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

by Pat Summitt

  Michelle fought like a lion—but she was all over the map. Early in the game she came down and spun on Rizzotti, did her patented Spinderella whirl, and got an open bucket. It was a great play—and the worst thing that could have happened, because now she was overexcited and started jacking up bad shots. I called her over and tore into her. Which was a mistake on my part. I was tired of not getting through to her, and instead of being calm, I matched her emotion. “You need to sit down and think about this!” I snapped. “Just watch, and get your head in the game.”

  I didn’t leave her there for long. When a player makes a mistake, you always want to put them back in quickly—you don’t just berate them and sit them down with no chance for redemption.

  We took a 38–32 halftime lead, but we could never draw away. At the two-minute mark it was all tied up. But when it came down to it, we just couldn’t stop UConn when we needed to most. We were in and out of schemes, trying to stymie them, but they just had too many options: if Wolters (10 points) didn’t get a shot, here came Lobo (17 points); if Lobo didn’t get a shot, here came Rizzotti (15 points).

  We still had our eye on the trophy. We were Tennessee, after all. We had everything planned: the victory T-shirts and hats were ready to be printed, the champagne was on ice, and the catering tables were ready for a huge celebration. But UConn surged—and suddenly nothing good happened for us. Nikki McCray missed a layup. Michelle got stripped of the ball. Then she blew a free throw. And with 1:51 to go, Jen Rizzotti dashed the ball up the court and confronted Michelle—who went for the steal. The gambler took over, at the wrong time. Rizzotti went right by her and scored, giving UConn the lead, and we never got it back. Final score, 70–64.

  It was a different feeling from any I’d ever had after a loss. The margin between losing and winning had been almost imperceptible. We had fought our hearts out, and we hadn’t given it away, the other team had simply taken it from us. It came down to a handful of great plays. Unfortunately, the other kids made them.

  Here’s the thing that would distinguish the UConn rivalry for me: it made everybody better. The two teams had pushed each other so hard that the quality of basketball just kept rising. The first thing I did when I got back to Knoxville was call a team meeting and warn them that we’d see UConn again, and we would have to raise our game. There were a lot of rivals we felt a distinct physical edge over, against whom we were bigger, stronger, and fitter, but this wasn’t one of them. UConn was our equal—and wasn’t going away.

  One thing a painful loss is good for is getting the attention of the last holdouts on your team, the kids who still haven’t quite given you everything they have. I sensed that Michelle Marciniak was withholding—she was still a little too interested in doing it her way instead of mine. I also sensed that she was congratulating herself for making it to an NCAA final. I decided to expose Michelle in front of the whole team. She had gone just 3 for 11 against UConn, while Rizzotti had gone 6 for 8.

  “You didn’t show up,” I said. “If you had shown up, we’d have won. You just weren’t as focused as you should have been. You had the opportunity of a lifetime. We lost a national championship and you were the point guard. You were the leader. You had the ball in your hand 80 percent of the time.”

  I turned to the rest of the team. “Is there anyone in this room who doesn’t think that if Michelle had her head on straight we would have won a national championship?”

  The room was stony silent; no one knew what to do. I could feel them cringing inwardly, unsure of whether or not to raise their hands. No doubt, some of them thought it was a brutal thing to say. And it was. But this was the hard part that I had warned Michelle about.

  “I told you last year when you were going to become the point guard that a huge responsibility comes with it,” I said. “You’re going to get lots of praise and lots of accolades from the outside world. But if it doesn’t work, it’s going to fall on you. Just like it falls on me. You’re the one responsible.”

  I wasn’t trying to be cruel; I was being honest. The standard conventional coaching manual says you don’t “embarrass” players in front of their teammates, but I disagreed. Here’s why: Dishonest teams don’t win the big one. They cover up their losses with rationalizations and excuses that soothe their eggshell egos, and they keep making the same mistakes. But the truly ambitious teams find relief in honesty when they’ve lost, because it’s the diagnostic tool that leads to a solution—here’s what we did wrong and let’s fix it, so we don’t ever have to feel this way again. Great teams explain their failure; they don’t excuse it. Then they pay a visit to Charles Atlas and get stronger. When you explain a loss aloud, it’s no longer a tormenting mystery. I believed in that brand of honesty my whole career, and I knew at least one other coach who believed in it too.

  It’s great to capture the moment right then and there, while the wound it still open and you can really get them to pay attention. I used to call players in and sit them down privately and say, “This is the deal.” I find myself doing it less and less, and here’s why: you know when they leave your office, they’re going to lie. You could say ten things and nine of them are “You are greatest in the world at nine things, but you suck going to your left.” They leave and say, “Coach says I suck.” I like to say things right in front of the team about reality. I like to say, This is what you’re doing and this is why it’s costing us, and does anybody have any questions? Because now they have to confront. They can’t go their separate ways and say, “He said …” No. Everybody heard it. And everybody on the team already knows it. They just want someone else to say it. You are just the voice of the team calling out that player—and now that player has to react. They have to either admit it, and fix it, or say everybody else is wrong. And if they do that, they further separate themselves from the team. College kids are still kids and are looking for direction. What gives you the stomach to do it is you know you’re right, and you’re only saying what they already know and believe.

  —GENO AURIEMMA

  Sometimes I had to hurt a young woman to her core. Why? Because often players don’t even know they are withholding something until they are pierced. When you pierce them, that’s when the last of their individual egos finally pours out. Then you can show them how to rebuild in the right way. I pierced Michelle that day, and I’d do it again before her career was over. It was by no means an easy thing or pleasant thing to do, and I went home that night and held my son, who wasn’t happy with me for making his latest crush unhappy. I chewed my lip and asked myself, Do you think you were too hard on her?

  But the trouble was, it worked. I might have felt worse about such tough love if it hadn’t paid off.

  For twenty years, Tennessee had set the standard of excellence in the women’s game—but now someone had met it. We had to learn from Connecticut the way other teams had learned from Tennessee. This wasn’t a team we could outhustle, or outmuscle. We would have to outwit and outexecute them.

  After losing to UConn twice in 1995, I knew that it wasn’t just our players who had to get better; the coaches had to get better too. I wanted to get a grip on UConn’s offense, called the Triple Post. They had beaten us twice with it and I was determined to study it, whether we ever used it or not. If you understand how to run something, then you also understand how to defend it.

  Basketball to me is all about countering—attacks and counterattacks are what create tempos in a game and shifts in momentum. But you also have to counter from season to season. Mickie called us “the Counter Queens.” Although we had a system with principles and core values that we didn’t deviate from, strategically we adjusted dramatically over the years as the game changed. I don’t know that I ever separated myself as a basketball technician, but along with Mickie and Holly as a staff, we were great at staying on the cutting edge of where the game was going, and using the marvelously evolving talents of kids. “It’s what you learn after you already know everything that counts,” I liked to say. Our abili
ty to keep learning and teaching new things is what separated us and made us the best program in history.

  I was by no means a master tactician, but I’d become a good enough one to make a difference on the sideline, for which I had a lot of guys in the business to thank. A great small-college legend named Don Meyer gave me his best methods, as did two Tennessee men’s coaches, Don DeVoe and Kevin O’Neill. DeVoe had a young assistant named Dean Lockwood, and I plundered his bookshelves for the latest instructionals or videos. I’d see a new title in his office and say, “Can I borrow this?” Or I’d duck into DeVoe’s office and say, “You got a minute? How do you defend the wing when the ball gets here?” I’d stay after work to watch the men practice.

  It impressed me how much of a student she was, what a learner. Here she is, someone in such command of her world, her team and her program, and I’m twenty-six years old, and yet she’s looking at my stuff saying, “What can I glean from this, what can I get out of this guy that can help us?” I would see her in Stokely standing at one end of the arena, leaning against a wall, watching us for twenty or thirty or forty minutes.

  —DEAN LOCKWOOD

  In seeking to counter the Triple Post, I turned to the men’s game for schooling once again. The greatest employers of the Triple Post were the Chicago Bulls under Phil Jackson, the eleven-time NBA title winner. In 1994, I had added a superb third assistant coach to our staff, one with a gift for analyzing videotape, named Al Brown. When I told Al that I wanted to study the Triple Post, he offered to make a call to the Bulls’ assistant Tex Winter, an acquaintance of his, who had first drawn up the scheme back in the 1940s. The Bulls graciously let our entire staff come study their system for a couple of days.

  Then we came home and, as we always did, began putting our own spin on things. I moved players around on the floor, so they would understand the overall patterns better. I’d bring our big players out to the perimeter and make them run the play like a guard, so they saw the play from that angle as well as their own. When one of our bigs got upset if a guard didn’t make a play, I’d say, “Fine. You go play point.”

  Shaking things up was good for all of us. Sometimes I just shook things up because I felt a creeping complacency—because the Counter Queen sensed a need for a counter—and I shook Michelle up harder than anyone in the 1996 season. She was still prone to glory seeking and costly gambles, and I turned up the heat in practice every day even more. “You thought last year was hard,” I warned her. “Wait till you see this year.”

  “You’re SELFISH,” I’d holler. “This does not revolve around you. This is about four other players on the floor; your teammates. You need to put other people first.”

  Michelle hated it when I screamed at her—she felt I belittled her in front of the rest of the team, especially our new freshmen, a couple of whom were the most promising players we’d ever recruited. One was a shy, fragile physical genius from New York named Chamique Holdsclaw. Another was a brilliant, tough-jawed Tennessee point guard named Kellie Jolly. I would blast Michelle, and they would just stare openmouthed, while Michelle’s shoulders curled.

  Michelle begged, “I can’t have my teammates seeing you yell at me like that. I’m asking you, if you could please turn your back to them when you’re yelling at me. Don’t let them see how mad you are.” But I just used her plea as another chance to challenge her: I made her feel weak for asking.

  “If that’s what you want, Michelle. I guess you’re just not tough then.”

  At the time you take everything personally, and it’s all a big emotionfest. It’s all about you. You’re trying to make it all about you, and she’s just trying to make it all about everyone else, to win. But you fight her.

  —MICHELLE MARCINIAK

  Mickie and Holly winced at the way I dealt with Michelle. It was their job to soften the blows and to tell me when I’d gone too far. “Now, Pat …,” they’d say. I cut them off. “If I didn’t think she could take it, I wouldn’t say it,” I replied. I knew full well that what Michelle wanted more than anything in the world was a compliment from me, and she wasn’t getting it until she held the trophy. It was straight out of the playbook of a tall man back in Henrietta. Mickie and Holly just said, “There’s the Richard in her.”

  I just think Pat was raised with—everything wasn’t wondeful and grand. The way she was raised, you know, you had to fight a little bit, and she hadn’t had it easy all her life and her dad was tough, and that was the backbone and foundation of how she coached.

  —HOLLY WARLICK

  The final crisis for Michelle came at Mississippi late in her senior season. The Ole Miss gym was small and dark, and Michelle hated it there, and she played terribly that night. She had about eight turnovers, missed a bunch of free throws, and ended up fouling out. “Would you get your head on?” I demanded. “What are you doing missing free throws? You’re an 85 percent free throw shooter. Sit down!” We lost, 79–72.

  I was at my wit’s end; Michelle was our senior leader, and if she played that way in the NCAA tournament, we’d be out of it. I walked into the locker room and said, “Everyone turn around, shut up, and sit down! Except you, Marciniak. Get up.” Michelle stood.

  “You had no leadership tonight. Where’s your head? If you weren’t so selfish, if you weren’t so into yourself … You let every single one of these people down.”

  When I boarded the bus for the trip home, Michelle was sitting in the second row, looking out the window with her headphones on, her eyes welling up. Now, the second row is where the coaches and staff sit, while the players congregate in the back of the bus. It was an obvious play for my attention. I sat down next to her and pulled her headphones off. “What are you doing?” I said. “You’re going to listen to music after you just played like that?”

  Silence.

  “You should be in the back of the bus talking to your teammates, trying to figure out what you can do. Instead you’re up here listening to music.”

  Tears.

  “You’re crying? You’re crying? Why? What, you can’t take it?”

  I knew that Michelle was as distressed as anyone that she’d had a bad game. But we had a month left in the season, and we were at the breaking point. Michelle either did it my way, or we would lose.

  If I’d learned anything in all my years of teaching, it was that when you reach an impasse with a player, you get what you demand, not what you ask for. If players see even a waver in you, they will give you what they want to give. Sometimes you have to make yourself their adversary. I pushed Michelle to the brink—unapologetically—and I did it out of conviction in the oldest athletic training principle in the world: when you get right to the verge, the mind and body respond by expanding. They grow. It was a stressful and manipulative dynamic, and the finest of lines, and by this point I had a permanent trench in the bottom of my lip. But I gave Michelle an ultimatum.

  Just before we got off the bus I said, “You need to think about whether you want to be a part of this team anymore.”

  Her head swiveled toward me in disbelief. “You heard me. I don’t think you can be our point guard. I thought you could for a little while, but I don’t think you can do it. So why don’t you get some rest and we’ll talk tomorrow, and you can let me know whether or not you want to be a part of this team anymore if you aren’t starting.”

  It was hardball. Did I mean it? Of course not—it was my turn to gamble. But Michelle didn’t know that, and she was devastated. She went home and told her mother she might quit, and then she stayed up all night weeping. She called me at six the next morning. “I want to do this; I want to be your point guard, and I want to lead this team to a championship, but I can’t do it with the way you’re coaching me,” she said. “You’ve broken my spirit.”

  “Well, that’s the last thing I’d ever want to do,” I said.

  “You embarrass me in front of my teammates and it makes me feel like I can’t lead them the way you want me to. I need you on my side.”

&nbs
p; “Okay, Michelle, I’ll handle you more gently. But I don’t want you as my starter anymore. I don’t think you can handle it. I feel like I gave you every opportunity and you really showed yourself in the game last night. Then after the game you inverted so much that I just don’t think this is really right for you.”

  “Pat, I can do it. I just need you to treat me different.”

  “You need me to treat you different? After aaalll the players who have come through this program? Aaalll the players who have won a national championship here? We’re in the last month and a half of the season and you want me to treat you different? That just tells me you’re not tough.”

  It’s funny now. But at the time it was just heart wrenching.

  “Pat, I’ll show you.”

  “Well, you’re gonna have to show me. Because there is nothing you can say right now.”

  I ignored her for about a week, would barely look at her. I played a variety of people at the point in practice, gave long minutes to our freshman Kellie Jolly, and acted like I’d put anyone at the point if I had to—anyone but Michelle. It was a total zero-tolerance policy for any more resistance, or lack of focus, or circus plays.

  But Michelle did what she promised: she showed me. As the tournament began, we grudgingly met halfway. She tried to do what I asked her to do, and I didn’t ride her quite as hard.

  In the NCAA Elite Eight, we faced our old nemesis Virginia—and with twenty minutes to go, my worst fears seemed about to be realized. It was one of those nights when there was an invisible lid on the basket, a mysterious force that repelled our shots. We trailed at halftime in one of the most ugly games I’d ever witnessed, 27–14. I told our staff, “Well, it can’t get any worse.” Oh, but it could. With seventeen minutes to play, we trailed by 17 points. We had to make up a point for every minute remaining, or the season would be over.