Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective
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Somehow Pat really picked us up. She praised us, and I will be honest, if she had been critical at that point, we’d have been done. We were quite immature and not real stable at that point. That was a huge moment.
—KELLIE JOLLY
Kyra Elzy hated to lose as much as any young woman I’d ever met. She was a Kentuckian who had been coming to our basketball camps since the age of fourteen; the first time I ever saw her she was wearing a Western Kentucky T-shirt. I grabbed her by it. “Future Lady Vols don’t come here with another college’s shirt on,” I said. We recruited Kyra all through high school, and one of the reasons I wanted her in orange was because of the way she reacted when she lost. The night her high school team dropped a heartbreaker in the state championship, she threw herself across her bed, screaming and crying, while her grandmother stood out in the hall saying, “Baby, baby, what happened? Oh, baby, you can’t win ’em all.” Kyra acted like she didn’t want to live to see another day. I called her house that night and I said, “I know it hurts now, but we’re gonna win a national championship while you’re here and you’ll forget all about a state championship.”
But then Kyra got to Tennessee in the fall of ’96 and I’d started in on her. She was a long, slim, limber kid who looked like a rare flower, and she was my second-favorite target after Abby. Kyra was a lovely, sweet person, but I badgered her to get meaner. “I would take you to lunch,” I said contemptuously, “but I wouldn’t take you to war.” The second half of the season I transitioned to another taunt: I told her, “We’re a two-guard away from winning a championship.” If only we had someone who could play her position, I said.
Kyra would go into Mickie’s or Holly’s office and say she’d had it, she was going back to LaGrange, Kentucky. Mickie would calm her down. “Now, Elzy, hang in there; as long as Pat is on you, she knows you have it in you. She’s just trying to get it out of you.”
She rode me like a Kentucky Derby horse.
—KYRA ELZY
All season long my father asked me why I kept playing Elzy and our other freshman, Niya Butts. They were unfinished players who were getting schooled by our opponents. But they were also quick, and long, and they were so committed to getting better that I could say to Richard, “I’m telling you, Dad, they’re going to be factors for us in March.”
The dramas continued; it never got easier. Kellie Jolly, after working for six hours a day, made a near-miraculous recovery from her knee surgery and rejoined us with fourteen games left on the schedule—it seemed like a luxury to have two healthy guards in the backcourt—but it was short-lived, because senior Laurie Milligan promptly suffered a season-ending injury against Alabama, dislocating her kneecap.
We lost ten games, to equal the worst season in my tenure. They got booed and heard insults from the stands, and I said a few things that toughened up their skin too. When Louisiana Tech whipped us 98–80, I said, “I feel like I’m coaching a seventh-grade team.” We fell out of the top 10 in the rankings for the first time in a decade. During the Southeastern Conference tournament, Abby went into such a terrible shooting slump that she ended up weeping in my arms in a hotel hallway.
But just before the NCAA tournament was about to begin, we had another meeting. I didn’t care what our record was anymore; our team had learned from all that losing, and we were a far better team in March than we had been in January. It would be a hard road to the Final Four in Cincinnati, I told them, but we were capable of it, if we were willing to keep working on our weaknesses, right up until the end. “What do you want to do?” I asked them. This time Abby answered in just the right tone.
“We want to go to Cincinnati,” she said.
But then we got our tournament draw: to get to the Final Four we’d have to go through the number one team in the country, UConn. The same UConn team that had destroyed us a couple of months earlier by a score of 72–57. The same UConn team that was undefeated and top ranked at 33-0 and had a massive force in the paint in the six-foot-eight Kara Wolters.
We had ten losses and our tallest player was six foot four. But I told our team, “I like our chances. I feel great about this matchup.” Why? Because they were the same team we’d seen the last time—but I knew we were a different one, with a whole new outlook. All the pressure would be on them, while no one expected anything out of us.
We practiced like dogs for a week, and when I was tough on them, Abby was the one who kept everyone on the same page. “If there is a championship in us, that woman will get it out of us,” she told everybody.
The Counter Queens had studied UConn and were prepared. We knew how UConn wanted to pass, move, and cut, and we thought we could take some things away. As far as Wolters, “We’re gonna put an orange uniform on her before she ever gets to the paint,” I told our centers Pashen Thompson and Tiffani Johnson. “When she gets ready to take a shower and pulls off her uniform, it’s gonna be orange.”
But the biggest counter would simply be how much better we were. Our glaring weaknesses were gone. Abby Conklin was a different leader: an openly caring one. She had always been one of our most selfless players, and that virtue began to shine through. Kyra Elzy and Niya Butts had become great on-the-ball defenders. Elzy had become a scoring threat, too, and nobody knew it but us. Most important, with Kellie Jolly back we were a more confident, attacking team. I told Kellie she had the green light. “You’ve got to be more offensive minded than you have been all year,” I said.
We were the biggest underdogs in the tournament. So much so that when the Lady Vols went out to warm up for the game, we saw tournament officials giving instructions to the UConn staff about how the award presentations would go. No one bothered to clue us in, we noticed. They just ignored us. Our kids stared across the court balefully—it only made them determined to deliver the shock of the year.
I will never forget taking the floor and there was no doubt in my mind we were going to win that game. I just remember in warm-ups looking at the other end of the floor and seeing UConn’s players and knowing we were going to beat them, because they had no idea what they were up against.
—KELLIE JOLLY
The ball went up. Second possession of the game, Kellie slashed straight through the UConn defense—and hit a layup. Next, it was Kyra’s turn. She caught the ball on the perimeter, and you could almost feel the UConn defense lay off her, because they didn’t think she was a shooter. Kyra launched a three—and boom, it ripped through the net.
I don’t know how Pat did it. That’s part of her magic. We were broke down, disappointed, we had fallen out of the top 10 for the first time in I don’t know how many years. But we were, like, “Bring it on, let’s GO.” We came out and punched them and I don’t think they knew what hit ’em.
—KYRA ELZY
Our game plan worked almost to perfection. Kyra and Niya’s defense harassed the UConn guards into horrendous shooting; they made just 6 of 27 shots. By the end of the game, Kellie would score 19 points. We led 45–33 at the half and still had a 14-point lead with a minute to go. Final score: Tennessee 91, UConn 81.
It was the most unlikely game we’d ever win over the Huskies. No one had gotten within single digits of them all season, and here we came with 91 points. Geno would admit that he simply wasn’t prepared for what we threw at him that day—but in a way he was partly responsible. It was a case of our greatest adversary pushing us to another level, and he would reply in the coming years by raising his own team to a higher level.
You learn. You got to expect that when you beat someone one way, they may do something completely different the next time. And son of a bitch if Pat didn’t come out in that game and do some things different.
—GENO AURIEMMA
When we boarded our bus that night headed to Cincinnati for the Final Four, I said, “It’s been a long year, but I told you if you believed in each other we would be here. Doesn’t this feel good? Now don’t just go to Cincinnati happy to be there. Go out and bring that trophy home.”
When you look at where we started, and where we ended up, how she got us to that point without us killing each other and her killing us, that was remarkable.
—KELLIE JOLLY
There had been so many days when I walked out of practice and asked our staff, “Do you think I was too hard on them today?” and they had answered, “Yes, we think you were too hard today.” I know I was too hard on Abby. It’s an open question whether we’d have lost fewer games if I had gone about it differently, but I didn’t know any other way, except to keep working until we had turned our negatives into positives. Fortunately, a young woman who wasn’t sure she was good enough to play at Tennessee turned out to be exceptional—and exceptionally tough. By the time Abby Conklin finished her career at UT, she had played in three national championship games and won two of them.
No team had ever won a national title with ten losses. The worst season we ever had turned into one of the best we ever had, because we had finally quit fighting with one another—but we never quit fighting.
Our “three-peat” of championships from 1996 to 1998 looks in the record book now like a solid block of triumph, but each one was distinct; the casts changed and we took dramatically different routes. There were moments in those years that I felt a fine professional control—but I’d be lying if I said that every motivational technique and rapid-fire decision I made was a matter of brilliant calculation. Just as often they were a result of pure feel. Here’s the truth: sometimes, the game plays you.
You labor into a headwind, and then suddenly the wind shifts and it’s at your back. In a way, the most absurd, hard-to-fathom aspect of the ’97 championship was what followed: the almost effortless, record-breaking 39-0 undefeated season in ’98 that was our finest ever.
I knew right away it would be a different kind of year when even our practices had an extra intensity. We had four new players, freshmen who burst onto the floor like atomic elements. Tamika Catchings of Duncanville, Texas, Semeka Randall of Cleveland, Ohio, Kristen “Ace” Clement of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Teresa Geter of Columbia, South Carolina, were called the greatest recruiting class in history, and they lived up to it. They were so powerful and so hot burning that I worried they would flame out.
For the first and only time in my life, a team would outstrip my own ambition and vision for them. It wasn’t my job to push them, I quickly discovered—it was my job to slow them down, tell them when to stop. That fall, one of our veteran players, Misty Greene, called Abby Conklin to deliver an incredulous report.
“Bud, you wouldn’t believe it,” she said. “She asked us if we felt like practicing today. She was worried we were tired.”
But they were also young, and needy, and as a group they would require more mothering and less pure coaching than any team I’d ever had. When we sat down for our annual “family night” meeting, in which we circled up and shared details about our parents and upbringing, we discovered that nine of our twelve players, including all four freshmen, had been raised for much of their lives by single mothers, or grandmothers, many of whom had worked multiple jobs to send their kids to college. To this day I believe that team was driven in part by a needful urgency to repay those maternal debts.
As I studied our players and thought about how to cope with them, I looked at my own son for clues, as was becoming my habit. Watching Tyler’s little mind grow made me think in new ways about the process of maturing, and how to encourage it. The idea of coaching, and parenting, wasn’t to create obedient little robots moving in predetermined choreography. Discipline only took you so far. Ty had reached the age where it required constant thought to deal with him, because he’d grown into a fully conversant little master negotiator.
One afternoon in the summer after our ’97 title, he had a pouting fit in the Atlanta airport during a layover. He wanted a new toy. I said, “No way.” We were renovating our house that summer, and when we cleaned out his room, I was appalled at the number of toys he’d collected, to the point that I’d made him pack some of them up to take to a community center for kids who weren’t as fortunate.
Tyler pouted from Concourse A to Concourse B. I was not really up for pouting, and he generally wasn’t allowed to do it, but he was six, so I gave him a little leeway. But when I suggested we needed to go into a bookstore to buy a birthday gift for someone, the pout deepened and he jerked my hand.
“You’re going with me,” I said. “Your attitude is not good, and you need to think about someone besides yourself.”
Then I said, “What little boy gets to do more than you?”
He said, “The UConn coach’s kid.”
I managed to contain myself and I picked up his little backpack and dumped it out. I said, “We’re going to count your toys.” There were twenty-five toys in there; it was like the midget car at the circus—they just kept coming out.
“Tyler, there are twenty-five toys here. Do you really think you need a new one?”
“Mama, that one’s not a toy,” he said, pointing.
“Okay, twenty-four. Do you really think you need another toy?”
“But I want one.”
“You need to think about this, son.”
Pout. Frown.
“I tell you what we’ll do,” I said. “If you had your own money, you could just buy a toy, right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Let’s write down chores you can do that I could pay you for.”
We made a list: he could make up our bed, he could feed the fish, he could feed the cats, he could wash the car. Then we talked about how much he got for each chore. Well, I created a mercenary. We got home, and he went manic with the chores and thought up new things to do for cash every day. I walked in our bedroom closet, and he had arrayed my shoes in a perfect line. “Why did you do that?” I asked.
He said, “That’s one of my chores.”
“How much?” I asked, faintly.
“Five dollars.”
But for the most part he continued to be an easy child, coasting along in my slipstream and treating it all as a giant sleepover. There were nights on the road when he insisted on staying with Mickie or Holly. Aunt Mickie taught him how to “party” in her hotel room: she let him jump from the dresser onto the bed and sprint down the hall with nothing but his underwear on.
Our freshmen declared their need for my maternal side almost as soon as they set foot on campus. It seemed like each one of them had some raw emotional vulnerability. There was Ace Clement, one of six kids raised by her single mother, Sue. Ace had broken Wilt Chamberlain’s high school scoring record back in Philadelphia, but she arrived at Tennessee with a broken heart: she had fallen hard for a pro athlete over the summer and was pining away for him. Her first question to me was “When can I go home for a weekend?” It took some time to talk her through it and persuade her to stay at Tennessee, and every day I worried that I’d wake up and find she had bolted.
Pat wanted to know what their issues were. She didn’t want to bury her head. She wanted to know, and some had more issues than others. She wanted to be needed as more than just a basketball coach. She enjoyed that, she reached out to them, and she always had the energy to do it. We had some kids that really needed structure, love, and a firm hand. And Pat was perfect for that.
—MICKIE DEMOSS
Semeka Randall was a powerf
ully built young woman with a personality like dynamite, but she could go suddenly dark, and get a little sullen if she didn’t get what she needed from me. She was emotionally hungry; she was extremely close to her mother, Bertha, who worked two jobs as a guidance counselor to support them, and had never been separated from her before. Semeka played the game with the fervor of someone who had to fight for everything; she became a great ball hawk growing up in Cleveland, where the guys she played with wouldn’t pass her the ball. If she wanted it, she said, “I had to get it myself.”
Bertha tried to forbid Semeka from playing pickup with the guys because it was so rough, but Semeka was always ducking out of the house to find a game. Bertha would send her to the store for milk, and Semeka would stay gone for an hour. Bertha would come marching down the street, saying, “Have you been playing ball again?” She would try to hand Semeka dolls to play with instead, but Semeka hated the dolls so much she broke them into pieces. She would tear their heads off, pull their arms off, and then their legs, and throw the pieces under her bed. That was Semeka.
“We need you to embrace your role and be an emotional leader,” I said. “Do you want to be that for us?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay, then. So what do you need from me?” I asked.