by Pat Summitt
But we were modernizing fast. Three events in 1972 changed everything for us. First, a group of dedicated women administrators formed the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, because the NCAA didn’t yet care enough about females to bother with us. The AIAW stepped in to govern women’s sports and established championships for us—including a sixteen-team basketball tournament that was eventually replaced by the women’s NCAA tournament.
The second big event was the announcement that women’s basketball would be an Olympic sport for the first time at the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal. And the third, though we didn’t know much about it yet, was the passing of Title IX, the little-noticed portion of the Equal Opportunity in Education Act that stated “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Although it would be several years before it was fully implemented, that legislative phrase led to athletic scholarships for women.
What these developments did was to make winning available to women. Previously, competition was a hobby—not a very socially acceptable one. But now that there were trophies, gold medals, and prestige on the table, interest in women’s sports surged. Everyone likes winning, no matter what form it takes—and even older male football administrators had to respect an Olympic gold medal sport. Forty years later, commentators at the 2012 London Olympics would marvel over the fact that American women significantly outmedaled men and attempt to analyze how such a thing happened. It started in 1972. That year triggered stratospheric growth, a boom.
I felt the effects immediately, and personally. Universities abandoned their archaic inhibitions and adopted a standardized full-court game, and at UT-Martin I could at last play five-on-five. I began to tell people, “I want to play in the Olympics.”
I spent that summer self-teaching myself the full-court game. I got ahold of a Fundamentals of Basketball textbook from our physical education department and studied the diagrams. I went back to Henrietta and into the hay barn with my brothers, and we walked through sets—sometimes using a dog or a bucket as a stand-in. Esther came over from Springfield, and the two of us would go against Charles and Kenneth, while Tommy, who was doing some part-time high school coaching, taught us the old Auburn shuffle, a series of patterns run continuously from either side of the court that emphasized movement to get high-percentage shots. We’d weave around upturned pails, or Dad’s dogs.
In the fall, we took it all back to school. Nadine let us put in our plays and run our own practices and coach each other—Esther would cuss at me to defend, or box out. “Quit passing it; you need to be the one shooting,” Esther would snap. We practiced against six and seven defenders to make things more difficult and assigned double-teams so we learned to fight out of them. We came up with our own training regimens and set our own curfew. When other girls were going to the frat socials, we talked over game plans in the dorm and went to bed early.
The result was a huge season for a little team from Tennessee. We went 20-8, and qualified for the inaugural national championship tournament. A review of the box scores shows that I averaged 19 points and 15 rebounds a game, so the plays we designed in the hayloft must have worked. I carried us to the southern regional championship with an upset of North Carolina when I scored 31 of our 54 points.
On March 16, 1972, the sixteen most elite teams in the country gathered for the first AIAW national championship tournament in Normal, Illinois. It was a five-hundred-mile road trip, but somehow, Bettye and Nadine begged and borrowed the money to send us. After we won the state tournament in Knoxville, Bettye went to a drugstore on the main drag and bought a large glass piggy bank and literally carried it around on the street, seeking donations. For a snapshot of the women’s game in 1972 imagine a full-grown woman walking around with a piggy bank, panhandling for change.
At first I was embarrassed, and then I thought, What the heck, I’m not doing this for me.
—BETTYE GILES
Once again, we piled into those station wagons. It was a seven-hour trip to Normal, where we actually got to stay in a motel—sleeping four to a room. We were the only team there without proper uniforms, or warm-ups. In an old photo of the sixteen teams, you can tell which ones we are: we’re bare armed in sleeveless jerseys, with no jackets.
We didn’t last long. We won our first-round game over Long Beach State, but in the next we were put firmly down by Mississippi State College for Women, 49–25. Still, it was an education to be there, because we got to see different styles of basketball, the best of which was the revelatory up-tempo game of Immaculata University, the “Might Macs,” who went on to win the first of their three straight national titles under Hall of Famer Cathy Rush. They were Catholic girls from a little school in Pennsylvania who practically wore pinafores when they played, but they were fast, sharp-eyed, hard-elbowed easterners, and they were backed by a fanatical following of nuns, who made such a huge, gonging racket pounding on pots and pans that their noisemakers would eventually be banned.
It was the high point of my collegiate career; UT-Martin never made it back to the national tournament while I was there. But that brief appearance was enough to crack a door open. I learned later that some eight-millimeter film of my performance made its way, thanks to Bettye and Nadine, to the talent evaluators who would select our Olympic team. Shortly afterward, a letter came in the mail.
It was embossed with the initials “USA” on the top.
“It is my privilege to invite you to trials for the selection of the World University Games team,” the letter read.
If women from the USA were going to compete in the Olympics for the first time, they had to get international experience. The World University Games were an important preliminary, to be held in August of 1973 in Moscow, the Soviet Union. Now, I had never even been on an airplane, much less out of the country; the farthest I had ever been was Normal, in the rear of a station wagon. But I was prepared to fly to Mars if I thought it would get me out of my Kmart clothes and into a uniform that said “USA” on it.
Miss Nadine put me in a car, and on her own time and at her own expense she drove me all the way to Fairfield, Iowa, for the USA trials. There, I made the cut to the final eighteen players and was invited to the final stage of the selection process, a monthlong training camp in Boston in the summer of ’73. If I made the team there, we’d go direct to Moscow for seventeen days of competition.
In June of 1973, I went home to Henrietta to pack a month’s worth of clothes and visit my folks for a few days. To a farm kid who had never been airborne, the trip ahead of me felt like sailing to the end of the world without a map. On the morning I left for Boston, my family sat around the kitchen table. I hugged my mother and sister, who were both in tears, and then I put a hand on my father’s shoulder. He was, I knew, quietly elated for me.
“Bye, Daddy. I love you,” I said.
“Awright,” he said.
The American Airlines flight from Nashville to Boston had a row of seats in the front that faced backward, and I was assigned to one of them. I sat there, immobilized with fear, with 150 other passengers staring back at me. As we taxied for takeoff I wondered if they could tell I’d never flown. I could almost see them thinking, That kid is scared to death.
I didn’t feel a whole lot safer once I landed in Boston. Our training camp was on the campus of Northeastern University in the heart of Boston, and as soon as all eighteen players checked into the dorm, we received an emphatic lecture from the coaches telling us not to go anywhere by ourselves, because just down the street was a red-light district where all the merchant sailors who came into the harbor went to celebrate their shore leave. I looked out the window, petrified. What am I doing here? I thought.
But it turned out to be one of the most transforming experiences of my life. I’d never been in a truly elite environment before, but now I was tra
ining with the very best college players in the country, under the best coaches, and I loved it.
Our head coach was a warm, encouraging woman named Jill Upton of Mississippi State College for Women. But it was her assistant, Billie Moore of Cal State Fullerton, who handled our daily training and who ultimately made the biggest impression on me. Billie would go on to become the Olympic coach and move to UCLA, where she won a national championship in 1978, earned the respect and friendship of John Wooden, and coached a pretty good multisport athlete named Jackie Joyner.
Billie was the most demanding person I’d met since my father. She had a very alive coaching style; loquacious and high energy, she talked and gestured with her hands, which made her short blond hair bounce up and down. If you didn’t do something exactly right, she snapped, “Again.” And then she’d stalk down the court after you, with her hair flopping. If you didn’t get it right again, you ran. And ran. And ran. “Again!” she would bark.
“We aren’t going to be the most talented team in international play,” Billie warned. “So we better be in shape.”
I’d never in my life had to condition at that level, or to meet such challenges, expressed with such intensity. But I took to Billie instantly, and in retrospect I think I must have known that here was the kind of person I wanted to be. She had no discernible traces of fear or self-consciousness. She was forceful, uncompromising, strong voiced, and she didn’t seem to think she had to demand less of us just because we were women. If anything, she suggested that she intended to demand more from us because we were women.
“Again!” she would roar, and point at the baseline. We ran until our knees were sore, and when the trainers told her to back off, she put us in a swimming pool and she made us run under water. We spent so much time in the pool we told her, “We’re going to be able to qualify as a water polo team.”
As I got to know Billie I found out she was a farm girl like me, who’d come from Westmoreland, Kansas, but she had only traces of a flat midwestern accent left and had acquired a California shine, or maybe it was just an aura of professional excellence. She recognized something familiar in me, the small-town girl fighting to improve herself. I told her about competing with my brothers, and described my father, and how he raised me like another son, but that I’d discovered there were different rules for women. Billie replied, “When I coach, I just coach players.”
Playing for Billie, I discovered my identity: a physical, hardworking slasher who carried my elbows up around my ears. I’d drive straight through whoever was under the goal—and eventually people learned to move aside. I grew more confident by the day as I realized I could compete with the best and was going to make the team.
There are players who aren’t always willing to play the hard parts of the game. But Pat played all the parts of it the way you’d like it to be played, with intensity, and a willingness to make everyone around her better. She would defend, and she was a huge factor on the boards. She was strong, very physical. She was not a finesse player. There were players who were prettier than her, could jump shoot better. But there was no one that competed better. I’m not saying she wasn’t talented. But it was her work ethic that made her special.
—BILLIE MOORE
I lost my fears and insecurities, thanks partly to Billie, and to my eastern teammates, like our six-one center Theresa Shank Grentz from Immaculata, whom I’d meet again years later as a coaching opponent. They taught me to enjoy the strange sights and smells and tastes of the Eastern Seaboard, the thick old brownstones of the South End and my first lobster rolls and clam bakes. We sampled the Boston pubs and met guys on campus, who would come to the dorm and call for us over the PA system.
About two weeks after I got to Boston, a Tennessee contingent arrived to check on me: my mother, Bettye, and Nadine. My mother had boarded an airplane for the first time in her life at the suggestion of my father, who was dying to know how I was doing in camp. Richard stayed home to run the farm and the businesses, reluctantly, but he gave my mother careful instructions to talk to the coaches and find out what my chances were of becoming an Olympian.
For the next three days my mother watched the coaches drive us from baseline to baseline. At first she either couldn’t get up the nerve to talk to anybody or wouldn’t impose. Each night when she called home my father said, “Did you talk to the coaches yet?” My mother said no and ventured the opinion that she didn’t think the coaches particularly wanted to talk to her. But Father kept insisting and suggested that she try Billie, since we were becoming friendly. Mother told me later she thought he was “going to die” if she didn’t do what he asked her to. Finally my mother caught up with Billie on the steps of the gym and introduced herself.
“Her father sent me up here,” she said. “He thinks our daughter is supposed to be in the Olympic Games. He said I have to be sure to talk to you and wants me to ask you, do you think our daughter has a chance of making this team?”
“Oh, yeah,” Billie said.
Mother had carefully rehearsed what else Richard told her to say. “He wants you to know that whatever she needs to work on to be Olympic caliber, she’ll do it.”
My father was campaigning for me, from hundreds of miles away.
Billie said the usual things to my mother about how if I continued to work hard I had a good chance of making it to Montreal, and she suggested a few things I needed to improve on and then said good-bye.
In early August, we flew to the Soviet Union with the USA men’s team, which starred a marvelous leaping skywalker of a player from North Carolina State named David Thompson, and checked into a dormitory at the University of Moscow. My main impression was of massive grayness, of towers and onion domes intermingled with industrial rectangles that turned out to be apartments. Red Square was like a sudden blast of color and elaborateness amid all the flat gray, and it seemed like everywhere were dusty-olive-uniformed soldiers with their flat, embossed caps.
Between games there wasn’t much to do, so we spent most of our free time at the dorm playing cards. We ate our meals at the University of Moscow cafeteria, which invariably served vats of borscht, as well as a tureen with floating fish heads looking at you. Billie got so sick she needed a shot, and we had to prop her up on the bench. We ate mostly bread and potatoes, and vanilla wafers.
But the food became irrelevant. Halfway through the medal round, in a Sunday night game against a country I can’t remember, I took a hard Eastern Bloc elbow to the face—and it dislocated my jaw. It felt as if my face had cracked in half. It hurt just to blink my eyes. The USA’s team doctor examined me and told me I needed to have my jaw reset in a hospital. I looked at Billie and mumbled crookedly, “Please come with me.” It sounded like “peas cm wif mm.”
They loaded me into a rickety Soviet ambulance that felt like the drive shaft was held together by a bobby pin. Every time we hit a pothole, starbursts of pain lit up in my face. When we got to a local hospital, there were no doctors because it was Sunday. We got back in the ambulance and bounced around to a couple of clinics and hospitals, pain spearing through my face, but found no one who could treat me. Finally, the driver took us back to the University of Moscow.
In the dormitory, the team doctor set my jaw himself. He grabbed my face firmly, reached deep into my mouth, and found my jawbone. I let him do it—didn’t have a choice. With a sharp motion, he wrenched my jaw back into place, while from the back of my mouth came a cry like something an animal would make.
For the rest of the trip I was on a diet of liquids. I didn’t eat anything I couldn’t sip through a straw, except some boiled and mashed Soviet potatoes, which I could barely chew.
I couldn’t eat. But I could breathe—that meant I could still play. We made the gold medal game, against a Soviet Union team that was the most dominant on the planet in women’s basketball, Billie informed us. The Soviets, with their military-style program, were in the midst of winning five straight world championships from 1959 onward. What’s more, they had a
virtually unstoppable player, a seven-foot-two giantess at center named Uljana Semjonova, who was almost as thick as she was tall. Billie’s idea was that since we couldn’t outjump her, maybe we could outrun her. It didn’t work. Playing against Semjonova was like playing against a towering oak tree—one that moved. We were crushed, not surprisingly, 82–44. But it was hard to be too disappointed. The Soviets finished undefeated at 7-0, but we won the silver medal with a 7-2 record, and I’d been our high scorer in three of those games.
By the time we flew home, I had lost fifteen pounds because I couldn’t chew. My face still felt crooked, and when I tried to talk, a cold nail of pain went through my jaw. I wanted to surprise my parents and had a friend pick me up at the Nashville airport and drive me to the farmhouse. My mother threw open the door—and burst into tears at how I looked.
My polyester sweats were hanging off me like I was a clothes hook, and my face was bruised. But I had a gleaming silver medal hanging on a blue ribbon around my neck. And on my jacket it said, “USA Basketball.”
I was a changed person when I came back to Martin for my senior year. I’d been somewhere in the world, done something, and won something, and I carried the glow of the medal with me. Plus, there was this new aggressive, sideways thrust to my crooked jaw.
I was no longer a country girl; I’d matured. I was confident and self-assured about who I was and, also, what I wanted to become. And I understood how to get there. I’d gained so much confidence, in fact, that my parents felt obliged to caution me. “Winning doesn’t make you better than anyone else,” they told me. “Losing doesn’t make you a bad person either. What goes around comes around, so you better be humble.”
But winning certainly altered how people treated me. Men looked at that silver medal like I’d come home from a war with a battle flag. The university administration even honored me on the field at halftime of a football game. Me, a woman. At a football game. I was asked to speak at a Rotary club. I was invited to give a speech in Memphis on what I’d observed of the Soviet Union.