Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective

by Pat Summitt

  For the first time, I understood just how much I could gain from basketball, how it could help me in all facets of who I wanted to be as a woman. The example was clear: that medal earned me a respect I couldn’t have acquired in any other field. It occurred to me that the winner’s podium was a pretty good place from which to conduct a women’s movement.

  The thing I always marvel about is that Pat and her teammates’ experiences as college basketball players was no less important to them than the ones today who go to a Final Four with all the trappings. And in fact I’m not sure it didn’t have a greater impression and mean more to people like Pat, because they had to work so hard for it, and today so much is given to them.

  —BILLIE MOORE

  Up to that point I had complicated, unclear feelings about Feminism with a capital F. I was isolated in a corner of the South, and I was further removed from the so-called sexual politics of the day by my passion for basketball, which feminists didn’t seem to have much use for. Feminists were demonstrators in New York City who spoke in hot rhetoric about “revolution,” and some of them had a tenor of complaint that I felt uncomfortable with. Dwelling on grievance was not something I cared to do; it wasn’t my temperament or how I was raised.

  What’s more, I didn’t feel like some of my own sensibilities were especially “feminist.” There were lots of aspects of being a woman I didn’t want to be liberated from. I wanted to be equal, certainly. But I liked the word lady. To me it connoted a kind of grace. I appreciated the fact that our team was called the Lady Pacers. And I was flattered to be called “Pretty Pat Head” by the local male sportswriter.

  This is not to say that I didn’t have the most powerful feelings on the subject of womanhood; I did. Fierce ones. And I had friends who were politically active, like Lin Dunn from Austin Peay, who belonged to the National Organization for Women.

  But I didn’t have the need to make some kind of open declaration. What I had instead was a deep, inarticulate purpose. I wanted to change things in the most solid, demonstrable way for young women like me, help broaden their lives and choices, through athletics. I wanted to help other women be … strong. If I had to sum up my feelings at the time, I’m not sure I could have. But the writer Nora Ephron would say it years later for me. “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim,” she said. That, right there, was the heart of my conviction.

  With Pat, she didn’t get into that militant feminism. She was more patient. Maybe it was the background with her family, and the way her dad drilled her, “This is who we are and we don’t get out of line.” I got out of line. But Pat, I don’t think she ever did. I wonder if she ever slammed her foot down and said “By damn!” I think she was more diplomatic and negotiated in a different way, with southern charm. And of course, she got what she wanted.

  —LIN DUNN

  What spoke to me was the combination of wit, guile, and muscularity of a Billie Jean King, who at the time was the number one tennis player in the world, cutting an indelible figure with her bounding serve-and-volley athleticism and glossy brunette shag. In September of ’73, the fall of my senior year, King won her $100,000 Battle of the Sexes challenge match over a baiting male opponent named Bobby Riggs. Before a packed crowd in the Houston Astrodome and a worldwide TV audience, Billie Jean drove him off the court in three straight sets, and then laughingly called him “Roberta.” It was a tremendous moment.

  If you showed the Battle of the Sexes to college women now, it would seem like a dated stunt. But at the time it was the grandest example of competitive ferocity and performance under pressure I’d ever seen from a woman. Under the most intense spotlight, in a chaotic setting with blaring trumpets and marching bands and fanfare, King didn’t wilt. Instead she handled the carnival chaos coolly. “I like bands,” she said. She won the respect of men like heavyweight champion George Foreman, who leaped out of his seat to applaud her between points. Like every other woman in the country I pressed close to the television and screamed an exultant “Yes!” when it was over. That match was a springboard—it brought awareness to female athletes and made us relevant. From that point on, the suggestion that there were some things women couldn’t do would lose ground.

  Did I have grievances as a young woman? You bet. But protesting or sign carrying wasn’t me—and wasn’t going to get it done. Billie Jean, now there was an influential force. Was there anything more equalizing than her sheer toughness, her combination of smarts and muscle? I wanted to influence, and to change. But there was only one way I could see that changed things: winning. You changed things for women by winning.

  The experience of playing internationally had given me a serious purpose, and I wanted my teammates to take the game as seriously as I did. I was majoring in education with the intention of becoming a teacher and a coach. I figured I would find a job where I could support myself while I trained for the Olympics. In the meantime, the Martin team was my version of training wheels.

  I imported all the drills I’d learned from Billie Moore to our team, and some of Billie Jean King’s full-throatedness as well. I ran our bench as if I was the coach, and, like any fresh convert, I was a little too fervent.

  Early in the season we had a young post player named Julia Brundige who I thought was getting physically beaten against Jackson State. I scolded her to play tougher, but she kept getting pushed around by her opposite number. During a time-out I told her, “You better get out there and give her a bloody nose, or your ass is going on the bench!”

  Well, that got Julia so fired up that she went right out and committed a hard foul. When the whistle blew, she stood there trembling with frustration and holding the ball. When the ref came over to retrieve it, Julia was still so furious that she said, “You want this ball?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then go get it,” she said.

  And she chucked it as hard as she could the length of the court.

  Whistle. Technical foul.

  After I quit staring in amazement, I told Julia, “All I meant was play physical. I didn’t mean get a technical foul.”

  It was the last bit of coaching I would do for a while. Basketball is an inherently humbling game. Anyone who has ever played it or coached it knows that it moves too fast to savor victory for very long—the action is too fluid. One event flows right into another, and the moment you pause to congratulate yourself, the ball flies down the court, and you’re on the other end of events.

  In January of ’74, we went on the road to play a Wednesday night game at Austin Peay, which was an easy drive from Henrietta. My parents and most of my friends from home came to see me play, and they instead witnessed the worst moment of my career. Late in the first half, I crashed the boards for a rebound and started to make a turn up the court to throw an outlet pass. Just as I did so another player clipped me in the left knee. I turned one way, and my knee turned the other.

  I crumpled to the court and knew right away it was serious. There was a spear of pain, followed by a spreading sensation as if boiling water had been thrown on my leg. After a minute the burning subsided, but I was left with a sickly hollow feeling in my knee. When my teammates helped me up, I couldn’t put any weight on it and had to be half carried to the sideline.

  Initially I tried to deny just how badly I was hurt. After halftime I even hobbled onto the floor to warm up, wishfully testing my knee to see if I could go back in the game. But it just buckled like it was made out of sticks.

  We lost the game. Afterward, arrangements were made to take me to the local county hospital. But suddenly my father stepped forward.

  “I want her to see a specialist,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe my ears. A specialist? My father never wanted anyone to see a doctor—it was too expensive. Not even when I’d driven a rusty nail through my foot in the barn as a girl did he want me to see a doctor, which had caused one of the few sharp exchanges between my parents; my mother finally prevailed and called a country doctor who treated m
e by running a needle with disinfectant through the hole.

  But now my father insisted. He didn’t want me in a county hospital; he was going to send me to the best orthopedic surgeon he could find. So he put me in the car and we drove to St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville.

  There in the examining room an orthopedic surgeon probed my knee and told me I had blown out my “anterior cruciate ligament,” the connective tissue in the hinge of the knee joint that keeps it stable. I had also torn my meniscus cartilage. There was nothing left in my knee but a bunch of floating, disconnected shreds. I would need “reconstructive” surgery, the doctor said. I cringed at the word: in the early 1970s, reconstructive surgery was effectively a career ender. These days an ACL can be repaired with the delicate instruments of arthroscopy, a couple of small incisions, and six months of rehab. But the technique back then was a heavy-handed and rudimentary job with a scalpel that left nasty scars, and usually a knee was never the same.

  I looked at my collapsed knee and saw my entire life collapsing with it. I might never get to take another athletic step.

  “I don’t know if you’ll play again,” the surgeon said.

  My father turned those irradiated blue eyes on him.

  “Play?” he said. “She’s going to be in the Olympics.”

  “I don’t …”

  “Fix it,” my father said firmly. “You go in there and you fix it.”

  My father’s certainty was the only reassuring thing I heard, and I latched on to it. If Daddy said I would play again, that meant I would. Later that night, my old childhood friend Jane Brown came to the hospital to visit. She found my parents in the lobby with Nadine and Bettye, all of them looking like doom. My father had an arm around my mother, whose chin was trembling.

  “What’s wrong?” Jane asked.

  “The doctor says she won’t ever play again,” my mother answered.

  As Jane headed to my room she tried to think of something comforting to say to me. She came through the door and said, “Trisha …” But I cut her off.

  “That doctor is crazy as hell if he thinks I won’t play again,” I said.

  I meant it. I was as determined as my father not to view the ACL as career ending—that just wasn’t an option. I thought, There’s no way this is stopping me.

  The next morning, the surgeon opened up my entire knee with a foot-long incision and attempted to stitch and graft things back into their proper places. I woke up with my leg heavily swathed in a cast that went from above my knee down to my toes. I was on crutches for weeks. When the bandages came off, there was a winding twelve-inch scar, a long tailing S-curve that started above my knee and stopped at my calf.

  When the surgeon came to visit me, he told me he’d heard that the only thing more painful than a torn-up knee was childbirth. I just looked at him.

  “I think I’ll be adopting all my kids,” I said.

  After that came months of tedious rehabilitation. Back then there were no fitness centers or personal trainers, and if you wanted physical therapy, you had to go to a clinic. I was on my own in Henrietta and did the best I could; most of my therapy was homemade. I found an old cloth bag with handles on it that belonged to my mother, loaded it up with bricks, and then hoisted myself up on our kitchen counter. I hooked the bag over my foot and did leg lifts with it, trying to strengthen my quadriceps.

  I ran the back roads of our farm. Around the same time, my brother Tommy was recovering from a broken leg, so we worked out together, hobbling. It was sort of like the old days in the hayloft; as soon as we both could stand on two feet again, we played one-on-one. I knew I was healing on the day that Tommy had a hard time winning.

  Only way I could beat her was to push her out of the way and shoot a layup. I said, “I’m through. I think you’re in better shape than I am.”

  —TOMMY HEAD

  I went back to school to continue rehabbing and to enjoy the rest of my senior year. To kill the boredom, we went to drive-ins to see disaster films like The Poseidon Adventure. One evening out of sheer mischief I pulled the main electrical breaker in the dorm, plunging us into darkness. They had to call the janitor out of Sunday night church to get the lights back on, and for years afterward he said, “I know it was that Head girl. Everyone loves her, but I know she’s nothing but trouble.”

  It was time to start job hunting. Vietnam wound down, and the Watergate scandal peaked, but I was more preoccupied with my knee and my future. If I couldn’t recover, the most realistic scenario was that I’d wind up back in Henrietta standing in front of a blackboard at one of the local high schools.

  To finish my degree at UT-Martin I was required to do some student teaching, and that spring I got a taste of what it was to be a high school instructor at a local school in Greenfield, Tennessee. Student teaching was a constant battle against chaos; the kids all thought they could take advantage of me because I was a young substitute. I learned something important about projecting authority: you had to set the tone immediately if you didn’t want to be challenged.

  I also learned that maybe I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life trying to control classrooms of wild, bored teenagers.

  The teacher I was working under asked me to cover a class while he ran an errand downtown. Sitting at a row of desks was a roomful of thirty or so students, including some of the most popular athletes in the school. I turned my back and was looking at the blackboard when a paper wad hit me in the arm. Now, a paper wad expertly done is heavy—it’s been soaked in water and then packed into a tight hard ball—and it hurts. I wheeled around and made eye contact with every student in that room, and as soon as I met eyes with the culprit, I knew he did it. He was one of the better-off kids in the school, the son of a prominent doctor. The kids stared at me, to gauge my reaction. His daddy was important, and I was just the female substitute. And I knew that’s what they thought.

  “I don’t want to hear a sound out of anyone,” I said. “I will be right back.”

  I went down to the teacher’s lounge and said, “I need a paddle.”

  There was a large paddle, just like the old Blister II that had been used on me back in Henrietta. When I got back to the classroom, you could hear a pin drop. I stared at the perpetrator with Richard Head’s eyes.

  “Why’d you do it?” I said.

  “I was just messing around,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hit you, I meant to hit the blackboard.”

  “You missed it,” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Come outside,” I said.

  In the hallway, I told him to grab his ankles. I hit him hard enough to pick him up off the floor, and then I said, “Go have a seat,” and we walked back in the classroom. For the next few days I waited to hear something about it from the teacher, or from the boy’s father, but no one ever said a word, and I got an A in student teaching.

  Bettye Giles didn’t believe I belonged at the high school level and urged me to apply to graduate school, which I did. She was determined to see me become a college coach, and she actually told the local newspaper that spring, “We need people like Pat in our field. The future depends on them.” Bettye called the women’s athletic directors at the University of Tennessee, Dr. Nancy Lay and Dr. Helen Watson, and personally pushed my application, telling them, “If you don’t take her, somebody else will.”

  That April, a letter arrived from Tennessee offering me a place in the master’s program in the physical education department, with a part-time job as an assistant to Tennessee’s basketball coach, Margaret Hutson. I was unsure of whether to accept. Tennessee was on the other side of the state, away from my family and my college friends, and it was hardly a force in women’s basketball. I wavered, unsure a big state school was where I belonged.

  But just two weeks later, Margaret Hutson decided to go on a sabbatical to pursue a doctorate. Tennessee suddenly had an opening for head coach. I was in the UT-Martin gym working out with some of my teammates, when Miss Giles walked in.
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  “I just got off the phone with the athletic director in Knoxville,” she said. “They would like you to be their head coach.”

  I was stunned. I said, “Now why would I want to go there and do that?”

  My teammates started chattering at me.

  “Because it’s a job and you’ll be paid to coach basketball,” they said. “Go.”

  So I went.

  How disappointed were you when you would lose?

  Sick. Just sick at my stomach.

  Why does it make you physically ill?

  Because I feel like I should be able to do something about it. But you can’t always do that.

  [Later]

  You can’t do anything about Alzheimer’s, either. But my understanding is, you want to work as much as possible for as long as possible?

  Sure.

  What’s your biggest concern about the diagnosis going forward? What concerns you?

  You know, I—the diagnosis is what it is. It’s not like I worry about going to bed and not waking up. But at first, man, it just knocked me out of my chair. Why me? We talked about that, went through all that, and now I have a better understanding. You know, I feel like I’m helping other people. That’s important.

  —May 25, 2012, Alys Beach, Florida, one year after diagnosis

  4

  Olympian

  I was driving across the Tennessee campus on a fall day in 1974, heading over to my new office, when I spotted a couple of young women bouncing a basketball on the sidewalk. I recognized them as two of Tennessee’s returning players, Diane Brady and Sue Thomas, and they had just finished a pickup game with some guys. I pulled over in my light green Cutlass with the vinyl top and rolled down my window.