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

by Pat Summitt

  “You’re too nice,” I told her in front of the team. “Nice girls finish last.”

  To teach Shelley to be more forceful, I resorted to a method you wouldn’t find in any instructional. I made her plan and run a practice. She had to design the workout, set up the drills, push her teammates through them, and decide when something had been done well enough. I never said a word.

  For a good hour and a half she just stood there and watched. I was drained. Not only do you have to talk, you are in the drill. I just remember being mentally exhausted after that practice. But what a great way to develop leadership and ownership.

  —SHELLEY SEXTON COLLIER

  By the time we got to the Final Four in Austin, I had a different attitude and feeling than I’d ever had about a team before. I felt at peace. Nobody expected much out of us—we were the lowest-ranked team there—but I was relaxed and completely confident in our kids, who had paid the price. I no longer felt it was up to me to make it happen; they had a certainty about them. When we checked into our Embassy Suites hotel in Austin, Karla Horton and Shelley Sexton came to my room. They looked me in the eye and said, “Pat, we came here to win a championship. We’re going to cut down nets.”

  In the semifinals we stunned Long Beach State, the highest-scoring team in the nation, 74–64. That set up a championship game with our old nemesis Louisiana Tech, which had upset Texas in the other semifinal to spare us the chore of playing the wrong orange on their home court. We had every reason to fear Louisiana Tech: they had beaten us early in the season by a dozen points, and my lifetime record against them was 1-11.

  But here’s how confident we were: at our practice on the morning of the game, we didn’t touch a basketball. Instead I had the team lie on the floor of the Erwin Center, with their heads in the jump circle, and close their eyes. Then Mickie, Holly, and I talked them through the scouting report. It was almost hypnotic; the only lights in the arena were the center lights, shining on the circle. Even the CBS technicians froze, stopped what they were doing, and a hush fell.

  In a calm, steady, self-assured voice I said, “Here’s what’s gonna happen.” We went through our offense, asked the players to see it, to think about how it was designed. Envision how they would get around a screen. See how the game would ebb and flow, we said. See yourselves as national champions.

  After that, there was a silence in my head all day. By tip-off I was only anxious about one thing: I wanted women’s basketball to look good for the CBS national television audience, so the game could grow. I chose my best suit, a blue-and-black-striped number with big square shoulder pads and the long midcalf hemline of the 1980s, and I curled my hair.

  It was a rout. We held Tech to their lowest score ever, 67–44. Had them from the get-go. The corn-fed chicks set big, wide, immovable screens for Bridgette, who curled around them into the lane and hit beautiful little jumpers. Our players knew everything Tech wanted to do before they did it—wherever they went, the Lady Vols were already there waiting.

  We were practically standing in their spots calling their plays out.

  —SHELLEY SEXTON COLLIER

  The second half was a matter of running the clock out. The last seven minutes seemed to take forever—each minute felt like an hour. I’d glance at the board, and only ten seconds had ticked off. After what seemed like another hour I’d peek again, and only forty-five seconds had gone by. Finally, the last few seconds wound down. The horn sounded, and it was like my ears popped. Shelley Sexton threw the ball in the air and screamed with joy. There was a distant, jubilant bloc of sound from the Lady Vols cheering section behind us—I stood on tiptoe and peered upward and spotted my family and held up my arm. Then the biggest corn-fed chick of all, Karla Horton, ran over, picked me up, and threw me over her shoulder like I was a two-by-four.

  It felt every bit as good as I imagined—every bit. I felt flooded with a sense of completion, and gratitude. I hugged every single Lady Vol and thanked them individually for making it happen. I said, “This team has played as hard and as smart as I could ask any team to play.”

  Shelley Sexton was the one who summed it up best. “Sometimes you have to go through hard times to get where you want to go,” she said.

  We were due—long due. But the funny thing was, once it finally happened, we barely knew how to celebrate. We got some shirts that said DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS, and crossed out the Texas and replaced it with Tennessee, and put them on. Mickie, Holly, Joan, and I jumped in a cab and went to Austin’s famed Sixth Street, but most of the places were closed because it was a Sunday. We ducked into a convenience store and bought some cigars, because we felt like that was what winners were supposed to do.

  Didn’t even know how to light ’em. We just weren’t prepared for a celebration. That changed.

  —MICKIE DEMOSS

  The next morning we piled on a plane for home. Shelley was carrying the national championship trophy, and as she took her seat she yelled down the aisle. “Hey, Pat!”

  “What?”

  “Nice girls don’t always finish last.”

  I started laughing. Shelley took her seat, and buckled in, and turned to Cheryl Littlejohn. “Nice girls don’t finish last,” she said again.

  We came home to thousands of people. The airport was packed and the streets were lined with fans holding up balloons. Cars honked at us, and a fire and police escort led us through the streets. A fire truck even spritzed us with water plumes. It was the best part of winning, to find out how much people cared. Every business in town had a Lady Vols sign in the window; everybody seemed to feel a piece of ownership, from the dry cleaner to the drugstore.

  The fans were all waving something in their hands. I looked closer.

  They were ears of corn.

  The truth? Winning is impermanent. It’s as vanishing as the champagne in the empty bottle. After the din and the celebration, what lingers is not the cold metal trophy but the feeling of warm exultation you shared with one another. While you are still looking back over your shoulder, a season ends and a new one begins. The leaves turn over, and so do the kids.

  We went to four consecutive NCAA Final Fours from 1986 to 1989, and won two of them, and I can’t separate them in my memory anymore without prompting or pictures. But what I do remember is the intensity of certain events:

  • In December of 1987, finally playing in front of the roaring, sold-out crowd I’d always envisioned, when Texas came to Knoxville for a number one versus number two rematch in our new Thompson-Boling Arena. The game traffic was so heavy I had to park my car on the shoulder of the road and I half jogged in my high heels, picking my way across a railroad track, to make tip-off. I’d just as soon have missed the game: Texas humiliated us, 97–78, and I was so angry I had the score painted on the wall of our pretty new locker room—in orange numerals three feet high—and for the rest of the season every drill we did had to be done in ninety-seven seconds.

  • Making that squad run four-hundred-yard dashes to get them in shape, telling them that we had two kind of players, “tunas” and “rabbits,” and declaring, “I’m not having any fat girls on this team.”

  • Wearing a bright orange outfit with white shoes on the sideline against Stanford, and walking off the court to hear a fan shout, “Hey, Coach Summitt! My boyfriend dresses better than you!”

  • On April 1, 1988, at the Final Four in Tacoma, placing a prank call to Mickie and Holly’s room at 7:30 A.M. on the morning of our semifinal rematch with Louisiana Tech, telling them that four of our starters had been hospitalized with food poisoning, and bringing Holly to tears before I said, “April Fool’s.”

  • Losing to Louisiana Tech that night, 68–59, and listening to senior Kathy Spinks sob so hard in the locker room that I said, “Handle it, Kathy.” Then adding, “Tennessee has been good for you, and you’ve been good to Tennessee.” Telling the whole team, “You’ve experienced more highs than 90 percent of the population, just remember that, and learn from the lows. There woul
d be no highs without the lows.”

  In the spring of 1989, on our way to our second national championship in three years, I was so superstitious that I went a month without shaving my legs. We had a dominant team with a 35-2 record, but the deeper we went into the NCAA tournament, the more convinced we became that if we changed a thing, the spell might break. With every game, our superstitions increased and gathered force.

  We had to eat only Bluebell ice cream. We had to keep every heads-up penny we found—and God forbid you should come across one showing tails. Don’t touch it, don’t even look at it, we cautioned one another. We had to wear the same makeup and do our hair the same for every game.

  Mickie would ask Holly, “Do you have the same eye shadow on?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good.”

  When I made the mistake of telling them that I hadn’t shaved my legs, from then on Mickie and Holly forbade me to touch a razor. Mickie asked every morning, “Pat, are your legs unshaved?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good.”

  But on the day that we met Auburn for the national championship, I couldn’t stand it anymore. My outfit required that I wear white hose, and there was no way I was appearing on national television with the legs of a German shepherd showing through my stockings. Anyway, by then we had beaten every opponent in the tournament by an average of 22 points, and I was convinced our team was strong enough to withstand a little superstition.

  When Mickie and Holly walked into the pregame locker room, I broke the news to them.

  “Y’all, before you even ask me, I shaved my legs this morning.”

  “You did what?” Mickie screamed.

  Holly buried her head in her hands. It was the worst news she’d had in weeks.

  “I had to,” I said. “I’m wearing white hose.”

  Mickie was furious. “You sacrificed the betterment of our team for your appearance?” she said. “Why would you do that?”

  “DeMoss, you need to relax and get out of this locker room and go calm down. We’re gonna win this ball game.”

  “How do you know we’re gonna win it? HOW DO YOU KNOW?”

  “Because I know.”

  I remember thinking, Now that’s confidence right there.

  —MICKIE DEMOSS

  I was confident, and I was right. The Lady Vols beat Auburn by the score of 76–60, behind a 27-point performance from my little girl, Bridgette Gordon. There was a moment of doubt in the second half, when Auburn, led by a tenacious dervish of a guard named Ruthie Bolton, cut our lead to just three points, 50–47. Bridgette had gone suddenly passive and quiet on the floor, and I called a time-out.

  Bridgette sat in the huddle with a hand over her mouth. I got within about three inches of her nose, and I said, “You’ve got about twenty more minutes left in your college career; why are you saving your energy?”

  Bridgette just looked at me and mumbled something through her hand.

  “Bridgette Gordon, quit being a baby! Get your HAND off your mouth and listen to me,” I said. “I can’t believe Ruthie Bolton wants this game more than you, because right now, she sure is outplaying you. Don’t you hide on us!”

  Bridgette just nodded and didn’t say anything. It was a repeat of a conversation we’d had almost weekly for four years. “You’ve got to be the hero or the goat when the game is on the line,” I’d told her. “In the eyes of the spectator when the game is over, you’re going to be one or the other. But if you stick your neck out, I’ll never criticize you for winding up the goat. Just don’t let the fear of failure get in your way.”

  Bridgette went back onto the floor and wrote her name all over the championship trophy. She knocked down three straight jumpers—a series of power dribbles, jump-stops, and little pops into the net. She nailed six points in a row to send us on a 13–4 run to open the game up again.

  I looked at her like, “Is this what you mean?”

  —BRIDGETTE GORDON

  But after it was over, I discovered the reason Bridgette had gone quiet and kept her hand over her mouth. She’d taken an elbow to the face, and one of her teeth was almost completely knocked out. The inside of her mouth was filled with blood, and her tooth was just barely hanging on.

  I wasn’t thinking about a title. I was thinking about how I was going to look toothless.

  —BRIDGETTE GORDON

  I was struck once again by how little control I really had—I would never score a basket for Tennessee. When I found out that Bridgette needed to have her mouth treated by a doctor, I felt so guilty I almost cried. I told the press, “I can’t say enough about what she means to this team. To this program. And to me.”

  This time we knew how to have a victory party. The kids were big into dancing, and all season long they had begged me to show them my moves. I said, “I don’t dance.” But when it got to tournament time, Bridgette and I made a wager. She said, “If we win, will you dance?” I replied, “If you win a championship, I’ll dance on a table.” Well, as soon as the buzzer sounded, Bridgette went on CBS for the postgame interview and told a national television audience, “What you really need to tune in to is Pat dancing on a table tonight.”

  All the kids could talk about in the locker room was how much fun it was going to be to watch me make a fool of myself. Joan Cronan had arranged a victory party for us at the home of a Tennessee booster who had a home on Puget Sound, and the kids were almost giddy as they loaded onto the team bus. As soon as we walked in the door, everybody stopped dead and stared into the living room.

  I saw it was a glass coffee table, and I nearly croaked. But as always, Pat rose to the occasion.

  —JOAN CRONAN

  Somebody started up ’60s Motown on a stereo. The kids gathered around the table, clapping and chanting while I tested the glass. When I kicked off my shoes and hitched up my slacks and stepped on the table, they erupted into squeals. Bridgette hopped up on one side of me, and Carla McGhee on the other, and I showed them my moves on that slick glass.

  She went to dancing like a country girl, and we all fell out. A big old country girl.

  —BRIDGETTE GORDON

  It was not the most elegant display, and I don’t know how we didn’t break the table, but that dance was the highlight of those years. Not for the reason you might expect, either. It was the highlight because Carla McGhee was well enough to dance with me.

  It had been a long three years for Carla and me, since her threat to transfer. Back in the fall of ’87, when we were all still feeling the afterglow from our first national championship victory, Carla had a terrible car accident. On the day before we were to start practicing for the ’88 season, she and a friend were driving through Knoxville when another car plowed into them. The force of the crash threw her through the windshield. The rescue crew had to cut the top of the car away to get to her, and when they pulled her out, they couldn’t believe how badly she was broken up.

  She was in a coma when I reached her hospital bedside, and her face and body were so shattered and swollen I didn’t recognize her. She had broken all but two bones in her face and several more in her body. Her right arm, her hip, her jaw, and her voice box were badly damaged.

  Spectators, people on the outside, always supposed that the worst thing that could happen to me as a coach was to lose in a big game. Wrong. The worst thing that could happen was to stand by helplessly and see a player hurt. It was an ever-present dread and the worst, most helpless aspect of the job. Parents sent their children to me in pristine condition, unmarked, and perfectly healthy. Every injury they sustained in my care, every little nick and scar, was a personal reproach. So imagine the feeling of looking down at young Carla McGhee and trying to summon the words to tell her mother, Joyce, and her foster mother, Clare, “I’m so sorry, your daughter is in a coma and they’ll have to try to put her beautiful face back together as best they can.”

  Carla stayed in a coma for three days. I’d have given anything for the slightest sign of her swagger, anything f
or a smart-aleck word. When she finally woke up, I said, “I don’t care if you ever pick up a ball again, but you’ve got to fight. You’ve got to recover. Promise me you won’t let this ruin your life.”

  Carla couldn’t reply—her vocal cords were too damaged to speak. She had to communicate by writing on a scratch pad, or by ringing a bell. She was in the hospital for two months while she underwent a series of reconstructive surgeries and skin grafts. She finally left at Thanksgiving, on crutches.

  Even after Carla began to heal physically, she went through a difficult time emotionally. She still felt torn up inside and had dark, depressing thoughts about death. It took a year of rehab before she was able to run well enough to rejoin the team, and even then she was still uncertain and afraid of contact. “I feel like something in me might break,” she said.

  Carla worked, and worked, and by the start of the 1989 season she was a starter for us again, even though sprints still hurt her hip. It was a delicate coaching job, to be sensitive to her pain and fear, yet try to push her through it. “The body is amazing,” I said. “So let it be amazing.” But it was Carla who was amazing. When she stood on a coffee table with me, she still wasn’t even completely 100 percent.

  It would take a few years—but eventually she became whole again. She went on to get her diploma in sports management and was named to the 1996 Olympic team that won a gold medal in Atlanta under my friend Stanford head coach Tara VanDerveer, who said she took Carla for her sheer toughness. After the Olympics, Carla was a founding player in the WNBA and competed for several seasons before retiring in 2003. She’s now the director of basketball operations at the University of Nevada-Reno.