by Pat Summitt
That’s not to say I became mild mannered. I was still a teacher who employed high-volume and, occasionally, withering sarcasm if the case demanded it. Which it did one day in practice when ESPN was filming us. Debbie Hawhee was a brilliant student who carried a 3.95 grade point average in literature. She would read the Greeks all day and then come to practice and sprint all out for three hours. Somehow, despite the workload, she would graduate a semester early, and she eventually went on to become a highly regarded literature professor at Penn State. But on this day, she was having trouble grasping the principles of a full-court press. I stopped practice.
“Hawhee!” I hollered. “What’s your GPA?”
Debbie just stood there, unwilling to say it aloud. “Unnnnnh,” she said.
“It’s a 3.95,” I said. “And you can’t figure out where to go?”
She was mortified.
Our program was no paradise, and my methods weren’t faultless. I don’t want to give the impression that every kid I touched magically became an all-American with a degree. Tennessee wasn’t for everyone, and everyone wasn’t for Tennessee. There were some players who didn’t consider me family, whom I either failed to reach or I mishandled. In thirty-eight years, a total of thirty-four players either left the team or transferred. Their reasons were various: three of them were medical casualties, their careers cut short by injury; five were walk-ons who subsequently walked off; two left to play other sports; one left to get married; and four had overwhelming cases of homesickness. But the rest transferred because they either wanted more playing time or found me too demanding, or weren’t a good fit.
I stayed with every one of them for as long as I thought there was some hope that they would get it. Even now, I prefer to think I didn’t give up on them—they gave up on themselves, came to me and said, “I can’t do this,” or “I don’t want to do this.”
To be frank, some of those who stayed all four years weren’t that enchanted with me either. Fortunately, they were gifted and resilient, and the stresses of the program usually developed them—in the end. But some didn’t always get the caring part, only the yelling. Some felt used. Some didn’t like a white lady with a southern accent barking at them. Each night at home, I would hold Tyler and chew my lip over whether I was being too harsh.
I was especially intense with the 1991 team because I was determined to make up for the dreadful loss to Virginia the previous year. It was an exhausting season, between learning to be a mother and trying to bring along a team that was half veterans and half freshmen. I juggled eleven different lineups, trying to find the right combination around Daedra, our anchor. “The first five in the game might not be the last five,” I warned them. It wasn’t the greatest Lady Vols team we ever put on the floor; we had some significant deficits and flaws, and nothing came particularly easy to us. We spent much of the season doing what I called “power drills”: a dozen kids would get into a defensive crouch, and I’d tell them to imagine the power in their backsides as they’d slide around the perimeter of the court, chanting, “Power power power power.”
But led by Daedra, they gradually grew into one of the most powerful, physical, and tenacious groups I ever had. Our point guard was a tiny five-foot-four Tennessean named Jody Adams, who looked so small on the floor it was like watching a hobbit with braids. Our two-guard was a gifted slasher-scorer from Canton, Michigan, named Dena Head, who seemed eternally and deceptively sleepy. Off the bench, Nikki Caldwell was a long-limbed freshman from nearby Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with a bass voice and such concentrated intensity she reminded me of myself.
Peggy Evans was a wonderfully attacking six-foot freshman forward from Detroit who clearly chafed to be a great player but needed some discipline and consistency in her game. Peggy was also one of those who didn’t like being snapped at by me. Most of the time she wore a smile on her face, but when I told her to run, she got visibly resentful—quite possibly because on one occasion, I told her to run the stadium stairs and forgot about her. I looked up, much, much later in practice, and she was in tears because her legs were aching so.
As the ’91 NCAA tournament approached I ratcheted up my intensity, and one day in practice I pushed Peggy too hard, and she had had it with me. It was right before the NCAA tournament, when I was always at my most demanding, and I’d decided I didn’t like her pace running the floor. I started tearing into her—but that only made her slower.
“We’re going with or without you,” I threatened. “I’ll leave your butt behind if I have to.”
Daedra came running across the floor. “Pat, let me handle this,” she said.
I stopped. Maybe Daedra’s kinder voice was what Peggy needed. “Okay, Dae,” I said. “But you better straighten it out.” Daedra did—she talked quietly to Peggy for a minute, and Peggy settled down and became a huge factor for us in the postseason.
Once I had a strong enough connection with a player, as I did with Daedra, I could be as blunt and confrontational as I needed to be without worrying about our relationship. When I had a sense that Daedra needed her buttons pressed, I did it. That was the case with us when we got to the 1991 Final Four in New Orleans.
It was such a closely competitive tournament that there was no time for sweet little exercises like “rebound” and “two points,” because our backs were to the wall in every single game. It seemed like I shouted us through the tournament, and by the time we got to New Orleans, my voice was thoroughly shredded; I was so hoarse I had trouble making myself heard in the huddle.
In the semifinals, we trailed Stanford 28–21 at halftime, and Daedra wasn’t playing well. She was fumbling the ball and missing easy shots under the basket, and I could tell it was because she was feeling pressure that it could be her last game. She needed to fight through it—and sometimes anger could help a player like Daedra punch through to the other side, into a great performance.
I happened to know that she had just been named Tennessee’s first winner of the Wade Trophy, named for Margaret Wade, which went to the best women’s college basketball player in the nation, but it hadn’t been made public yet. During the halftime break, I gave our team some basic instructions, and then I said, “Everybody out of the locker room except for Train.”
After the room cleared out, I got in Daedra’s face and told her about the award. “You’re only the best player in the country,” I said, seething. “You’ve been named winner of the Wade Trophy, the most prestigious prize in basketball—and you’re playing like you just learned the game. Everybody in the country is going to say, ‘Why did she win it?’ Is this the best game that the nation’s best player can play tonight?”
I’m, like, Are we watching the same game? But she needed me to do more. She knew she could ride me and I would rise if I got that extra push. She jumped me, and those big blue eyes were piercing through me. I said, “I got you, Pat.”
—DAEDRA CHARLES
Daedra went back out on the floor and said to Jody and Nikki, “Y’all get me the ball. Let’s go to work.” That’s exactly what they did. Daedra kept her hand up for the ball the entire second half. They’d lob it in to her, and she’d catch it and spin and kiss it off the glass. Daedra ended up with 18 points, and we won, 68–60.
That set up a national championship game that would endure as one of the most emotional and hard fought of my thirty-eight years. Our opponent would be, of all schools, Virginia. The dreaded, hated team that had broken our hearts a year earlier, the flagship school of the state in which I refused to let my son be born because the memory of that loss was so painful. The morning of the game, I dressed six-month-old Tyler in his little jumper and pulled a T-shirt over his head that we’d had made specially for the occasion.
It had an encircled Virginia Cavaliers logo on it, with a red line drawn through it.
Then I put him in a pair of tiny sneakers. No baby shoes for my boy. He was a baller right from the start.
My own fashion statement was a snow-white suit with gigantic shoulder p
ads. On both sidelines, the coaches looked like Cinderellas. Virginia coach Debbie Ryan had on a floral dress with puffed sleeves, and Mickie and Holly wore long pastel purple and violet dresses with hemlines to midcalf. It was the Laura Ashley era. We all looked like we were wrapped in designer curtains.
But I wasn’t so crazy about the fashion statements of our senior Daedra Charles and rookie Nikki Caldwell, who proudly showed up with their jersey numerals shaved in the backs of their heads. My mouth fell open. I blamed Daedra. One of our team sayings was “To have a great leader you must have eager followers.” In this case, Daedra was the great leader and Nikki was the eager follower. They had gone to the hairdresser together to have their necks shaved—they both wore short wedge haircuts. Daedra told the hairdresser she wanted something special. “I want number 32 in my hair.” Nikki promptly imitated her.
Years later I said, “Isn’t that better than getting tatted? My hair can grow back and a tat is for life.”
—NIKKI CALDWELL
Mickie tried to be the buffer. She said, “Now, Pat, don’t say a word. This is the Final Four.” But I wasn’t having it. I couldn’t wait to get into them. I went to them and put my hands on both their shoulders and leaned in—close. “You’d better show up and play,” I said. “This is not an individual game, and you don’t draw attention to yourself that way. You better hope we win.”
I told the whole team the same thing. There was no inspiring, Knute Rockne win-one-for-the-Gipper speech from me that day. The truth was, I knew that we weren’t as talented as Virginia—they were bigger, taller, and more skilled, and I feared we had no one who could match Dawn Staley’s weaving, acrobatic genius. All we had were warriors with a taste for grinding. I made the calculated decision to appeal to their combativeness. I said, “We better not lose this game, because I can’t take another year of losing to Virginia. Can you? I refuse to lose. We are not losing to Dawn Staley again. If we do—y’all don’t want to go home with me. I will be a madwoman.”
Then I turned to Daedra. “If we don’t win, it’s going to be your fault, because you didn’t come ready to play.” Daedra just nodded. “Okay, I got you.”
But at first, it looked like we had no business being in the championship game. We trailed Virginia by 10 points in the first half—Daedra couldn’t make a shot and neither could anyone else. The only thing that kept us in was sleepy-eyed Dena Head, who went on a tear; we came up with a little isolation play for her and she worked it to perfection. Virginia was so preoccupied with collapsing on Daedra that Dena just kept slashing to the basket and either getting a layup or a foul. Slowly, we crawled back in it, and we led 27–26 by halftime.
But by then, Daedra had picked up three fouls. We were as superstitious as ever, and Daedra decided that she had tempted fate because during pregame warm-ups, she hadn’t been able to find Tyler and kiss his forehead. Daedra looked up in the stands and yelled to R.B. He handed Tyler down through the crowd—I looked up and saw our baby being passed around by strangers over the railing to Daedra. She put her lipstick imprint on his forehead. Our nanny, Vanessa, ran down out of the stands to fetch him and carry him back to R.B.
I still don’t know how we did it. We were down 5 points with 1:21 to go. It was a matter of every player making a small difference with a hustle play—Lisa Harrison rose in the air and snatched a rebound—she would have 25 in two games in that Final Four. Caldwell raced the length of the court like a woman possessed to block a Virginia fast break. And a staffer offered a great suggestion. During a crucial time-out down the stretch, our graduate assistant Angela Lawson, a former guard for Louisiana Tech’s 1988 national championship team, told me she had a play that she guaranteed would get us two points. “How do you know?” I said. She answered, “Well, we ran it to beat Tennessee.” I gave her my seat in the huddle, and she drew it up.
It worked: Dena Head sprang free and hit a little leaner. We were still down by 2 points, but then Dena drew a foul with three seconds left. She went to the line for two free throws that could send it to overtime. Virginia called a time-out to try to ice her.
A time-out lasts sixty seconds, and in that brief, hectic segment you have to send a message that your players will believe in and trust. I’d learned that the first thing you say, and the last thing you say, will stick. Everything else goes in one ear and out the other. It was critical that the message they heard from me was positive—I had to instill confidence. “When Dena makes these free throws,” I began, and gave our players some defensive instructions. Then, right before the huddle broke, I repeated it. “When Dena makes the free throws …”
Up in the stands, Joan Cronan turned to R.B. “Is Ty asleep?” she asked.
“Yes.” R.B. beamed.
Tyler knew before anybody we were going to win that game. Dena sank both free throws. We still had to survive a pell-mell Dawn Staley drive to the basket that nearly went in, but it ticked off the rim, and regulation ended with the score 60–60. I said, “Yes! Yes!” Overtime was no waltz. The game was so physical that four players fouled out—including Daedra and Peggy. But Dena, who would wind up with 28 points, staked us to a 70–64 lead with another pair of free throws, and just before she hit them, she looked over at Daedra on the bench. “This is for you, Train,” she said. It still wasn’t quite over—the indomitable Staley banked in a three-pointer with four seconds left to cut it to 70–67. But Jody Adams raced her dribble up the court, and the clock mercifully expired.
Suddenly a ring of Lady Vols surrounded me; Mickie and Holly grabbed me in a group hug. As soon as they released me, Caldwell was hanging on one shoulder, and Daedra was on the other. Then someone handed Tyler down through the crowd again, and he was in my arms. It was Tennessee’s third national championship in five years—but for me, it felt like a first. I’d never won one that felt so complete.
There was a huge amount of trust that transpired in that last segment and then overtime. There was no look in Pat’s eye that showed any type of defeat. There was just a huge bond between us, because the foundation had been laid.
—NIKKI CALDWELL
I forgot all about the shaved hair. That night, we told the kids we would do whatever they wanted to celebrate, and they announced they wanted to see Bourbon Street. We took them out, and fed them crawfish, and then we wandered through the French Quarter listening to the tinny music and sticking our heads into the various dives. Which allowed Deb Hawhee to get off one of the great one-liners in program history.
One of the joints our players peered into was a burlesque club. They giggled and carried on at the sight of the dancers, until Joan Cronan scolded them, saying, “That’s somebody’s daughter.” We crossed the street and continued our wanderings, until we came to another club. This one starred a burlesque queen named Lily St. Clair—who was showing her age. The kids peeked through the open door at Lily, and Deb couldn’t resist.
“That’s somebody’s mother,” she said.
I want to ask you a tough question.
Okay.
If you could trade your championships for your health back, would you?
Uhhhh. That’s not even realistic.
I know. But I’d like to hear how you feel.
[Pause]
I would give back every one of my trophies to still be coaching.
That says it’s the teaching you really love, more than the winning.
That’s right.
It also says that retirement is a deep wound.
Yes. It is.
—June 23, 2012, at night driving from Henrietta back to Knoxville with the tape recorder off, thirteen months after diagnosis
8
Champion, Part I
The price of love is entanglement. My son became an inseparable part of our team and locker room, with no boundary between family and work anymore, and that led to emotional complications. For one thing, it divided Tyler’s loyalties. He got crushes on our players, and when I’d yell at them, he would form a deep creased frown between his eyes
and give me the cold shoulder. “I’m sleeping in the garage with Micey,” he’d announce. Micey was the cat.
For some reason, Tyler was drawn to the young women I had the most complicated relationships with, players on whom I practiced the toughest love. The first great obsession of his life was Vonda Ward, and it was a May-December romance; he was three and she was twenty. I couldn’t believe it, because it’s fair to say that I never had a more complex relationship with a player than the one I had with Vonda Ward of Northfield, Ohio. I loved Vonda and found her enormously interesting—she was an unusual, even extraordinary young woman who moved to a different drummer—but she frustrated me as a ballplayer. She was built like a superhero, a lithe six foot six with muscles everywhere, crowned with a blaze of yellow-gold hair that Tyler found enthralling. But Vonda had just one drawback: she was as hardheaded as a young Pat Summitt.
Vonda wanted to be a finesse player; I wanted her to be a physical, dominating force in the paint. Vonda wasn’t having it; she was going to play the game her way. I’d tell her to do something, and she would stand there and stare back at me intractably, hands on her hips and rolling her eyes, until I came unglued. It was all-out war. I tried threatening, benching, withering sarcasm.
“I’ve never seen a post player before who is six six and wants to play as if she’s five six,” I said, exasperated.
Courage wasn’t the issue with Vonda, far from it. She had a fascination with firefighters, and in her free time she trained as a volunteer with the Knoxville fire department. When I found out, I was tremendously proud—but it got under my skin, irritated me, too.