by Pat Summitt
I also knew we had a great chance to win another title—if I could convince our team not to rest on their laurels, which they were in danger of doing. I had coached teams that got complacent and recognized all the signs.
I had some techniques for dealing with it, making them less self-satisfied.
I benched Candace Parker. Twice. The first time was at Stanford, when she disobeyed my instruction to deny the middle—you’d think they would learn by now. “You either stick to it, or you won’t play,” I told her. We were trailing—I didn’t care, it was the principle of the thing. Besides which, a part of me thought, Let’s see what we do without her. We lost in overtime, 73–69.
The second benching came in Chicago against number fifteen DePaul, just after the New Year. It was Candace’s hometown and her whole family came, as did her fiancé, Shelden Williams, who stayed in our hotel. Two nights before the game, Candace missed curfew because she was visiting Shelden’s room. She didn’t blow it by much—just twenty minutes or so. Still, the entire team knew she hadn’t made bed check, and we had to constantly guard against the suspicion that Candace got special treatment because she was a star.
She left me no choice. I had to bench her. I hated to do it to her family, but I told Candace, “If it’s good for everyone else, it’s good for you.” Lex and Nicky were our captains and I went to them. “I think I have to bench her for the whole game,” I said. They argued that was too harsh and suggested I bench her for the first half, which was what I was hoping they’d say.
It ended up working in our favor, because it taught us that we could play without Candace if we had to. Alex Fuller, one of our most unsung but reliable players, came off the bench for a career-high 19 points, and Nicky chipped in 12, while Candace stood next to me on the sideline chewing on her jersey in frustration.
I did everything I could to unsettle them, plagued by a sense that they were too pleased with themselves. One afternoon when they arrived at practice, there were no balls in sight. I said, “You know what? Here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to climb the stairs to the very top of this arena. You guys don’t understand what people go through to come here and watch you play. No team in the country has the support you have, and you take it for granted. So I want you to walk to the top and sit there and reflect on what it takes to get here, and the amount of money people pay to see you play. Sit up there and discuss what you’re going to do different. Because this isn’t about you.”
At times you cringed, because you’d want to say, “It ain’t perfect but it’s pretty good, Pat.” But she would just want to go in and shake it up. She’d take that snow globe and shake it and watch the snowflakes fall. Because her instincts were telling her, “Hey, we can’t let ’em get too comfortable.”
—DEAN LOCKWOOD
All these events combined to give us the edginess we needed for the NCAA tournament—in which nothing was comfortable. We drew the most hard-nosed and hot-handed team in the country for our regional final, Texas A&M. Early in the first half, Candace went for a steal—and came out of a scrum for the ball grabbing at her left shoulder. Her arm drooped weirdly, dangling like a limp fire hose. I knew on sight exactly what it was—she had dislocated her shoulder.
I knew because I had done the same thing two weeks earlier, fighting off a raccoon. Sitting on the rail of my back deck, it had surprised me, hissing and about to attack my Labrador, Sally. The dog tensed—and then let out a bay as the raccoon was about to spring. I said, “Sally, no!,” and without even thinking I stepped forward and gave the raccoon a forearm shiver, knocking it off the rail and into the undergrowth below. I hit it so hard I yanked my shoulder out of joint. Now I was the one baying, in pain, as my arm fell to my side. I grabbed at my shoulder and staggered back inside and woke Tyler up so he could pop my arm back into place. The story got around and made it into the local paper, and I was practically pelted with fake raccoons. People sent them in the mail, left them on my desk, put pictures of them on my refrigerator.
Jenny Moshak, our longtime head of sports medicine, took Candace to the locker room and popped the shoulder back into place and put a brace on her. Candace was clearly favoring her arm, but she dug in and played through the pain. The Aggies led us by five, with 6:17 to play. We could have folded—instead, other players rose up, led by Lex Hornbuckle, who launched a three-pointer from 40 feet that blew through the net to give us some breathing room, and somehow we got out of there with the win, 53–45.
We went to Tampa for what would be the last NCAA Final Four of my career, though I hardly knew it at the time. All I knew was that we had to face LSU, our Southeastern Conference rival, coached by one of the savviest men in the game, Van Chancellor, and led by one of the few players who could meet Candace Parker eye to eye, a giant six-foot-five eagle named Sylvia Fowles.
Everything we tried to do, they checkmated. We were up by just 22–19 at the half, the lowest halftime score in NCAA Final Four history. Nobody could gain an edge. Until, with 7.1 seconds left, it was LSU ahead by a point, 46–45.
Time-out.
Candace was being smothered and struggling. Of all people, she went to Nicky Anosike for help; that was how far they had come. “Nicky, I need you to talk me through this,” she said.
“Listen to me,” Nicky said. “It doesn’t matter what happened the rest of this game. It matters what happens here and now. This is what people are going to be talking about. What happens in the next few seconds.”
Over on the sideline, my old friend Tara VanDerveer was watching closely. Just two hours earlier, her Stanford team, led by a luminous star named Candice Wiggins, had beaten UConn to make it into the title game. Whoever prevailed over the next seven seconds would be her opponent. At the moment it looked like LSU. But Tara turned to her assistant coaches.
“You watch,” she said. “Pat’s going to pull another rabbit out of the hat.”
But I wasn’t the one who performed the magic trick. If I haven’t talked enough about our staff, what happened next should illustrate how valuable they were all those years. During every time-out, I briefly huddled with them and sought ideas. Sometimes I drove them crazy: I wanted their stimulation, wheels turning, everyone feeding me ideas, but I was just as likely to sift through their suggestions and then discard them, saying, “Here’s what I’m going to do.”
But in this instance, I seized on an idea from Nikki Caldwell, who a week later would become a head coach in her own right at UCLA. “Have Candace bring the ball up,” she said urgently. It was totally counterintuitive: Candace was our go-to player, on whom we counted when we needed a score. If Candace brought the ball up the court, that meant she’d have to pass it off. It meant someone else would take the last shot of the game. It meant that if we lost, everyone in the country would want to know why we hadn’t gone to the best player in the game. I nodded. It was a high-stakes decision. But I loved being the trigger puller. Loved it.
I went into the huddle—and made the last critical call I would ever make in an NCAA Final Four. I looked at Lex, who would be our inbounder. “Get the ball in to Candace,” I said. I turned to Candace. “They will converge on you. Find the open player.” They all nodded and took their places.
What happened next is a credit to the culture of a program in which players are taught to commit, to play all out, to attend to every detail no matter how seemingly unimportant, to never go through the motions, no matter how routine seeming, to finish with as much energy as they started with.
Everything happened just as we predicted. Lex inbounded to Candace, who took four giant dribbles up the court. The clock ticked 7 … 6 … 5. The LSU defenders collapsed on her—drawn to her like iron filings to a magnet. Candace kept her eyes up the court … and rifled a pass to Nicky under the LSU basket. Nicky went up—an LSU defender swatted at her. The shot ticked off the rim. Nicky had missed. The clock ticked 4 … 3 …
Out of nowhere Lex came flying in like Batman. She had gone scoreless all game. But after inboundin
g the ball she had sprinted hard and trailed Nicky to the basket. She hurled herself into the air over Nicky’s back and caught the ball up around the backboard. She hung there for a moment—and then kissed it softly off the glass. It fell through the net for the game winner, to send us into the national championship game. Lex Hornbuckle had started the play behind the baseline on the opposite end of the court—she was the last player to set foot on the floor. Yet she had beaten the defense to the basket and scored the game winner.
Pandemonium.
Two days later, we defeated Stanford for our eighth national championship, 64–48, and I stood under another soft, dense rain of confetti. Had I known I’d never see another Final Four as a competitor, I might have taken more careful note of my thoughts. All I remember is feeling blaze-eyed with euphoria, and yet snow-blinded by all the colorful paper that drifted around me. Those fluttering bits of brightness seemed so reflective of the countless inspired moments our players had given me, a great torrent of victories. More than three decades of potent emotions seemed to be cascading down on my head all at once. Up on the rim of the arena, a huge rainbow-lit LED display read “And then there was Tennessee.”
I felt full of wistful, appreciative love for our seniors, whom I would miss badly. Candace Parker was simply the most gifted player I ever laid hands on. Lex Hornbuckle and Shannon Bobbitt would live in my memory as two of the greatest difference makers we ever had, and Nicky Anosike’s combination of leadership and scholarship was matchless; she would be named NCAA Woman of the Year. That spring, they would all graduate with the highest cumulative grade point average we ever had, and our entire starting five would be drafted by the WNBA. The strangest outcome of all: Candace and Nicky would become the closest of friends. I was inexpressibly proud of all of them.
Not too long after we returned to Knoxville, Dean told me that he wanted to fix me up. He had met the man for me, he said. He had stopped at a gas station late one night to fill up his car. He stuck the nozzle into the tank, and he noticed a guy one pump over, looking at him weirdly. The guy was a rough character, long hair, tattoos, missing a tooth, with a grimy baseball cap.
Cap Guy goes, “Hey! You’re that man-fella, aren’t you, that works with the Lady Vols?”
Dean, disconcerted, said, “Yeah. That’s me.”
“You work every day with Coach Summitt. You see her every day, doncha?”
Dean surreptitiously checked out the guy’s car, trying to assess the situation. It had a gun rack. He said carefully, “Yes, I do.”
The guy handed him a card, with his name and phone number on it.
“You give her this,” he said. “That’s my kinda woman right there. Any woman gonna square off with a raccoon, that’s my kinda woman. I wanna meet her.”
Can we talk about your faith?
I’d like to do that.
What were you taught growing up?
Well, we just went to a very small country church. It was simple. We were taught to love the Lord.
Do you think God is with you in this?
I do.
Do you believe this happened to you for a reason?
Yes. I understand it. But I don’t always like it. I know I got a big battle ahead. I’m going to outlive the life expectancy.
Do you believe when you do die, you’ll be reunited with the people you love? Like Richard?
I don’t know what form it will take. How do you wrap your mind around that? I don’t think I’m afraid to die.
You seem to have peace.
You make it what you can. And then you move on.
—September 23, 2012, on the phone late at night, sixteen months after diagnosis
11
Patient
What I hated most about the Alzheimer’s diagnosis was all the “can’ts” that came with it. Can’t cure it. Can’t reverse it. So many people told me about all the things an Alzheimer’s patient eventually can’t do. Can’t work. Can’t drive. Can’t travel. I seemed to be surrounded by negativity, by fear, and by stigma.
Almost nobody talked to me about the things I can do.
There was only one “can’t” I would accept regarding the illness. “I can’t change it,” I told Tyler. “But I can try to do something about it.”
I was determined to make a list of the cans: I can continue to work for as long as possible—I refuse to stay at home and rot away. I can resist the pressure to retire and disappear. I can decline to be afraid, or self-conscious. I can try to be an example: it’s easy to tell people how things are done; real teachers show people how things are done.
I can joke about it.
“I’ve forgotten I have it,” I told Tyler.
I can fight.
I’d always told our players that attitude is a choice. “It is what it is,” I said, “but it will become what you make of it.” I’d prepared my whole adult professional life for this sort of battle. If this wasn’t what I had been teaching young women over three and a half decades, under the guise of basketball, then I’d had no purpose at all. None.
The fact is, by the time I was diagnosed, I had been working with Alzheimer’s quite well for some time. Three more Aprils had passed since we’d won our 2008 title. The afterglow of the championship wore off quickly: in ’09, we replaced the Parker-Anosike crowd almost entirely with freshmen, and I couldn’t grow them up fast enough to avoid an upset loss to Ball State in the first round of the NCAA tournament. But since then they had matured beautifully, with back-to-back seasons of 32-3 and 34-3. We had won just about everything in our sights; the only gap in our résumé was a Final Four. Whatever the signs of Alzheimer’s, and whenever they manifested, they hadn’t prevented us from running up a 66-6 record over two seasons.
I arrived at a decision: I wanted to meet the disease as assertively as I’d met every other challenge in my life. With Tyler’s help, I sought treatment from my neurologist, Dr. John Dougherty, head of the Memory Clinic at the University of Tennessee’s Cole Neuroscience Center, who put me on the standard Alzheimer’s medications Aricept and Namenda. But Tyler also began to research cutting-edge clinics where I could get second opinions and explore emerging therapies and clinical trials.
Next, I had to inform the Tennessee administration, and I had to go public. I will be frank: the prospect of telling the world I had Alzheimer’s made me flinch. All my vanity, and my competitive instincts as a coach, recoiled from the idea. People will use it against me, a voice in my head whispered. But another voice told me, You have to face the truth.
In the third week of August 2011, Tyler called our longtime friend and attorney Robert B. Barnett of the Washington, D.C., law firm Williams & Connolly to tell him what we’d learned at Mayo. Bob flew to Knoxville for a meeting. I’m sure he assumed he was coming to negotiate my retirement package.
I surprised him. I told Bob I didn’t believe the disease was severe enough yet to warrant retirement. “I’d like to coach two more years,” I said. I feared resigning abruptly would harm the program that was such a labor of love for me and betray the players I’d recruited. Although I was having symptoms, I believed I could still do two critical things: teach and lead.
But Bob looked grim. Given the progressive nature of Alzheimer’s, he thought it likely university administration officials would ask me to retire. I needed to prepare myself to walk away on my own terms.
I nodded and said something noncommittal. Then I got up from the couch and went into my bedroom and lay down in the dark and wept. It was a blow. I wanted to fight—and they might not let me.
At that moment, I had to confront the fact that Alzheimer’s wasn’t the kind of opponent over which I could declare a triumph. A victory in this case wasn’t going to be a banner-raising affair. After thirty-eight years, all that I had built was being wrested away from me like a repossession in the night. Alzheimer’s had walked into my home and taken over. It stood in the corner like a dim shade, giving all the orders and making decisions for me, while I sat there, saying, “But
…”
I’d always been the decider, the trigger puller. But victory in this case was simply maintaining some say over my life. It was going to be a matter of smaller, day-to-day conquests over helplessness, and purposelessness. It was a siege, a one-step-up-and-two-steps-back affair. It was about buying time.
A few minutes later, Tyler came in. After I’d left the room, Tyler and Bob had continued to talk, and they arrived at a possible solution. Bob would propose that I remain as head coach, but with a redistribution of some of my duties to the assistants, who could take on the things I was struggling to do, like play calling. It was worth a try, but it would depend on whether or not Tennessee’s administrators still saw me as having some value and abilities.
That afternoon, Tyler, Bob, and I met with UT chancellor Jimmy Cheek and Joan Cronan. Bob had his lawyer’s body armor on and was prepared to battle on my behalf. But as Chancellor Cheek and Joan listened to my disclosure and heard the word Alzheimer’s, tears streamed down their faces. Chancellor Cheek said, “You are now and will always be our coach, for as long as you’re able. As long as you want to be part of the Tennessee family, there will be a place for you.” He gave me the blessing to continue, as did Joan. They understood we would be in uncharted waters. Joan said, “But think about the difference you’ve made and can make going forward.” Their attitude was that the experiment was well worth it. Tyler and I then left, and Bob sat down with the university counsel, Catherine Mizell, and Chancellor Cheek to iron out the details of reworking my contract.
It was a remarkable vote of confidence, and a relieving one. It also didn’t surprise me; UT’s administrators had been generous to me since I was twenty-two years old. Whether it was Andy Holt coming to a game with a sack of ham sandwiches, or Dr. Joe Johnson making me the highest-paid coach in the sport, or Dr. Cheek and Joan reaching a steadying hand out in the face of a mortal diagnosis, I’d had their unwavering support. There weren’t many female professionals who could count on such benevolence from their employers. I could. But I couldn’t help thinking about other Alzheimer’s patients who wanted to keep working, but no one would fashion a role for them, because of the perception that the disease renders you instantly useless. Maybe I could change that perception—maybe that was how I was supposed to redefine victory.
