by Pat Summitt
If there was a player who taught me just how much control I didn’t have, it was Lynne Collins. She was a big, energetic, bass-voiced blonde whom we nicknamed Orca for her habit of throwing herself on the floor and flopping after loose balls like a beached whale. R.B. and I had driven over to scout Lynne in a high school game, and during a time-out I watched her bite the top off a water bottle, because it was too small. She just spit out the plastic and chugged. I turned to R.B. and said, “I want that kid.”
But Lynne was also what I called “an outlaw.” She didn’t just chug water, she chugged beer. She treated my training rules as purely optional, and right away started busting curfew. From then on she was constantly in trouble.
“Why are you always looking at me?” she asked.
“Because you smell like a brewery,” I said.
Lynne swore I had a network of snitches all over town, waiting to call in her every transgression, which I did. She used to sing the lyrics to Michael Jackson’s “Somebody’s Watching Me.” She would chant, “Pat Summitt’s waaaaatching me. I got no privacccccy.…” We played constant cat and mouse. Once, when I heard she had been out and about, I got in my car and drove out to the strip where I knew she was likely to be. She saw my gray Oldsmobile Toronado coming down an alley toward her and broke into a run—first she tried to hide behind a bus, and then she crept behind a light pole. Finally I wrangled her into the car and told her she was not only benched, she wasn’t even allowed to dress for the game. That night Lynne showed up in her street clothes—and limped to the bench so everyone would think she was injured.
After a while Lynne started going farther afield, hoping to evade detection. One afternoon I strode into practice while the players were stretching, and I made a beeline right for her. She just rolled her eyes and said, “Uh-oh.”
I said, “I heard you bought a six-pack of Coors at the Pilot gas station on Northshore last night.”
Northshore was twenty miles from campus.
Lynne goes, “Nope.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“It was actually an eight-pack of Miller Lite,” she said.
I just stared at her and tried to contain my icy smile.
“I know,” Lynne said, wearily. “ ‘Get on the line.’ ”
Lynne did everything dramatically. Whenever I made the team run suicides, she screamed like it was about to kill her. She would hit the end line and wail, “OH MY GOD!” After each sprint they got ten seconds to recover, and then had to go again. One afternoon Lynne’s screams got louder and louder. Every time she hit the end line, I heard, “OH MY GOD!”
After about the fourth time, I got tired of hearing it. I looked at her with daggers in my eyes and I said, “Lynne Collins, if I hear that out of you one more time, we’re gonna run ten more.”
Everyone around Lynne muttered, “Lynne, shut up.”
They ran again. This time when Lynne approached the line, everybody tensed. Her foot hit the baseline. She took a deep, gasping breath and opened her mouth, and this is what I heard: “JE-SUS CHRIST!”
Everybody just stopped dead. The gym fell totally silent and they all looked at me to see what I would do. I had to turn away because I started giggling, and next to me Nancy Darsch was giggling too, and pretty soon we were laughing so hard we had to bend over.
I was figuring out more subtle approaches to discipline. I was continually racked with worry about their well-being: How do you sleep when you feel responsible for a dozen eighteen- to twenty-year-olds with car keys, willful temperaments, raging thirsts, and surging hormones? But if I tried to police everything they did, we’d all be miserable. The answer was to borrow from Richard Head and have just a few simple rules—but make sure they feared the consequences of breaking them.
One evening I ran into two of our players, Susan Foulds and her roommate, Cindy Noble, our all-American center, at a Tennessee men’s game. Lately I thought I’d smelled nicotine on them. I strolled over and took a seat next to them.
“I had a funny dream last night,” I said conversationally. “I dreamed I caught you two smoking.”
They blanched. There was a long, tense pause. Then Cindy spoke.
“What did you dream you did to us?”
I said coolly, “I dreamed I made you run.” Then I got up and sauntered away.
But the most effective way to get their attention was to embarrass them. They liked to look good—cared about appearances. When we went on a road trip to Colorado, they spent most of their time sunbathing, oiled up and lounging outside on the hotel patio, all day. We lost by 20. I was furious—but instead of making them run sprints when we got home, I made them run right then and there, in front of the opposing fans as soon as the game was over. They were mortified. They looked good doing it though. Bronzed up.
Another time we lost at Stephen F. Austin. Horrible. She made us go into their weight room and lift weights. We had our uniforms on, and our sweats. I weighed 118 pounds and couldn’t lift a bar, much less the weights. Their fans and staff were watching us. Like, “Look, there are the Lady Vols.”
—PAT HATMAKER
But the young women on that team were made of something, as was anyone who survived with me. I discovered how much steel they had in them the night I drove them to a cookout thrown by some boosters, and our van blew out a tire. I pulled the shuddering van over to the shoulder of the interstate and got out and started rummaging in the back for a jack. I couldn’t find one. There was no jack.
I stuck my head inside the side door and said, “All right, ladies. Everybody out of the van.” They climbed out and stood around.
“Half of you on this side, and half on the other,” I said. “On the count of three, you’re gonna lift, and I’ll change the tire.”
They stared at me incredulously. “You want us to lift a van?” Hatmaker asked.
“Let’s go,” I ordered.
They shuffled into place, doubtfully. Half of them got on one side, and half on the other. I counted to three—and they lifted that van up. I don’t how they didn’t blow their backs out, but they did it. Some took more weight than others—skinny Pat Hatmaker was shaking like a Chihuahua after a haircut.
I said, “Okay, hold it. Hold it.”
They stood there trembling with effort until finally I said, “Okay, drop ’er down.”
They were proud of it. When we got to the cookout, they said, “Sorry we’re late. We got a flat and had to lift the van.”
The better I got to know our players, the more I was able to search out their competitive personalities, find their insecurities, and shore them up. “Mo” Ostrowski was a magnificent, willowy pure player with tremendous reach and finesse. But she was strangely passive on the court. She lacked that drive-it-up-the-floor personality, a gimme-the-ball-and-get-out-of-my-way attitude that great scorers usually have. Some players want the ball in crucial situations, but others are more anxious; they think, What if I don’t make it? What if I miss? Mary would hesitate. In a game against Long Beach State, we had a chance to win with a few seconds left and Mo holding the ball. She had an open shot right in front of her. But instead of shooting it, she saw Lynne Collins under the basket, and passed it—just as Lynne turned to rebound. The ball hit Lynne in the back, and we never got a shot off.
Taking a game over just didn’t come naturally to her, I realized. Watching her early in her career was like looking at a skyscraper in which the elevator didn’t yet go all the way to the top. It was my job to try to get the elevator all the way up. I tried begging her to shoot, and threatening her. Finally I just required it. I made a rule: she had to get off at least ten shots a game or she had to run. It worked: she ended up leading us in scoring her sophomore and senior years and made all-American.
Hatmaker had a similar shyness, though I didn’t realize it at first. She was a wonderful player to watch, catlike and agile, so active that I didn’t realize how much confidence she still lacked as a freshman. But I began to notice that she didn’t like much physic
al contact. Pat was afraid of taking a charge: when another player came at her, instead of setting her feet she would shuffle and cringe. I took care of that one day in practice: I made Pat take a charge from every player on our team, until she learned that a little bump wasn’t going to break her. Physical nerve was never again an issue with Pat. In fact, she went on to become a police officer, and then a security specialist at the Oak Ridge nuclear facility. Hatmaker keeps us all safe.
But as a freshman Pat had some lingering insecurity, which I didn’t realize until we were in the Final Four with a game on the line. The Fearless Five finished their freshman year by making it all the way to the national semifinals in Eugene, Oregon, where we once again met Old Dominion. The game came down to the last eleven seconds, and we had a one-point lead. I called a time-out and set up a play: I wanted to get the ball in Hatmaker’s hands because she was our quickest, best ball handler and best free throw shooter.
We came out of our huddle—and I saw the players have a second huddle. Not a good sign. Then Mo Ostrowski picked up the ball and slapped it, to start the play. Hatmaker took off—and ran away from the play. Never looked back. Instead, our junior guard Susan Clower stepped up and received the ball and was immediately fouled. Now, Susan didn’t go to the free throw line much in pressure situations.
Inside, I was livid. But everything I’d learned about communicating with players told me that it was vital to stay positive, because Susan immediately looked over to me for reassurance. How do you look back at someone who is clearly nervous, who you know isn’t real comfortable in this situation? I just remember giving her the thumbs-up and telling her she was ready. And she was: Susan was playing in her third straight Final Four. She hit the first shot, looked right back over at me again. I gave her another high sign. She made the second one, and we won, 68–65.
It was a great moment for Susan and our whole team. But I couldn’t celebrate, for thinking about what had just happened. On the way to the locker room, Mo Ostrowski caught up with me. “I’ve got to tell you something,” she said. “After our huddle, we had another huddle.”
I said, “I noticed.”
“Hatmaker told us she did not want the ball,” Mary said.
When I got to the locker room, Pat was sitting right in the front row. She made immediate eye contact with me, which was important because it meant she wanted to confront what had happened. It was a brave reaction and I respected her for it. But it was also my responsibility to call her out. “I can’t believe you wouldn’t want the ball, and I can’t believe we put you in this situation,” I said, “and you let the whole team down.” But I didn’t want to get so caught up in how upset I was with Pat that we failed to prepare for tomorrow—we had a championship game to play against Louisiana Tech. I started to pump her back up. “You’ll be okay,” I said. “You’re going to learn from this. Now, let’s move on.”
But I was the person who learned the most that day. I’d not done a good job of understanding the players I was working with and how they responded to pressures. My most important call of the game was designed to get the ball to Hatmaker, and Hatmaker didn’t want the ball. Not once had I sat with her and said, “How would you feel if we’re in this situation?” I should have known. Should have talked to her more—or better yet, listened to her.
That I still had a lot to learn showed in the championship game: Louisiana Tech killed us, 79–59. We were too young; we fell behind by 11 at halftime and I got outcoached by a couple of veterans on the Louisiana Tech sideline named Sonja Hogg and Leon Barmore, Sonja’s assistant. It was the first time we ever allowed a TV camera in our locker room, and NBC caught me live trying to encourage my players, which earned us the consolation of sympathy mail.
People started saying we were “always the bridesmaid, never the bride.” We just couldn’t seem to win—we always came up a little short—and the following year we were disappointed yet again. As seniors, the Fearless Five carried us to the brink of another national championship, this one at Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles. Mild “Mo” Ostrowski finally rose to her full height and set an NCAA record in the semifinals with 35 points and 17 rebounds against Cheney State. In the title game, we met a team from Southern California that was one of the greatest ever assembled, starring an array of Hall of Famers and Olympians in Cheryl Miller, Cynthia Cooper, Pam and Paula McGee, and JaMaiia Bond.
It was a huge opportunity: I’d been named head coach of our ’84 Olympic team, which meant a crack at a rare double victory, a championship and a gold medal in the space of a few months. And it almost happened. We led Southern Cal for thirty-three minutes. It was right there; we could almost feel the trophy in our hands. But then our kids wore down. We made a couple of tired turnovers, and the Trojans surged over the last five minutes, to a 72–61 victory.
I’ll say this for us: we were good losers. It was our fifth trip to the Final Four in a seven-year stretch, and we’d lost every time. I racked my brain trying to figure out what the difference was between us and the teams that won. “What do we need to do?” I asked Nancy. “Is it the players? Is it me?”
I took to my bed, sick, and didn’t get up for two days. I shuffled around in my pajamas. I couldn’t eat; I couldn’t sleep. I blamed myself. It was me: I was the one responsible. You let it get away. You should have done something different. I was simply still learning against older and more experienced coaches. I stared at the tape trying to analyze my weakness: If I had gone to a zone, would it have changed the momentum? Why didn’t I switch defenses? Should I have conditioned us differently, so we had fresher legs? I felt like I cost us, whether because I was stubborn, or limited, not able to see the entire floor. I gritted my teeth and said, “Someday, we’re going to win a championship.”
Commitment is all about risk: the payoff is either heartbreak or exhilaration. But it’s also about tedium, the willingness to persevere through problems without quitting and, more important, without demoralization. It’s a kind of faith. In retrospect, those seasons weren’t failures: the only thing we failed to do was win one more game. As hard as I took our losses, there was dignity in them. We were willing to fail. How we behaved in those moments was, of course, as self-defining as winning could ever be, and that was a lesson that translated off the court. Both in marriage and in work, I’d discovered my own heart, and its capacity for devoting sustained, focused attention to something other than myself. In time I would go from feeling like we would never win, to feeling like you couldn’t ever count us out again.
Sometimes I wish God hadn’t given me so many issues.
What kind of issues?
Personal issues.
Can you tell me about them?
I guess they made me who I am. I guess they made me better. One thing I’ve learned.
What?
How powerful God is.
—April 14, 2012, Knoxville, Tennessee, eleven months after diagnosis
6
Professional Woman
After years of defending my right to an unconventional job, all I wanted was the most conventional female role, to be a mother. But for the first time in my life, I found something I couldn’t will myself to do. I could change a tractor tire, chop tobacco, and get a team to the Final Four, but I couldn’t do the most fundamental thing in the world: bear a child.
R.B. and I had settled into married life smoothly, with the exception of a couple of minor adjustments. At heart I was a traditionalist when it came to family, and I liked to cook dinner at home every night. One evening I was stirring something on the stovetop when R.B. wandered in and began lecturing me because I used the big gas ring instead of the small one. “Now listen,” I said, “if you want this marriage to last, when I’m cooking you need to just get out of the way.”
We both had grown up in homes crowded with children—R.B. was the oldest of four—and we talked for hours about whether to have four children or five. I hoped for at least one daughter, so I could raise a strong woman. I was sure I could juggle m
otherhood with coaching, though the job had become more and more demanding—and deeply preoccupying. One night, I walked in the house without even noticing a new car in the driveway. R.B. said, “What do you think?”
“About what?” I said.
“Did you park in the garage?”
“Yes.”
“What did you see?”
There was a huge new gleaming SUV there, and I was so lost in thought that I had pulled up right alongside it and never registered it.
I had taken my ability to have a baby for granted. I don’t remember the exact dates or circumstances anymore—Alzheimer’s treats painful and joyful recollections equally. I just remember how thrilled I was each time I learned I was pregnant, and then the abrupt, empty despondency when I no longer was. Between 1982 and 1989, I suffered four miscarriages.
I barely had time to feel like an expectant mother the first time it happened, early in my first trimester. The doctor explained that it wasn’t uncommon; almost a quarter of pregnancies end in miscarriage, and the vast majority of women go on to healthy pregnancies. I wiped the tears off my face. “We’ll just try again,” I told R.B., and to improve our chances I made myself as healthy as possible and quit drinking alcohol at dinner in favor of iced tea.
But I wasn’t in the vast majority. I lost another baby. And then another, this time not as early. I was pregnant long enough to feel that there were two of us in my body, and to be physically knocked down by the grief when I felt alone again.
