella and her wicked stepmother,” the Knoxville press calls Michelle and Pat. From all over the country friends and relatives send the picture to Michelle and her parents, demanding, What is this woman doing to Michelle?

  Pat flinches. Why, she wonders, can’t people look at the photograph in context, why can’t they understand that she’s as swift to drop her whole life and rush to her players’ sides when they have problems as she is to drop the roof on them when they screw up? That she’s Miss Hazel’s daughter every inch as much as she is Tall Man’s? That she grew up watching and imitating her mother, who was the first to visit the sick or the dying, first to pick, pluck, prepare and deliver a meal of butter beans and fried chicken and mashed potatoes and homemade ice cream to the worried or the grieving?