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

by Pat Summitt

  Trish Roberts committed to Tennessee. At the time there were no restrictions under the AIAW rules governing women’s sports, so she came to Knoxville and enrolled for the start of the 1976 school year. She wanted to see how good she could be, even though I warned her, “Our roles have changed now. I’m going to be hard on you.”

  “Pat, I don’t have a problem with that,” she said. “I just want to play ball.”

  I was hard on her, hard on all of them, harder than I would ever be again on any team. So hard that in retrospect I don’t know how they didn’t break, or quit. I couldn’t have played for me then. I was so committed, so unsmiling and intent on building the program, that I must have seemed like a scowl with lipstick.

  Winning an Olympic medal made me hungry to repeat the experience of achieving something. I was done as a player, but I was just beginning as a coach, and there were other prizes out there. I came roaring home from Montreal ready to shout to our players the secrets I’d learned about what it takes to win something big, starting with the most crucial one: You had to be willing to physically outwork and outtough everyone in your path.

  I recruited guys to practice against and made Trish and our other players go against them every day. I borrowed an old lesson from my brothers about arm wrestling against someone stronger than you: that too was all about commitment; you had to survive the first jolt, and then dig in. I wanted our players to learn to hold their ground, and when they didn’t, I sneered.

  “Babies,” I said. “Sissies. Nice girls.”

  The Xs and Os were way basic. You just did it harder. You went faster. If there was an obstacle, you did it anyway. It was, “I don’t care if they’re standing there waiting for you. Run into them.”

  —NANCY DARSCH

  I was hardest of all on an effervescent freshman named Frances Hollingsworth “Holly” Warlick, a freshman guard from Knoxville. Holly had a golden head and gray-green eyes, and two big white chips for front teeth, which she showed all the time. She had a habit of smiling even wider when she was mad than she did when she was laughing, which was an interesting quality, and one I liked. On the outside she was adorable, but on the inside she had the heart of a boxer battling out of a corner.

  Holly had lost her father, Bill, to a cerebral hemorrhage just two years earlier when she was a junior in high school, cutting her girlhood short. His death plunged the family into not only an emotional crisis but a financial one, and Holly ended up sharing a room with her mother, Fran, who had to go to work as a hotel clerk. Holly turned her sorrow into competitive fuel, trying to solve all her problems by running right through them. She had a straight-ahead approach that I admired; nothing ever seemed to get her down or defeat her. She was one of the most contagiously high-energy athletes I ever saw, with a magical ability to lift others with her own inspired, streaking effort.

  She was a state champion in the 400, and she’d go hurtling toward the basket at such a velocity that sometimes she couldn’t make a layup. She’d charge in at full speed and whang the ball off the backboard. “The bricklayer,” we called her.

  Trish and Holly arrived on campus at a fortunate moment. The days of punch and cookies were over. President Gerald R. Ford had signed Title IX regulations into law in 1975, and schools hurriedly poured money into women’s basketball in an effort to comply. The University of Texas shelled out $17,000 in 1976 to hire a coach named Jody Conradt, shocking a local newspaper into printing this headline: “Woman Hired at Man’s Salary.”

  After all the years of bad uniforms and bake sales, I was suddenly in the middle of a gold rush. Tennessee’s president, Dr. Ed Boling, set up an independent women’s athletic department and funded us to the tune of $126,000 for seven sports, and we had our own athletic director, a talented executive named Gloria Ray. I no longer had to be a jack-of-all-trades administrator, no more making out schedules for the tennis team, no more ankle taping. I had a recruiting budget and was allowed to hire an assistant. My first hire was a tiny fireball of a grad student named Elizabeth Jackson, but eventually I chose as my permanent assistant a clipped, deadpan but drily funny young woman from Massachusetts named Nancy Darsch who had a quality I lacked: patience.

  For the first time, there was scholarship money. It was only enough for three full rides at $3,000 apiece, but it was something. I split one of them into three partials so I could spread it around: Sue Thomas got money for books, Suzanne Barbre got room and board, while Lisa McGill got tuition.

  Best of all, as a concession to Title IX compliance, we got to move out of Alumni Gym and into the newly renovated arena where our men’s team played, the Stokely Athletics Center. We weren’t equal, but it was a good start, and it gave us newfound, respectable status. To go with it I decided we needed a new identity, a break from the dingy, underfunded past. I called a team meeting.

  “We need a new name,” I said. “What do you want to be called?”

  The team stared back at me, not entirely sure what I was getting at, quite possibly because they were hungover. More about that in a moment.

  “A name,” I said. “We need to choose a name.”

  Up until then we were the “Volettes,” somebody’s idea of a feminized version of the Tennessee Volunteers. But to me it sounded too much like a chorus line of dancing girls. It was our choice what to call ourselves, I told them. We could remain the Volettes, or we could pick something else, something new.

  “Who do you want to be?” I said. “Do you just want to be the Volunteers, like the guys? Or how about the Lady Volunteers?”

  “Lady sounds classy,” someone said.

  “Yeah, ’cause we’re so good-lookin’,” Lisa McGill said.

  They voted, and Lady Vols we became. We debuted in Stokely on November 13, 1976, against Kentucky, just after a home football game, and got a spillover crowd. We gave them their money’s worth. Our players swayed and loosened up to Rod Stewart’s “Hot Legs,” which they considered their theme song. Then the ball went up, and all I saw for the next forty minutes was a streak of color—a great detonating burst of orange.

  Holly and Trish together were like a match touching dynamite. Trish would fling the ball ahead and Holly would chase it, outrunning everybody. Then Holly would charge to the basket—miss the layup—and Trish would rise up in the air and softly field the rebound and lay it in. Holly kidded her that she missed on purpose, put the ball on the backboard to get the assist.

  All of a sudden, it was an easy game. I didn’t have to say anything in the huddles; what was there to say, except, “Keep doing what you’re doing”? I was just a bystander, enjoying the view from the best seat in the house as we beat Kentucky 107–53. Trish scored 51 points and had 20 rebounds that day, to break the scoring record for Stokely. Which may have had something to do with our halftime snack: orange slices and Coca-Cola—as if we needed any more octane.

  By the next morning it was all over town that there was an electric new brand of basketball worth watching at Tennessee, and it wasn’t played by guys. The phone rang off the hook from people who wanted season tickets or to give us a donation. Overnight we started drawing crowds of six thousand, who roared appreciatively at our headlong style. They were such darling kids, and on top of it they expended so much energy, that audiences found them irresistible. The newspapers started covering us and named Holly “the Secretary of Defense,” for her combative style. The Lady Vols got so much attention they started putting on makeup and nail polish for games.

  When you played that team, you saw all their players giving everything they had—they had absolutely nothing left when they left the court. They played hard every second of every minute they were in the game. You couldn’t beat ’em because they gave so much. I remember Warlick, I mean this kid, she would go up eighteen rows in the stands to save a ball and get it back in. And not only that, there were people standing there waiting to catch it.

  —MARYNELL MEADORS

  The most surprising thing about that team was that they could play the
way they did, while being so wild off the court. I had to be hard on them, because with the exception of Trish, who didn’t drink, they were as hard partying as they were hard charging. The drinking age in Tennessee back then was just eighteen, and it was perfectly legal for them to go to bars, but it was against our training rules. They tried to hide their beer-foamed frolics from me, but they’d come into practice reeking, and it only got worse as I sweated it out of them.

  Lisa McGill was a ringleader. She was a garrulous young lady with wide brown eyes and a bawling laugh, who came from enough money in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, to own a fur coat, which she infamously wore one night to the supermarket along with her flip-flops, to buy more beer. Her apartment was headquarters, which was something of a relief; at least indoors and out of the public eye our players couldn’t get in too much trouble. I assigned our student manager, Donna Fielden, to keep an eye on them. Donna would go over to Lisa’s apartment carrying stacks of practice gear and leave tidy piles of shirts, shorts, bras, and sneakers for each player, with name cards on top. Next, she would set four alarm clocks. Then she’d walk out the door, saying, “If y’all don’t make it to practice, it’s not my fault.”

  Shortly after Christmas, I got the word that they had pulled an all-nighter. I decided, “I’m going to run ’em until they can’t puke anymore.” When they arrived for practice that day, bleary-eyed and rank, I awaited them with four garbage cans, placed strategically on each corner of the court. “Get on the line,” I said.

  After fifteen suicides, there was a player in every corner, heaving. One of the trash cans got so unpleasant that players took a left and veered over to the opposite corner. Nobody was left standing except for Trish, who didn’t drink, and Holly, who wasn’t going to give in. She just stood there grinning that overbroad grin that told you how mad she was inside.

  No amount of disciplining could tame them—they just went right back to living it up. Pretty soon I’d hear another story of them strutting around town in their 501 jeans carrying beer bottles. I’d work them until they crawled out of the gym, and they’d just pop back up ready for more. They had no quit in them.

  It was a trait that came straight from Holly. It was a constant challenge to control all that high energy, channel it in the right direction, and finally, I arrived at a more clever approach. Rather than just running Holly to death, I baited her. I instituted a drill just for her: I’d put twenty minutes on the clock and keep track of her misses and turnovers. She had to make ten straight layups, or the whole team had to run for her. Holly would make eight—and then chunk it and groan. I’d yell, “Everybody on the line for Holly!,” and make her feel responsible for the collective pain. She would stand there flushed and radiating fury through her huge grin. But it taught her to be a more responsible leader and to play under control.

  We were scared of her. And we loved her. I would walk out going, “She’s crazy as hell.” Then I’d come back the next day and she’d challenge me again, and I would respond and throw it back in her face. She knew that. I’d be like, “I’ll show her!” Yeah, you’ll show her. That’s what she wanted.

  —HOLLY WARLICK

  Our steadying influence was Trish Roberts, who set Tennessee records with 29.9 points and 14.2 rebounds a game that season, and they’ve never been matched. She was sweet, churchy, and conscientious in the way she went about all of her business. At the end of every semester I made a big point of reading the names aloud of anyone who made above a 3.0 grade point average. After the first semester, Trish said, “I want to be one of those people whose name you call.” Next thing I knew, she made the honor roll.

  Pat pushed me and saw something in me I didn’t see in myself. When she believes strongly in something, then she is going to hound you, and hound you, until you see it. Eventually.

  —TRISH ROBERTS

  The whole team fed off the energy that Trish and Holly created. We steadily climbed the rankings until we were fifth in the country and made it to the AIAW National Championships in Minneapolis. It was the farthest a Tennessee women’s team had ever been from home, and here’s how nervous and inexperienced we were: when we got to the airport, I said to our manager, Donna, “Where is your equipment trunk?” She’d left it, packed with our uniforms, behind in the locker room. I tossed my car keys to Lisa McGill and said, “Go. Go as fast as you can, and don’t wreck, and don’t stop.”

  But our run ended in the national semifinals, where we met Delta State and center Lusia Harris, my Olympic teammate. Delta State was a small school in cotton country, and its coach was the legendary Margaret Wade, an elegant Mississippian who wore her silvery hair teased and helmetlike, and a rope of pearls. Margaret was the picture of a lady, until she opened her blazer and showed a tag she kept pinned inside. It said, “Give Them Hell.”

  Which they proceeded to do. Lusia was the first truly dominant player of modern women’s basketball, six foot three and 185 hard-muscled pounds of pivoting, to-the-rim force, so much that a few months later the New Orleans Jazz would draft her, making her the first woman ever taken by an NBA team. She would be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992 with a class that included Connie Hawkins and Bob Lanier. In three seasons, Lusia and Delta State racked up three straight titles and a record of 109-6. We were just too small for her. We had no business being in that game, but we fought valiantly. At one point Holly was trapped by the defense and had nowhere to go—so she whipped a half-court pass under her legs up to Trish for a layup. I missed the play. I was looking down at some stats and heard the crowd erupt.

  “What happened?” I asked Nancy.

  “You don’t want to know,” Nancy said.

  We got within four points that day, 72–68. But we just couldn’t stop Lusia.

  The trouble with commitment is that you can give it everything, and fail. When your utmost is not quite good enough, what then? Here’s what you do. You say a few choked, hoarse words to a bunch of kids whose heads are so low that you can see the backs of their pale, curved necks, and you can’t find their faces behind the curtains of their hair, damp with sweat and crying. Then you walk out and find some private corner where your own head drops into your hands.

  I remember very clearly after the game I had gone into the restroom. And Pat must have gone in there. I remember hearing her, crying. To be so close, you know?

  —TRISH ROBERTS

  If I had met R.B. Summitt any earlier in life, I wouldn’t have had time for him. I’d already lost a couple of relationships to my ambition. There was a fellow coach who seemed so enamored, until he began to complain about my hectic schedule and started seeing someone on the side. Right before I went to the 1976 Olympics, he had given me an ultimatum. I went over to my friend Jane Brown’s house in tears. “I need to talk to you,” I said. My boyfriend had told me it was the Olympics or him. “What am I going to do?” I cried.

  Jane said, “Trish, you don’t put conditions on love. If he loves you, he backs you. He supports you. Why doesn’t he want you to go? You’ve worked too hard for this. You have to go.”

  I wanted her to go for her, but I also selfishly wanted her to go for me, for all of us, because if she was on that floor playing, a part of me was on that floor playing. A part of a lot of us was on that floor playing: her family, my family, her coaches and teammates and sorority sisters and friends. She was living the dream for all of us.

  —JANE BROWN CLARK

  After Montreal I was wounded and on the defensive, wrapped up in my career and waiting for the guy who didn’t think it came at his expense. When I finally did meet R.B. in April of 1977, I made him wait four long, patient years, because I wanted to be sure he knew what he was getting into. He came over to my apartment one night at the invitation of my roommate, Marsha McGregor, a state bank examiner, who was hosting a barbecue for a banking convention in town. Several leisure-suited guys filled up the room, and one of them drifted in my direction, a stocky, muscular sort with dark hair and a smile-creased face and specta
cles that made him look athletic and smart at the same time. I was hardly dressed for socializing; I’d just gotten back from a basketball camp and had on a tank top and shorts. But this guy seemed to appreciate the view and introduced himself as R.B. I thought, What kind of silly name is that?, and for the rest of the night and some time afterward insisted on calling him “C.B.,” as in citizens band radio.

  The initials stood for Ross Barnes, and it was a fine old southern name from Sevier County, Tennessee, where his father, Ross, owned a bank, and his mother, Mae, was a schoolteacher who’d made a name as a local feminist pioneer for getting her pilot’s license. I’d actually heard of R.B. around campus: as a student at Tennessee he had been a fraternity council leader who won the “torchbearer” award, the highest prize for academic achievement and activism given by the university.

  For the rest of the night, “C.B.” tried to block out the other guys who swirled around. At some point someone asked to see my Olympic medal, and R.B. marveled over it and listened to my stories of playing in Montreal against the Soviets. At the end of the evening he was the last guy left in the apartment, and we sat up talking until well past midnight. Finally I said, hesitantly, “So is it basketball you’re interested in, or is it me?”

  “It’s you,” he said. “I don’t know anything about basketball.”

  We just seemed to fall into easy step together. We had a formal date that weekend—I tested him by taking him to hear the 19th Amendment—and the next, and the next, until we were seeing each other constantly. He was a southern charm boy, a door opener and an arch-persuader. He called me “Patricia” and made me feel elegant; no one else had ever done that.