by Pat Summitt
She didn’t have confidence, but she was smart. When she decided she was going to have good grades, she made good ones. When she set her mind on something, that’s what she did. Pat just took advantage of every opportunity to the fullest.
—ESTHER HUBBARD
Step by step, I worked on self-improvement. I lost my shyness and began to enjoy college life, the football games, dates and socials, and the usual dormitory mischief. We got the boys we dated to buy us six-packs of beer, and at night after curfew they would sneak under our windows. We lowered sheets, and they would tie the beer up in a linen knot, and we hauled it four stories up.
Pretty soon there was no trace left of the wallflower. I was a dating fool—there was a boy I was always jumping in the car to go off and see, a desperate commute to the Kentucky border that took me across Paris Landing Bridge. One time, trying to get back to campus for curfew, I got caught speeding and didn’t have my driver’s license. I was terrified of what my father would say, so I gave my name as Sandra Lee Fields—inspired by the view of nothing but farms. I never lived the name down with the Chi Os.
There wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in Martin, just a rough honky-tonk bar named Cadillacs that a sorority girl didn’t want to be seen in, so we slipped down to an old trestle bridge to drink our beer. We were so far out in the country that the television reception was poor and you had to bend rabbit-eared antennae to pick up one station in Jackson, Tennessee. Mostly we listened to the radio.
The tumultuous news of those years came to me in short crackling bulletins that I barely remember: the Watergate break-in, Vietnam peace talks, terms like “stagflation” and “price controls,” the bouts of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, the exploits of Evel Knievel jumping buses on his motorcycle.
It was the era of streakers, and every now and then some guy would decide to dash nude across campus. Clement Hall sat in a main courtyard, so we were invariably in his path, and the dorm would go into total lockdown, and a curfew was enforced for fear some of us belles might see a naked man.
Though it was the early ’70s, we weren’t political. Most of the young women I knew at Martin had been sent there specifically because it was out in the country, away from the race and antiwar politics roiling places like Memphis. Vietnam was in our consciousness—but not because we protested it. On the contrary—because our brothers fought in it.
Esther’s brother served there in 1968, and my brother Charles went in 1969 as an infantryman in the Big Red One, before coming home with a Purple Heart, shrapnel in his back, and a case of shell shock so bad that he hit the floorboards of our truck one day when it backfired. That was a hard year in our family, and Charles’s service in Vietnam was the only thing I ever heard my parents fight about. Charles had saved almost all his army pay, and when he got home he declared his intention of rewarding himself with a red Chevelle Super Sport, the hottest muscle car going. Nobody had ever heard my parents have a cross word, until Daddy forbade Charles to buy that car. “He’ll kill himself,” he said. Mother turned on him and said, “He went off and fought for his country and almost died! He come home alive, and he deserves to have what he wants.” My father shut his mouth and that’s all there was to it. Charles got the car.
So we didn’t listen to protest songs. When we blasted music on the radio, most of it was Motown, Gladys Knight, or folkie stuff. The Fifth Dimension, or Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of “If I Had a Hammer.” Or “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” with its introductory chorus, “Wimoweh, wimoweh, wimoweh.…” But my favorite was Loretta Lynn, who came out with her autobiographical song, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” in a twang that sounded so much like mine.
“The work we done was hard,” she crooned, “and at night we’d sleep ’cause we was tarred.…”
There was one place I felt completely comfortable: the gym. I made my way over to the small office where the women’s athletic program was in its infancy under the direction of an underfunded physical education teacher. “Are you Miss Bettye Giles?” I asked. When she nodded, I asked, “When does basketball practice start?”
Miss Giles, I learned, had a budget of exactly $500 for three sports: volleyball, basketball, and tennis. And she had just one coach, a small spark of a woman named Nadine Gearin, a volunteer who had never really played any of the above. Nadine was more of a badminton expert.
They not only lacked the funding, they lacked good athletes. Bettye took one look at me and, like Esther, decided I was naive and easily led. She said, “Pat, basketball doesn’t start until late fall, and around here we have our athletes play volleyball first, to kind of get in condition.”
It was a lie. They just needed a warm body to fill out the roster. But I believed her.
“Volleyball?” I said. “That’s what you do to get in condition?”
“Yes,” she said firmly. “We want all our basketball players to play volleyball.”
“Well, okay. That’s fine. Whatever it takes, that’s what I’ll do, just so I can play basketball.”
Did I want to play volleyball? No. It didn’t get me in shape, either. But back then I did what I was told and played volleyball until it was basketball season.
Martin’s basketball team was barely deserving of the term “varsity”—it had evolved from intramurals only a year earlier, and they still played that silly abbreviated half-court game, with three players on each end of the floor. Our uniforms were plain, school-issued physical education gear that everyone wore to their gym classes, sleeveless blue jerseys of heavy cotton twill, with navy shorts. We passed them out by size, and we put numerals on them with athletic tape, until Miss Nadine got us some real ones.
Nadine had a friend in the fabric department of a local store who gave her a sheet of scrap felt. She cut out the numbers and offered to sew them on, but we said, “No, we can sew ’em on ourselves.” But you could tell how few of us took home economics. They were the crookedest bunch of numbers you ever saw. Some girls had their numbers up around the neckline, and some down around the waist. Some had one number lower than the other. Esther was number 21, and hers, of course, were perfect. I was number 55, and mine were pretty straight. My official team photo shows me with my long hair wound in a bun with strands falling out, striped tube socks up to my knee pads, and high-topped Converse.
Nadine was an old-fashioned, old-school, ladies’ gym teacher. She was a tiny little thing, no more than about five foot three, with tightly curled hair and narrow spectacles, and a high-pitched, chirruping voice that was inherently comical. She wore high heels to be taller, and one afternoon she broke one off while she was coaching us, and she limped around the court on her lopsided little shoe, her face red with exertion, until we all died laughing.
But we were grateful to her: she was an unpaid volunteer who gave us her time so that we’d have an opportunity to play. She didn’t know a lot about basketball—and she told us she didn’t know a lot. But she tried; she bought, at her own expense, every book she could find about strategy, and to her credit she asked questions. She’d ask, “Who do you think should play guard?”
Sometimes our input wasn’t the most dedicated or useful.
“Miss Gearin,” we’d say, “it’s fraternity rush this week and we’re supposed to be at the Pike house by eight. We need to stop practice at seven fifteen so we can get our makeup on and be ready.”
Nadine would just say sweetly, “Well. Okay.”
That was the state of women’s basketball in 1970, and my starting point. There were no mentors or so-called coaching trees for women, like there were for ambitious young male coaches who grew out of the personality cults around legends like Clair Bee in New York, Frank McGuire in North Carolina, Adolph Rupp in Kentucky, or John Wooden in California. Nor were there rich regional playgrounds for women, like the schoolyard network of Philadelphia. But if Nadine didn’t teach us much Xs and Os, she taught us respect and teamwork, and she took us where we wanted to go.
We were so poor we didn’t even have
a team bus. The Lady Pacers traveled in two borrowed station wagons, with Nadine and a team manager behind the wheels. We’d cram three in the front seat, and four people in back, and the tallest of us suffered the most. Imagine half a dozen girls, a couple of whom stood five foot ten or above, climbing out of a car with cramped legs, and trying to play ball.
Nadine was an endless source of amusement on these trips, with her high-pitched voice and innocent little face. She was so tiny she had to sit on a pillow to see over the steering wheel—but then she’d hit the gas and go roaring down the road at ninety miles per hour. Once, as we were caravanning to a game, she got pulled over by a cop.
He said, “Do you know how fast you were going?”
She said, sweetly, “No, but I couldn’t have been speeding.”
“Ma’am, you were going over seventy-five miles an hour!”
Nadine said, feigning shock, “That just couldn’t be … Oh! Wait just a minute! I’ve got new tires on my car. Could that make me go so fast?”
Our training meals were bologna and cheese sandwiches at a rest stop, or McDonald’s. We didn’t stay in hotels—no money. Instead we slept on mats on the floor of the gym where we played the next day. Our archrival was Tennessee Tech over in Cookeville, a 215-mile drive, which meant a four-hour trip jammed together in the station wagons. Then we slept stiffly in sleeping bags on the hardwood floor of the Tennessee Tech field house.
What a frumpy, earth-bound, starved, and sleep-deprived little team we were, playing in dank, humid gyms that reeked of industrial cleanser and floor varnish and ointment, with a faint waft of hairspray and perfume underneath female perspiration. But I loved it, treasured the cheap uniform that didn’t breathe, the damp jersey that got heavier the more I sweated, and couldn’t wait to tie up my clumsy flat-soled sneakers, made of canvas with metal eyelets for laces. We knew nothing about training, or about our own bodies; every day of practice was an exercise in curious self-discovery.
Somehow in my first season we went 16-3 to win the Tennessee state title. At the end of it we went back to Tennessee Tech for a tournament, in which all the women’s teams in the state converged for a single weekend. After driving four hours to Cookeville and sleeping on a floor, we played six games in two days—two on Friday night, and then four on Saturday. One right after the other.
Without washing our uniforms.
We got about fifteen minutes to rest between games. By late Saturday afternoon, our knees were buckling. Nadine dealt with it by cracking ammonia sticks and waving them under our nostrils. We didn’t have conditioning, or weights, but we had ammonia. If she thought I looked a little peaked, she would whip out one of her ammonia packets and break it open and thrust it under my nose until I wrenched my head away, my eyes watering. It actually worked, right up until our sixth game. We lost it to Belmont, and by then we were so weary we didn’t care, we were just ready to go home.
Our training was crude, the conditions were awful, and we thought nothing of it. It hardly occurred to us that we were entitled to better, or more. Until, at the end of that season, the UT-Martin athletic department’s way of rewarding us for winning the state title was to invite us to an awards banquet—for the men’s team, which that season had won just three games. While we went 16-3, the guys had gone 3-20. Yet we sat for hours, watching guys receive plaques and awards and congratulations for their efforts. Finally, they paused the proceedings to briefly introduce us. That was our recognition: we got to stand up for a minute.
The coach of the men’s team was an old boy named Floyd Burdette, who had played ball for Martin in the 1930s, and whom we jokingly called Buckethead. Every year Burdette held an open tryout and, for one day, anybody on campus could attempt to make the team. Apparently Floyd heard about how I grew up playing with my brothers and could dribble like a guy, a vision of equality he found alarming. He watched me handle the ball in the gym one day and went to Miss Giles.
“Do not let her try out for my basketball team,” he said. “Don’t you send her over there.”
Miss Giles realized Coach Burdette was terrified of a women’s movement on campus. Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” was all over the radio every five minutes. The drum-driven chord changes and “hear me roar” crescendo of the song have become a cliché, but at the time we felt it was an anthem of soul-shaking positivism, and there was a lot of discussion about “liberation.” Burdette was worried Miss Giles would try to strike a feminist blow by sending me to the men’s tryout, and he might be politically pressured to give me a spot on the team.
Bettye took the opportunity to torment him a little. “I’m not sending her anywhere,” Miss Giles said. “But she might decide to come on her own.” She suggested I was already better than a couple of his walk-ons. Which maybe I was.
She reminded him, “The sign says, ‘Open tryouts.’ It does not say what sex.”
He flushed and said, “I refuse to have a girl on the floor.”
At the time he felt that he would probably have to take her on the team as a walk-on. He didn’t want to get into the male-female thing. It was very much what men felt—that as women made progress it was going to detract from their program. I faced that here an awful lot.
—BETTYE GILES
It was an era when sports pages didn’t cover women much, and if they did, they used terms like “the sex that burns the toast,” a phrase I actually read in an issue of Sports Illustrated. The local paper was kind to us and gave us good coverage, but on one occasion it actually referred to me—I promise this is true—as “Pretty Pat Head.” Which I actually didn’t mind in the slightest.
This may sound odd, but despite everything, those of us who played basketball in the deprived, formative era of the early 1970s wouldn’t trade the experience. In all the years afterward it gave us a pride of ownership, a sense that we were the architects of our own game, and that our success was entirely self-earned; we’d never been handed anything. And there was a lot to be said for building yourself from the ground up.
If we got any money from our universities, it was a pittance, usually bestowed by a benevolent, or not so benevolent, male administrator. Athletic departments of that era weren’t yet big businesses, but rather fiefdoms ruled by crew-cut former gridiron stars, most of whom thought anything spent on a female in athletics came at the expense of men. At Tennessee Tech, for instance, a twenty-two-year-old coach named Marynell Meadors worked under an athletic director named Flavious Smith, a local football hero from the 1950s. When Marynell launched a women’s basketball team at Tech in 1970, he refused to fund it. Nevertheless, she dominated the state.
I said, “Do you think we could possibly start some women’s sports?” He said, “Oh yeah, we can do that.” I said, “Well, do you think we could have some money to operate on?” He said, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars.” I said, “Oh, thank you.” You learned by watching men practice in their gym. If they’d let you in. Sometimes they were offended if you asked to come in.
—MARYNELL MEADORS
Tennessee Tech could only afford to take day trips, and they traveled in a fifteen-passenger van that was so dilapidated the doors wouldn’t always stay shut. Marynell was always fearful that the door would slide open and one of her players would fall out on the highway. Also, the van had bald tires.
Over at Austin Peay, a dynamic young coach named Lin Dunn had to cope with a bulldog-faced athletic director named Dave Aaron, who had coached basketball in the 1950s. When Lin launched the women’s varsity, he refused to give her a dime or even a vehicle to travel with. He told her, “You can only use the gym when no one else wants it.” Including, he said, every intramural team.
I remember begging for a van and he said no. So we drove in my big old red Impala. It could only fit eight people in it, so if you didn’t have a good week of practice, you didn’t go. I would slip into the men’s locker room and steal things. I stole a set of warm-ups they didn’t want anymore. I was always finagling things to get by.
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�LIN DUNN
We got more support from our own fathers. At Martin’s games, you’d see our dads sidle up to Bettye Giles and press bills in her hand, to help feed us or pay for our gas. My father was one of them. On more than one occasion, Richard slipped a hundred-dollar bill into the purse of Miss Giles.
What little other money we had, we raised. At UT-Martin, we raked yards and had bake sales. Once, we peddled raffle tickets for a bicycle—I sold my share of chances but forgot to write down the names of the poor folks I sold tickets to. They never knew how they got cheated.
Out at Cal State Fullerton, my future Olympic coach, Billie Moore, organized a Blue Chip Stamp drive to fund her team. She passed out the booklets to her players and they filled them up and exchanged them for merchandise they would auction. Another year Billie got them to sell candy—but that only lasted one season because her players ate it all, and weight became an issue.
Next, Billie tried car washes. She put up a sign and handed out hoses and sponges to her players. Some were more industrious than others.
We’d finish a car, and I’d check it, and one side of the car was washed and the other didn’t have a drop of water on it. Also, at the end of the day we had all these extra floor mats. The kids had forgotten to put them back in the cars.
—BILLIE MOORE