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

by Pat Summitt

  “A hug,” she said.

  I gave it to her. When the press asked Semeka how she was adjusting to my famously vocal coaching style, Semeka answered, “If she stops yelling at me, that means she doesn’t care. Evidently, she cares about me a lot.”

  After five championships, I felt comfortable with who I was with our players; I no longer had anything to prove or authority to establish. I didn’t feel I had to strike any particular pose, and I didn’t want to be withholding with this team. They didn’t need it. I became more aware of which players I didn’t have enough daily contact with. One afternoon I wandered over to our sophomore center LaShonda Stephens and draped an arm around her, and I literally felt her physically relax. She must have needed it, I realized.

  Easily the most affectionate Lady Vol of all was Tamika Catchings. When she was a seventeen-year-old recruit, I visited her at home in Duncanville, Texas, and she said to me shyly, “You want to see my room?” I said sure. It was a tiny bedroom in the back of the apartment she shared with her mother, Wanda, who was divorced from her father, Harvey, a former NBA player. Tamika kept her room as neat as an infantryman’s locker, and all over the walls were motivational slogans. She said, shyly, “You want to see my closet?” I said sure again, and she opened it and pulled out her most treasured garment. It was her uniform from a USA Junior National team.

  After we left the house and got into the rental car, I said to Mickie, “It’s going to kill me if we don’t get that kid. It’s going to kill me.”

  She was one of the most endearing players I’d ever met, with a face like a doll. She didn’t have an ounce of artifice or emotional dishonesty. We would have only one run-in in four years. In her first practice I criticized her defensive stance and told her, “Get your hands up!” Tamika got tearful. She was usually so perfect she had never been corrected.

  “Do I have to handle you with lace gloves?” I asked. “Do I have to pamper you? Or do I have to send you back to Duncanville, Texas?”

  Tamika’s immediate reaction was, “My mom would kill me if I got sent home.” She straightened up, and after that we never had another incident.

  Catch was so unspoiled that she thought every hotel room was the Ritz. Early that season we went back to my alma mater, UT-Martin, for a game, and stayed at the only hotel in town, a small Econo Lodge. It was so much bigger than her room back in Duncanville that Tamika thought it was a palace.

  “I love the Econo Lodge,” she said.

  “Well, you just wait till we get to the Hilton,” I said.

  Catch was so sweetly accommodating that she even obeyed my edict about a clean locker room. Our inner dressing area had rows of handsome, highly polished wood lockers with doors on them, and every so often I would walk through there and get annoyed because the kids were so messy. They would leave their doors wide open with clothes and shoes falling out. It irked me to see the locker room we had worked so hard to get look slovenly. “How your area looks, that’s a reflection on the team as a whole,” I said. “What’s behind closed doors, that’s yours, but you never know who is walking through this locker room and you have all this stuff hanging out. Tidy it up.” Of course, they would clean it up for a day or two, and then they would revert right back to sloppiness. But Tamika’s area was always neat and orderly, just like her room at home.

  So it was all the more surprising when I noticed that Catch was not following some of my directions on the floor. Then she blew a curfew. I knew that Catch was partly deaf: she had a condition called congenital sensorineural hearing loss. She was our quietest player; she usually communicated with a nod or shake of her head instead of speaking aloud, because she was self-conscious about her speech, which had a slight, telltale slur. But I’d been told by her high school coach that her hearing loss wasn’t too significant, and she showed few signs of it.

  When Catch returned to our hotel a half hour after curfew during a road trip to Stanford, however, I knew her hearing was worse than I’d realized. She admitted she hadn’t heard me announce the curfew time on the team bus. She also admitted, after some gentle questions, that she couldn’t hear my signals on the court in crowd noise. I decided to confront the issue, and we had her tested. It turned out Catch had “profound” hearing loss, and that she had covered up for it since she was a girl.

  I asked Catch if she would consider wearing hearing aids, very small ones that were all but invisible. “I don’t know if I’d be comfortable with that,” she answered. Catch had hearing aids until the third grade, but other children had mercilessly teased her about how big they were, and she was so pained and embarrassed that one day she’d thrown them away in a field. She had never worn them again and instead learned to compensate to an amazing degree over the years; she read lips and smiled and laughed at jokes even when she didn’t hear them. She refused to concede to the idea of “impairment” or “disability.”

  I replied that in my judgment she was going to be a great player who would have to appear in her share of press conferences. “You have big goals in life,” I said. She was going to have to speak in public—and her hearing and speech issues were going to be more conspicuous than a hearing aid. “Tamika, we all have problems,” I said. “My eyes are bad, so I wear contacts and glasses to see. My feet are bad and I have to wear orthotics. If you have a problem, why not fix it?” But the clincher may have been when I told her that I had gotten braces at the age of twenty-nine, to fix my crooked front teeth. Tamika finally agreed to try new hearing aids and also to work with our university speech therapists.

  It was trial and error with the hearing aids. As with Becky Clark before her, sometimes Tamika would sweat so much in practice or games that they would break or malfunction. We worked on her anticipation and on hand signaling. Tamika today would tell you that she actually views her hearing loss as something of an asset as an athlete, because it made her more observant and intuitive. But back then it was a struggle, and we had to stay on her to wear the hearing aids.

  “Where are they?” I’d ask.

  “In my locker,” she’d say.

  “Go get ’em,” I’d say. “I’m not paying for them to sit in your locker.”

  The player on our ’98 team who was most in need of my unconditional affection and reassurance was not a freshman. She was our centerpiece, the lead Meek, that peaking virtuoso Chamique Holdsclaw. On the court Chamique was so natural she seemed to wear the game like a second skin: she could pull up, spin, and drop a hovering finger roll all in one motion, conjuring up moves in the moment, reshaping her body in midair. But take a ball out of her hands and she was a tender, shrinking young woman.

  “You look so scary!” she had blurted when I came to the Astoria Houses, a project in Queens, New York, to recruit her. Now, if anyone should have been scared it was me; Chamique’s high school coach, Vinny Cannizzaro, a former cop, had insisted on escorting me through the project with a gun inside his blazer.

  Chamique’s grandmother June, who had raised her, said, “Chamique, you need to apologize!” Chamique stammered something, and I just laughed and told her it was all right, she could make it up to me by coming to Tennessee.

  I remember my grandmother looking at me like “I’m gonna choke you, I taught you better.” But for me it was surreal. Pat Summitt was in my kitchen in the Astoria projects. I’d seen her on TV but she was in my house, and you shoulda seen the lineup out the building when she came. All the dudes were off the court. She was, like, “Are they gonna bother me?” The neighborhood wasn’t the safest. But they were just lined up to see Pat Summitt.

  —CHAMIQUE HOLDSCLAW

  Chamique was more than the usual wounded adolescent. She’d had some horrendous episodes in her childhood; her mother, Bonita, battled alcoholism, and her father, Willie, was a diagnosed schizophrenic. June Holdsclaw was doing her best to make up for it and give Chamique love and stability, but she was a tender, fragile young woman. Chamique was so sensitive that she hated it when I yelled at other players, much less her. The
first time I turned my voice and eyes on her as a freshman, she almost went right back to New York.

  I barked at her and she just stopped dead and started to walk out of the practice gym.

  She said, “That’s it, I quit.”

  On her way out of the door, she yelled, “I’m calling Geno! ’Cause Geno wouldn’t treat me like this!”

  I stood there and watched her go, nonplussed. But Mickie looked at me like a deer in the headlights.

  “Pat, we got to do something, we can’t afford to lose her!”

  “Well, then, go get her,” I said.

  Mickie went running out the door. She found Chamique in the locker room muttering, “Man, I’m getting my bus ticket and going back to New York.” The bus was all she could afford. Mickie said, “Look, Holdsclaw, you can’t quit; you know Pat just wants the best for you. Just hang in there because at the end of the tunnel is a great reward.” Chamique came back out on the court, and at the end of practice I put an arm around her and said, “Why don’t you come out to the house and eat with us tonight?”

  Chamique settled down, but for the next few weeks whenever she was unhappy she’d talk about that bus ticket. Of course, I knew Chamique wasn’t going anywhere, because June Holdsclaw wanted her down south with us, where she’d be taken care of. She’d told Chamique flat out, “Once you go to Tennessee, you’re not coming back.”

  It was a small thing that finally won Chamique over, completely unrelated to basketball. I thought she was underperforming in the classroom; though her grades were nothing to worry about, she was capable of more. She’d had a first-rate prep school education as a scholarship student at Christ the King in Brooklyn, which regularly sent kids on to the Ivy League. I called her in for a talk and put my hand on her shoulder.

  “Just as great an athlete and player as you are, you can be just as great a student,” I said. “I know what kind of work you can do. Mique, some people I can accept this from, but not you.”

  For some reason, that did it; that was my breakthrough with her. Chamique bore down in the classroom, and over the next two semesters her grade point average popped up to a 3.5. She never again threatened to ride a bus back to New York. All she needed to know was that I cared about her beyond basketball.

  When she told me that, it was the realest, most honest thing I ever heard. I was like wow, she really believes in me, the way she looked at me with those eyes. After that we were a match made in heaven.

  —CHAMIQUE HOLDSCLAW

  The result of all this need and emotion was a team of swift, rippling electricity. The “Three Meeks,” Semeka, Tamika, and Chamique, floated across the floor creating one unbelievable play after another; the ball would go flying up the court from Meek to Meek and never hit the ground. It was like watching volleyball. One of them would be our leading scorer in thirty-seven of our thirty-nine games, and it was the great pleasure of my working life to draw up plays in which all of them got to touch the ball.

  We played the game for one another.

  —CHAMIQUE HOLDSCLAW

  In November we went out to Stanford for a Thanksgiving road trip, and I felt the wave of a great season building. I was sleepless, full of something. I woke up at two, four, and six A.M. Next to me in the bed, Tyler did a 360 in his sleep. I woke up once with his feet in my ribs, and again with his head in my ribs. He was a little body magnet chasing me around in his sleep. Finally I got out of bed and called up Billie Moore, who had come up for the game, and I said, “Billie, I’ve got to walk and talk.” We went for an early morning power walk to burn off my restlessness. All my guardedness and emotional reserve were falling away with this squad and I didn’t know if it was the right thing or not. I finally articulated what was brimming in me.

  “This is the team I’ve worked my whole life for,” I told Billie.

  Stanford was an annual barometer game for us; if we could compete with the Cardinal, we knew we were in business. They were a consistently first-rate team, beautifully schooled by my great friend Tara VanDerveer, whom I would have happily sent my own daughter to play for, if I’d had one. Tara invariably poked holes in my team and showed me where we were weak. But that morning Tara called me and asked, “Are you excited about this game?”

  “Sure I am,” I said.

  “I’m not,” she confessed.

  Tara was right to be apprehensive: it was an 18-point victory for us, 88–70. Even Billie Moore, always my toughest critic, was agape. “Holy smokes, Pat,” she said. “Who’s going to beat you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  From then on, massive crowds gathered to watch us win by massive scores: we beat DePaul 125–46, Georgia 102–43, Vanderbilt 106–45.

  And we beat third-ranked UConn 84–69, in Thompson-Boling Arena in front of 24,597, the largest crowd ever to witness a women’s basketball game up to that point. Geno met me at half-court for the pregame handshake in such a gigantic swell of noise that I had to lean over and shout into his ear, “This is a compliment to both programs,” and he nodded in agreement. Even the eaves were packed with people standing, until the fire marshal shut the doors and left a crowd of hundreds outside.

  Kellie came in from warm-ups and said, breathlessly, “It’s like a rock concert out there.”

  At Christmas, R.B. and I gave Tyler a go-kart, and it was his great delight to make me ride in it with him and accelerate through puddles and splash mud all over me. Our season was like that—one long roar of acceleration, a continuation of the same blowout game, each one played at the same high speed. We beat teams by an average of 30 points a night. I kept an eye on our players for fatigue; I was constantly worried they might burn out. I coddled them, and spoiled them, the way I spoiled Ty. I had them over for dinner and cooked every single item they requested. The menu: eight steaks, three kinds of chicken, fried shrimp, beans, potatoes, corn, and sweet potato pie.

  As needy as they could be off the court, they were impossibly confident on it. Their locker room was full of thudding, thumping music, and when I asked what it was, Semeka told me it was their theme song, a rap entitled “No Limit Soldiers.”

  “I’ve never heard it,” I said to Semeka.

  “You don’t want to,” she said.

  Ace might have required soothing talks about her love life, but on the practice court, she dove for every loose ball until she had floor burns, and she absorbed my demands with an unblinking steady resilience.

  Me to Ace: “What have you learned?”

  “That I’m soft.”

  “Prove me wrong.”

  “I will.”

  By the time of the NCAA tournament, we were the overwhelming favorite, flatly the most deserving team in America, and I’d never desired a title so badly for a group. But we were so young I didn’t know how they would react to the pressure. I was willing to go to any length to prepare them, use any manipulation to get their minds right.

  “I want this for the kids,” I said to Mickie and Holly. “I’ll do anything to help them get it. I’ll say anything. I’ll get a technical. I’ll strip.”

  We went to Nashville for the NCAA regionals, hosted at Vanderbilt’s Memorial Gymnasium, where our Sweet 16 opponent would be Rutgers, coached by one of my best friends in the game, C. Vivian Stringer. At a pregame banquet, the Rutgers kids tried to get into the heads of our freshmen. One of them told Semeka, “I got one thing to say to you: overrated.”

  The next afternoon when the Lady Vols took the floor to limber up, the Rutgers kids were still at it. “It’s hanging time,” they said. “Get the rope.” Even Vivian gave me the business when I went over to the bench to greet her. Vivian and I had a teasing relationship that went back years; we were late-night phone companions and didn’t miss a chance to hit a casino together for a little blackjack, either. Memorial Gymnasium was packed to the rafters with fifteen thousand Lady Vols fans in a state of pandemonium, and as I reached out to hug Vivian, she murmured in my ear, “Fifteen thousand people. And they all have t
he nerve to wear orange.” I pulled away giggling. The Meeks took care of any concerns I had about Rutgers, 92–60.

  I knew from long experience the NCAA Elite Eight was the toughest game to win in college basketball for a favored team. It was an intermediate hurdle, but the one I dreaded most, because of the pressure to reach a Final Four. Our opponent in this one was a team every bit as fast and athletic as we were, North Carolina, coached by my old friend Sylvia Rhyne. As we watched tape of them, my tension grew. We had beaten teams all season by 30—but margins tended to shrink in the Elite Eight, and I had a feeling we were due for a tough ball game. North Carolina was no doormat.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep again. I had a nightmare that I was fishing off our dock, and I got fishhooks caught in my eyes. I shuddered awake at about six A.M. and never went back to sleep. It was a premonition, I feared.

  The thing you need to know about pressure is that it may be invisible, but it has physical properties. It constricts the blood flow to your smaller muscles, costing fine motor control; narrows your vision; and slows your reactions. It’s real. The invisible vise of it gripped our kids against North Carolina. Suddenly their feet and hands wouldn’t work, and for the first time all season they actually got outrun down the floor. Chamique went for a stretch of twenty-two minutes and only scored 2 points, because she kept fumbling the ball.

  Chamique came to the bench. “The ball keeps slipping out of my hands,” she said.

  “Don’t make excuses,” I said. “Make plays.”

  But with 7:19 left we trailed by 61–49. We were sick, and stunned. “What can we do?” Semeka asked me desperately. “What can we do?” Holly moved to the end of the bench, hoping superstitiously that it might change our luck. Up in the stands, Tyler sat in R.B.’s lap, tremulous. “Are we going to lose?” he asked.

  “It looks bad,” R.B. warned him.