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

by Pat Summitt

  I called a time-out. Hoping to snap them out of it, I hurled my clipboard so hard it broke into two pieces. The shards flew in the air. “This crowd is doing everything it can to help you!” I hollered over the noise. “Now what are you doing? Am I coaching the wrong team? Should I be over there? You’re letting them play your game! If you’re going down, you’re going down fighting. Whatever you need to do, do it. Claw their eyes out.”

  But Kellie’s speech in that time-out was the more effective one. For the first and only time in her career, she raised her voice at her teammates. She slammed my footstool on the ground so hard she almost splintered the legs.

  “I am NOT going home,” she screamed, “so you better get out there and help me, because I can’t do it alone!”

  All that slamming and screaming finally broke the trance. We put on a full-court press. Suddenly the Lady Vols came alive—and turned into a swarm of sharks. There was a steady rhythm to their play: strip, steal, layup. We ran fresh players in and out, and shifted defenses, freezing the Carolina players into uncertainty. The momentum swung—hard. We scored 12 points in two minutes.

  “I need some heart pills,” Elzy said breathlessly on the bench. Mickie ran through ten different offenses on her clipboard, probing, looking for plays that worked. Holly grabbed me by the shoulders and looked me level in the eyes. “Get Jolly back in the game for free throws!” I nodded. We went 13 for 13 on free throws down the stretch.

  And we outscored North Carolina 27–9 over those final seven minutes.

  Final score: Tennessee 76, North Carolina 70.

  As we came off the floor I turned to Holly, Mickie, and Al. “We’re going to win the whole thing now,” I said, tiredly but certainly. In the back hallway of the arena, I found my parents. My father stumped toward me with his cane and dragged me into a hug that knocked the breath out of me. He banged his cane on the floor and said, “That’s about the best job you ever done. This time I admit it. I’d about give up.”

  That night we went to a great old Nashville café called Rotiers. “Give me your coldest beer,” I said. We sat there until four A.M., reliving the game, in disbelief.

  By the time we got back to Knoxville, I’d slept just five hours in two days. But instead of going to sleep, I had to go to a parent-teacher meeting at Tyler’s school, and transform myself from a shouting coach to a concerned mother. Tyler’s teacher had requested the meeting because he had gotten in trouble for fighting on the playground. I chatted amiably with his teacher and promised I would speak to him about it.

  That night I had the talk with him. But it wasn’t quite the one he expected.

  “What do you do if someone pushes you?” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “You push back,” I said firmly.

  We went to the Final Four in Kansas City and made it look like a waltz. I remember feeling tension over things that now seem small: Kellie came down with a sore throat and couldn’t hit a shot in practice, and Tamika went into a shooting slump too. But we slaughtered Arkansas by almost 30 in the semifinal. On the morning of the championship game against our old foe Louisiana Tech, Tyler said, “Mama, I love them.” I said, “I do too.”

  That night in the locker room I told them, “I’ve never been more confident of a team in my life.” It was a blowout from the very outset, 93–75, touched off by Kellie, who sailed in a couple of epic three-pointers to open the game. She went on to a career-high 20, as did Catch, with 27. At halftime it was already such a rout that Tech’s coach, my old friend Leon Barmore, saw us in the hallway and called out, “Hey, Pat, take it easy!”

  Afterward, Leon summed up what I’d been thinking all season. “That’s the greatest women’s basketball team I’ve ever seen in all my years of coaching,” he said. They were that, and more, to me: they were the only instance of perfection I would ever experience. But they were also so young and imperfect, and if I traced my delight in them back to its source, it came from that, from seeing ordinary young women, with all of their ordinary problems, do the extraordinary through sheer unchained commitment. They made me feel complete, saturated, and utterly exhausted.

  When it was done, we all had the strangest reaction. I walked into the locker room, and instead of triumph, I found them in tears. They had just won the championship, and they were … crying.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, alarmed.

  “We’re sad it’s over,” they said.

  As years went by, the more I thought about it, the more those seasons reminded me of something. We spent months hoping, yearning, studying, and practicing for a coveted but far-off result. We experienced deep spasmodic agonies in getting there. But when it was done and we saw the end result, it erased all the pain, and what was left was pure joy. It was exactly like childbirth. And it was my hope that all my daughters from that era, the Meeks and Kellies, the Vondas, Abbys, and Michelles, felt the same, that the pain faded and they just remembered the beauty that came out of it, like I did.

  Are you all right? What is it?

  I don’t know. Sometimes I have these weird feelings.

  What kind of feelings?

  It’s almost like I’m seeing things.

  The doctors talked about this. You’re in a safe place. With people who love you.

  I know.

  What do you see?

  It’s hard to describe. It’s like this feeling comes over me. It’s not earth-shattering.

  Yes, it is.

  It’s okay. I’m fine.

  Is it like seeing a ghost?

  No. Not really.

  What’s it like?

  It’s like someone’s in the house.

  —May 19, 2012, Destin, Florida, one year after diagnosis

  10

  Single Mother

  There was a toll for all that winning: I was exhausted, played out like a loose string from the years of tension and pressure. R.B., Tyler, and I went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with friends for a badly needed vacation. We hiked in the mountain air, swam in lakes, and suspended training rules and enjoyed our liquid refreshments. One afternoon I went into a convenience store to buy more beer for the group. I got a case under one arm, and a case under the other, and carried them to the counter, assuming I was incognito in shorts, a tank top, a hat, and sunglasses.

  The clerk said, “Hey, Coach Summitt!”

  I froze, my reputation for rectitude on the line.

  “I’m a student at Tennessee, working this summer at Jackson Hole. So glad to meet you.”

  I calmly set the beer on the counter and looked down at it with a false innocence.

  “Huh,” I said. “I thought I bought milk!”

  In retrospect, the expectations from the three-peat were impossible to meet. Not only were we playing at a pace that was unsustainable, I was living at one. The Tennessee Lady Vols were national icons, and people young and old gathered around our team bus four deep for autographs. Sports Illustrated made me the first female coach to grace the cover, and I went on Charlie Rose and the morning talk shows. A documentary film, Cinderella Season: The Lady Vols Fight Back, chronicling our ’97 championship season, aired on a loop on HBO. We were so popular someone actually asked me to autograph a piece of toilet paper.

  In the midst of all that, I was chairing a United Way campaign, overseeing a renovation of our house, and writing a principles-of-success book called Reach for the Summit, which hit the bestseller lists and made me an in-demand corporate speaker. I went on a national book-signing tour that left me with cramps in my hand. Disney called and wanted the rights to my life story; I refused. The CIA called and asked if I’d address their staff on team building; I accepted. The treadmill spun at a hundred miles an hour, and I couldn’t get off. R.B., Tyler, and I were living squeezed into one room while the house was under construction, and my whole life felt like I was trying to pack ten pounds of flour in a five-pound sack. It was a two-hour drive to Johnson City, Tennessee, and I remember making it in one. “My shooting star,” R.B. ca
lled me. In addition to all those professional obligations, I was also trying to be a good wife, mother, and daughter, care for a dozen players, and recruit.

  I never could keep up with the lady. I can remember going on recruiting trips and we’d get on the plane and she’d pull out her briefcase and write recruiting letters. I’d say, “Can we talk for a minute?” And she’d say, “Okay, what do you want to talk about?” and keep writing. She was the queen of multitasking. I don’t know how she did it, how her brain stored all that info. She had just boundless energy, boundless.

  —MICKIE DEMOSS

  The Lady Vols were not only recognized; we were apparently chic. Famed photographer Annie Leibovitz came to Knoxville and took our portraits, which our players found hilarious, since they viewed me as profoundly unhip and culturally out of touch. Fashion consultants put me in blue Armani and moussed my hair, tickling the Meeks.

  “Coach, you look great. Very GQ,” Semeka said.

  “What’s GQ?” I asked.

  She explained that it was a high-end magazine. A few days later I had another nice outfit on.

  “Hey, Mique!” I said. “Does this look QT?”

  “No!” the kids shouted, falling about in giggles.

  But the result of all the tumult was that our team went into the ’99 season in a strange emotional state. Returning to practice was a letdown—we wanted a shortcut straight to another national title. On the very first day of the new season, Chamique said, “Man, I can’t wait to cut down nets this year.” It was the wrong attitude, and our minds were on too many other things.

  The long joyride came to an end against Duke in the ’99 NCAA regional final in Greensboro. “Why isn’t this easier?” the looks on our faces said. By the end of the game, our bench was like the front row at a funeral. The final score was 69–63 in favor of Duke; there would be no four-peat. “I’m sorry,” Kellie said, when she came to the bench, in tears. “I can’t believe it.”

  Chamique almost fell into my arms. “Coach Summitt, I was so awful,” she cried. She took a seat on the bench and draped a towel over her head. I kneeled next to her. “You have to take that towel off your head,” I said. “You handled all that success, and now you have to handle failure. You’ve got to handle losing. We’re all here to help you.”

  All these events led me to think carefully about how I defined success as we entered a new decade in 2000. As usual after a season-ending loss, I stayed in my pajamas the entire next day. But at around four P.M., I finally roused myself. I took a walk, and threw a ball with my son, and shook myself out of my mood.

  When you win as much as we did, you start to think you should win every year, and that’s just wrong. The three-peat had tricked us into doing the one thing I promised I’d never do: measure success purely on championships. It was my twenty-fifth year as a coach, and if there was one thing I’d learned in that quarter century, it was that losing was a far more common experience than winning.

  The coming years would constantly remind me of that. Eight seasons would go by between the three-peat and our next national championship. Eight Aprils, passing in icy showers and shards of sunlight, annual spring sojourns in the NCAA tournament, blurs of action in indistinguishable domes in midsized host cities. We spent Easters as vagabond worshippers in strange churches. I shouted my way from arena to arena, until my throat felt raked in gravel and I carried the perpetual scent of eucalyptus drops on my breath, trying to soothe it.

  Kids came in and went out, turning like leaves. Four years seemed like a long time, until it suddenly felt fleeting. Spring always became another fall, and we moved on.

  There were impasses and negotiations with players who were changing, becoming more sophisticated and argumentative. They wanted more from the game than self-esteem, with the WNBA offering star players salaries approaching $100,000. They were in some ways more reticent, harder to reach, more attached to their electronics, less easily impressed. They didn’t always get my down-home farm analogies, and I found myself stretching to communicate, in ways that didn’t come as naturally to me.

  Some of them were smarter than me—like Kara Lawson. She was a brilliant, self-possessed, cool-handed guard from Virginia who would lead us to NCAA Final Fours in three of her four years. She turned down Duke and Stanford to come to Tennessee, where she carried a 4.0 in finance, and required an explanation for everything we did. I had to constantly keep my wits about me in dealing with her. As a freshman she didn’t feel watching tape was an efficient use of her valuable and highly focused time. “I don’t see why we have to do it,” she said.

  “Let me ask you this,” I said. “If you take a math test, when you get the test back, don’t you look to see what problems you missed?”

  “Coach, I don’t miss problems on math tests.”

  “Well, you’re gonna watch tape anyway,” I said, laughing.

  There was a constant undertow from spectators and media to treat those years as failures when we didn’t win championships. It was easy for them to say we failed, but it was my livelihood and life, and I knew what went into it. Sometimes it was true that not hanging a banner was a disappointment—and sometimes it was the furthest thing from true. Sometimes it was heroic.

  Michelle Snow taught us all something about handling loss. She was a six-foot-five center from Pensacola who reminded me of a giant baby bird; we even nicknamed her “Snowbird.” She was utterly unique; God only made one of her, an elegant, long, unfolding player whose reach when fully extended was seven foot ten, with a lot of pieces to organize.

  I’d never come across such conflicting strengths and weaknesses. Snow could press five hundred pounds with her long legs, but when it came to the upper body, she couldn’t do a single push-up. She couldn’t gain weight, either. I told her she was on a diet of “see-food”: everything she could see, she was supposed to eat. She and Tyler bonded over sweets, and on road trips he would seek out her room and dive into her stash.

  One evening someone asked me, “Where’s Tyler?” I heard myself answer:

  “He’s in bed with Michelle Snow, watching cartoons.”

  But she was a shy and burdened young woman, who would sit apart in the locker room with her head down and her earphones on. It was all I could do to get her to look up. “No one will take you serious when you won’t even look ’em in the face,” I said. Her makeup was gentle, thoughtful, and sometimes blank. “Snow!” I’d yell, and her head would swivel toward me like a baby dinosaur, looking for a leaf to chew. “I think you need to major in psychology,” I said. “Because I can’t figure you out. Maybe you can figure yourself out.” She took me up on it and got her degree in psychology.

  I told her, I said, “Psychology taught me a lot about you.”

  —MICHELLE SNOW

  It turned out that Michelle had deeper issues than basketball; she had life-and-death ones: her mother, Rosa, was dying of systemic lupus erythematosus, but she had kept it secret from us because she didn’t want any excuses. Imagine carrying that to practice every day? When the rest of our players thought about where to eat, Snow thought about her mother’s latest blood test and worried about being a surrogate parent to her four younger brothers and sisters. The things that were so important to the rest of us just weren’t as important to Snow.

  At the end of the 2001 season, Snow’s junior year, we were upset in the Sweet 16 by an underdog team from Xavier, brilliantly coached by a young woman named Melanie Balcomb who eventually became a dear friend of mine. When we got back to Knoxville, Snow went missing. I spent the day in my pajamas, as usual, and late in the day I tried to call her to check on her. There was no answer. I started asking around, and one of the kids said, “Maybe she’s at work.” I was baffled.

  “Snow has a job?” I said.

  As soon as the season ended, she had taken shifts in a store at one of the malls to make extra money to send home to her family. I was in my pajamas chewing my lip over basketball, and Snow was at work trying to help her mother.

&n
bsp; I didn’t tell her because I didn’t want her sympathy.

  —MICHELLE SNOW

  Never again would I look at a blank face and assume that I had the whole picture. I became a little more flexible and searching with kids.

  I struggled constantly with how much slack to cut Snow. She was not a player that I could break down and build up again—because if you broke her down, she might just stay broken. How do you demand all-out commitment from someone when it’s obvious she has more important commitments elsewhere? What was the right balance? How do you motivate someone who knows that a ball game is not the most important thing in life—and has her priorities in exactly the right order?

  But Snow didn’t want special treatment. I dogged her throughout her career, about her stance in the post, her weight; I forced her to take public speaking classes. “Snow!” I’d holler. “You’re stronger than you think you are!” She didn’t want my sympathy as much as she needed me to be a guardian of the right principles, and of her future, which was the greater form of love. Even when she stared back with that blank mask, I knew she was counting on me not to waver. As time went on, players were usually thankful for my firmness, and I had to trust Michelle would be too.

  “You may not like me now, but you will love me later,” I said.

  She was right.

  —MICHELLE SNOW

  As a senior in ’02, Snow carried us back to the NCAA Final Four and solidified her WNBA draft status. She went in the first round to the four-time champion Houston Comets, signing a big enough contract to pay for private nursing for Rosa, which was her real ambition. With Snow, the lessons weren’t about championships. They were about carrying on, how to live with a shadow, and they were lessons I would need to employ myself in the years ahead.