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

by Pat Summitt

  I think in Pat’s mind, the more I got to know her, there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do, whether it was change a tractor tire or run an Olympic trial. Pat was a doer. It was all about action, all about let’s get to work. She wasn’t a planner and a thinker and let’s analyze this. It was about action. “DeMoss, you get over here and put that there.” And maybe it was wrong, but we’d just redo it. She didn’t mind redoing it. She’d do it sixteen times if she had to. She coached every day like it was the national championship game. Every practice was coached like that. It was never a letup. I can’t ever remember a day where she was tired, ever.

  —MICKIE DEMOSS

  Most college-age women didn’t know what kind of effort they were capable of. Didn’t have a clue. But I did. There is an old saying: a champion is someone who is willing to be uncomfortable. My message to that team at 4:30 A.M. was: “This is what it takes. I’ve shown you what it requires, what real effort looks like. Now you know, and if you turn away from it, take a shortcut, you’ll be settling for less. And if you do it once, you’ll do it for the rest of your life.”

  Why did it work? How could I harangue them, and drive them at 4:30 in the morning, and get results? Why did they accept it, instead of quit or revolt? The answer was that I had become sure of and secure in my relationships with our players. My demandingness was based in a fundamental sense that every kid had potential greatness in her—and they understood that, because I made it clear to them. I’d learned the single most important principle of teaching: they don’t care how much you know, unless they know how much you care.

  A player named Bridgette Gordon had as much to do with bringing me to that realization as anyone. Bridgette was a six-foot forward from DeLand, Florida, whom everybody called “Pat’s little girl.” More than a hundred schools had pursued her, but she chose us after her mother, Marjorie, a nurse’s assistant who was trying to raise eight kids alone after a divorce, made me promise to treat Bridgette like my own daughter. We were sitting on Marjorie’s front porch when she said, “Bridgette’s so young and she’s never been anywhere, Pat. Please take care of her.”

  It was a relationship I never expected to have in coaching: surrogate mother. I was taken aback. But something made me accept it: sitting on the porch that day, I promised Marjorie that I would treat Bridgette like my own daughter. The fact was, I had my share of motherly feelings and needed someplace to put them, and, well, here were all these kids right in front of me. I already felt deeply committed to them, and surrogate parenthood was just a small last emotional step. And Bridgette was adorable, with a crooked perpetual smile, and brown eyes so animated they almost shot sparks.

  But I was an inexperienced mother figure, and during Bridgette’s freshman year, I made some mistakes with her—the kind any new parent makes when trying to strike a balance between nurture and discipline, watchfulness and hovering, pride and demand. To complicate matters, I was jumping right in with a teenager, and Bridgette was a typical one, moody, smart-mouthed, with a habit of rolling her eyes and mumbling under her breath when she was spoken to. Which drove me crazy.

  Pat could ride you for five straight hours, and then with a snap, at three o’clock, right after practice, she’d invite me into her office and want to know how my day was. She’d ask how my mother was doing. I’d think, “You just rode me for five hours and you want to know how me and my mama’s doing? I’m doing fine—and I don’t want to talk to you.”

  —BRIDGETTE GORDON

  When I scheduled a three-mile training run, and it rained, Bridgette assumed I’d cancel it. “Get your rain suits on, that’s what I bought ’em for,” I said. Bridgette sighed, and murmured under her breath. When it snowed, she cut class, for which I made her do a five A.M. workout. I got on her for everything from her body language to dress; she had a taste for rattling gold jewelry and was always styling her high wedge of hair in the latest do.

  She said, “Respect is not demanded, it’s earned. So if you want to be respected, this is how you carry yourself. That Lady Vols across your chest is not about Bridgette Gordon, it’s about this program and the people before you, and the people before them, and you’re going to carry yourself like a lady, and act like a lady, on and off this court. You’re going to dress appropriately, carry yourself appropriately.” Forget about basketball, she taught me how to be a woman, demanded I act like a woman.

  —BRIDGETTE GORDON

  But Bridgette almost left the program at Christmas that season because of one of my parental overreactions. We’d gone to Hawaii for a tournament, and early one morning I got word that Bridgette’s first semester report card had come in, and it wasn’t good. In fact, it said her grade point average was 0.0. I learned later that her first-quarter grades had been withheld because she had some unpaid library fines, but I didn’t know that yet—I just thought Bridgette had cut so many classes she had no grades. I flew off the handle. I found Mickie and Holly on Waikiki Beach and told them, “I just found out Bridgette’s grades. She’s got a goose egg. We’ve got to go talk to her.”

  Mickie pointed to the surf. I saw Bridgette, in a yellow bathing suit and swim cap, hanging ten on a surfboard and heading into shore. I waved her over.

  “Bridgette Gordon, I knew you’d been acting funny!”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Did I tell you that you could speak?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Your GPA is 0.0.”

  “Excuse me? But …”

  “Did I tell you to speak?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I’ve had just about enough of you. I’m tired of worrying myself to death over you. I ought to send you back to Florida on a raft with a slow leak.”

  I started crying and I said, “A raft from Hawaii? What kind of person are you?”

  —BRIDGETTE GORDON

  I stormed off, leaving Mickie and Holly to talk to Bridgette more calmly and try to figure out what had happened. The crisis was resolved when we got word that Bridgette was in good academic standing but owed money to the library. By then Bridgette was mad.

  “You know what?” she told Mickie. “When I go home for Christmas, I’m not coming back. So she doesn’t have to worry about me anymore.”

  But when Bridgette got home to DeLand for the holidays and told Marjorie she didn’t intend to return to Tennessee, Marjorie just smiled and said, “Oh yeah, you’re going back.”

  For all of the structure and discipline at Tennessee, I also liked to indulge Bridgette and the rest of our players, whether it was with ice cream sundaes at pregame meals, or road trips to New York and Hawaii. The reward of being a teacher is to watch the widening of young eyes when they experience something new, and one night on a road trip to Notre Dame, I got to watch Bridgette’s face as she saw snow for the first time.

  We came out of a restaurant into a white curtain. Bridgette was elated; she’d been hoping to see snow ever since she left Florida, and right at her feet there was a foot of it. I watched her scoop up a handful, and I said, “Do you want to go play in it?” Bridgette’s eyes turned into bright pennies and she nodded.

  “If you’ve never seen snow, then you’ve never done a doughnut, have you?”

  She shook her head. “Come on,” I said, and pulled my rental car keys out of my purse. Bridgette and a couple of other players loaded into the passenger seats, and I said, “Buckle up.” The empty parking lot was carpeted in white. I said, “Hang on.” I hit the accelerator—and then the brake—and spun the wheel. The car went into a 360, sliding across the snow-slick asphalt, and the kids shrieked with pleasure. In the seat next to me I heard Bridgette expel her breath, “Whoooo.” Bridgette couldn’t get over it. I did several 360s before I got tired of seeing Bridgette’s eyes widen. Finally she said, “Okay, I think I’ve seen enough snow now.”

  At the end of that season I took Bridgette home to Henrietta with me. She was scheduled to fly out of Nashville to an all-star international tournament called the Olympic Festival, and I was
going to the farm that same week, so I invited her to come meet my family and to see where I’d come from; it was my way of saying to her, “You’re part of my family too.” We walked around the tobacco fields and I explained to her how I’d grown up. She stared at the cows and other livestock and watched the picking of tomatoes and snap peas in the garden behind the house. She sat down with us for a large family supper and watched how my mother served and waited on everybody at the table.

  “Do you ever rest, Miss Hazel?” Bridgette asked.

  Mama just laughed and shook her head.

  Pat was my mother away from home. And she took me home like the daughter she didn’t have.

  —BRIDGETTE GORDON

  After that, Bridgette didn’t roll her eyes and mumble at me anymore. She looked me in the eye, and even sometimes teasingly called me “Treesh,” like she’d heard my family do. By the time Bridgette graduated with a degree in political science, everybody would call her “Little Pat,” or “Little Trish,” or “Pat Junior.” Some of our players just called her “Pat’s pet.” But Bridgette told them, “She gets on me harder than she does any of you,” and she was right. I got on Bridgette. But it was like I told all of them: the day I didn’t get on them was the day they knew I didn’t care.

  If I had a great strength as a coach, it was that I got the most out of people. That very young team? The next year, they broke through and won Tennessee’s first national championship.

  In 1986–1987 it all finally came together for us: players, staff, and philosophy. It seemed like every kid on that team needed something more from me than just basketball coaching, a different kind of caring. They were a project, all of them interesting characters with their own issues. Some of them needed love—and some of them needed tough love.

  There was Dawn Marsh, a showy junior guard from Alcoa, Tennessee, who drove me crazy with her reckless flamboyant passes behind her back, which sometimes flew into the third row. I accused her of trying to give balls away to the crowd as souvenirs. She made me so mad once I chased her down a hallway, ran her up against a wall, put a hand on either side of her head, and leaned in and said, “You been reading too many of your press clippings and they’re not accurate.” Melissa McCray was the perfect balance to Dawn: a great guard who was so churchy and responsible that our players called her “Emma,” claiming she reminded them of their grandmother, and Emma was the most grandmotherly name they could think of. Melissa was the kind of leader who got her teammates up on Sunday morning after they had been out at the clubs and made them go to religious services.

  Sheila Frost was a six-four sophomore forward from Pulaski, Tennessee, who was such a gentle young woman trapped in a big body that her nickname was “Pee-Wee,” a tag that I loathed and forbade anyone to use.

  “She is not a Pee-Wee,” I announced. “She is a GIANT. We do not have any weak individuals on this team.”

  Carla McGhee was a six-foot-three freshman from Peoria, Illinois, with an attitude, who for much of that season wasn’t even sure she wanted to stay at Tennessee. She was tough, raw, and cocky, but she only played hard in spurts. She resented the regimented aspects of the program, and our skirmish started on the very first day of fall workouts, when I made the team line up for a three-mile training run.

  Carla said, “I told you black people don’t do distance. I can run a fifty or a hundred or a two hundred, but I’m not going to run three miles.”

  I said, “I told you I don’t see color. Start running.”

  Carla fought me throughout that year, and I kicked her out of practice on more than one occasion for loafing, or for resisting me. She’d complain that she hadn’t intended to join the army. I could feel her lack of commitment, and one day I chased her down outside of Stokely and demanded to know what her issue was.

  She said, “You need to just go on, Pat, before I say something we’ll both regret.”

  “Say it,” I said. “You say it.”

  “I think I need to transfer,” she said. “I think I need to play for a black coach. I want to go play for Vivian Stringer.”

  I told her I could arrange that—Iowa’s Vivian Stringer was a good friend of mine. Then we both calmed down, and we sat on some steps and really talked. I told her to think about it and if she was serious, I’d help her transfer anyplace in the country. We reached an uneasy truce. I could afford to be calm, because I knew Carla’s mother wasn’t going to let her go anywhere.

  No one was more needy than Kathy Spinks, financially. She was a six-foot-two broad-shouldered young woman with a tumble of auburn hair, and she came from a little coal-mining town, Belfry, Kentucky, so far up in the hills that the roads didn’t have guardrails. Her home was not unlike the one I’d been born in. I can remember the winding mountain road, and the coal trucks that rumbled by, and then the little cabin with no phone or running water. You could see that even the basics, food and clothing, were hard to come by for that family.

  Here I came in my good suit and high heels, stepping across their wooden porch. Several schools were recruiting Kathy, including Kentucky, and it was a confusing process for them. But her father solved it by telling her, “You’re going to play for that Olympic coach.”

  I think I’m the only person that ever played for Tennessee that’s been grand marshal of a King Coal Parade.

  —KATHY SPINKS GRIZZELL

  When Kathy checked into her freshman dorm, it was the first time in her life she’d had a telephone and an indoor shower. Yet when her mother dropped her off, Kathy was wearing a suit exactly like the one I’d worn to her home on my visit. Her mother had studied it and then sewn a replica of it for her daughter. That’s how proud those people were.

  I kept Kathy’s background a secret from our players; I knew what it was to feel backward and exposed. I could see her studying others, wanting to fit in but not being sure of how to do it or what to say. When we went to restaurants, she always ordered the same thing, “a cheeseburger and fries.” It hit me that she didn’t know most of the items on the menu and didn’t want to seem uncouth. I began to claim the seat next to her and would quietly order for her, so she had some variety and learned different cuisines.

  One thing Kathy couldn’t hide was the fact that she’d never seen a black person before she came to Tennessee. She stared at her roommate, Cheryl Littlejohn, a center from Gastonia, North Carolina, and said, “So, the inside of your hands are pink?”

  Kathy had moments when it was too overwhelming for her and she was tempted to run back to Belfry in tears. At one point during the ’87 season, she fell behind academically. “Pat, I’m gonna fail,” she said. “No, you’re not,” I said. “You can do this. I’m not ignorant as to how you grew up. I know exactly. You’re a lot like me. You can overcome anything.” Everybody in the athletic department was pulling for her, but no one pulled harder than Kathy herself. She not only passed—she eventually made the dean’s list.

  She threw the gauntlet down. She said, “I overcame it, now what are you going to do?” I think the phrase she used was, “Are you going to be a pantywaist about it?”

  —KATHY SPINKS GRIZZELL

  A championship season, as it turned out, wasn’t a matter of magical transformation, of something that had been hard suddenly becoming easy. It was a season with as many problems as we’d ever had. There wasn’t a single all-American on our roster, and we struggled to climb the rankings all year. But we had something. A quality. We had people like Kathy Spinks.

  Kathy was one of our so-called corn-fed chicks, a mocking name opponents eventually gave our beefy, muscular blue-collar frontcourt, a group that included Carla McGhee, Cheryl Littlejohn, Karla Horton, and Jennifer Tuggle. The corn-fed chicks battled and banged through the toughest schedule in the country; we played twenty teams ranked in the top 20 and lost to a half dozen of them. But we made our opponents feel it. Carla McGhee even wore elbow pads that made her biceps pop.

  Just after Christmas we met the Texas Longhorns, the defending national champions, wi
th whom there was no love lost; just a couple of weeks earlier we had wrested the number one ranking from them. When Karla Horton turned to sprint down the court, she accidentally ran into a Longhorn, and the player went down in a heap because Karla was so hard packed with muscle. During the injury time-out, Texas coach Jody Conradt, who was normally a friend of mine, walked down to our bench and began poking me angrily in the chest. “If you’d teach your kids how to play proper defense, you might win a national championship someday!” she said. I just stood there and kept my mouth shut out of respect for Jody, but our bench went nuts. Holly was furious and jumped up, saying, “Don’t take that off her, Summitt!” We lost, but from that day on we called Texas “the wrong shade of orange” and vowed to get revenge at the Final Four, which was to be held in Austin that year.

  To go with the corn-fed chicks, we had great leadership in the backcourt. Mickie kept her promise and brought in the best freshman in the country, a spectacular guard from Flint, Michigan, named Tonya Edwards, who was so tough she reminded me of a bramble patch. Then there was our angel-faced point guard Shelley Sexton, a senior from nearby Lake City. Shelley was a charismatic player, but she had a drawback: she was sweet. It was the point guard’s job to be the floor general, to issue orders and to hold her teammates accountable. But Shelley was soft-spoken and gentle, and she hated to criticize. She’d say, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I’d shout back at her, no, it was not okay.