by Pat Summitt
“Let him win!” I said.
“No,” Daddy said. “He won’t get better.”
That was how I was with our players. It was all in the name of making them stronger. Feel bullied? Do something about it. Suffer a setback? Handle it. The one thing I hated, the one thing I couldn’t stand, was when they acted weak, or hurt, or intimidated.
“Don’t wilt!” I shouted. “Be assertive!”
I thought I could will them to a championship. But no matter how hard I worked them, we couldn’t quite get to the top. In three of Holly Warlick’s four years at Tennessee, we finished either second or third in the country. I have patchwork memories of how desperately hard they played, and how I burned after each season-ending loss:
• In 1978, climbing all the way to number one in the country, only to be torpedoed by a media firestorm when a scathing Sports Illustrated article called us “the University of Transfer,” because Cindy Brogdon had decided to follow Trish Roberts to Tennessee, angering coaches around the country who felt I’d used my Olympic relationship to influence them into switching schools. We were knocked off by a bigger, stronger number six Maryland in the regionals of the AIAW tournament, and afterward our players sobbed. “I can’t believe we weren’t tall enough,” they wailed.
• In 1979, flying with the men’s team to a doubleheader at Louisiana State University in turbulence so bad that heads were hitting the ceiling of the plane, and everyone was nauseated. The players thought I would cancel practice; instead I made us go right to the arena and told anyone who was still sick to “throw up, and get on the court.” We fought to overtime only to have the LSU men’s coach, Dale Brown, order us off the floor so the men could start on time. Dale became a friend to women’s basketball, but he wasn’t that night. I said, “No way are we getting off this court. We’re not leaving,” and we argued eye to eye until we compromised and played the overtime on a running clock.
• At the end of that season, making it to the AIAW tournament at Fordham in New York City, and our center Kathy O’Neil was so country that when we drove into Manhattan she said, “Look, y’all, there’s the Golden Gate Bridge!” Nancy had to tell her no, that one was in California. At every stoplight the window washers came out and Miss Hazel of Henrietta tried to tip each one of them. We played in Rose Hill Arena in the Bronx, where there were holes in the ceiling and pigeons nesting behind the backboard. The birds flapped in the rafters and dropped bombs along the sidelines, and periodically I had to relocate to avoid getting my suit ruined. We won there, only to get killed by Louisiana Tech in the Final Four in Greensboro, North Carolina, 102–84. It was the second time in three years we finished third in the country.
“The harder you work,” I told them, “the harder it is to surrender.” But too often they interpreted it as intimidation or punishment. Holly would stare back at me with that bright, implacable grin of hers, and then go to her room and blast Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” on her stereo, and scream the words: “I ain’t WORK-ING here no more!”
But eventually, I changed. And if I hadn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’d be talking to someone else, because the kids would have all quit and I’d have burned out, fast. What changed me? Jill Rankin, partly. Also R.B. Summitt.
I tried to help with team chemistry because my minor in college was psychology. But of course, I had to try to figure out Pat first.
—R.B. SUMMITT
Jill was another transfer. Nothing in the rules prohibited transfers, despite the anger of my fellow coaches, and players from other schools were ringing my phone off the hook for a good reason: we were the hot, rising program, and Stokely was the biggest stage for women in the game. I actually could have taken more transfers than I did; even Nancy Lieberman wanted to be a Lady Vol, but I felt it wasn’t a good mix and told her to stay at Old Dominion. But when Jill called, I jumped at her: she was a six-foot-three center and a three-time all-American at tiny Wayland Baptist College out in Texas, with great presence around the basket. When Jill’s coach, Dean Weese, left the school for a pro league, she no longer wanted to stay at Wayland and called me to ask if she could finish out her career as a Lady Vol. “Come on,” I said. There would be no more crying about height.
I had coached Jill on the USA national team in competitions like the Pam Am Games, so I knew the kind of player we were getting. If the ball touched her fingers, it was going in, but that wasn’t the best thing about her. It was how she lightened me up that made her such a valuable addition. On top of that strong body Jill had a pixie haircut, and the soul of one, too. She was a deadly funny, self-secure young woman who wasn’t the least bit afraid of me; in fact, she seemed to think I was good material. I let her get away with murder. She would stroll into my office and sit in my chair and put her feet up on my desk.
In years to come, I always introduced Jill by saying, “She’s the first player who ever made fun of me.” Pause. “To my face.”
Jill had heard from other players how intense I was. “You don’t jack with her,” they said. But that just convinced Jill that it was her role in life to loosen me up. She was a great mimic, and she studied the way I walked. Once I was walking through the parking lot on my way into the arena for a game, in a dapper outfit of burgundy vest, gauchos, and wine-colored boots, when here comes Rankin after me, copying the walk perfectly. She went long-striding into the gym, fast and businesslike, with one arm swinging wide and the other held close to her body. The kids shrieked and I turned around, just in time to catch her. She never missed a beat.
Or she’d get right up close and set her jaw and peck them on the chest with her finger, then growl at them in my voice, “You WILL rebound!”
Life was a comedy with Jill around. That season we went to UT-Martin to play, and it was important to me that we look good in front of my alma mater. I was so wired up that when Holly and Jill were a little late leaving the motel for the team bus, I threw rocks at their doors. When we got to the gym, it seemed like everyone I ever knew was in the stands. I was pleased at how glamorous we looked as we took the floor: I had ordered us fancy new warm-ups, very trendy long bell-bottoms with twenty-four-inch-diameter cuffs like the NBA guys wore. The Lady Vols ran on the floor and started a three-man weave, with Jill leading off. Well, somehow her feet got tangled in her bell-bottoms, and she tripped. Fell flat. And started sliding. She dusted at least six feet of the court.
Everyone wanted to laugh. But I gave her one of those “I can’t believe that just happened” looks and signaled her to get up, keep going. Well, two minutes later another player, Jerilynn Harper, tripped on her big bell-bottoms. Fell flat. I hissed, “Get those things off!” But by then the kids, led by Jill, were cackling uncontrollably, and so was the audience, and so was I.
Jill taught me that I could be demanding and still have fun; the two weren’t mutually exclusive. Even when I was angriest, Jill had a way of breaking me down. Late that season we took a bad loss at South Carolina. We were up by 18 points at the half, but it was a terrible environment, with a rock band behind our bench that made it impossible to hear, and in the second half we came out flat, didn’t score until the nine-minute mark. Ended up losing the game. I was furious, and it provoked one of my more ingenious motivational techniques.
When we got back to our Town & Country Hotel, I told the kids to pack their own uniforms instead of giving them to the managers for laundering. The next day we drove home, and as I pulled into the parking lot, I said, “Don’t go back to your dorms. We’re going straight to the locker room. Get your uniforms out. We’re going to finish those twenty minutes you didn’t play in them. They aren’t ready for the laundry yet—you didn’t play hard enough to get ’em dirty.” I made them dig their sweaty, cold uniforms out of the laundry bag and put them on.
Pat could make you hate losing as bad as she did by putting consequences on it. If you didn’t hate it for all the right reasons, she was going to teach you to hate it.
—JILL RAN
KIN
Holly was so mad, she said, “I’ll show her. I’m even putting my sweaty socks back on.” She decided to try to stink me out. Not only did she pull on her damp wet, reeking socks, she even put her sweaty sports bra back on. That gave Jill an idea.
“If we’ve got to play in these uniforms again, then we should have player introductions again,” she said.
Holly brightened up at that. She, Jill, and Kathy O’Neil walked out into the Stokely tunnel and did the Tennessee cheer: “T-E-Double N-E-Double S-Double E!” Then Jill put her hands around her mouth like a megaphone and said, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, starting for the Lady Vols at point guard, number 22, HOOOOOLLLLLLY WARRRRRRLICK!” and mimicked crowd noise. Holly went running out to midcourt pumping her fists high above her head. Then Jill introduced herself, “JIIILLLLLL RAAAANKINNN!!!!!” And she ran out and high-fived Holly.
They both turned back to look at Kathy who was waiting her turn in that tunnel. She said, excitedly, “Introduce me!” But all of a sudden Jill and Holly saw me striding down the tunnel. Holly shook her head at Kathy, like uh-uh. Kathy said, “What’s wrong?” By then Holly and Jill had frozen.
I said, “You think this is funny?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You do, don’t you? You think this is funny.”
“No, ma’am.”
But it was funny, of course. It got even funnier when people started wandering into the gym and saw our players in their uniforms and said, “Hey, is there a game tonight?” They were embarrassed—mortified. But it made an impression.
We didn’t win a championship that year either, but the laughter lessened the pain. Holly and Jill led us right to the brink of one: we made the AIAW title game, for a televised matchup on NBC against the number one team in the country, Old Dominion, led by a six-foot-eight center named Anne Donovan, and my old teammate Nancy Lieberman. Who proceeded to play as if her sole intent was to make me sorry I hadn’t let her transfer. It was all in place for us to take the final step to a championship—and we just couldn’t get it done. Maybe it was nerves, or we tried too hard, but our guards made just two of fourteen shots. Old Dominion won, 68–53.
It was another wrenching loss, and it was compounded on March 21, when President Jimmy Carter announced the American boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There was nothing abstract about the boycott for us. Holly, Jill, and our six-five center Cindy Noble had been selected to be on the Olympic team, and I was scheduled to be there as an assistant coach to my friend Sue Gunter. The kids couldn’t get over the loss of such an opportunity—and never would.
The only good thing about the boycott was that it gave me the summer off and allowed me to plan my wedding. One night that May over dinner at my apartment, R.B. gave me an ultimatum: “I’m calling the question,” he said. It was a parliamentary term meaning it was time for me to make a decision. I had to marry him or release him and let him move on. “This is dragging out and we both want children, and we aren’t getting younger,” he said.
By this time we had been dating for almost four years, more than long enough for me to decide whether we were right together. He had not always been patient, occasionally breaking off with me to date others, to my misery. I had no intention of losing him again and had been waiting for him to propose.
If R.B. was braced for disappointment when he issued his ultimatum, this time I surprised him.
I smiled and said, “I’ve been thinking that August 23 would be a good date.”
Just then R.B. glanced over at my digital clock—which was beaming 8:23 P.M. We took it as a sign, a blessing on the date.
We were tremendously different. He was a big reader who loved science fiction, and I barely cracked a book unless it was a how-to-succeed tract. He loved the Smoky Mountains and I liked the Florida beaches. He was patient and slow talking, sentimental and wide open with his feelings. I was fast and furious and kept my deeper feelings under cover. I liked Elvis, Loretta, and Dolly. He liked John Denver and ABBA.
But he smoothed my edges, took me out of basketball, opened life up, and taught me to be more expressive, made it easier to say the words that my father never could, “I love you.”
I got married in the first and only wedding dress I tried on—that’s how decisive I was. Once I wanted to be married, I didn’t second-guess. At the rehearsal dinner my father looked at R.B. and said, “Ain’t gonna be no divorce.” R.B. reached over and shook his hand and said, “You’re right.”
There would be no more “separating” the personal and the professional for me. From then on, they began to merge. Jill Rankin tied most of the rice bags, and Nancy Darsch was a bridesmaid. Holly, Cindy Noble, Suzanne Barbre, and the rest of the Lady Vols “decorated” our car with tin cans.
The ceremony was conducted by our pastor at Mt. Carmel United Methodist Church, although my father suggested he could have done as well, because he had become a justice of the peace. We were standing in the hall waiting to walk down the aisle, when my old friend Jane Brown, who was a bridesmaid, reached over and hugged me and said, “I’ve been here before and I’m just as nervous.” Daddy looked down at Jane and said, “Yeah, but she could have saved us all of this trouble if she had just let me marry them at home.”
We saved the front left pew of the church for the Lady Vols. They were all there, a dozen of them in their most respectable dresses. “Amazing Grace” played, and then the wedding march began. Our players rose—and kept rising, and rising, until they unfolded to their full height. They looked like tall, draped curtains.
Here’s the problem with inviting a basketball team to your wedding and giving them the front pew.
Nobody behind them could see.
I was finally becoming a more creative, resourceful coach. I no longer thought I had to be in control of everything and everybody; in fact, if there was one thing I’d realized, it was that once the game starts, a coach can’t physically control what’s happening. You can’t move bodies from point A to point B.
The job of coach wasn’t about being a martinet. It was about preparing people to make good independent decisions. Getting them in the right spots at the right time was as much a matter of understanding them, and talking to them, as it was of directing their traffic.
When she first started, the age difference was so close she had to prove a point, that she was the coach and we were players. She treated everyone the same. But we were a team that loved to play the game and had big hearts, and by our senior year she was learning what she could do with kids, and what she couldn’t do. I think she understood, “I’ve got to do this a little different.” Because she had developed a relationship with us, she knew how far she could go.
—HOLLY WARLICK
Becky Clark was a nineteen-year-old premed major from Memphis, and she was partly deaf. She had significant hearing loss that was progressively worsening, but she refused to concede to it and wanted to try out for the team. I gave her a chance, because I thought it would be a good learning exercise for all of us, and she made the team in 1980.
Becky had hearing aids, but she couldn’t wear them when she was playing because sweat destroyed them. In the noise of practice and games, she couldn’t make out what anyone said to her. That meant, as a team, all of us had to deal with Becky’s debility, make sure she saw our eyes and read lips. “You fill in the blanks for your teammates,” I told them. “No matter what the problem is. If there’s any miscommunication, it’s your fault.”
One afternoon in practice during a defensive segment Becky ran into a screen and fell to the floor. Her teammates were supposed to warn her that a screen was coming so she could switch off—but Becky hadn’t heard anybody yell “switch” and slammed right into it. We had to figure out how to help her, but she also had to figure out how to help herself. I blew the whistle.
“Becky, what happened there—tell me!” I said. “You’ve got to get around that pick.”
“I couldn�
�t hear my teammates holler,” she said.
With Becky, the best way to communicate was visually. She needed nonverbal cues, I realized. Somehow, she had to accomplish the task of seeing what everyone else was hearing. I walked over and stood in her spot and got in a defensive stance. I went through the steps of denying the ball to an opponent and stepping around a screen from her perspective, trying to show her how to use her eyes instead of ears.
She said, “Becky, let yourself see the whole court. You’ve got to see that pick coming. You’re going to have to use your peripheral vision, become aware of movement around and behind you as well as in front of you. The key is, you’ve got to anticipate. You’ve got to anticipate the action, anticipate the movement. Okay now, let’s try it again.” Coach Summitt taught me a valuable lesson during that practice session, which has served me in all phases of my life. Although I’m now deaf, I can still hear her urging me on with one simple word, “Anticipate!”
—BECKY CLARK
Players like Becky were shaping me as much as I was shaping them. Each one seemed to come with some moral, insight, or lesson about teaching. Cindy Noble, Debbie Groover, Cindy Ely, Susan Clower, Shelia Collins—they all left their impression on me. Sometimes it felt like picking a series of locks: How could I spring open their potential? My coaching was becoming more reciprocal and responsive, a matter of understanding their makeup, rather than just pulling their strings.
I had to get to know a whole new group in 1980–1981, because with Jill and Holly graduating we were virtually starting over. We’d rely on seven incoming freshmen—and only five made it through my workouts to Christmas break. We dubbed the survivors the Fearless Five. They were from all over the country—with television exposure our recruiting had gone national: Mary Ostrowski was a brilliantly talented but reticent six-two center from West Virginia. Lynne Collins was an energetic six-one forward from Virginia. Tanya Haave was an intelligent swing player from Colorado. Paula Towns, whom we called P-Town, was a six-one forward from Georgia. Pat Hatmaker was our local, a five-foot-eight greyhound of a guard from Knoxville, whom we nicknamed Rattle, because she was so bony thin. Every Monday I made our players weigh in, and Hatmaker was the only one who didn’t weigh enough.