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

by Pat Summitt

  —NICKY ANOSIKE

  I wanted Nicky, and here’s why. She would pay any price to succeed, and her work ethic set the tone for our entire team. When I ran them ragged, and Alberta Auguste wailed, “Oh, help me, Jesus!,” and players were bent double gasping that they were tired, I heard Nicky’s voice.

  “We’re not tired,” she said. “My mother’s tired. This isn’t what tired is.”

  Right then, I knew we were in business.

  But there was one issue we had to solve: Nicky and Candace couldn’t stand each other. They clashed like plaid and stripes, and no amount of circling up and campfire conversation could hide that fact. There were days in practice when they would barely exchange a glance.

  The problem was that they were so different, yet equally competitive. Candace made everything look natural and smooth; Nicky was all work and power. Candace was our best offensive player, Nicky our best defender. I decided the tension between them wasn’t all bad, if I could find a way to channel it.

  I threw them into what Nikki Caldwell liked to call “the pit.” Summoning a long-ago lesson from my experience in the Olympic Trials, I matched them up against each other in a one-on-one drill, then stood back and let them go at it. I had a feeling they would each learn a lesson. It was like an old movie where two monsters fight: Nicky would smack down Candace, but then Candace would school Nicky. Candace prided herself on winning every drill. Well, guess who won—Nicky. Defense had carried the day, as I suspected it might. Candace couldn’t stand it—she hated to lose at anything, and she was beside herself. She stormed back and forth for a minute, and then she came running over to me.

  She said, “We have to go again.”

  Nicky put the ball on her hip and said, “Coach, we’re not playing again. I already won.”

  “No, no, no,” Candace said.

  “IT’S OVER!” Nicky said.

  I was delighted. I said, “No, let’s play again.”

  They went back on the court, Nicky fuming. Part of the drill was that they got to call their own fouls, an honor system. Nicky had trouble finishing around the basket, but if she didn’t make the bucket, she was good at drawing fouls. She missed a layup, and she called a foul. Next possession, same thing: “Yep, you fouled me again,” she said. Candace was boiling. The third time Nicky called a foul, Candace started screaming.

  “I didn’t even touch you, you’re just calling fouls ’cause you can’t score, you such a PUNK!”

  Nicky screamed back, “I’m not a punk, I already WON!”

  By now they were crowding each other and I had to step in and try to break them up, two very salty six-foot-four and six-foot-five bodies. The other coaches came running in, and we finally got them separated. Nicky said: “Pat, you could’ve gotten hurt.”

  I loved it. In those few minutes, Candace played better D, and Nicky was more efficient offensively, and you could see that they were pulling the best out of each other. Moreover, in an odd way, it made them trust. Each of them taught the other a lesson about her value, and when we were in a tight game and needed a score, or a stop, they would know who to go to.

  Those are the situations Pat put us in, and it wasn’t done accidentally. She loves confrontation and likes to create that environment, because not only is she entertained by it, but it interests her to see what people are made of and what you have inside of you.

  —NICKY ANOSIKE

  We still had some issues to work out before we jelled. Too many of our players relied on their sizable gifts instead of each other and weren’t quite willing to do all the dirty work. I stacked the deck against them every way I could think of in practice. We installed something Dean called “the persistence drill,” which tested their stamina: they had to make consecutive full-court layups for two straight minutes—and if they missed, start over. On the defensive end, they had to make seven straight defensive stops before they could get off the floor.

  But perhaps nothing was as effective as what Nicky Anosike did just before the NCAA tournament. She called a player-only meeting and presented each of them with a contract she had written up. She thought her teammates talked a better game than they played, and she understood that there was something about signing your name that resonated with people.

  “I’m a woman of my word,” she told the team. “My word is the one thing I have. I’m sick of people talking. Sign this contract, and if you aren’t doing this on the court, you answer to me.”

  The word for that is ownership. Nicky took ownership, and we turned into beasts in the NCAA tournament. We ripped through Ole Miss in the regional final, 98–62, when Bobbitt scored our first 10 points by draining treys, and Candace went off for 24 points, 14 rebounds, and several blocked shots, which earned her the ultimate compliment from Nicky, who said, “I respect what you did tonight.” That sealed the deal. Nikki Caldwell observed, “There’s a language players speak when they’re getting ready to win something big. And I’m hearing it.”

  We needed every bit of their togetherness in the Final Four in Cleveland, where we met the team that had our number recently, North Carolina. It was another nightmare game: Candace was double-teamed and got in foul trouble, and no one could knock down a shot. The Tar Heels, led by their comet of a guard, Ivory Latta, were up by 12 with just 8:18 to go, 48–36.

  Time-out. I felt like I’d been in this game my whole life. Down by double digits, a short clock, and kids giving off a smell of desperation with their sweat, needing me to breathe life into their competitive lungs. They were hurting, concerned—there was a little bit of doubt; are we going under? I wasn’t having it, wasn’t having any of it.

  I opened my mouth, and something close to a roar came out. “We are not losing this ball game!” I hollered. “We have come too far and worked too hard. We’re not leaving here without a championship!” I reminded them of their persistence drills. “Can you make seven straight stops?” I asked. They nodded. That was what it would take. “Steal and score! Seven straight stops!”

  I just remember Pat was adamant; we are not losing this game. She made sure everybody heard her. You could see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice; you could see it in how she was standing.

  —NIKKI CALDWELL

  On the next seven trips down the floor, here’s what they did: they forced six steals. Trying to get past Alexis Hornbuckle was like trying to run through a windmill. It was a total shutout—Carolina scored exactly 2 points over the last eight minutes, on free throws. They never got another decent shot. We won, 56–50.

  Two nights later we met Rutgers and won our first national championship in eight years, 59–46. “It’s been way too long,” Candace said. “And I’m tired of going into Thompson-Boling Arena and playing on the Summitt and not looking up and seeing a banner that has all our names written all over it.”

  Everyone always wanted to know how each championship felt, what defined and separated it. This one felt like a soft rain of confetti. It felt like an embrace with my son—who was now taller than me. It felt like a flying kiss on the cheek from Candace, who sailed around the arena like she had wings. It was my seventh title—but it was a first for our players, and as I celebrated it with them, it felt like newness. It was wonderful to feel something other than pain, and it made me young hearted again. As my old friend Steve Spurrier had said to me on my fiftieth birthday, “You and I both know why we do this. We do it so we don’t ever have to grow up.” And it was true.

  I’d had a lot to prove that season: that I could live alone, that I could raise my son and run our household without a husband in it, that I could rebuild my life as a single woman, that I could fight off the arthritis and keep working and winning. I no longer felt so stiff and heartsore. I felt I was finally moving forward, and life could be good again, even joyful.

  That summer, I made two important decisions about the quality of my life. After a year of separation, I decided to end my marriage. R.B. was a good person, a loving father, and we’d had a lot of good years. But I couldn�
�t reconcile. I filed for divorce.

  I also reached the decision that my professional life would be better without UConn in it. I canceled our annual series, the most controversial act of my career, and one for which I’d be heavily criticized, especially by people from Connecticut. Everyone should know that as of this writing, Geno and I have recovered our friendship—and I do regard it as friendship—and I want it to stay that way. We are in the best place we’ve ever been. My version of what happened is simply that, my version, as I experienced it.

  Believe it or not, it had almost nothing to do with the rivalry itself. The fact is, relationships between coaches are rarely ruined by what happens on the court—we all know what goes around comes around, and that it’s an inherently humbling game. Relationships between coaches are ruined off the court. It’s what happens before and after, in the handshake line and most especially in recruiting, that poisons relationships. And that’s what happened to Geno and me.

  For the better part of thirteen years, Geno and I got along well. Though we were competitive, we felt a bond, a shared sense that we elevated the game to a very rare air.

  One year there was a snow emergency in Hartford, with fourteen inches on the ground, and the governor of the state told everyone to stay off the roads. When we got to the Civic Center, fourteen thousand people were there, and the governor was sitting in the first row. It was a game played at a level that no one else in women’s basketball could play at, for the longest time.… We knew that game ultimately was going to determine what kind of year we had. How will you compete in that game? That’s how you will measure your team. That game was how I knew whether we had the heart for winning a championship. And regardless of what ended up coming out of that, the personalities, in the end the competitive spirit that both teams displayed on those game days is something that will never be duplicated.

  —GENO AURIEMMA

  On the court it was pure class, future Hall of Famers on both sides knocking down epic shots. Off the court we were amiable, and complimentary, even teasing. In the fall of 1998 after Reach for the Summit hit the bestseller list, I went to Hartford for a book signing. Geno sent a huge bouquet of flowers to the store, with a funny note. “Congratulations. I hope your next visit is not nearly so successful,” he wrote. When we got a fish tank in our offices at Tennessee and two of the fish tried to devour each other, I named them Pat and Geno. I’d walk into the office and check the tank and ask our secretaries cheerfully, “Did Pat eat Geno yet?”

  After we got killed by UConn in the 2002 NCAA Final Four, 79–56, I visited their locker room to tell them how superb I thought they were—their senior class of Sue Bird, Swin Cash, and Asjha Jones equaled anything the Meeks had ever done. “You guys are everything the game should be,” I said. “You’re one of the best teams I’ve ever seen, and you need to go on and win the whole thing.”

  Geno and I chatted regularly at functions, and when an issue arose in women’s basketball, such as how to promote the game, we thought alike. We were allies when it came to the issue of pay. There were occasions when we shared contractual details so that the other could win a raise from their university. “I think I can help you,” I remember Geno saying.

  For all of that, Geno and I didn’t socialize much; in all the years we competed, we had dinner just once, whereas I shared meals with other coaches regularly. Perhaps we should have done more of that and gotten to know the sides that people closest to us saw: the good parent, the funny cocktail companion, the generous colleague who helped younger coaches get their starts and inspired loyalty in staffs. We knew those sides existed, because people told us about them. But I’m not sure we ever met in the way we should have.

  Then a couple of elbows got thrown. Geno always liked to make barbed remarks, but it seemed to me that from 2000 on, they had an ungenerous edge. Oddly, the more success UConn had, the more Geno seemed to resent Tennessee. In the summer of 2001, there was a bafflingly rude encounter when we were at different tables in the same restaurant, and he made me so uncomfortable by shouting my name derisively that I left the premises.

  One evening during a coaching function in New York, he said to Mickie, “You know, you’re pretty funny. We could be friends if you weren’t with Tennessee.” Mickie was bewildered. We’d always been friendly with our rivals; some of our best friends had handed us painful losses: Sue Gunter at LSU, Jody Conradt at Texas, Sylvia Hatchell at North Carolina, Leon Barmore at Louisiana Tech, Tara VanDerveer at Stanford, and Melanie Balcomb at Xavier and then Vanderbilt.

  After our traumatic upset loss to Xavier, someone faxed me a note scribbled in what looked like Geno’s handwriting. “I predicted Tennessee would lose to Xavier, and I also predicted Pat would blame her team instead of herself,” it read. I faxed it to Geno. “What’s this about?” I wrote. He never replied. When I became great friends with Villanova coach Harry Perretta, who was an old friend of Geno’s, he told the press that Harry “left me for an older woman” and made off-color jokes about us sitting in a hot tub together. I shot back. “I agree Geno is jealous,” I said. “You could also put paranoid in there.”

  Geno felt elbows from us, too. I learned later that he believed Al Brown was discourteous to him in the handshake line. And when UConn was upset by Notre Dame in the 2001 NCAA Final Four, some of our staff had chanted, ungraciously, “Who let the dogs out!,” and apparently he heard about it.

  It got to the point where I took it up with him one summer when we wound up at the same all-star tournament. “It’s a choice to play you,” I said. If the ugliness continued, “I’ll cancel the series.” He looked shocked and said, hurriedly, “Well, that wouldn’t be good for anybody.” There was a temporary truce. When we met in the championship game at the 2004 NCAA Final Four in New Orleans, he leaned over during a pregame handshake and said, “Listen. Don’t let anyone tell you I don’t respect you. I’ve always respected you.”

  All of this should have been filed away as two coaches with competitive egos being thin-skinned. The problem was, it formed the backdrop of hard feelings for what happened next. Recruiting is the most difficult part of the game, and no coach likes it. Resentments arise when you can’t just go out on a court and settle matters with a ball and a scoreboard.

  I’ve seen it a thousand times: relationships in this profession destroyed over recruiting. Not in games—it doesn’t matter if someone beats you on the court. But if they feel taken advantage of in recruiting, that’s when things deteriorate and aren’t so chummy. In a game if there are fouls, each side gets two free throws. Recruiting is where the battlegrounds are tougher, because the rules of engagement get real gray at times.

  —MICKIE DEMOSS

  I didn’t do gray. I only did black and white. I believed I had a special responsibility to follow the rules closely, because whatever a coach at the top of the game did, every other coach in the country was going to do twice as aggressively. Over the course of about a year, I became increasingly upset with a couple of UConn’s tactics in recruiting. I didn’t itemize my complaints publicly then, and I’m not going to now. I went through the appropriate channels and that’s how it will stay. I made my concerns known to UConn through our athletic director, Joan Cronan, and the Southeastern Conference. UConn responded that they saw nothing wrong with what they were doing. I made my concerns known again. Same response.

  I was finished. I didn’t see any other choice. “I’m not putting up with this anymore,” I told my staff. I met with Joan and our university president, Dr. John Petersen, and outlined my reasons for wanting to discontinue the series: the lack of response from UConn and the personal negativity convinced me it was no longer in our best interest. I thought we needed to send a message that we didn’t want a game that wasn’t played in the right spirit. The administration agreed, and we declined to renew the series.

  A few nights later, my home phone rang. It was Geno. In retrospect, that was the moment when friendship and alliance should have prevailed. Each of us should have said,
“Let’s talk this through and solve this. What are your concerns?” But we had long passed the point of being able to talk that way. Instead it was hostile and defensive from the start. Geno made an opening remark.

  “Geno, you and I both know we aren’t playing by the same rules,” I said.

  The conversation only lasted a minute or so more. It mainly consisted of him saying that he hoped to see us in the NCAA tournament, so “I can kick your ass.” But we never played again.

  In the years since, the anger and suspicion have dissipated, replaced by the original bond. Shortly before I announced my diagnosis, a note came in the mail. It was from Geno, saying he’d heard I had health issues, and he was thinking about me. Shortly after I went public, I formed the Pat Summitt Foundation to fight Alzheimer’s, with the help of my friend Danielle Donehew, an associate commissioner of the Big East Conference. Danielle asked Geno if he wanted to be the first contributor to it. He wrote out a check on the spot—for $10,000.

  We’re competitors and we have a lot of respect, and for anyone to expect more than that when there’s so much at stake when we meet on court, it’s just unrealistic. The average person out there wants to make it this blood feud. I’m thinking, Come on, it’s still just basketball. You’ve got two competitive, strong-willed people, and some of it was blown out of proportion. And in the end, it came down to: the games were the games and that was that, and it’s over, and life is life.

  —GENO AURIEMMA

  I still believe my decision was the right one, for me. I was more at peace without UConn on our schedule; I had enough battles between divorce, ill health, and single parenting, and I didn’t need the constant skirmishing UConn had come to represent. I had a sharp sense that I had paid my dues, been a good ambassador for the game, and now I was on the downhill side of my career.