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

by Pat Summitt

  Our losses weren’t always about ourselves, or what we did on the court. Some years we just weren’t quite as great as the team we faced: from 2000 to 2006 we went to five Final Fours and reached three championship games, losing each time to the team whose turn it was to dominate a decade, UConn. There was no beating them, but we sure liked trying. I have a proud image from the ’03 final against them: Gwen Jackson rose to the backboard like a drowning swimmer fighting for her last breath, to cut it to 71–68 with twenty-one seconds left, before we finally bowed.

  The expectations from the three-peat continued to haunt us: the record book tells me that in 2001 we went 31-3—and didn’t win. In 2002 we went 29-5—and didn’t win. In 2003 we went 33-5—and again didn’t win. At some point during those seasons an anonymous note appeared in my mailbox. It told me the game had passed me by and suggested I needed to quit. I’d never gotten hate mail, and it stung. I had just turned fifty.

  Was I past it? Certainly not, though I had to admit there were times when our players thought my expressions were quaint. I would holler, “Defense is not where you keep the cows!” The kids would stare at me, mystified.

  She used to make all these farm references and we didn’t know what the heck she was talking about. Anytime she went into farm mode, I was like, I don’t understand. One day she tried to compare herding sheep to closing out.

  —KARA LAWSON

  The suggestion that I was tired or slowing only incensed me, and I set out to prove I had more energy than ever. I practiced our team for three hours at a stretch—my mantra was, “Let’s go one more time.” Kara Lawson depended on her legs for her shot, and she came to me to complain she was tired. It was the one thing sure to get no sympathy from me.

  “Pat, I’m feeling run-down,” she said.

  I just gave her the stare.

  “Maybe you need to get on a multivitamin,” I said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Maybe you’ve got iron-poor blood.”

  There were exits and entrances, and some of them were beloved colleagues. In 2002, Al Brown left us, and I replaced him with Nikki Caldwell, whose relationship with us had evolved from player to friend to protégée: she was a commanding sideline presence, with a husky bass voice and piercing gaze, who brought a fresh shot of urgent ambition. In 2003, Mickie became the head coach at Kentucky, where she would turn a last-place team into a twenty-game winner. We missed her badly, but in 2004, we replaced her with the preternaturally energetic Dean Lockwood.

  We had injuries—six great players tore their anterior cruciate ligaments, the bane of my existence, in that period. “Loree Moore’s the one player we can’t lose,” I said to Tyler. She was the best point guard in the country in ’04, before she blew her knee on a steal and fast break against Duke.

  The ’04 team is lodged in a compartment of my heart for their sheer surprisingness, and staunch refusal to quit against long odds. How could I remember such players as anything but champions: Ashley Robinson, a willowy Texan with a funny gait on her surgically repaired ACL-damaged knee, her leg never quite straight; Tasha Butts, a Georgian of such steadfast leadership that everyone on the sideline would climb a mast in a hurricane for her.

  “BUTTS!” I’d thunder at her, and she would bat her eyes at me and say calmly as a lamb, “Ma’am?”

  Their run in the NCAA tournament was the damnedest thing I ever experienced: they won three straight games by 2 points in the final seconds to make it to the championship. They did it on pure fight: Ashley, fouling out of a game and hurling her warm-up into the stands in a fury. Tasha, slapping away a hand check so emphatically you could hear the whap. Against LSU in the Final Four in New Orleans, Shyra Ely snatching a steal and flinging it to LaToya Davis for a layup with two seconds to go, to explode the arena.

  But there was a price for all that fight, work, and stress. Ten minutes after the final buzzer in the LSU game, I stood in a back hallway of the New Orleans arena with my hand to my chest. I was drenched with sweat and wrung out, my heart beating like a hummingbird.

  “I can’t breathe,” I said, gasping.

  “I guess not,” said a reporter. “After that finish, I can’t either.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean it. I can’t catch my breath.”

  I tried to inhale, but my heart would not stop skipping. I sat down, and gradually my heart rate slowed, and I regained my breath. A team physician examined me and announced that I was having palpitations, and while it was nothing to be overly concerned about, I should have some tests.

  A day later, we ran out of miracle finishes: the Lady Vols lost in the NCAA final to Diana Taurasi and UConn, 70–61. It was our eleventh championship game appearance, a new collegiate record. We headed back to Knoxville with the knowledge that we couldn’t have done more.

  At home, I was strapped to a heart monitor for a couple of days. The diagnosis was arrhythmia, an irregular beat—apparently one part of my heart raced ahead of itself. Imagine that, I thought, wryly. I was put on medication, a beta-blocker, to slow the rhythm.

  It took me aback: I always imagined that I was in control of my heart, that its beat was rock steady. Years earlier, I had participated in a study for some Vanderbilt medical researchers, who wired coaches with heart monitors. I had the highest sustained heart rate in the group—except when the game was on the line. Under pressure, I was able to calm myself so effectively that my heart rate actually slowed.

  For the first time, I felt stress had gotten the better of me. The doctors explained arrhythmia was nothing extraordinary; lots of people got it as they grew older. But in retrospect, it was the beginning of the long, gradual overall decline of my health.

  It’s not clear to me how much personal unhappiness contributed to the encroachment of illness. I just know that there was a cascade of grief, followed by a series of ailments. If I’d lived a life of perfect happiness and constant leisure, would I still have gotten sick? Was my health just an unfortunate genetic twist? Or did the load of overwork and sorrows begin to wear away at me?

  The first blow was the loss of my father. Throughout ’05 I watched him slip away, debilitated by a series of strokes. He and my mother came to Knoxville for long stretches so I could help care for them, and for days he would sit in a recliner, unable to move. He lost control of his bodily functions, and to his mortification and fury I would have to clean him up.

  “I want to die,” that towering man said, weeping.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I can’t believe my own daughter has to wipe my butt.”

  “Well, Daddy, I guess you wiped my butt a few times when I was little,” I said. “Didn’t you?”

  His shoulders started shaking with silent laughter.

  “I guess I did.”

  “How many times?” I asked.

  “A few.”

  “That’s right. A few.”

  He was so infirm he missed a landmark victory that spring: on March 22, 2005, we broke the all-time NCAA Division I record for coaching victories when we beat Purdue in the second round of the NCAA tournament for our 880th win. In a surprise ceremony after the game, the university rewarded me for writing our name in the history books by writing my name on the court. The floor of Thompson-Boling Arena would henceforth be known as The Summitt, a gesture that brought me to tears.

  What made me cry was the thought of how many young feet had run up and down that court to create such a mark, for which I got the credit. “When I retire, I won’t be sitting in a rocking chair looking at trophies,” I told the press that night. “I hope I’ll be on the phone talking to former players or sitting around chatting with them.”

  It was the highlight to an otherwise devastating year. We started that season with thirteen scholarship players, but by the end of it we had just nine, after a sickening epidemic of injuries. We had the finest recruiting class in the country, a half-dozen players nicknamed “the Six Pack,” led by the magnificent six-foot-four prodigy Candace Parker of Napervi
lle, Illinois. Four of them arrived with sore knees. Candace and a svelte in-state prospect named Alex Fuller both required surgery almost immediately and would have to sit out the year.

  We still managed to make it to the Final Four in Indianapolis, carried by a couple of determined leaders in Shyra Ely and Shanna Zolman, who were native Indianans. But they did just about all they could do in getting us there. In the semifinal we built a 16-point lead against Michigan State, then surrendered it. We collapsed, mentally and physically, and lost 68–64.

  Five months later, in October, my father died. He was a forbidding, unsmiling man, but he had buried warmth and I loved him. I made it home to Henrietta in time to spend about twenty minutes with him before he passed, long enough to hold his hand and tell him what was in my heart, how thankful I was for all he gave me.

  The funeral was at Mt. Carmel United Methodist Church, where I had been married, and it was filled to overflowing with people he had loaned money to or carried on his books. The pastor had to open the doors to adjoining rooms to accommodate the overflow, and there were more people packed in the back, standing on tiptoe trying to hear the eulogies.

  “Your father loaned me thirty dollars and it started my life,” one man said. “I told him I couldn’t pay him back, and he said he didn’t care.”

  Mrs. Mavis Gupton told about helping out in Head’s Store many years earlier. One day an older lady came into the store and said, “Mr. Richard, I really need to borrow a hundred dollars.” Daddy pulled out his old leather wallet and handed the lady a hundred dollars. She said, “Thank you, Mr. Richard. I promise I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.” When she left, Daddy turned around, looked at Mavis, and said, “Who was that woman?”

  As R.B. and Tyler and I drove home, I talked to my son about his grandfather. I wanted him to remember how hardworking yet generous he was. “This day should be a celebration of what a good man he was,” I said. “Funerals shouldn’t be so much about mourning and sorrow. If you ever speak at a funeral, it needs to be a celebration. And that’s what mine better be. A celebration.”

  But it was hard to follow my own advice and not mourn. My father had been an incalculably powerful presence for me, and I felt his absence. When you spend your whole life trying to please someone, and then they are gone, you don’t know who to please anymore.

  There were other sadnesses too—a seemingly unending stream of them. In the spring of 2004, Rosa Snow had died after her lengthy battle with lupus, news that devastated us. Holly and I drove to the funeral. Michelle didn’t know we were coming; she was sitting in the front row with her family when we walked in, and when she saw us, she started choking with sobs. I just sat down with her, and put my arms around her, and held her for a long time. In August of 2005, there was another loss: one of my oldest friends in the business, LSU coach Sue Gunter, died at age sixty-six after a long battle with emphysema.

  Raising my son sustained me. Tyler had grown from a little boy into a teenager, and he continued to haunt our locker room. I was concerned that all the privilege would spoil him: What other boy had a pass around his neck that said “All access” and could walk past ten security guards and sit wherever he wanted? Or knew Michael Jordan and Peyton Manning, and watched football games in skyboxes, and stayed in gigantic hotel suites? We had done so well financially that we now owned half the hillside behind the house, and I built him a basketball court and swimming pool, with a pool house stocked with arcade games.

  Basketball gave him a counterbalance to all the indulgence. He hung out with our team managers and helped with their chores. One of them, a UT student named Adam Waller, became like a brother to him. There was an afternoon when they were roughhousing, and Tyler started punching on Adam. Adam looked at me and said, “What should I do?”

  I said, “Punch him back.”

  When Tyler got cut from his sixth-grade basketball team, I decided it wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened to him, because it kept him honest. I walked into the house, and he was sitting on his bed crying. He had a ball under each arm, and tears were running down his face.

  “Tyler, what’s wrong?”

  He said, “I got cut.”

  My heart broke, and a voice in my own head said, What coach in east Tennessee would cut my son? But then the disciplinarian came out in me. I was pretty sure that a part of Tyler had thought he would make the team based on his name.

  I said, “Well, do you think you worked hard enough?”

  There was a pause, and he said, “No.”

  “Well, now you know what you got to do.”

  “Mom, will you help me?”

  I said, “Son, I will help you. But I will not start your engine. You have to start your own engine every day. Do you understand?”

  He nodded.

  “I promise you, if you are willing to wear out the leather on both those basketballs, you’ll make it.”

  Tyler will tell you it was a defining moment in his life. Getting cut changed him—it altered his habits, and his drive. I never had to motivate him again. So much of parenting was a matter of keeping your word, just as it was in coaching. I kept my word to Ty: his involvement in basketball came from his commitment and initiative, not mine. He learned to push himself.

  She would never say, “Hey, let’s go work out.” I would always have to say, “Will you go shoot with me?” She would say, “Absolutely,” and she’d be right there; she’d drop everything.

  —TYLER SUMMITT

  Initially, it was difficult for Tyler to take coaching from me. I didn’t let him win so much as a game of PIG from me on the court. He wasn’t exceptionally gifted; he had his father’s physique with muscles all over, but he was more smart than athletic, and he had to work very fundamentally to become a good player.

  “Get your eyes up.”

  “Okay.”

  “Get your EYES up!”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  “Get your eyes UP!”

  I could see the battle going on in his head. Rationally he knew I was one of the best coaches in the country; irrationally he couldn’t stand for his mother to talk to him that way. After we were done shooting, I’d say sweetly, “What do you want for dinner? You want mashed potatoes or rice?” And he’d glare at me, like, “I’m so mad I can’t speak right now.”

  I think I was getting mad because she was staying on me and I couldn’t fix it quick enough for her, so I was mad at my own weakness, mad at her for staying on me, mad at the situation as a whole. She wouldn’t so much yell at me, but she was very, very firm. She had my attention. There was no crowd, no referee, no horns buzzing, maybe some birds chirping, that’s it. It was just me and her.

  —TYLER SUMMITT

  He began to outwork and outorganize his mother. He had a calendar with letter codes on each day: B for Bible, T for trash, S for sit-ups. At first when I watched film, he would play a video game or do kid stuff, but gradually he started paying attention and began to point things out.

  And to argue. We were sitting together gazing at the screen when a ref called a walk on one of our players. “Yeah, she definitely walked,” he said.

  “No, she didn’t,” I said.

  “Yeah, she took like three steps.”

  “No, she dribbled on the first step,” I said. “Watch.”

  I backed it up and replayed it in slow motion.

  “See that!” he said. “She walked!”

  I didn’t consciously set out to turn him into a coach, but I wanted him to study the game right if he was going to play it. When he watched film with our coaching staff, I’d pause and explain that just because the ball went in the net, it wasn’t necessarily a good possession. I’d point out how a small detail, one player who set a poor screen, affected the overall flow and pattern.

  At first, they were talking French. I mean, they were seeing eighteen things at once, and I was watching the ball go in like the rest of the fans in Thompson-Boling. I think once I realized they saw more, I wanted to see more. As tim
e went on I tried to predict what she was doing. In those championship games I’d be, like, “She’s about to take Michelle out.” Or I’d think, “She’s about to switch defenses.” And sometimes she would.

  —TYLER SUMMITT

  He began to write notes for me. I’d go off to a road game, and when I came home, there would be a piece of paper waiting for me on the kitchen counter: “Point guards passed to corners too much, and ball got stuck down there. A lot of times, posts were late on help side.”

  Tyler eventually made the varsity and started at point guard as a sophomore for the Webb School, an elite private prep academy where a lot of kids had prominent last names. He also found that his own name came with a drawback. In his first game, no sooner did he take the floor for Webb than the whole cheering section for the opponent, West High, shouted in concert at him: “Mama’s boy!”

  Next time down the floor, he caught the ball, and here it came again. “Maaaama’s boy!” It went on the whole game, a crescendo that only got louder, “MAMA’S BOY! MAMA’S BOY!” Ty kept his composure and managed to play well and came home bragging on himself.

  “I didn’t let it bother me, and I didn’t have a single turnover,” he said.

  I felt I had finally done something basketball-wise that I could talk about. And she wouldn’t let me. She listened to me and took it all in, and she said, “Tyler. You never blow your own horn. You let others blow it for you.”

  —TYLER SUMMITT

  But I would rue my concern that Tyler’s life was too easy, that he needed to learn to deal with problems. He would have more than enough of those at the end of that year, when he became a child of divorce. At the age of fifteen, Tyler found himself the man of the house and a caretaker, when his mother took to her bed and couldn’t get up.

  My marriage fell apart on the eve of the 2006 NCAA tournament, literally. It was a Sunday night in March, and I was up late cooking because the following day I was hosting a party: the NCAA brackets would be announced and every year the team gathered at my house for a big meal with homemade ice cream, while we learned our tournament draw together. Feeding everyone helped calm my nerves. Also a camera crew from ESPN was due at the house to film us live for a network show.