by Pat Summitt
You don’t walk away from such a calling just to take care of yourself.
Quit? Quit? We keep score in life because it matters. It counts. Too many people opt out and never discover their own abilities, because they fear failure. They don’t understand commitment. When you learn to keep fighting in the face of potential failure, it gives you a larger skill set to do what you want to do in life. It gives you vision. But you can’t acquire it if you’re afraid of keeping score.
Basketball is a beautiful game on so many levels, because it creates movement—there is motion within the four lines of the court, and elevation. It’s a game that can lift kids out of wretched parks with broken swings and carry them to another plane. But you don’t create that beauty without the squeal of sneakers, drenching sweat, and cries of real pain.
This was a different kind of pain, however. And I didn’t know how to deal with it. Neither did Tyler. Early one morning, he came in my room and woke me up. My bedroom is a beautiful haven with soft muted beige colors and painted vines on the wall, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust in the flat, dim light. But when I made out his face, I saw he was weeping. “You’re all I’ve got,” he said. “And I need help.” He begged me to address the disease with him. I needed to accept it, and help him accept it, too.
I shot upright in bed. “I am right here for you, son,” I said. “Let’s take care of this right now.” It suddenly hit me that in trying to cope with the disease in my own way—with denial—I had actually left my son alone in dealing with it.
Tyler crawled onto the bed, and I put my arms around him. We held each other and had a long talk. We realized that we were both trying to outtough the other. He was trying to be Superman, and I was trying to be Wonder Woman. But as much as we wanted to deny reality, we couldn’t. The only way to deal with trouble of this magnitude was to face it—and admit to the fact that I would need a lot of help.
It wasn’t easy to reverse roles, to admit that I was struggling and needed care. Surrender didn’t come naturally to me, and neither did vulnerability.
All my life, I had preached “taking ownership” to athletes. I insisted they commit to their talent and to themselves, not just by working at the things they were good at, but by admitting the things they weren’t good at. It was a difficult, counterintuitive thing to teach—no one feels strong when she examines her own weakness. But in facing weakness, you learn how much there is in you, and you find a blueprint for real strength. Don’t look away from the difficult things, I urged our athletes. “Take ownership!”
When you own something, you possess it, live it, act on it.
It was time to take ownership of my diagnosis. The question was, how? What was the best way to confront it? Was it better to retire and concentrate on fighting the Alzheimer’s, or was that too much of a concession to the disease? In order to decide, I had to review everything I thought I was about.
I had to remember.
What do you want your players to learn from this? As far as teaching them, what do you want to teach them?
You know, I just want them to understand, “This is what I’m going through. Some of you have gone through knee injuries, you’ve had other issues, but you don’t quit living.” You know? You keep going.
How do you feel now that you have a diagnosis? Do you feel better?
I feel better just knowing what I’m dealing with. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not going to keep me from living my life. It’s not going to keep me from coaching. I’m going to stick my neck out, and do what I always do.
—August 2011, Knoxville, Tennessee, nine weeks after diagnosis
2
Country Girl
The Pontiac GTO idled with a low vibration under my seat. Ahead was a two-lane blacktop, a quarter mile of country road in Henrietta, Tennessee, lit by one dim streetlight and the headlamps of the other teenaged drag racers, who had come out in the middle of the night to kill boredom by cheating death in their Dodges and Plymouths. I was sixteen, the only girl at a wheel. Perched on a dormer windowsill of our farmhouse down the road, my sister, Linda, and some of her friends sneaked cigarettes as they gazed at the finish line in the distance, which was just a marker before a blind curve.
Somebody waved a start signal. My wheels bit pavement. Torque pulled at the rear of the car and tires sought traction on black tarmac. I went from 0 to 60 mph in about seven seconds.
Nothing was at stake except bragging rights. The guys from Ashland City seemed to think they were better drivers, with hotter cars, than folks from Henrietta, an unincorporated little farm community without so much as a caution light or post office, just one little general store. The Ashland City guys would come up in the middle of the night, and our farm boys would leave the feed mill where they drank beer and pull out to the road in their polished muscle cars to take them on.
Both of us would sneak out that window. There would be guys on the roof of the store too, trying to see who won. It was very, very dangerous. If you met somebody on the road it was a head-on crash.
—LINDA ATTEBERY
My GTO was a borrowed ride; the only automobiles my family owned were pickup trucks and a dented sedan. But I would beg my boyfriends for their treasured keys. “Come on, let me have a turn at the wheel,” I’d say. I was the only girl they ever let drive, maybe because I was taller and stronger than most of the guys. I was the only one who asked, too. It was flat-out scary; even my brothers didn’t drag race—and maybe that’s why I did it.
The car roared through the standing quarter mile, the needle ticking upward.
There wasn’t much to Henrietta. The blacktop stretched through meadows and hollows bordered by cornstalks brushed with gold. You could hear the night cicadas and smell the sweet smoke of tobacco curing. There were more barns and sheds than houses.
Parked along the roadside was Howell Foust, in his burnt-orange Dodge Super Bee, which I conned the keys to sometimes. My cousin Ricky Elliott, with his black Chevelle Super Sport, was there too. Rudy Batts in his cream-colored ’68 Chevelle with the heel-toe clutch and the four-on-the-floor gearshift tight by your knee. And Phillip Jarrell, in his blue, long-torso, coyote-dusting Plymouth Road Runner.
I hit 100 mph in about fifteen seconds. On the dashboard, the needle of the speedometer shivered at the max point.
The front of the GTO burst across the finish line, just nosing out the other car. I pulled over before the curve and braked, with relief. I had a mixed record as a drag racer. I won some—and sometimes I cleaned out a ditch. But I could not stand to lose.
It had something to do, I understood vaguely, with how I was raised, the fourth of five children and the first girl in a southern farm family. Outside, in the fields, I was treated the same as my older brothers, namely, like a farmhand. I did the same work as a man. But in every other instance, women came in second and had to fight for respect.
I was going to prove I could come in first. I couldn’t stand to be second at anything, a bet, a dare, a race, or the nightly games of basketball with my brothers in the hayloft. If I lost, I’d tell them, “We’re going to play again after we finish our supper.” If I lost again after supper, I’d say, “We’re going to stay out here all night.” We’d play until I was on a winning side, because I had no intention of going to bed in second place.
The car shuddered to a stop. I switched off the ignition and climbed out. I handed the keys over to their rightful owner and grinned at the boys, who grinned back approvingly. I headed back to the little white farmhouse by the side of the road, where I would slip back through that dormer window silently for fear of waking my parents.
I’m going to bed a winner tonight, I thought.
That meant I could sleep.
I drove a tractor long before I ever drove car, and I drove it like a fool, too. We were hardscrabble, self-made people. My father had to sell a mule to get the money to marry my mother, that’s how little they had starting out. I wish I could say it was a horse, or a cow, or some noble
r creature, but it wasn’t, it was a mule. The price was a hundred dollars.
Most of the roads were unpaved back then. There was nothing in Henrietta except tobacco fields, cornfields, churches, and the small general store that my parents owned for a while, where we pumped gas and sold sugar to bootleggers. Which caused some comment from the Methodists.
For the first few years of my life we lived in a log cabin in a little place called Oak Plains, with no running water. There was just a pump off the back porch that drew from a well, and an outhouse. Later, when some of the young women who played for me were self-conscious about their lack of wherewithal, I told them it was no excuse for failure to make something out of themselves. “Don’t think I’m ignorant as to how you grew up,” I said.
The cabin was so small that I slept in a baby bed until I was six, while my three brothers slept heaped together like a wolf pack. The logs seemed to trap every temperature, summer swelter or winter frost. Our only heat came from a fireplace and an old coal stove that my mother cooked on. You could see light coming in from the chinks and cracks between the logs, and the weather would blow right through. You’d get in bed at night, and in the morning have to throw snow off your covers.
Jesse James supposedly laid the cornerstone of the cabin, and although there is no direct proof of that, my daddy believed it and I did too. The area was settled in the early 1800s by rascally fortune hunters from the Carolinas and Kentucky, who littered the surrounding counties with their abandoned chimney stones and named their landmarks things like Half Pone, Raccoon Creek, and Cheap Hill. They lingered invisibly, too, in ghost stories such as the Bell Witch, an invisible specter that slaps children. Our local founder was a pioneer named Abner Gupton, who left an estate of seven thousand acres and three hundred slaves, although by the 1950s, comparatively few people of color were left in the county. I remember an old black man named Blue.
No one ever went to the doctor, couldn’t afford it. If you got sick, Daddy just looked at you as if to say, “Get well,” and Mama made a potion of Listerine, ground-up aspirin, and salt water. When we got warts, we went to a man who rubbed on them and then made us spit on a stone and throw it over a shoulder and bury a dishrag in the yard.
My mother, Hazel Albright, quit school in the ninth grade and went to work in an Acme boot factory to help support her family. She came from Shady Grove, where her father had a sixty-acre farm and did some sawmilling. She was tiny, just five foot four, with rich brown curls and mild blue eyes, and a light, quick laugh. You’d never have known she didn’t have much education and had to scratch for a living, because she’s so smart, which you can tell from the way she wins at cards. She never seemed in a bad mood when I was a girl, and I don’t ever remember her complaining. She didn’t need much to have fun, just good friends around a kitchen table, and some aces and kings to rob them with.
She met my father one afternoon when he came over to talk to her brother about catching a ride to school together. Richard Head was six foot five, with a white-blond head and those sky-blue eyes, and a voice that sounded like it came out from the bottom of a steel drum. He was lovestruck. He said right away he “was going to have her one way or the other.” They married when he was twenty and she was still just seventeen.
They were a mismatched pair. My daddy seldom smiled and didn’t talk much, but when he did, he meant it. People were so intimidated by him they called him Mister Richard, or just Tall Man. Some of his silence was a result of the fact that he was so sore and tired from working all the time. But in retrospect, it must have also been sadness. His mother was ill for much of his life, with rheumatoid arthritis so bad that she became wheelchair-bound, which the family dealt with by lowering the kitchen cabinets and the sink, so that she could continue to keep house. Eventually, she was institutionalized in Nashville. Her illness would be part of my inheritance—it’s one thing I got from her, along with a pump organ.
My parents, different as they were, made great partners. They shared a determination to live by their own hands instead of working for others. When they first married, my father took a job as hired farmhand for just $40 a month, but on the side he trapped possums and rabbits to sell for their hides, while my mother cooked hot lunches over at a public school in Ashland City. They raised chickens, and on Saturdays my father would go up to Nashville and peddle them for a dollar apiece. Dollar by dollar, they saved up $100 to buy their first cow. Then they bought another that way, and another, until they had fifteen cows. They would milk them by hand and sell the five-gallon cans to the local schools.
They worked constantly—they didn’t know the difference between work and hard work. They had no choice, because the cabin was filling up with kids: my oldest brother, Tommy, was born in June 1945, then came Charles in June of ’48, then Kenneth in ’50, and me in ’52, followed by my sister, Linda, the baby of the family, after a lag of six years, in ’58.
We inherited Richard’s genes, as you can see in the family pictures that show a row of kids so strapping that it must have taken every dime they had to feed us. When Tommy was thirteen, his head already came to my dad’s shoulder, and he would grow to be six foot six. I was scared to death I was going to be as tall as my brother, because by the time I was in third grade I was five foot nine. You can imagine my relief when I stopped at five eleven.
The pictures also show how much pride my parents took in us: I’m invariably in a flouncy little frock with my hair tied by a ribbon, while the boys are in blazers with bow ties, their heads cropped and slick with hair tonic. My mother is always in her best dress—she only had two—a fitted polka-dot one, which she wore with a rope of fake pearls. Next to her is my father, austere in a thin black necktie and crisp white shirt. We are always posed in front of a nice paisley curtain or a neatly trimmed hedge.
My parents put every dollar they earned back into expanding their farm, and by the time I was six, they finally had enough wherewithal to build a one-story brick house on some acreage they bought nearby. We called it the Home Place, an old-fashioned term, but it had modern conveniences including running water and electricity, which meant we could have our first television. My father also installed a large wood heater. The boys would get out of the tub and back up to it, and sometimes the grill would sizzle on their backsides. They’d go to school and change to play ball, and somebody would say, “What happened to your butt?,” because they’d have grillwork across it.
But oftentimes the stripes were from Daddy’s belt, or whatever else he could reach to whip you with. My father was a good man, but he was also fearsome; there is no other word for him. He was a towering, unsmiling patriarch, and if you disobeyed him, he would come after you with his belt, or a tobacco stick, or a switch, or a milkstrap, or whatever else came to hand. If you misbehaved, you didn’t sit in time-out. You got worn out.
Kenny was just seven or so when they were building the new house, and one afternoon he went racing through the room while Daddy was laying down flooring. Daddy told him to quit that, but Kenny did it again. Daddy reached out, snatched him up by the collar, and began whacking him on the behind with a piece of hardwood while Kenny’s feet still cycled through the air. He was moving so fast when Daddy dropped him that when we tell the story now, we joke he practically left black marks on the floor.
We got switched for missed chores and for forgetting to close a gate and letting the livestock out. If you didn’t do something, you got a switch. If you didn’t do it on time, you got a switch. You got switched for wrassling over a place on the sofa or for making a racket at Granny’s. One minute we’d be quarreling, and the next minute Daddy’s belt would fly and we’d scatter like pigeons.
My brothers swear I got off lightly because I was the first daughter. Daddy would whip us in order, Tommy first, then Charles, then Kenneth, and then he’d look for me. One night, my brothers and I got into a pillow fight at bedtime and had a lively contest until we heard Daddy’s feet hit the floor. I jumped behind a curtain and hid and then dove head
first out the window while he laid into the boys.
She stayed in about as much trouble as we did; she just didn’t get as many whippings. Daddy would get on to us, and by the time he’d whip me, then Charles, then Kenneth, she’d be under the bed. He couldn’t find her till the next morning and by then he’d forget about it, and everything was fine. I know she got out of whippings at least fifteen, twenty times that way.
—TOMMY HEAD
But I remember getting my share of his hand. I was no more than five years old when I felt it for the first time. My brothers decided it would be entertaining to teach me a song about beans and bodily functions, and that night I sang it at the dinner table. I had just finished the chorus about “beans, the magical fruit” and was giggling, when his hand rose in the air and I went flying across the room with the imprint of it on my face. He had backhanded me out of my chair—hit me so hard that I did a backflip. My mother burst into tears as she collected me off the floor.
Dinner when Tall Man was in the house was tense. We would be cutting up and laughing, telling stories and throwing rolls, until Daddy came in the room, and then we’d all go quiet and stock-still. You felt his presence. I don’t recall having a lot of sit-down dinners with enjoyable conversation. He might talk a little bit about sports or farming or his hunting dogs, but mostly he grunted or was silent, and we were too.
He was a lot more soft with me than he was with Mom. I remember if they wanted to offer him a glass of wine at dinner, they would pour it and kind of glance over two seats away and then kind of sliiiide it down the table, and look away. If he wanted it, and he took it, they would kind of exhale. I would think, Why are they so scared of this guy? If someone else walked in it would be, “How you doing, Mister Head?” And everybody, even my uncles, would say, “Yes, sir. No, sir.”