by Pat Summitt
“Michelle, when you go down and you do a 360 spin move and hit the woman in the third row eating popcorn with the ball, when you do that, you’re not thinking about what’s best for the team. You’re doing what Michelle wants to do.”
But Michelle was going to do it her way. She didn’t talk back or show an attitude—she’d just go right back out and do the exact opposite of what I told her.
“Don’t spin ever again, Michelle.”
The first time an opportunity presented itself, she’d spin.
“Didn’t I tell you not to spin?”
A few more minutes would go by, and I’d halt practice, and this time my voice would rise.
“Michelle! You’re trying to thread a needle, throw a one-handed pass through an entire lane. It got picked off AGAIN.”
Mickie and Holly thought I kept her on too short a leash and wanted me to give her more line. We argued about it, heatedly. Ego and stubbornness were part of the standard equipment for great players, Mickie insisted. “You’re yanking Marciniak too soon, not letting her get into her game,” she said. “Let her play through her mistakes a bit more.” But I hesitated to prematurely embolden a player who was so erratic.
“I know what I’m doing,” I said.
Now that I look back on it, I see where Pat was coming from. Michelle basically wasn’t tamed yet. That was back when I still had the energy and the stupidity to argue. But Pat was up for a good argument. She liked the challenge of it. And I think that’s what kept us all from getting too comfortable.
—MICKIE DEMOSS
I felt like I always had to hold my breath with Michelle. A classic instance of her double-edged play came in our season-ending loss to Louisiana Tech in the 1994 NCAA Sweet 16. We were a 30-1 team that year, our best record in program history—but it made us wildly overconfident, and Louisiana Tech handed us a stunning upset, 71–68. Michelle came off the bench to score 14 points, but she also did something that was wholly … Michelle. She went down and rippled the net with a long-distance three-pointer and then showboated with her hand dangling in the air and didn’t get set on defense. Tech came right down and hit a three in her face.
I was livid. I leveled her with a death ray glare and beckoned her over. As she came jogging to the bench, I shot out my arm, grabbed ahold of her jersey, and twisted it, pulling her closer. I stuck a finger in her chest and said, “Here you are, you come in and you did something really good, you hit a three. But then you gave up what you worked so hard for. Don’t you ever do that again—if you do, you’ll be sitting next to me. We’re not here to trade baskets.” A photographer from the Associated Press snapped a picture of the moment, and it ran all over the country. I wasn’t proud of the photo—it looked like the Wicked Witch talking to Spinderella—and I called Michelle’s mother and father the next day and assured them I wasn’t in the habit of jerking their daughter around.
But Michelle liked it. She cut it out of the paper and pasted it to the dashboard of her car to remind herself of what not to do. “That’s the way Pat wants me to think,” she told herself.
The loss to Louisiana Tech made me sick. When we got back to Knoxville, I went to bed and didn’t get up for a couple of days—not even when we had a flash flood. Torrential rains caused the Little River to rise dangerously in front of the house; it covered our dock, and then the gazebo, and began creeping up the hillside toward the porch. R.B. said, “Pat, you’ve got to get up, the water is rising over the dock.”
I just raised my head about an inch from the pillow and said irritably, “Well, what exactly do you want me to do about it?”
Fortunately the river fell again, while I lay there immobile as a sandbag. What finally got me up was Michelle. Despite our skirmishes, she impressed me and gave me hope—she was a fearless, unquenchable competitor who never buckled under pressure, and when it came to effort, I wished I had twelve of her. I couldn’t fault her desire to be great. I decided to bow to Mickie and Holly and hand Michelle the job of starting point guard for the following season. The morning after the flood, I called her and told her to come out to my house for a meeting. When Michelle arrived, I was on the sofa watching tape—I hadn’t slept.
She had her glasses on, and that’s a scary moment, because you know she was up watching film all night. You just don’t want her to have glasses on. You want Pat to have her contacts in, because if she has her contacts in, she had a little bit of sleep and she’s not as cranky.
—MICHELLE MARCINIAK
I said, “I’m thinking about making you my point guard.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know if you can handle it.”
“What would make you say that?”
“It’s a lot different coming off the bench than it is starting. There is a lot more pressure on a starter.”
“I disagree. I don’t like coming off the bench.”
“Okay,” I said, “but I’ve been coaching this game as long as you’ve been alive. And I’m telling you it’s not going to be easy, Michelle, and you need to trust me on that. I’m going to be a lot harder on you as a starter. But if I go with you, I’m going with you.”
What Michelle didn’t yet know was that there is a vast difference between playing and leading. The point guard position in basketball is one of the great tutorials on leadership, and it ought to be taught in classrooms. Anyone can perfect a dribble with muscle memory; very few people are able to organize and direct followers, which is a far more subtle and multifaceted skill. Leadership is really a form of temporary authority that others grant you, and they only follow you if they find you consistently credible. It’s all about perception—and if teammates find you the least bit inconsistent, moody, unpredictable, indecisive, or emotionally unreliable, then they balk and the whole team is destabilized.
Most young people are all the things I just listed, and Michelle was no different. If there is a single ingredient in leadership, it’s emotional maturity.
Over the next two seasons, I intentionally did everything I could to break Michelle down. Why? Because until she completely surrendered herself and her ego, she wasn’t going to become the reliable leader we needed. A willingness to do whatever it is that needs to be done regardless of self-interest is the hallmark of a mature leader. With Michelle there was a lingering note of “what about me?”
Marciniak always played hard, and five hundred miles an hour, but she’d make decisions and you’d be like, “What? Why did you do that?” You could see Pat’s frustration with Michelle. She wouldn’t question her drive and work ethic, but she would question her decision making in the moment.
—ABBY CONKLIN
Michelle’s highly emotional style made her prone to unpredictability, and in the ’95 season we couldn’t afford for her to be even a little off, because early on we lost our most reliable senior guard, Tiffany Woosley, to a blown knee. We had a great senior class and I badly wanted to see them get a championship: Woosley, Vonda Ward, Nikki McCray, and Dana Johnson had built an 88-8 record in three seasons and been ranked number one in the country for most of that time. The only thing they had failed to do was reach the Final Four, which just shows that your most powerful teams don’t always finish first. With Tiffany out, the seniors would be relying in large part on Michelle.
One afternoon Michelle had an absolute dog day in practice. We were running a sideline drill, and she crashed into the ball racks, and balls scattered everywhere. Well, that just irritated me to no end.
“If you’re THINKING, if you’re HERE, Michelle, you don’t run over a ball rack,” I boomed.
In the next drill, she threw the ball away at least five times on wacky, errant passes. “Would you do that in a game?” I thundered. “You’re careless. Everybody on the line. Let’s run for Michelle’s carelessness!”
Next came shooting drills. By now I’m pacing around her like a lion, and I can see that she’s watching for my wrath out of the corner of her eye.
You know where she is. You can feel t
hat icy stare as she comes across half-court. So I take a shot—and it hits the side of the backboard.
—MICHELLE MARCINIAK
I stopped practice.
“What was that?” I demanded. “What are you doing? If this is the national championship game, you would hit the side of the backboard? The game is on the line. We’re competing for a championship. And that’s what you would do? Is that right?”
Silence.
“Answer me.”
She started sniffing and her chin trembled. She looked at Mickie, who shook her head faintly, as if to warn her, “Whatever you do, don’t cry.”
But it was too late. Michelle was bawling, tears streaming out of her eyes.
“You’re crying? You’re crying? Are you kidding? What are you crying about? You’re supposed to be tough, our leader. Our point guard. And you’re crying. Why? Because I’m hard on you? Well, guess what. Get used to it. You should be by now.”
There were plenty of nights in the locker room when I wanted to cry, plenty of games when I was frustrated or nervous. You couldn’t let people see that, I told her; if everybody on the team viewed me as a basket case, how would that make them feel? She had to project poise, control, and confidence, no matter what she felt inside. “You can’t afford to do that in the presence of your team,” I said later, more calmly. “That’s just part of being a manager or leader.”
Michelle had always worried solely about herself on the court but now she was trying to play while running an entire team, and sprinting the floor while shouting directions at the same time is harder than it looks. She had to direct the traffic, make sure everyone knew what offense we were in, manage them when they were in the wrong spots, pick them up when they were down, refocus them, encourage them.
But Michelle would go dead silent and sink into herself. She just wanted to let her spinning do the talking. I’d holler at her, and she would gaze back at me hopelessly, as if she could never get it right. Sometimes I’d kick her out of practice. “Just get out,” I said. “Just go. Obviously you aren’t paying attention, you don’t understand what I want and how I want it, so get out. Just leave.”
Michelle never knew what to do when I kicked her out of practice. Get showered? Or sit in her locker and tremble? Go back in and watch the rest of the workout from the sideline? No, the thing to do was to hang around and look remorseful, tell your teammates good job, and then cautiously approach me to ask for forgiveness.
It was like, “You’re not getting a compliment from me until it’s done well and it’s done how I want it done.” You go out and have a great practice, and her mentality is “Well, you should.” Her whole motto is That’s why I recruited you, because you should be the best. You have a great practice, now you should have another great practice. So the bar was set. Then that’s the new standard. She’s going to say, “You can’t go back here anymore.” So you just keep improving your situation. You always wanted to please her, and it was never good enough. You weren’t going to get the compliment. What you would get was a caring spirit. A few hours after practice we’d go over and eat at her home; all of a sudden Pat the mother would come out, and she would just love on us. Well, she would trick you. ’Cause you would watch this woman and this child and your heart melts and gets soft and you feel good about this relationship, like she is a person, she’s not just this ranting raving coach trying to push your buttons.
—MICHELLE MARCINIAK
But Michelle responded and grew, and in the spring of ’95 she led us back to the NCAA Final Four for the first time in three years. We went to Minneapolis—Tyler called it Minny Apples—believing it was our trophy to lose. We had an ideal mix of size and speed, and great veteran play. In addition to Michelle and Vonda, we had Dana Johnson, a bruising center out of Baltimore; Nikki McCray, a lovely, quick-footed forward from Collierville, Tennessee, who played with such urgency that she would go on to win an Olympic gold medal and star in the pros; and a junior sharpshooter guard named Latina Davis, from Winchester, Tennessee, with a blindingly fast first step.
Our team motto that year was “One Team with One Goal.” But we had One Problem: the University of Connecticut. They were a skyrocketing, unbeaten team led by a willowy, elegant six-foot-four center named Rebecca Lobo with a smile as wide as a doorway and coached by a guy who was the first opponent I’d met who could match me for stormy intensity, Geno Auriemma. This was the inaugural year of a rivalry that, despite our quarrels over the coming years, we both agreed was an absolute masterpiece.
In order for a sport to build in the popular imagination it needs a rivalry, a gripping narrative of warring opposites. Tennessee-UConn was that for women’s basketball. We were a fascinating study in primary colors: Tennessee was southern, stately, established; UConn was a come-lately easterner with hard elbows. We were slashers who preyed on teams off the dribble; they were highly orchestrated passers who picked you apart in the air. We played from the inside out; they played from the outside in. We wore bright neon orange; they wore drab blue.
There was tremendous personal contrast as well. I tried to be correct and decorous in public; Geno was a smart-ass who would take negative attention over no attention at all. You could put a microphone on me for an hour and never hear anything worse than “dadgummit”; he was notoriously foulmouthed. I was intensely competitive but left it on the court; he was combative and carried grudges off the court. Then of course there was the most fundamental difference of all: gender. He complained about being a man working in a women’s sport. To which I was always tempted to reply, “Try being a woman in a man’s world.”
These largely superficial, situational, and somewhat exaggerated differences would define our relationship sharply over the years. But we also had more characteristics in common than people would suppose, and we liked each other. We both loved to laugh. We both enjoyed expensive bottles of red wine. We both lived the game as if it was in us on a cellular level. We both taught it with an unrelenting energy and attention to detail. We both loved our players with a loyal, familial devotion that gave us, and them, equal amounts of pleasure and agony. And we were both kinder people than we appeared to outsiders.
We could both get enraged at officials. The first time we ever met face-to-face was on the court at Stokely Arena in the mid-1980s. Geno was then an assistant at the dread Virginia under my friend Debbie Ryan. It was halftime and I headed straight for a referee to complain about the lousy calls. Just as I got there, here came this irate Italian with a dark widow’s peak and a wide-open mouth, swearing at the top of his lungs, until the official gave him a technical. I just stood there, amused. “I agree a hundred percent,” I said.
Strange as it might sound, I had a little chip on my shoulder. We’re playing at UT and you know it’s not going to be easy, and I thought the officials were not giving us the respect we deserved. I remember as soon as the horn sounded for the half, I ran over, and was going to give this ref a piece of my mind. And there she is. I’m thinking, “What is she doing out here?” And I realized, she’s pissed too. We got there at the same time and, stupid me, I opened my mouth first. The ref hits me with a technical. She just walks away, like, “Well, I got my trip accomplished.” Now I got to walk into our locker room and say, “By the way, they got two more points.”
—GENO AURIEMMA
Another thing Geno and I had in common was that we agreed women’s basketball needed to be on television more in order to grow. In the summer of ’94, I got a call from him asking if we would play UConn in a made-for-TV game on ESPN on Martin Luther King Day. It wasn’t the most advantageous matchup for us; UConn was clearly an ascendant and dangerous top 5 team. What’s more, the game would be at Connecticut, which meant it could easily be a loss for us.
Everybody worth a damn said no, because it was going to be at our place. ESPN asked me, “Do you think she would play?” So I called her and she said, “Yeah.” And I said, “I told you she would play. She’s not like the rest of these people.”
&n
bsp; —GENO AURIEMMA
I couldn’t say no. I’d always felt a tremendous responsibility to give back to the game; I could never repay what it had given me and meant to me. It had changed my life, and I always wanted to promote it so it could change other women’s lives, too. So I said yes. And we lost. We went to Gampel Pavilion on MLK Day as the number one ranked team in the country. The Huskies were ranked number two, and the press was three deep. The Huskies were the hungrier team that day and whipped us 77–66.
But in Minneapolis we had a chance for revenge in the game that mattered more: the national championship. We were the best two teams in the country by a mile, and knew it, and so did a sellout crowd of more than eighteen thousand that packed the Target Center. For forty minutes the kids warred, and they produced an instant classic that is still replayed on ESPN. Vonda Ward and Dana Johnson dueled with Lobo and Kara Wolters, while on the perimeter Marciniak sparred with an inexhaustible, scrapping UConn guard named Jennifer Rizzotti.
We were getting ready to play them and all the geniuses were saying, “You can’t run your offense against them, how you gonna run your offense?” I said, “Bull, the same way. We will run our offense against them.” Uh-uh, they won’t let you. The first three times up the floor we can’t make a pass. And I’m like, holy Christ, they must be right.
—GENO AURIEMMA