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

by Pat Summitt

  The other book was a thin little volume called Hope for the Flowers, by Trina Paulus, a 1972 bestseller that was a work of the consciousness-raising period. It was a story of the transformation of a caterpillar character named Stripe into a butterfly, and it shows you what an idealistic, fresh teacher I was, not too far removed from the country girl who yearned for metamorphosis. The meaning was simple: Stripe the caterpillar wished to be something more, but he learned that transformation didn’t come just from striving. You had to go deep inside, where it was dark and frightening, and meet yourself. If you were willing to do that, then you might grow wings.

  Diane never gave either one back to me. She kept them both. And that was okay.

  I didn’t let our players know it, but when I wasn’t coaching, I was still as much of a student as they were, and as young at heart, which you could tell if you swung by my little apartment just off the main drag. You’d have heard the clinking of bottles and my stereo blasting the wails of Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys, singing “Different Drum.”

  Yes, and I ain’t saying you ain’t pretty

  All I’m saying is I’m not ready

  For any person place or thing

  To try and pull the reins in on me

  Soon as I stepped off the basketball court, I’d lose the stern face and slip into some jeans and go looking for as much cheap adventure as you could find on my stipend of $250 a month. The grad students in the phys ed department shared the same office space in that hot attic, and we were bonded by a combination of poverty, hilarity, and overwork. We went to the Scottish Inn for thirty-five-cent cocktails, or ate Lum’s hot dogs cooked in beer, or went to Western Sizzlin’ because you could get a salad and a baked potato for a dollar.

  Since we had no money, we were always trying to sneak our way into things for free. There was an all-girl band in town named the 19th Amendment, which commanded our loyalty, and we found out they were booked to play at a young bankers’ convention at a large hotel in town. I put on my most authoritative voice and called the hotel. “I’m with the Pan Hellenic Organization,” I said. I was considering whether or not to hire the 19th Amendment for my own convention, and could I possibly bring a group of colleagues to hear them? Not only did they let us in; they put us at a table at the very front, and we ate and drank for free.

  Pat would do about anything really—she was fearless. She was the ringleader of everything and the professors all loved her to death; she could win ’em over. There were about six of us. We had cookouts almost every weekend, and her apartment was the gathering place and everybody congregated there. She had a big stereo, and we’d buy the groceries and she’d cook. She had confidence plus, everything was a challenge, and she didn’t back down from anybody or anything.

  —SYLVIA HATCHELL

  We formed our own softball team and entered the Knoxville Recreational Women’s League, playing in baseball shirts with big letters on them that said AST, which drove our opponents crazy trying to figure out what it meant. It was our joke: it stood for “A Softball Team,” which made us fall around with laughter.

  I supplemented my small income by playing cards, at which I was as bold as I was good. I got to know some of the UT faculty and discovered a small, friendly professorial poker group and talked my way into their game. I’d play with the professors into the small hours of the morning and take their money. For some reason they didn’t hold it against me.

  Nor did one of those professors, Dr. Barbara Meade, hold it against me when I decided it would be hilarious to paper her yard one night. I had the keys to Alumni Gym, and Sylvia and I collected all the toilet rolls from the restrooms and drove out to Dr. Meade’s home in west Knoxville and draped her pear trees in so much paper it looked like a Russian blizzard. We must have felt faintly guilty, because we offered to cut her lawn for her. Sylvia would push the mower one lap, and then I’d hand her my beer and take the mower and push it for a lap.

  Life then seemed like one huge contest to me, and I met it with what seems to me now like inexhaustible vitality—where did I find the energy to play softball?—and a certain amount of swagger. I was always going a hundred miles an hour in my Cutlass, trying to get to all the places I needed to go and get there first. One afternoon Sylvia and I were driving in traffic when a guy nosed in front of me. I reflexively hit the gas and cut him off. At the next stoplight he started chewing me out. Well, he had met his match. “If you want to pull over, we can settle it right now,” I said, and it was all Sylvia could do to stop me from getting out of the car.

  Somehow, between all of that, I acquired my master’s degree and learned to teach. For all my mischief, I’d found my calling. The Tennessee program wasn’t designed to make a basketball coach out of me, it was to make an educator, and I discovered that I loved the job.

  The idea of it was that I should be able to teach more than Xs and Os. I should be able to teach … anything. I absorbed the “whole-part-whole method,” how to explain an overall concept to students, break it down into smaller pieces, then put it back together again with emphasis, explaining the key concepts that unlocked larger schemes.

  I was required to teach phys ed classes in sports I’d never played, like racquetball and badminton. But my favorite was self-defense, which meant I had to learn some rudimentary martial arts techniques. I liked to think I could defend myself, and liked to teach other women to do it. Plus, I enjoyed making all the noises.

  I became dedicated. I taught a class in Fundamentals of Basketball, which was immediately popular with all the campus star athletes, who figured it for an easy grade. Among those who signed up was Ernie Grunfeld, a six-foot-six ballplayer with a crooked smile and a flowing game. The Tennessee men’s team was in the midst of a fabulous heyday with Ernie and his fellow New York playground ace Bernard King, nicknamed the “Ernie and Bernie Show,” because they lit up the campus with their bright personalities and explosive games. Ernie was on the USA national team, so I knew him a little bit, and I figured I’d enjoy having him in class. Except he never came. He and the rest of the athletes cut it, assuming I’d give them an A.

  I couldn’t do it. I was too principled in the classroom and too intolerant of laziness. I just couldn’t rubber-stamp their transcripts because they were stars on the men’s team.

  I gave Ernie a D.

  He came to my office, incredulous.

  “How could you give me a D?” he asked.

  “You didn’t show up,” I said.

  “Yeah. But I know all that stuff.”

  “Ernie, get out of here,” I said, laughing, “before I give you an F.”

  The message got around: don’t cut Pat’s class.

  At the end of the spring semester, the Tennessee administration offered me a full-time job. Well, really, three jobs. At a starting salary of $8,900, I’d be head coach of the women’s basketball team, an instructor required to teach three courses, and an administrator in the athletics department. The salary was a relief, but it meant more work than ever. In the 1975–1976 season, Tennessee had a budget of just $5,000 for six women’s sports, and I was in charge of administering most of them. I had to order the uniforms, do the scheduling, including travel, and serve as the rules compliance person. I was also still trying to rehabilitate my knee and train as a world-class athlete.

  I was overwhelmed. Something was bound to suffer, and it was my knee. I tried to get workouts in, but it was difficult. I’d get up early in the morning and go to a weight room, and try to strengthen my leg, which was still stiff and painful a year after surgery.

  There were no women in the weight room at that time; it was only guys. She would go in there and do curls with that leg. She had a major scar. Big-time scar. Let me tell you she went after it. She’d have tears in her eyes because of the pain, trying to get that leg back. You talk about commitment.

  —SYLVIA HATCHELL

  But I just couldn’t keep up with it, and slowly but surely I fell out of shape. In September of 1975, I rejoined th
e USA national team for the World Championships in Bogotá, Colombia, and the Pan American Games in Mexico City. I was slow and overweight, and I hobbled. In Mexico City when they handed out our USA gear, among the things we got was a dress for official functions. I held my dress up, and I thought: That thing is huge. It was a size 16 and it should have swallowed me, but it didn’t. There was a little market where we would go trade our international souvenirs, and I decided to trade my dress. When I pulled it out, the lady who ran the market started laughing and said, “Oh, grande, grande, grande!” Well, it was grande. I thought, This lady right here knows what she’s looking at. And I knew, too. My body had changed since the knee injury.

  I got benched. I hardly played, unless it was a twenty-point blowout. I joked that I played end, guard, and tackle: sat on the end of the bench, guarded the water bottles, and tackled anyone who came in there that wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Our head coach was Cathy Rush from Immaculata, with Billie Moore again serving as an assistant, and they had little use for me in the shape I was in. They had more use for me at the card table, where Cathy had a tendency to win big pots and then quit, so I couldn’t get my money back. I lost a lot of my per diem meal money to her.

  But I learned a valuable coaching lesson on that trip. By then I was the most senior member of the team, and it was embarrassing and hurtful to be on the end of the bench with a bad knee. All around me were young collegians like Ann Meyers, who was a star at UCLA, and Nancy Lieberman, a phenomenal flame-haired teenaged guard from New York. As the oldest person on the team I knew that their eyes were on me. I had every opportunity to feel sorry for myself and create tension.

  What I learned is that how someone accepts being a member of the supporting cast is critical to chemistry: an unhappy role player can be disruptive, create a culture of whining, and undermine the authority of the decision makers. For the first time in my life I was in that position and had to decide how to deal with it. Nancy sat on the bench next to me, though for a different reason: she was too young and inexperienced to get much playing time. It would have been very easy for me to lean over and whisper complaints in her ear.

  But I decided if I ever wanted to amount to anything as a professional I had to be an example for Nancy. She and I were invariably the last players to get in the game, and one afternoon it got particularly humiliating. The USA was up by more than 30 points and there were just a couple of minutes left when Cathy Rush finally looked down the bench and pointed at Nancy and me. It was time for the scrubs to mop up.

  Nancy was furious. She said, “I’m not going in.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “This is embarrassing,” she said. “I’m not going in.”

  Nancy went on to become a great player and friend of mine, but she was young, and the young are inherently self-absorbed.

  “Oh, yes, you are,” I said. “And I’ll tell you one thing. You better not pass me the ball, because if you do, you’ll never get it back.”

  I spent the rest of the tournament swallowing my pride, and drinking beer with Ernie Grunfeld in the local marketplaces. It wasn’t a great trip, and it got worse.

  Although we managed to win the gold in the Pan Ams, we finished a lowly eighth out of fourteen teams in the World Championships. It was a huge setback because it denied us an automatic spot in the Montreal Games. We were relegated to a pre-Olympic qualifying tournament.

  One afternoon after practice as I was walking off the court I saw Bill Wall, the executive director of what has now become USA Basketball. Bill was a no-nonsense executive in gray flannel whose commitment to supporting the women’s game was critical; he supported us financially when others would have marginalized us. Perhaps just as important, he was genuinely interested in us. Bill knew I was out of shape and that I’d been spending a lot of time sampling Mexican beer.

  Bill said, “You’re not going to make the Olympic team like this.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You’ll never make it,” he said.

  I wheeled around and glared at him, and said, “Oh yes I will.”

  My jaw was thrust halfway back to America. But Bill was just being honest, and trying to motivate me. When I went to Billie Moore and repeated what Bill had said, she was equally honest.

  She said, “If you have any desire to make the Olympic team, you better take off at least ten or fifteen pounds. You’re going to be older, and you’ve got a bad knee. If you don’t get yourself in the best shape you’ve ever been in, and become much quicker, you won’t have a chance to compete.”

  It was a low point. I’d fought so hard to come back from the knee, and to learn I might not make it to Montreal shook me to the core. I was going to be devastated if I didn’t make that team. I refused to even think about it.

  “Well, then, you’d better get a plan,” Billie said.

  This may come as a surprise, but when I’m challenged, I can be a little excessive. I didn’t lose ten pounds, or even fifteen, in the next year. I lost twenty-seven pounds. There were no more barbecues and thirty-five-cent beers. I swore off red meat. I got up every morning and ran for miles, and any day that I didn’t get my mileage in, I made myself run double the next. I trained five and six hours a day. After I ran, I went to the weight room and then to the gym to play pickup against guys. I worked with total commitment, determined to be in the shape of my life at the USA Trials.

  Looking back on it, I was probably still too much of a player to do a great job as a coach. I crammed in my duties to the team on the side, and the result was that my second season wouldn’t go down as Tennessee’s finest: we’d lost five seniors and had four rookies. Our starting center was a freshman named Jane Pemberton, who had only played defense in high school. She couldn’t shoot a BB in the ocean, which wasn’t her fault; Jane had just never shot the ball. Ever.

  Naturally, I didn’t want her to start now.

  “Jane,” I said, “I don’t want you shooting tonight. Your job is to rebound. Do you understand that?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” she said.

  If there was one thing I had at the end of every game, it was instant feedback, because there was a box score that told me what kind of job we did. That night when I looked at the box, a couple of statistics jumped out at me. Jane Pemberton had only one rebound. But Suzanne Barbre, our shooting guard, had seven.

  I looked at Jane and said, “What’s the one thing I asked you to do?”

  She thought for a minute, and kind of scratched her head, and said, “Rebound?”

  “That’s right. You have one, and you’re playing center. Suzanne here had seven. Does that tell you anything?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jane said. “You oughta think about moving me over to guard.”

  True story.

  Once again, I tried to make up for our shortcomings with conditioning. Around Thanksgiving, I held one of the most legendary practices in the annals of the program. It was a beautiful football Saturday, the day of the big annual Tennessee-Vanderbilt game. It was noon as we walked onto the court, and the players could hear the pregame bands playing over in Neyland Stadium, which backed up to Alumni Gym. We were still practicing when the halftime ceremonies began.

  “Did y’all have dates?” I asked. “Did y’all think you were going to the game?”

  Another hour went by in a blur. And another. Next thing they knew, the football game was over. We’d been practicing for more than four hours. When I finally let them leave Alumni, at the same time the football crowd left the stadium, they could barely walk to their cars.

  We went 16-11 that season, which would stand for thirty-some years as our worst record. The real force in the state was Tennessee Tech under Marynell Meadors, with whom I had carried over a rivalry from college at UT-Martin. We’d have a lot of antagonists at Tennessee over the years, but none of them were quite as low-down bitter as that early enmity with Tech. Our annual game was dubbed the “Toilet Bowl,” thanks to a stunt pulled by the Tech studen
ts that season.

  They got ahold of a toilet bowl and painted it in school colors of purple and gold and rolled it onto the court, where the mascot started chucking oranges (our color) into it, to the great delight of the students in the crowd, who were equipped with squares of bathroom tissue. The first time Tech scored a basket they made it snow toilet paper, and both teams had to leave the floor so it could be swept.

  My family had driven over for the game and didn’t take it at all well, especially since we were losing. Some old Tech boy was sitting near my father and figured out who he was and decided to give him a bad time by screaming at me, “Pat Head, you’re a bitch!” He kept it up the whole game while my father just sat quietly and never twitched a facial muscle. “I’ve seen a better Head on a nickel beer!” he’d scream. My little sister, Linda, was there with her boyfriend, Wesley Attebery, a tough tobacco farmer with sharp-toed boots and a handlebar mustache.

  Wesley finally turned to the screamer and said, “You need to keep yer damn mouth shut.”

  The screamer said, “What’s it to you?”

  Wesley said, “She might be my sister-in-law one day.”

  The screamer sneered, and said, “I don’t give a—”

  And that’s when Wesley hauled off and hit him, broke his glasses, grabbed him underneath the collar, and said, “Boy, you done —ed up now, I’m fixin’ to kill yer ass.” By now people on our bench saw the scuffle break out and were about to climb into the stands, so it was a good thing the game ended. My father never moved; he just sat there grinning like a fox.