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

by Pat Summitt

  I put the ice cream in the freezer and cleaned the kitchen. R.B. had gone down early because he wasn’t feeling well. I went into our semi-darkened room, and as I got ready for bed, I heard a buzz from his cell phone, indicating a text message. I wasn’t in the habit of checking his cell, but he had left it lying on the bathroom counter. I glanced at it wondering who would text him at that hour. I picked it up and looked at it. After a sickened and stunned moment, I threw the phone across the room as hard as I could, hoping to destroy it the way I felt destroyed.

  R.B. and I were awake for the rest of the night. I was white-hot with rage, and heartbroken at the same time. After twenty-seven years, I was at least smart enough to accept that all unions are compromised, and no mate is perfect, and we’d had our share of problems. But I thought we were working through them together. I was blindsided—and I’d never recover from the feeling of sudden alienation.

  My career was tumultuous and could devour my energy, and at times he made it clear he needed more attention—there were a couple of Final Fours that were memorably tense weeks in our marital history. I was gone for days at a time, and R.B.’s responsibility as president of his family’s bank meant he couldn’t always come with me. But we’d nevertheless managed to travel the world together through basketball—to Australia, England, Italy, Alaska. Perhaps I should have been concerned when earlier that season we had gone to a Thanksgiving tournament in the Caribbean and, for the first time in our marriage, he hadn’t come with us for the holiday. He said he had too much to do at the bank.

  I thought I had worked hard at nurturing our home life, cooking every night, being the supportive wife at annual banking functions. I didn’t think my job was an issue in our marriage—but I was always slightly afraid it could be, that he would tilt toward resenting all that came with it, the constant presence of other people in our lives, the separations and distractions. I knew we were attempting a highly difficult balance—and for the longest time, I thought we’d succeeded. But in the space of a single night, I questioned every assumption between us.

  In the morning R.B. left for work, and I got Tyler off to school. My sister, Linda, arrived—I had called her. She found me with the covers over my head, and she crawled into bed with me.

  The ESPN trucks pulled up and began unloading their cameras and lights at our pool house. Somehow, I got through that day, cooked for and fed more than fifty people, including the local media, and appeared on national television. For better or worse, I’d always had the ability to draw shutters over my personal feelings and keep operating, in the same way I was able to slow my heart rate down. With ESPN at the house, there was no time to dwell on the painful questions: Can I restore a damaged relationship? Can he stay here? Can I stay here? Do I stay in a broken marriage for a child?

  I mostly held myself together, but not entirely. The NCAA committee gave us a nightmare regional matchup with Rutgers and North Carolina, a “bracket of death” as everyone called it. I was exhausted and distraught under my skin, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t have it in me to put on a gracious public display. When an ESPN announcer asked me on live television how I felt about our tournament draw, I replied angrily that the committee had slapped us in the face. Everyone was shocked at my tone. Under the circumstances, I thought it was an essay in self-control.

  Later that night after all the people and TV trucks had gone, I went into Tyler’s room and sat down with my son for the most difficult conversation of my life. I explained that his father and I were separating. “It’s just going to be you and me,” I said. “And you and I are going to be okay.”

  R.B. came in—I had asked him to stay away during the TV show—and I left the room so R.B. and Tyler could talk. “You can explain this to your son,” I said.

  The next day, with a wedge in my heart, I dressed and went into the office. I called Holly, Nikki, and Dean in for a meeting and broke down as I told them what had happened. I didn’t know how I was going to get through the tournament, and I’d have to rely on them heavily, I said. They seemed almost as affected as I was.

  Yes, there had always been a lot of demands on her, but she was one who tried to get home and cook every night, and make sure R.B. and Ty were included in every aspect of the program. It was almost like she was trying to show us, yes, you can have this unbelievable career and be in this profession, and, yes, you can have a family and be successful too. But then it was, “Can you?” You know?

  —NIKKI CALDWELL

  The staff took as much off me as they could, but we didn’t stand a chance in the tournament. It had been a difficult season, quite apart from my personal problems. Candace Parker was tentative after two knee surgeries and suffering her own anguish because her parents were divorcing. Our wonderful, heedlessly slashing guard Alexis Hornbuckle broke her wrist diving for a loose ball. And our sophomore point guard Sa’de Wiley-Gatewood, a player on whom I’d lavished care, had transferred out at Christmas because she couldn’t play “her game.” As I’d always said, “Tennessee’s not right for everyone—and not everyone’s right for Tennessee.”

  We got through Rutgers in the Sweet 16 thanks to 29 points from our senior Shanna Zolman. But our players were out of sorts and sensed that something was wrong. Shanna asked Tyler, “Hey, where’s your dad?” Ty just looked away and didn’t answer. But that didn’t fool Candace, who recognized what was happening from her own experience and gravitated to Tyler. They became confidants and spent the trip wandering the hotel lobby together whispering, comparing notes on parental breakups, a strange-looking pair, Candace a slender stalk at six four and Tyler looking mannish and boyish at the same time in his oversized baggy sweats.

  North Carolina crushed us in the next round. It was one of Sylvia’s best teams ever, starring a blistering guard named Ivory Latta, and they finished us off, 75–63. It was a terrible ending for Shanna, who set three Tennessee shooting records for her career but walked away feeling discontented and that I’d been both harsh and distant with her. She didn’t understand my behavior, and I couldn’t blame her. We parted with a rift.

  I gave Sylvia Hatchell a hug and wished her well. Later that night, Sylvia said to her husband, “Sammy, something is wrong with Pat. She wasn’t right. She didn’t have her normal fight.”

  With the tournament over, I had no choice but to go home to an empty house and think about my marriage. I believed in and honored the institution, and R.B. had been an essential source of unconditional love for me. For all our problems, I’d been deeply content and always felt our worst day together was better than being apart. Especially early on, he treated me as if he had found a rare gem, and I had a string of diamonds on my wrist to remind me of that. He was a southern charm boy with a way with gestures. After every big win in a tournament, there were long-stemmed roses. Our relationship had given me a confidence, sureness. But now it seemed he wanted all the advantages of being married to me, but none of the disadvantages. I was brokenhearted, and bitterly angry, and something cut off inside me.

  She can be pretty uncoachable in some areas. It’s my life’s greatest failure to not be able to figure things out, and to fix it. I fell in love with her and never quit. We had something very special. I never claimed to be perfect. I did well for so long, and when I messed up, I didn’t meet her standards.

  —R.B. SUMMITT

  As R.B. and I walked through the difficult situation, we struggled not to put Tyler in the middle, and to keep it private, but rumors were racing all over town. Someone anonymously called the local ABC affiliate and said, “You need to look into the breakup of Pat and R.B.’s marriage.” As if it was a scandal. A local writer for the Associated Press called our media relations director, Debby Jennings, and inquired about our status. She tartly replied, “If you’d like to ask Pat that question yourself, I will be glad to have her call you back.” Never mind, the reply came. It was a relief when summer came, and Tyler and I left town for a vacation in the Destin, Florida, area where we had a condominium on
the beach. I stared at the blue water and tried to sort out my feelings with my oldest, closest friends.

  While I was there, I also had to face the fact that something had gone badly wrong with me physically. For weeks, I had been feeling a pervasive achiness. Initially I thought it was lingering soreness and trauma from a terrible fall I’d taken when I was out walking our Labradors. But now I found myself almost immobilized by pain, so stiff I could barely move.

  I quit eating, lost weight, went to bed. I felt like something was gnawing my joints from the inside out. Tyler would run hot baths of Epsom salts for me, filling a tub and trying to find the right relieving temperature. I could barely dress myself; Tyler had to pull my socks on for me. “You’re my rock,” I told him.

  My longtime physician, Dr. Amy Bentley, found the answer: I had rheumatoid arthritis, the systemic autoimmune disease that put my grandmother in a wheelchair. It was incurable: for the rest of my life I’d have chronically inflamed joints, though medication could help control it. With the answer came some relief; a rheumatologist put me on a couple of different therapies, and the pain ebbed. But my body never returned to normalcy.

  My emotional state remained tender too. I second-guessed myself a lot during that time. For all the control, intuitiveness, and direction I had on the basketball court, I beat myself up for not having the same control and insight into my personal life. I felt like I was living in a bad country music song.

  Going back to work was the best medicine. A combination of antiinflammatories, cold packs, and hot pads helped get me moving again; at practice I looked like a NASCAR pit stop on the sideline as our trainers worked to change the ice bags I wore on my knees under my sweats. But there wasn’t a day that being in the gym with our players didn’t lift me up and loosen my limbs. For a few hours every afternoon, it was a relief to be immersed in their young and simple worlds.

  She never got tired of it, she loved everything about it.… I remember when it was tough on us at home with the divorce, and she would be, like, “Okay, it’s time for practice.” And that was it, whether we were crying or sad, as soon as she looked at the clock and it was time for practice, it was like Wonder Woman.

  —TYLER SUMMITT

  I couldn’t help but feel reanimated by how promising our team was. As a coach you know when you can check off enough boxes to contend for a championship, whether there are enough scorers, defenders, rebounders, and decision makers to make a deep run. In 2007, we had all of them, and after years of bedeviling injuries, we were finally whole and healthy.

  Above all we had Candace Parker, the best player in a generation, who was finally healed and confident enough for her talent to flower. She was built like a green young tree, supple and strong. She was virtually ambidextrous, almost as good with her left hand as her right, and she could dunk with ease. She had a light, creative touch around the basket, but if you pushed her away from it, she would loft deadly fallaway jumpers, and she could handle and pass the ball like a guard.

  Everyone in the country wanted Candace, but fortunately, I had a head start: I had unwittingly been nice to her when she was a little girl. Back in our heyday with the Meeks, we went to Chicago to play DePaul, and after the game I stepped into the bleachers to speak to Tamika Catchings’s father, Harvey. A gentleman from another row leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Do you mind taking a picture with my daughter?” I turned around and saw a thirteen-year-old girl, thin as a bamboo reed.

  She looked over and said in this big southern accent, “I’m gonna have to take you home and fatten you up.”

  —CANDACE PARKER

  When we met again as coach and recruit, we had an immediate bond—but by then every coach in the country was chasing her. A particularly overaggressive one from another conference swooped in and began campaigning hard, not just in her own favor, but against us, messing with Candace’s head by mudslinging.

  Things had gotten a little ugly. Stories were told, and strings were being pulled every which way. “You don’t want to be a part of that program.” Different things like that. Negative recruiting, I guess; that’s what Pat called it. She never did it. She always talked about the positives of the University of Tennessee. She never really discussed other schools; because she said it didn’t matter, she was selling me on Tennessee.

  —CANDACE PARKER

  I was well aware that we were being slimed. Holly and I flew to Naperville, Illinois, to visit Candace at home with her parents and make our last pitch. We sat down on their couch, and I said, “Holly, get me a glass of water, will you?”

  Candace’s mother, Sara, said, “Let me get that for you.”

  I said, “No, no, Holly will get it.”

  Holly came back to the sofa with two glasses of water and set them down on the table. I turned to Candace. “People can mess with your head,” I said. “Can’t they?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  I pushed a glass of water in front of her. “This is your mind,” I said. “It’s clear, right?”

  Then I reached in my pocket for an Alka-Seltzer tablet and dropped it in the glass. It began bubbling.

  “And this is what people are trying to do to your mind.”

  The water clouded up. It boiled and fizzled, getting murkier and murkier.

  I pushed the second glass of water toward Candace. It was still and transparent.

  “This is what Tennessee is,” I said. “We’re clear. And we’re very clear with you. Don’t let other people put stuff in it.”

  That was it; that was our pitch. Sold.

  But then Candace arrived at Tennessee on a bad knee. She came to our first team meeting with a limp, and we immediately ordered her to sit out and scheduled an MRI. “We don’t play at Tennessee on swollen knees,” our medical director told her. The MRI showed that she needed articulate cartilage surgery. When she found out, she burst into tears, and so did I. Not only was Candace hurt, she was away from home for the first time and her parents, Larry and Sara, had just separated.

  Holly and I were at her bedside along with her mother when Candace woke up from surgery. She had dreamed she was playing basketball while she was under the anesthesia, and her first words were, “We won.”

  Holly smiled and said, “Did I hit the game winner?”

  Candace murmured, “No. I did.”

  Hopefully, it was an omen.

  With Candace healthy, the trick was to build a cohesive team that wouldn’t resent her large presence and star quality. She was an attention magnet, but we had other great players, who probably wondered if there were enough basketballs to go around. Alexis Hornbuckle of Charleston, West Virginia, was our detonator, a guard with coiled springs for legs who seemed to cause a separation on the scoreboard every time she took the floor. We called her “Bucky” or “Lex.” Sidney Spencer was a long, silky forward with a three-point shot so reliable it was almost unfair, and we called her “Sidville,” because she could be sort of spacey and in her own world. Alex Fuller was a slim, elegant forward who was skilled in every aspect of the game.

  We had two junior college transfers: Alberta Auguste of Marrero, Louisiana, was a wavy-limbed five-foot-eleven quick-stepper, and Shannon Bobbitt, a New York-bred point guard who originally committed to Rutgers but needed a year in junior college to shore up her grades. Shannon was just five foot two, but she had grown up in Harlem playing street ball with guys and had an uncanny ability to take apart a defense.

  I’d never had a player more appreciative of a scholarship than Shannon. She was from a family of eight kids who grew up worried about food and shelter; her mother supported them with her job for the New York City Board of Education, while her father was on disability. Shannon was dazzled by the richness of our program; even her sweat socks were “the nicest socks I’ve ever had,” she said. She exhausted herself on the practice court to “pay you back for the risk you took on me,” she told me. She was supremely coachable, sponged instruction, and did exactly what I asked her to. “I’d adopt
you if I could,” I told her.

  Nicky Anosike was a combination of strength and strong-mindedness. She was another New Yorker, a sculpted six-foot-four, 210-pound center with a pile of tightly woven braids and a centered, resolute quality that made her teammates vote her the person they would most like to have at their side in a dark alley. Her mother, Ngozi, was a Nigerian immigrant who had arrived in this country in 1977 with a sixth-grade education and raised eight children single-handedly in a Staten Island project. Ngozi was a remarkable success story; she had worked as a housekeeper while she put herself through high school, and by the time I began recruiting Nicky in 2003 she had just gotten her nursing degree.

  Nicky didn’t want me to come to their tiny apartment, because she was embarrassed by it and thought I’d judge her. She had no clue that I’d lived in a cabin with no water or electricity; she just saw my good suit and the diamond rings.

  I was so embarrassed about where I was from. I didn’t see the part of Pat that grew up on a farm and had to work to get where she was. I saw this immaculate woman always on ESPN and this huge celebrity. I didn’t want her to see what I was struggling with. What if I invite her over and she sees the mice? Or she sees the cockroaches, or she sees eight kids in a small apartment? Or she sees I don’t have a bed? What will she think of me? Will she still want me?