by Pat Summitt
There was such concern about whether girls should play the game, in fact, that my basketball career almost came to an abrupt end in eighth grade. Our Home Place sat just inside the Montgomery County line, which meant by residency I was supposed to attend high school in Clarksville. But education officials there had abolished the sport a few years earlier after a young woman ran into the gymnasium wall and died from a head injury.
I sat at dinner one day bemoaning the fact that Clarksville High didn’t have basketball for girls, when my dad suddenly spoke. Which he didn’t do often.
He said, “Well. We’ll just move.”
It was an extraordinary statement. We had a comfortable, almost brand-new brick home, which my parents had built with their own hands. Now he intended to walk away from it?
He did. Our grocery store sat on the main street of Henrietta just over the Cheatham County line. Next door to the grocery sat an old white farmhouse, unoccupied and in disrepair. My father bought it and moved us into Henrietta, simply so that I could go to Ashland City High School, which had a very good girls’ team.
My parents left their warm, solid, convenient new home for that rickety old place, and they never said a word in protest about it. It was a hardship, but they did it for me. The house was dilapidated, a white two-story clapboard with no insulation, so the wind whipped right through it. I remember standing up against the fireplace and warming my backside while I breathed out frost. Also, the place creaked—the stairs were so old that every other step groaned and squeaked, and we tried to memorize which ones didn’t, so that we could sneak up and down them—walk up two, and skip three.
Who back in the 1960s sized up a daughter’s jump shot and decided it was important enough to sacrifice for? Almost nobody. In 1968, just sixteen thousand American women played college sports, and most of them did it under a shadow of somebody’s disapproval, whether parents who thought it unladylike, or boyfriends who thought it a waste of time. Four decades later, it’s commonplace to invest in a young woman’s talent: There are now 191,000 women athletes in the NCAA, and if you tell a father that there is no team for his girl to play on, he doesn’t just move. He sues. Back then, however, it was virtually unheard of.
But my father valued my talent and had the instinct and foresight to think that investing in it might do something good for me. And if he hadn’t made the sacrifice of moving, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If there was any proof that Richard Head was a loving, committed father, there it was. With that one act, he gave me everything.
Well, people thought we had lost our minds. But he thought she could be anything, ’cause she was tough and raised up with the boys. He always was right behind her in whatever she did.
—HAZEL HEAD
My father was an engaged and fiercely devoted parent who wanted me to have the same chance as my brothers. He never missed my high school games if he could help it. I remember him sitting in the Ashland City High bleachers, unsmiling and unexpressive as ever, except for his hand: it was beating on the old wooden railing with excitement. He wouldn’t yell, but I could hear his fist hammering on the wood, bang, bang, bang. I knew without a word what he was saying: “Come on, Trisha.”
By the age of fifteen, I was a broad-shouldered, auburn-haired girl with a side part and cheeks reddened from outdoor work. I had reached my full height of five eleven and was so ridiculously strong that I could throw a hay bale higher than most men. My brothers and I would have contests to see who could toss a bale higher into the wagon.
She could carry a hundred-pound bag of feed on one shoulder, and a sixty-pound bag of dog food under the other arm. I saw her do that seven or eight times. The boys in high school was all scared of her.
—TOMMY HEAD
My high school coach was a stickler named Mike Jarreau, who taught me the fundamentals of the game with repetition and dedication instead of paddling. He drilled our team for hours in set plays, made us do things over and over until we were as choreographed as a bunch of chorus girls. Sometimes we looked like it. In one drill, you had to sprint to half-court to receive a pass, and jump up in the air ten times, counting aloud, “One! Two! Three! …”
It’s difficult to explain to someone who has never competed, but a moment arrives in the life of a serious athlete when the game begins to live in you. It so occupies your mind and body that you almost become it. You gain a sense of such command over your own arms and legs that it can almost feel like flying, and you begin to crave that sensation daily. Everything else is just an interruption until you can return to it. That was me. I played, quite literally, in my sleep.
My bedroom was so cold in the winter that not even an electric blanket and a plug-in heater made it comfortable. One February night just before the annual state tournament, my best friend, Jane, and I decided we needed to sleep warmly if we were going to play well, so we dragged my mattress down the stairs and laid it in front of the woodstove in the living room. In the middle of the night, Jane felt something whack her on the head. It was my arm. The mattress was jumping, and she heard, “One! Two! Three!” I was practicing the jump drill in my dreams.
In summer, my little room was suffocating. The bed sat right under the window, and when it got hot, I’d throw my legs around as I played in my sleep, and every now and then, I’d kick out the panes. I busted several windows by tossing and thrashing. I’d wake up to a cracking sound and know I’d shattered a piece of glass again by sprinting in my dreams.
I played in hot and cold; the Ashland City gym had no air-conditioning, just some large fans mounted high up in the windows. I played hurt. One season as we were getting ready for the state tournament, I broke my arm practicing my superheroine jumping skills. Our gym doubled as the school auditorium, with a stage at one end, and you could jump from the stage and almost grab the net if you hurled yourself far enough. I got onstage and leaped at the net—and fell on my arm, breaking it.
I tolerated the cast for about forty-eight hours before I soaked it in the bathtub, softening the plaster, and then chipped away with a knife to loosen it until I could move my arm enough to keep shooting.
Playing ball was all I really had. There wasn’t much else to do; life on the farm was rigid, strict, and sheltered. I wasn’t allowed to go on an actual date until I was sixteen, and even then I was only permitted to venture with my sometime boyfriend Mack as far as Ashland City to see a movie or get something to eat at the Dairy Dip, where we hung out in the parking lot until we spotted the sheriff, who already had us on his radar for drag racing. It was a big deal the first time I ate pizza—I’d never had it before, didn’t even know what it was. All we had on the farm was meat and vegetables, which created some culinary adventures. The first time my sister, Linda, went out to a diner, she ordered fried shrimp and ate the tails because she didn’t know better.
A big highlight of the week was an episode of Gunsmoke. Or we’d sit up on the roof of the grain silo and look at the stars. Sometimes at night for fun my brothers would lead unsuspecting friends through the hog lot and die laughing when they slipped and fell in the mud.
How’s this for boredom? We painted the water tower. It started with a haunted house phase; one Saturday night, Jane and I and our friends Ricky and Howell decided to explore some of the abandoned shacks that dotted the countryside. After chasing ghosts with flashlights for an hour or so, we stumbled on an old shed that was full of spray paint cans. All of a sudden we lost interest in ghosts and developed an intense interest in graffiti. The question was, what to paint? One of the guys said, “We need to paint the water tower!” It seemed like the perfect canvas: rising hundreds of feet in the air, it presented a huge bland façade that cried out for paint.
The boys started climbing, and I clambered up the first few rungs after them. But when they announced they intended to paint their initials on it, and they wanted to put mine up there too, I stopped.
My father was the water commissioner for the county, and he had played a major role in getting
city water pumped into the tower. In the years since we’d left the log cabin, Richard Head had become a pillar of the community who was involved in every civic issue from road improvements to serving on the Cheatham County court. If he thought I’d had anything to do with defacing the water tower, I would face the wrath of Mister Richard. I said, “You can’t put my initials on anything; Daddy will know! You have nothing to lose. But my dad—he’ll kill me.”
I turned around and said to Jane, “I’m not going all the way up there.” She said, “Me neither,” and we scrambled back down. But the guys went all the way up and painted “Class of 69” and “Class of 70” in huge letters on the tower.
The next morning, my father sat down to the Sunday breakfast table fuming. He’d been out to check on the cows and had seen the water tower. “I can’t believe anybody would do that!” he said. “Whoever did it needs to be punished—and the parents who raised kids to do that ought to be punished just as bad.” Jane started choking, and I kicked her under the table. Richard turned on me. “You two know everything that goes on around here,” he said. “I want you to find out who did it. I’m not only going after them, I’m going after their parents, too.”
I was so scared of Richard Head that I was thirty years old before I told him who painted the tower. Jane and I confessed to him one afternoon when I was home on a visit. He just glared and said, “I guess you young ladies know you aren’t too big to spank.” And then his shoulders started shaking with laughter.
Wherever I went, I was under strict orders to be home by eleven, and I set some land speed records meeting curfew. One night Jane’s car ran out of gas, so we snuck her mother’s old Plymouth out of the garage and I drove like I was in the Indy 500 trying to get home. The next morning our local state trooper saw Jane’s mother, Sue, and said, “Sue, where in hell were you going last night?” Sue said, “I didn’t go nowhere last night.”
He said, “You sure did, I clocked you going ninety-five.”
“You didn’t clock me, I was home in bed.”
“Well, it was your car, with your license plate.”
Sue just looked at him mystified. Then they both realized what had happened. He said, “You tell that Head girl I know it was her.”
My reputation as a speed demon was getting around. But driving fast was the only thing I had to do for excitement, other than compete. I never hunted with my brothers—I couldn’t bear to kill things, and I even found it traumatic to do 4-H. There is a picture of me with a calf at a fair, in jeans and a barn jacket, but it pained me to raise small animals and then sell them.
Instead I took up barrel racing. I had a horse named Trigger that was my most beloved friend, and we became intensely competitive in the Ashland City local rodeos. I won a wall full of ribbons doing it, which emboldened me to take up scoop racing, too. In a scoop race, you sit behind your horse in a large corn scoop and drag along the ground as he charges around the barrels. One night, I asked my parents to come watch me. Trigger and I went racing out into the arena and swirled around the barrels, then galloped into the final turn for home. But Trigger was towing me so hard that the scoop swung out wide—and headed toward the fence.
I went straight through it. Took out three planks.
When I shook off the splinters and got up, my parents were covering their faces with their hands. My mother said, “I don’t think we want to go through this again.” And my career as a scoop racer was over. I thought, It’s time to quit.
Although I loved growing up on the farm, I found it socially isolating. So often I couldn’t do the things other kids did, either because I didn’t have the money or I had to work. I spent my sixteenth birthday on a tractor. There was no Sweet 16 party, just a long day’s work. Some classmates tried to plan a party for me, a small get-together at the Ashland City Country Club, where one of the boys in my class was a member because his father owned a Ford dealership. He arranged for a bunch of us to spend the afternoon swimming, which thrilled me. I’d never been to a country club.
I was set on going—until we got a forecast for rain. My father said, “You’ve got to drive the tractor and pick up the straw.” I looked out at the pasture, and there were a thousand bales of straw on the ground. At first I thought maybe I could get it done in time for the party. I hit the clutch on the tractor and started stacking bales with the automatic lift. Every few minutes I checked my watch, and it got later and later. Finally, I said hesitantly, “Dad, how are we going to get this done in time for the party?”
“There’s no way you can go to a party,” my father said. “Looks like rain. You’ve got to help me do this.”
I said, “But, Daddy, it’s my birthday.”
“I don’t care whose birthday it is. We can’t afford for the rain to come in with this straw on the ground.”
I was so upset that I started driving like a crazed woman. At one point, I slammed on the brakes so hard I nearly threw him off the tractor. He looked at me with eyes that had turned radioactive. He didn’t say a word, but I knew to be careful and not open my mouth again.
I never made it to the party. It was a sacrifice that my father demanded, and so I made it. I knew better than to cry in front of him about not being able to swim with a bunch of city kids at a country club. Don’t you cry, girl. I better not see you cry.
When my brothers were thirsty, they held their tea glasses in the air and rattled the ice. Wordlessly, they sat at the table crouched over heaping plates of food, with their glasses upraised and shaking. Rattle, rattle, rattle. The sound of ice against glass was a statement. It said, “Serve me.”
One of them would drain a glass and then hold it out. Rattle. Rattle. “Come fill my glass up.” Insistent, unthinking, and demanding, until a female in the house grasped a jug of tea and poured it for him. Then another brother would drain his drink and hold up the glass. Rattle. Rattle, rattle. It was the southern way. When men ate, the women served them.
As I got older, the noise began to rile me. It ran up my spine and into my head. Rattle, rattle, rattle. Finally one day, it shot up my backbone, into my forehead, and came out of my mouth. Rattle, rattle.
“Get it yourself,” I snapped.
Grudgingly, those big tall boys might raise calloused hands and pour their own tea. But more often than not they just sat there until my mother came around the table and refilled their glass. It bothered me that she had to wait on my brothers—because as hard as the men in our family worked, nobody could touch my mother for tireless backbreaking labor. She did every bit as much as they did on the farm, and on top of that, she ran the household.
By tradition on a farm in the South, the men did the outside work, and women did the inside work. But as far as I could tell, my mother worked both inside and outside. After a long day of outdoor farm chores, she did the cooking, cleaning, washing, and ironing. She made most of our clothes herself, because we didn’t have a lot of cash to buy them. Late at night she’d pick up dirty clothes after my brothers—who didn’t think they should have to do anything in the house because they’d been outside all day—and wash and mend them.
My mother was mild-spoken, but underneath her generous, patient temperament was a tough constitution. She did most of the milking, and would lift those tall eighty-pound milk cans into the cooler by herself, until she eventually ruined her shoulder and needed four surgeries to repair it. After milking, she’d come back and cook breakfast and get us off to school, which was no small job. It was nothing for Tommy to eat a dozen eggs by himself. Along with three sides of bacon and sausage, biscuits and toast, and a half a jar of jelly.
Next, she’d fix lunch for any of the hired hands Daddy had brought in. After that, she tended her ten-acre vegetable garden, harvesting in her big sun hat. Then she joined my dad in the field to help him with his chores. By the time she came back to the house, the cows had to be done again, and dinner had to be started.
She was never at rest. She could do anything—I remember her saving a wounded baby pig by sti
tching it up with a needle and thread. She could drive anything too. She got her driver’s license in the two-ton truck, which she used to haul wholesale goods for our country store. “Miss Hazel, is Richard gonna make a truck driver out of you?” the local policeman asked her. She just laughed. She’d rumble up to Cumberland Wholesale with my sister, Linda, still a small child, in the cab beside her. She’d load up the truck and then drive it back and unload the goods into the store and stock the shelves.
It was Miss Hazel who made the money to buy our first real car. Our 1952 yellow Plymouth came from her butterbean money, which she grew in that immense vegetable patch behind the house. She drove it faster than anybody in the family, including me. With Miss Hazel at the wheel, you had to worry about whiplash. She’d do eighty on that two-lane blacktop racing from one place to another, and then she’d hit the brake and you’d eat the dashboard.
Mama moved at a faster pace than Dad did, but then, she had more to do. When my father came home, he would sit down and eat, or relax. She never asked my father to do anything for her that she could do herself—if the trash needed taking out, she did it—because she wanted him to rest. His day was done. But hers was only about half over.
It was a double standard, and I noticed it and thought, This isn’t right. As a teenager I began volunteering to do more of the housework, simply because I wanted to help my mother. I noticed when the windows in the house needed washing, and I’d do them so she didn’t have to. I babysat for Linda and enlisted her in household chores.