by Pat Summitt
He must have thought it was a pretty grand thing, because he took everybody to eat at Cracker Barrel after that and bought the damn supper.
—WESLEY ATTEBERY
That was pretty much the story of the ’76 season.
The end of the Tennessee season was just the beginning of mine. In the summer of 1976, I reported to the USA Trials, which were held in the small town of Warrensburg, Missouri, on the campus of Central Missouri State. For five weeks I fought every day, in a cauldron of a gym cooled only by some giant industrial fans, to make the Olympic team.
The trials started with twenty-four players, and fourteen of them were forwards—my position. Only a dozen players would make the team, and I was the oldest player there, with a foot-long scar on my knee. Those were my odds.
Billie made us fight for a spot by playing one-on-one, full court. With a gleam in her eye, she ordered me to go against one of the youngest and quickest players on the team, Cindy Brogdon, an eighteen-year-old college freshman from Mercer University. “There’s nothing like going one-on-one to find out who wants it the most,” Billie said.
Cindy was a sweet kid from Buford, Georgia, with a fair, narrow, triangular young face and springs for legs. She could spot up and shoot from any place inside of half-court, with a smooth stroke and unbelievable range that would hold up among today’s players. She was a whole lot better than I was and I had to figure out, quick, how to beat her.
I had two advantages: I was bigger, and I worked harder. Cindy was thin, and like most young players she liked to sell tickets with her shot, but she didn’t spend too much energy on other parts of her game.
I told myself, She can’t score if she doesn’t have the ball. I made her work so hard to get the ball it demoralized her. Cindy got her first shot off, and it missed—and from then on, I bodied her away from the basket, beat her to the boards, and just wore her out. After five minutes of going full court, I’d won, 5–0.
Pat was all up in my face, and when my first attempt didn’t go in, I never got a second chance because of her aggressive boxing out. She was so strong you could not get around her to follow your shot. She was the most aggressive person I ever met on a basketball court.
—CINDY BROGDON
It meant more to me than to her; she was sure to make the team because of her scoring ability, whereas my status had been more in doubt. Once Cindy recovered from the shock, which she did quickly, we became good friends, and when we both made the final cut, I invited her to be my roommate. I couldn’t help but identify with her: she was a country girl who hadn’t traveled much outside of Georgia and was experiencing international play for the first time. I remembered how alone I’d felt at the age of eighteen when I left the farm.
I was the oldest member of the team at twenty-four and became a sort of magnet for all the young players from the South. Another kid who felt out of her element was Trish Roberts, a slightly built, mortally shy girl from Monroe, Georgia. On the court Trish had an almost phantom quickness and one of the smoothest offensive games I’ve ever seen. But off the court she would hardly look at you and was so bashful she wouldn’t speak, which I found affecting. She was terrified of the easterners on the team, with their unfamiliar vowels and smart mouths, and especially intimidated by Billie Moore. If Billie said “boo” to her, she’d flinch and run in the other direction. I spent a lot of time trying to draw Trish out.
I was very shy and really nervous and scared a lot, and I had never been a lot of places and thrown in with girls who were different. I was in awe of their accents and the way they reacted to things. I was used to saying yes ma’am and no ma’am. Pat was very encouraging to others, and she always sat near or was around the coaches. I think she was soaking up and learning everything she could from them. She was so much more mature than the rest of us.
—TRISH ROBERTS
The team that Billie put together was diverse in both talent and geography and reads now like a Hall of Fame induction list. Our anchor was the magnificent Lusia Harris, a rangy center who was in the midst of winning three straight national championships at Delta State and once hung 58 points on Tennessee Tech. Nancy Dunkle was a crafty six-foot-two forward and a three-time all-American for Billie at Cal State Fullerton. Ann Meyers of UCLA was a four-time all-American who looked like California personified with a toothpaste commercial smile. Juliene Simpson of New Jersey was a selfless, scrapping guard who like me was older than the rest at twenty-three. Then there was my young flame-headed friend Nancy Lieberman, of Far Rockaway, New York; a center from Illinois, Charlotte Lewis; and a trio of easterners—Gail Marquis of New York, Mary Anne O’Conner of Connecticut, and Sue Rojcewicz of Worcester, Massachusetts.
I made the team strictly for my veteran smarts and willingness to defend, an unusual trait on an all-star team. I would take a charge, or whatever else Billie asked of me, and I went to the boards so hard I ended up second in rebounding. One day when we were scrimmaging against some male players, Billie barked at me, “Put a body on that guy!” She claims the next trip down the court, I sent him into the bleachers. I wasn’t a great player, but apparently I was a good teammate, because I was elected a cocaptain.
Pat led by example. I mean she was a hard worker. If there was a ball rolling on the floor, she was going to dive. She and I went up for a rebound, and she put her elbow out and it got me right in my hip bone. To this day I still have problems with that bruise.
—TRISH ROBERTS
But making the team was only half the battle. Next, we went to an Olympic prequalifying tournament in Hamilton, Ontario, where we would have to win to get to Montreal. We were considered a vast underdog: the USA team had finished a lowly eighth in the World Championships a year earlier. Once again Billie ran us so hard every muscle in our legs was sore. She didn’t just put us through two-a-days, she put us through three-a-days. It was brutal. We worked out morning, noon, and night, six hours a day.
Some players weren’t used to Billie’s style, and Lusia Harris was one of them. She played a slower-tempo, walk-the-ball-up-the-court style at Delta State, and she was hurting. I ran alongside her, practically pulling her up and down the floor.
Lusia said, “But, Billie, at Delta State they wait for me to get down the floor.”
“You aren’t in Cleveland, Mississippi, anymore,” Billie said. “The Russians aren’t going to wait for you.”
We scrimmaged against men’s teams, and one day the guys got out on too many fast breaks, while our sore-legged players stood and watched them. Billie didn’t say much, but I knew her well enough to know she wasn’t happy. When the younger players like Cindy Brogdon wanted to go out and find pizza, I said, “I’ll tell you right now we better get to bed and get some rest because Billie is going to kill us tomorrow.” The next day we went the first hour without ever shooting or even touching a ball. “You’re going to play the game right,” Billie said, and she made us run until some of us had the dry heaves.
After five weeks of that, we went to Ontario. Billie withheld from us just how little faith USA Basketball had in us: they ticketed us to fly straight home after the tournament, instead of to Montreal, figuring we’d never come through qualifying, and gave us a budget of just $500.
We shocked them by storming through the tournament in first place. My family drove to Hamilton all the way from Henrietta in a yellow Cadillac my brother Tommy bought. It was the heart of tobacco season, which tells you how important it was to Daddy to see me play in a USA uniform, but he got mad because he thought I should be scoring more. Every time I went in the game, he shouted, “Shoot it, Trisha!” And every time he shouted it, Trish Roberts would pull up and shoot it.
Trish said, “I don’t know who that man hollering at me is.”
Since there were no expectations that we’d get to Montreal, no one had made any provisions for us, and with ten days still remaining to the Opening Ceremonies, we had nowhere to stay, we were homeless. Bill Wall gave Billie his American Express card to tide us over, and Bi
llie got on the phone to an executive at Kodak, one of our sponsors, who found us rooms in an unoccupied dormitory at the University of Rochester that was under renovation. We spent ten days in Rochester sleeping in dormitory bunk beds, listening to hammering, and practicing. Small crowds of twenty or so would gather to watch us sprinting, cursing, and sprinting again as Billie pushed us.
Finally, it was time to go to Montreal, where our quarters weren’t much better. All twelve of us were assigned to a two-bedroom apartment in the Olympic village. We crammed five players to a room—who all had to share the same bath—and out of desperation put a couple of cots in the kitchen. If anyone wanted some privacy, she just walked out. I don’t know how we lived that way, I only recall being so excited to be there that it didn’t matter. We were thankful to have beds, and uniforms that said USA on them.
We just accepted it. We grew up in a generation where we had one pair of shoes to do everything. Today, heaven forbid if their game shoes touch a court that has asphalt on it. But we were very happy to get a pair of shoes.
—ANN MEYERS
More than forty years later, it’s difficult to separate my own memories from the snapshots of the Montreal Games on my wall. I remember how vast and full the oval Olympic Stadium seemed during the Opening Ceremonies, and my USA blazer with white blouse and handkerchief in the pocket. I remember the polyester sweat suits with zipper collars and piping that were the fashion then. I remember the jagged modern architecture of the village, Edwin Moses galloping over hurdles, the little valentine face of gymnast Nadia Comaneci, and watching Ernie Grunfeld help win a gold for the U.S. men’s team, coached by that kind, philosophic gentleman Dean Smith.
Above all I remember seven-foot-two Uljana Semjonova, against whom I dreaded playing, based on my last encounter with her at the World University Games.
The Olympics was all about whether anyone could upset the Soviets, and we knew we were probably playing for the silver. We were reminded of it every time we saw Semjonova in the village. One night we went to the arena to watch a game and found ourselves sitting right behind her. She was eating an apple, and we couldn’t take our eyes off it. It looked like a golf ball in her hand. She ate it in two bites.
But I discovered, through that one-of-a-kind Olympic experience of sharing a village together, that Semjonova was as gentle as she was large. I don’t know what possessed me to try to talk to her except sheer curiosity, but one afternoon in the cafeteria I sat down next to her and tried to begin a conversation. She was from Latvia, I gathered that much. We couldn’t exchange many words, except nyet and da, but somehow we communicated well enough to become friendly. I remember being out in the village one afternoon with some teammates and running into her. I introduced my teammates, who gathered around her. She took off one of her rings and showed it to us—it was the size of a fifty-cent piece.
Playing against her was a helpless feeling, however. Billie had a cassette player, and before every game she blasted Natalie Cole’s “This Will Be,” which became our theme song. On the day that we met the Soviets, she played it one more time. But we knew it was probably not to be.
Billie tried to come up with a game plan for Semjonova, but how do you stop seven foot two? I was assigned to defend her, and I remember my head coming up to her armpit. I stood there in my polyester red, white, and blue uniform, as tall as I could make myself seem at five foot eleven—and I was right under her armpit.
Since we couldn’t match up with her, the best hope was to get her in foul trouble. The plan was to put one person in front of her, and when she posted up and turned, to have someone else slide over and take a charge. Trish Roberts played down low because she was six foot one, but she was built like a sapling.
Well, the big girl posted up every single time on the same side, which meant I was usually the one who had to come over. I remember I took the first charge. I belly flopped, and when I looked up, I saw Semjonova falling. I crawled out of that lane fast, because I knew if she fell on me, it was over.
—TRISH ROBERTS
The final score was 112–77. Nevertheless, we clinched silver, which was far more than anyone expected of us, and we became one of the more popular American stories of the Games, a kind of David and Goliath tale. Afterward, when Billie met the American press, a reporter asked her, “What does the U.S. team need in order to catch up with the Soviets?”
Billie answered, “About ten more inches.”
Billie knew we’d done all we could, and she was deeply proud of us. She told us to feel a sense of the occasion. “I want you to understand what a moment in time you have,” she said. “What an impact you have. There will be many more Olympic teams that follow you. But there will only be one team that was the first.”
I can’t say that I understood at the time what pioneers we were, or what a tradition we would inaugurate. The USA women’s team would become more dominant than the Soviets ever dreamed. From 1976 to 2012 our American women would amass a record of 58-3 and win seven gold medals, including five straight, and Tennessee would be a huge factor in that success.
All I knew then was that four years of work and hardship had paid off. I remember all of us clustered on the medal podium together, and a photographer called out to us, and we turned as one and waved. I remember staying up all night, feeling a sense of the moment, though perhaps not quite in the way Billie expected us to, sitting on a curb in the Olympic village sharing beers with my teammates.
I remember feeling that an Olympic medal was a mountainous achievement for a girl from Henrietta, Tennessee. Just as it was for a girl from Monroe, Georgia, or from Cleveland, Mississippi, or Far Rockaway, New York. And I remember the understanding that came with it; when you set a goal of such distant possibility and reach it, you gain an insight into what it takes that lasts the rest of your life. It felt utterly life altering. To summon the competitiveness to work every single day for a goal that was months and even years ahead was the most invaluable lesson I’d ever learn. I thought I could accomplish anything. And I thought I could teach it to others.
It was time to hang up my sneakers and jersey and go back to Tennessee to continue the work I had started, putting sneakers and jerseys on other women. Before I left Montreal, I had a conversation with Trish Roberts. She was in the midst of a checkerboard college career: she had played a season at North Georgia State College and then transferred to Emporia State College out in Kansas. But she didn’t like being at a small college in the Midwest and wanted to move closer to home, preferably to a larger school, where she could play on a bigger stage.
Trish didn’t realize I was a college coach until she was sitting on the team bus going to practice one day, and she mentioned to Lusia Harris, “I don’t want to go back to Emporia. I think I should transfer.” Lusia told her, “Maybe you ought to go to Tennessee and play for Pat.” When Trish looked surprised, Lusia explained that I wasn’t a college player like the rest of them, I was a coach, which accounted for how much more serious I was.
Trish came to my seat and said, “What’s your team like?”
I happened to keep a folder of coaching notes and other Tennessee material in my equipment bag, including a team picture. I pulled it out and showed it to Trish. She turned to Lusia and raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“Can you see me standing in the back row with all them white girls?” she said.
Maybe she couldn’t. But I sure could.
If someone says what does Alzheimer’s feel like, what do you say?
Well, it’s an opponent for me. I know what I’m dealing with. I think I’ve got a pretty good game plan, with all the doctors and everything. But like I said, probably the one thing, it’s like waking up in a strange place.
It seems like there are symptoms inside, and then ones from the outside that are imposed on you. Like, “We think you should consider whether to retire.”
Exactly.
So the diagnosis brings things from outside that are as difficult to deal with as anything happening
inside your body? You don’t have as much control?
Well, I don’t really feel that. I feel like I still have control of who I am.… And I think people have good intentions. But sometimes I’m like, “Leave me alone.” I don’t feel that anymore. But for a while I was like “Leave me fricking alone.”
[Later]
I’m not going to let it take everything from me.
And you haven’t.
No. I don’t intend to.
—June 21, 2012, driving from Knoxville to Nashville
5
Bridesmaid and Bride
A lot of people are afraid of commitment because it means they’ll have to say, “That’s the best I can do.” They elect to be average. When you compete, you decide to find out what your real limits are, not just what you think they are. I wasn’t afraid of that commitment, or of demanding it from others. But when it came to emotional commitment, the off-a-cliff peril of grasping another hand and saying, “I do,” I was more hesitant. The problem was, I understood the word too well.
At the University of Tennessee in 1976–1977, we committed. Gave it everything we had—and lost. There were no trophies or glittering rings, and little applause in those years. But we laid down the foundational values of Lady Vols basketball on which everything that came after was built: effort, discipline, and intensity. There was something else, too, that was another foundational value, though I had trouble expressing it: love. That was there. Underneath all the yelling.
