by Pat Summitt
After only four months of seeing each other, I took him to meet my family, an experience he survived despite the best efforts of my brothers to drown him. We all went out waterskiing on the Cumberland River, which R.B. had never done much of. It was R.B.’s turn to retrieve the ski, and just as he leaned over to get it, Kenneth gunned the engine and R.B. almost fell overboard, and got a river-water shampoo, which made my brothers laugh until they cried. Then when he tried to stand up on the ski, he submerged, but refused to let go of the rope. After about ten minutes of being dragged underwater, he popped back up—skiing. He was that stubborn; he wouldn’t let go of the line. R.B. always said afterward that it was the story of our courtship.
A lot of people weren’t sure they liked them together. He was the fraternity boy, and he always dated blondes. Pat was a challenge, now. She was so different from all the other women he had been going out with.
—SYLVIA RHYNE HATCHELL
R.B. didn’t complain when I had to travel twenty-six thousand miles in the summer coaching the junior national team in the Pan American Games in Mexico City and we couldn’t talk because the phones were too expensive. He just said he missed me. He didn’t complain when, instead of going out to dinner, I had to work late writing letters to recruits. He would come over and hang out, and I’d put Linda Ronstadt on the stereo and gaze at him speculatively.
Yes, and I ain’t saying you ain’t pretty
All I’m saying is I’m not ready
For any person place or thing
To try and pull the reins in on me
I waited for him to make an irritated remark about how time-consuming my job was, but he never did. Instead, to my amazement, he dove headfirst into it. I had to run around town to Rotary clubs and civic groups, begging for support, but I hated and feared public speaking. R.B. would help me write remarks and listen to me rehearse them, then would drive me to the event and wait patiently in the car, because I was too nervous to let him sit in the audience.
He encouraged and defended me when I got my first negative press, for entering into a controversial campaign to overturn the antiquated rules of girls’ basketball in Tennessee’s middle schools and high schools. Our state was one of just five left in the entire country that forced girls to play half-court (with Oklahoma, Texas, New York, and Iowa), and I wanted to change it. When a local girl named Victoria Cape sued in U.S. District Court, arguing that the rules were an “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable distinction,” I testified on her behalf.
I declared that the Tennessee schools forced “a mental and physical handicap” on girls, and stumped all around the state, begging parents and other coaches to testify similarly and support a rule change. Women weren’t pushed physically, I said; we hadn’t tapped into an iota of what we were capable of. “Don’t tell me we’re not strong enough to run full court,” I said.
It was a highly divisive stance that earned outrage across the state from high school coaches, who considered six-on-six a rich tradition. Some never spoke to me again. They argued all kinds of nonsense. They said the rules were necessary to “prevent girls from straining themselves” or to “aid the clumsy girls.” Jim Smiddy of Bradley County High, one of the winningest coaches in the state, insisted that the split-court game was “the prettiest thing about girls’ basketball.” Bill “Pusher” Howell from Murfreesboro declared that if girls tried to play full court, “the scores would be in the 20s and 30s and it would be the dullest thing you ever witnessed.”
So here she comes, trying to tell all these country guys to change. They did not like Pat Head. Thought she was disrupting the game. “It’s not broke, why you gonna fix it?” She was not a popular coach at the beginning.
—HOLLY WARLICK
I replied that I couldn’t keep taking players who had never crossed the half-court line and put the University of Tennessee at a total competitive disadvantage. “If you don’t change, I can’t recruit Tennessee players to our state school,” I said. We needed to catch up to the rest of the country.
We won the campaign. A wonderful sports columnist for the Nashville Tennessean named F.M. Williams, a gentleman in a plaid sports coat with black-rimmed glasses, helped swing public opinion. F.M. made it a point to come to our games and to drop mentions of us into his columns along with Tennessee football. “The barrier to change has been built by old coaches, who don’t like learning new techniques at this late date in their careers,” he declared.
Finally, District Court Judge Robert Taylor ruled that the “weak and awkward girls” rationale was indeed discriminatory. “When a state chooses to deny a significant education experience to a class of its citizens and no rational justification for such different treatment can be found, the Constitution requires that such distinction be voided,” he ordered. It ended an era. Tennessee high schools went to the full-court game for the 1979–80 season, and Oklahoma and Iowa soon followed.
But the acrimony of the campaign reaffirmed something I knew instinctively: sports for women still smacked of revolution to a lot of men, especially in the South. There was deep resistance to Title IX. I saw and felt it every day. When I took the junior national team to Mexico City for the Pan Am Games, the men stayed in a comfortable hotel, while we were assigned to a dilapidated old dormitory from the 1968 Olympic Games that was so filthy our players wouldn’t get under the bedsheets, and the showers had standing water in them.
The next morning we went to breakfast, and somebody said, “Look at all those cats.”
Bill Wall, who’d come over to visit us, said, “Those aren’t cats, those are rats.”
I said, “You’ve got to get us out of here, right now.” And he did. But when we went to practice, there were no lights, and no nets on the rim, and we had one flat ball.
For all our comparative luxuries at Tennessee, we were still slighted. Although we played in Stokely, our locker room was in the basement and we shared it with male wrestlers. When we went on the road for doubleheaders with the men’s team, we packed into our fifteen-passenger van, while they flew. Scheduling court time was a constant headache. We were told that we couldn’t set foot on the court until the men had finished practicing. But when we practiced, the guys would come out while we were still working and warm up and shoot. There were days when we couldn’t get into our locker room because it was being used for a visiting men’s team in one sport or another. We didn’t have anything that we could point to and say, “Wait a minute, that’s ours.”
In 1977, the AIAW convention came to Memphis, and the main topic of conversation was the open hostility women faced regarding Title IX. Elma Roane of Memphis State complained that the NCAA wanted women’s basketball “to remain a club sport.” Bettye Giles said, “It’s been difficult to maintain a working relationship. Eventually we’re going to have to get together. Everyone needs to get rid of this male-female thing and start working on what’s best for everybody.”
There were two ways to approach the problem: I could go right at it, or I could try to finesse it. I chose finesse. The fact was that we couldn’t fight these battles by ourselves: it was important for women to lead women, but we needed powerful male allies too, men like Bill Wall and Dr. Ed Boling. Even Victoria Cape had a man behind her: it was really her father, James, who brought the lawsuit against Tennessee high schools. Especially in the South, a woman didn’t make male allies by ranting or picking needless fights. There was an old saying, “You don’t cut what you can untie.”
I found a softer presentation worked better. I felt I understood guys’ sensibilities and knew how to talk to them, having grown up with three brothers. I also liked their company and wasn’t easily offended. There was so much apprehension about what Title IX would mean for men’s sports that it was important to reassure them. When our women’s athletic director, Gloria Ray, and I lobbied for donations, we made a point of saying, “We are not a substitute for men’s sports. We’re an addition to them.”
I envied my male counterparts their marketing b
udgets, large staffs, and air travel; they had it easy. But I bit my tongue. Nancy Darsch became my full-time assistant in 1979, and she was much more outspoken than I was. When we faced an eight-hour trip in a van while the men flew to the same city, she wanted me to take it up with the university authorities. But I knew it was important to be flexible. I told Nancy, “It doesn’t do any good to criticize. Let’s find some solutions or alternatives.”
I would get her all fired up, and then she’d have to calm herself before she went into a meeting. There is the old saying that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. She had a knack for how to present things and how to reason with people and do it calmly. She had a way with the men in decision-making positions.
—NANCY DARSCH
When the men’s team got ten pairs of sneakers, I didn’t storm in and demand ten pairs for us. We didn’t need ten. I would ask for two pairs. When I looked at the men’s recruiting budget, I didn’t demand that we have matching funds. I just gasped and said, “We couldn’t spend that in two years. We don’t need that much.” Emulating the excesses of the men’s teams and the way they overspent wasn’t my recipe for fiscal success.
I won one small issue at a time: an upgrade from motels to Hiltons; a small budget for air travel. There was the memorable day when we moved upstairs in Stokely to a real dressing room. When I walked our kids into their new quarters and they saw their sleek wooden lockers, with doors that closed and their own nameplates, they were so overwhelmed they actually got tears in their eyes.
But I also knew that no matter how soft my approach, some in the men’s department resented me, an uncomfortable sensation that would persist for decades, and it was important and reassuring to have someone like R.B. at my side. When I felt exposed and criticized during the high school controversy, R.B. didn’t just support me, he told me he was proud of me. When I came home from work frustrated and wearily observed, “It’s a man’s world,” he just looked back at me sympathetically and said, “You’re right.”
He didn’t act self-conscious about the fact that his girlfriend was a better athlete than he was. Instead he let me teach him racquetball, and we played until we were drenched with sweat. Then we’d walk up on “The Hill,” a peak at the center of campus, and sit on a lawn amid the old redbrick and white stone citadel-like buildings, with a view of the surrounding hills and the lazy brown Tennessee River. We’d open beers and talk while we cooled off and watched the sun set.
When R.B. got to be a decent enough player to start beating me, I got edgy about it and had trouble cooking his dinner cheerfully. He understood what a competitor I was, and he quietly announced he didn’t think it was “good for our relationship,” and instead we entered local tournaments and played other people instead of each other.
We went to Tennessee football games together every weekend, and I would look around at the tremendous, rabid support from the huge crowds that filled Neyland Stadium. When I told R.B. I dreamed of filling up an arena to see the Lady Vols play, he didn’t laugh. He told me that he believed I was capable of it one day.
He came to every one of our home games and began making occasional road trips with me, offering to help drive. In those days he owned a Ford window van with captain’s chairs, a cooler, curtains, and fold-down backbench seats. He would haul the luggage for the team, so we had more room to stretch out our long legs in our fifteen-passenger vehicle. Sometimes I’d leave Nancy with the team van and ride with R.B., but more often than not I didn’t feel I should ride separately from the team, so he’d play lead dog for us and drive ahead because he had a CB and a radar detector. On those long drives, I’d loan R.B. one of our players, to help keep him awake.
The kids teased me that they were relieved when R.B. and I met, because there were so many days when I came to practice happy. R.B. had a way of getting me to relent, of reminding me they were just kids. He would laugh at everything they did and talk about how silly they were, just teenagers, and tell me how much he enjoyed being part of the team and what I did for a living.
I could handle it. To me her work was challenging and different and fun, and I could see what a great opportunity it was for her. I just had this sense that women should have the same opportunities, and that was a thing we talked about a lot, how the game built so much social character.
—R.B. SUMMITT
R.B. helped me through the first serious crisis I faced with a player. Lisa McGill’s wildness finally got the better of her. In the summer of ’77 she went to a boating and waterskiing party and she was in the river carving up the water on a competition ski, when she jumped a wake and lost control and went into a cartwheel. She catapulted across the water, and the ski caught, and the force of it almost took her leg off. She ripped every muscle and tendon she had, and some veins and arteries as well.
I rushed to the emergency room, to find Lisa in shock, on an IV, and being prepped for emergency surgery. “I’m really sick,” she said. I knew her well enough to ask, “What have you been drinking today?” She answered, “Scotch and water.” I said plaintively, “Well, you oughta be sick.”
I walked into an anteroom to talk to the orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Bill Youmans, who would operate on Lady Vols throughout my career. I asked him how bad it was. His face told me it was not good, but I wasn’t prepared for his answer: He’d never seen a worse leg injury. The worst-case scenario was that she could actually lose her leg.
“Pat, I don’t know if she’ll ever play again,” he said. “I don’t know if she’ll walk. I don’t know if I can fix it.”
I had a flashback of lying in a hospital in Nashville, as a surgeon said similar words. I stared at Dr. Youmans with Richard Head’s eyes. “I guess this is where the rubber meets the road,” I said.
He fixed it, but Lisa was in a cast from hip to toe and we wouldn’t know if she could play again for months. Two days after the surgery, I told Lisa’s mother she needed to get some rest and offered to stay the night at the hospital. I slept on a cot by Lisa’s bedside, and in the middle of the night I woke up to hear her calling, “Pat, Pat, help me.” I jumped up and found that she had sweated through her nightclothes. “I’m freezing to death,” she said. I found some dry things and propped her up and gingerly helped her change, trying not to cause too much pain. It was about three A.M. when I finally got her settled back to sleep. As she was drifting off, I blurted awkwardly, “I love you, Lise.” She said, “I love you, too.”
The first person to show up at the hospital the next morning was R.B. Summitt. He came with coffee, juice, and doughnuts. For the rest of the summer he was my emotional support, which I’d never had before; previously, when things went badly, I was on my own, because my family was back in Henrietta. R.B. became the person I confided in about the sickening worry during the long afternoons at the hospital, and then the 5:30 A.M. workouts in the swimming pool when she started to rehabilitate. Lisa swam so much that when Dr. Youmans told her she couldn’t even think about playing for a year, she decided to try out for the Lady Vol swimming team and made it. It helped strengthen her leg, and she eventually rejoined us.
Lisa’s accident uncovered something in me. The kind of commitment we had on our team put all kinds of emotions at stake. When you worked, played, and fought as hard as we did together, we couldn’t help loving one another. But the thing about love and commitment was that it could also wound.
After just a few months of being together, R.B. bought a diamond ring and showed it to me. It was probably a mistake—it scared me. For all his support, I told R.B. I wasn’t convinced that he really knew what he was getting into with me, or with my work, which I had no intention of giving up. I saw better than he did what was ahead: marriage to me wouldn’t be easy, and it certainly wouldn’t be conventional. I was a highly unusual choice for a traditional southern man—even my own brother Tommy shook his head and told him, “I don’t know how you put up with Sis.” How would R.B. feel when the novelty of my basketball passion wore off? Would he pressure me to q
uit? I declined the proposal—for now. I wasn’t refusing him, I said, but I felt it was premature.
“I want to be sure,” I said. “I need more time.”
He agreed to wait.
I loved our players and wanted a closer relationship with them, but up to that point, I didn’t know how to have it. I was so consumed with their performance on the court that I had trouble talking to them about other things. It was pretty obvious they didn’t want to talk to me, when they’d all try to pack into the equipment van driven by Nancy Darsch instead of riding with me. At the time, I convinced myself it was a compliment.
When we lost, my van was a miserable place to be. It had a double gas tank, and when it ran low I could flip a switch to the other tank. That meant we could drive for hours without pulling over for a bathroom break or a bite of food.
“I’Il never push you more than I’ll push myself,” I said. It never occurred to me to ask what demon was pushing me so hard in the back. I’d push and push—and then walk out of the gym and leave Nancy to bind up their emotional wounds, soothe their feelings, and listen to their woes.
Even for me sometimes observing, I would feel pain for them. I would try to smooth it over, put an arm around a shoulder and say, “You’re okay.” She was fierce, no question about it, but those players got pushed beyond their comfort zone and that was not a bad thing. She wanted them to go at it with her. Pat wanted them to fight.
—NANCY DARSCH
It was the Richard in me, I guess. I visited Henrietta and sat on the sofa and watched my father play checkers with my little nephew, Derrick, one of Tommy’s sons. Daddy wouldn’t let him take a single piece. They’d play, and Daddy would sweep the board, and Derrick would cry.
