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

  Copyright © 2013 by Pat Head Summitt

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Summitt, Pat Head, 1952–

  Sum it up: a thousand and ninety-eight victories, a couple of irrelevant losses, and a life in perspective / Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins. — First edition.

  pages cm

  1. Summitt, Pat Head, 1952– —Mental health. 2. Alzheimer’s disease—Patients—Biography. 3. Basketball coaches—United States—Biography. 4. Tennessee Volunteers (Basketball team)—History.

  I. Jenkins, Sally. II. Title.

  RC523.3.S86 2013

  362.1968′310092—dc23

  [B] 2012050333

  eISBN: 978-0-385-34688-7

  Jacket design by Michael Nagin

  Jacket photography by Bradley Spitzer

  v3.1

  Dedicated to my families, original and extended: to my son, my mother, my siblings and their families; to my players and their parents and grandparents who made me part of their lives; to the many coaches and coaching mentors I’ve had the honor to work with who are as close as family; to the many friends who might as well be sisters and brothers; and finally to the family of people who combat Alzheimer’s disease

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1 • Footprints in the Sand

  2 • Country Girl

  3 • Miss Chi Omega

  4 • Olympian

  5 • Bridesmaid and Bride

  6 • Professional Woman

  7 • Working Mother

  8 • Champion, Part I

  Photo Insert

  9 • Champion, Part II

  10 • Single Mother

  11 • Patient

  Where Some of Them Are Now

  Appendix

  Acknowledgments

  Photograph Credit

  I know there’s something else I’m supposed to be doing.

  There’s something God wants me to do.

  Like what?

  I’m not sure.

  You don’t think winning eight national championships and raising a son is enough? You think there’s something more you’re supposed to be doing?

  I know there’s something else. I feel it.

  —February 23, 2011, on a road trip to Oxford, Mississippi, three months before diagnosis

  1

  Footprints in the Sand

  I remember a Tennessee field with hay as far as I could see and a tall man standing in it, staring at me with pale blue eyes. Eyes that you wanted to look away from. Daunting eyes. My father had eyes that gave me the feeling he could order up any kind of weather he wanted, just by looking at the sky. If the tobacco crop needed rain, he’d glare upward, until I swore it got cloudy. I gestured at the hay field and said, “Daddy, how long do I have to stay out here?” He said, “You’ll be finished when it’s done. And it’s not done till it’s done right.”

  I remember a leaning gray barn with an iron basketball rim mounted in the hayloft. At night after the chores—after it was done, and done right—my three older brothers and I climbed to the loft for ball games in which they offered no quarter. Just elbows and fists, and the advice “Don’t you cry, girl. I better not see you cry.” I remember learning to hit back—hard enough to send them through the gallery door into a ten-foot drop to the bales below.

  I remember the supper table crammed with bodies, children with clattering forks fighting over the last piece of chicken, and my mild, selfless mother, filling the glasses and plates with a close-lipped smile and a voice soft as a housedress, and then I remember watching her muscle a two-ton truck into gear and roar off to pick up farm supplies.

  I remember the searing smell of the ammonia that my college coach waved under my nose, and heavy polyester uniforms with crooked numerals, and the dark hotbox auxiliary gyms with no air-conditioning where they stuck women, one in particular leaking light from holes in the roof, through which birds flapped and splattered their droppings on the floor.

  I remember being young and wild with energy, conducting searches for amber liquid refreshments, pulling into joints that sold twenty-cent beer.

  “What’s your brand?”

  “Cold.”

  I remember standing on a medal podium in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, imbued with a sense that if you won enough basketball games, there was no such thing as poor, or backward, or country, or female, or inferior.

  I remember every player—every single one—who wore the Tennessee orange, a shade that our rivals hate, a bold, aggravating color that you can usually find on a roadside crew, “or in a correctional institution,” as my friend Wendy Larry jokes. But to us the color is a flag of pride, because it identifies us as Lady Vols and therefore as women of an unmistakable type. Fighters. I remember how many of them fought for a better life for themselves. I just met them halfway.

  I remember the faces on the young women who ran suicide drills, flame-lunged and set-jawed, while I drove them on with a stare that burned up the ground between them and me. I remember the sound of my own voice, shouting. “Holdsclaw, sprint through the line!” Urgent, determined. “Snow, you’re stronger than you think! You don’t ever let other people tell you who you are!” Exasperated, mocking, baiting. “Holly Warlick, just get out of the drill. Just get out. Put someone in who can throw a pass.”

  When you see Pat’s heartbeat in her neck, you’re in trouble. Big trouble. You don’t want to look in her eyes, so you try to look someplace else, and then you find her neck—and you see her heartbeat in her neck. Also, you see her teeth gritting. That’s not real cool either.

  —HOLLY WARLICK

  I remember being able to almost read their thoughts. That lady is crazy; why is she torturing us? (They embellish.) I can’t ever satisfy her; what does she want from me? (Only everything.) Man, I’m getting a bus ticket and going back to New York. Or Indiana. Or Oregon. Or coal country Kentucky.

  “Yeah, I would recommend playing for Pat Summitt,” Abby Conklin liked to say, “if a year of counseling comes with it.”

  Bless their hearts.

  I remember chewing the inside of my lower lip over losses, until I had a permanent entrenched scar. I remember asking my friends and family two questions after every NCAA championship game.

  “Do you think I was too hard on them?”

  “What did Daddy say?”

  I remember being so possessed by the job that I coached in my sleep. I’d toss and kick until I woke myself up hollering, “Git down the floor!”

  I remember standing on the sideline and stamping my high heels on the hardwood so furiously it sounded like gunshots, and whacking my hands on the scorer’s table until I flattened the gold championship rings on my fingers.

  I remember jabbing a finger into an official’s face and backing him from midcourt to the baseline.

  I remember the sound of certainty in my own voice, lifted over the roar of twenty thousand people and two rivalrous marching bands in a sold-out arena at the NCAA Final Four, as I told our players that though they trailed by eleven points with seven minutes to go, the game w
as ours. “We’re not leaving here without a championship!” I shouted hoarsely. “So y’all just go on out there and get it!”

  I remember how intensely in the moment I felt in big games. I remember the second-by-second adjustments, the dialing up of players’ emotions in the huddles, operating on pure feel, calling plays less by rational process than by some buried sense of rhythm, that now is the time for a change of pace. I remember the speed of the decision making—who needs the ball, who needs to be in the game—and how I loved that. Loved it.

  I remember the laughter that was always equal to the shouting, great geysers of it that went with victory champagne. Peals of stress-relieving hilarity behind closed doors with assistant coaches who have been more close friends than colleagues, Mickie DeMoss, Holly Warlick, Dean Lockwood, Nikki Caldwell. I remember Mickie, the queen of one-liners, razzing Dean about a date he wouldn’t introduce us to. “You know, Dean,” she said, “you can always get her teeth fixed,” and all of us whooped until we banged our silverware on the table.

  I remember their constant teasing about my hair, and my clothes—the outrageous colors, hemlines, and shoulder pads. Once, Holly scanned my light blue suit up and down and said, “No damn Easter egg is going to tell me what to do!”

  I remember a tiny saloon in the Tennessee hills where the bartender squirted bourbon shots from a squeeze bottle, straight into the customers’ mouths. I remember later, when I was older and more sedate, rambling across a vineyard in France with my great friend DeMoss and our former player Caldwell, and deciding to open the bottle of wine we’d just bought, but not having any glasses. “Well, we’ll just have to take it to the head,” Caldwell said. So we sipped the Bordeaux straight from the bottle.

  I remember teaching a clinic to other coaches and opening the floor for questions, and a guy raised his hand and asked if I had any advice when it came to “coaching women.” I remember leveling him with a death ray stare and then relaxing and curling up the corner of my mouth and saying, “Don’t worry about coaching ‘women.’ Just go home and coach ‘basketball.’ ”

  I remember my wedding day back in Henrietta, Tennessee, to R.B. Summitt, a handsome, deep-chested young banker from Sevierville, Tennessee. My parents against their better judgment ordered a champagne fountain for the reception, and the next morning my mother said softly, “Trisha, I think your guests got too full.”

  I remember the night my son was born. The doctor placed him on my chest and I said, “Hey, Tyler, I’ve been waitin’ on you.” He rolled directly toward the sound of my voice and locked eyes with me and R.B., who was by my shoulder. Holly and Mickie were in the delivery room for reasons too complicated to explain now but that I’ll get to later, and Mickie blurted, “He’s got kind of a cone head.” And Holly said, “Mickie, don’t say that!” and they started bickering, and it was true that he did have a little bit of a cone head, but he grew into a fine young baby, and a fine young man, and my greatest achievement.

  I remember all this. But there are also things I don’t remember; things that I know are important and that I should remember. On some days, I feel like a jigsaw with pieces missing. I can put most of the puzzle together, but there are blanks that I can’t fill in. It’s the middle that’s missing. How can I see the whole picture, know what it’s supposed to be, when the middle is missing? But then I look at my son, and remember.

  It’s you, darlin’, I think to myself. It’s you.

  Here are some of the things I don’t remember.

  Sometimes, when I first wake up, I don’t remember where I am. For a moment I’m disoriented and uneasy, and I have to lie there until it comes to me.

  Occasionally when I’m asked a question, I begin to answer it but then I forget the subject—it slips away like a thread through my fingers.

  I struggle to remember directions. There are moments when I’m driving to someplace I should know, and I have to ask, “Do I go left or right here?”

  I tend not to remember what hotel room I’m in.

  I don’t remember what time my appointments are for.

  I don’t remember records, final scores, and statistics. Numbers have a strange slipperiness for me, a lack of specificity; they suggest nothing. If you ask me how many games we won in 1998, or what happened in the 2008 NCAA national championship game, I struggle to remember which one it was.

  But if you tell me who was on that team—if you prompt me with names rather than numbers—Shannon Bobbitt, Alexis Hornbuckle, Alberta Auguste, Candace Parker, Nicky Anosike—they bring it all back. Show me a picture of a former player, frozen in an old team photo, and I remember her. “That’s Linda Ray,” I will say. “She didn’t play much but she was a great teammate, and smart. Biochemistry major.”

  By now, in considering the things I remember and the things I don’t, something may have struck you. My memories are not made up so much of information, but rather of episodes and engagements with the people I love. The things I struggle with—times, dates, schedules—are things you could as easily read on a digital watch or calendar. But people and emotions are engraved in me. What this tells me is that facts are only the smallest components of memory. They are elements, but nothing close to the whole.

  My birthday (June 14, 1952) is always on Flag Day, but that doesn’t begin to sum up the years of my life or the events stamped most deeply on me. Nor do other numbers that are so often used to describe my career. Thirty-eight years as the head coach at Tennessee. Eight national championships. An all-time record of 1,098 victories, and a 100 percent graduation rate, which was the real point of all that winning. Twenty-seven successful years of marriage, followed by one shattering breakup. Six crushing miscarriages compensated for by one matchless, peerless son, for which I’m grateful to God. Two devastating and incurable medical diagnoses.

  None of that sums it up.

  A memoir is not a documentary. We think we keep an accurate record of ourselves in the bean-counting tablets of our minds, but we don’t. None of us sees or remembers everything about one’s life; memories are unreliable—they smudge, and fade, like disappearing footprints in the sand. We’re too busy standing in the middle of it all to remember everything perfectly, and I was busier than most people.

  Always, we rely on others, the people who have known us best, and most intently, to complete the picture of ourselves.

  In my case, I’m especially reliant.

  In the late spring of 2011, I was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, the progressive neurological illness that attacks the brain. From what I’m told, an unnatural buildup of proteins forms a gluelike plaque in my nerve cells and synapses, interfering with my ability to remember and to reason. So far there is no cure—it’s irreversible. It’s estimated that about five million Americans suffer from the affliction, and another fifteen million caregivers, spouses, and children are affected by it.

  Have you ever walked along a shoreline, only to have your footprints washed away by the surf? That’s what Alzheimer’s is like. The waves steadily erase the marks we leave in the sand, all the sand castles. Some days are better than others—the waves come in and they recede, bringing a fog with them that sometimes clears.

  In my case, symptoms began to appear when I was only fifty-seven. In fact, the doctors believe early-onset Alzheimer’s has a strong genetic predictor, and that it may have been progressing hidden in me for some years before I was diagnosed. I’d been walking around with a slow-ticking, slow-exploding bomb in my brain cells, and it only became apparent when it began to seriously interfere with my work.

  It’s hard to pinpoint the exact day that I first noticed something wrong. Over the course of a year, from 2010 to 2011, I began to experience a troubling series of lapses. I had to ask people to remind me of the same things, over and over. I’d ask three times in the space of an hour, “What time is my meeting again?”—and then be late. In the fall of 2010, one of my college teammates and oldest friends, Esther Hubbard, was supposed to come up for a Tennessee foot
ball game. I must have called her four times and said, “Now when are y’all coming?”

  It was talk, and repeat. Talk, and repeat. I thought, Something isn’t right. Someone is going to have to confront this.

  —ESTHER HUBBARD

  Close friends noticed that I would forget the most important conversations. Michelle Marciniak, a former point guard with whom I had a long, embattled coach-player relationship that ended with an unforgettable 1996 national championship, came up to stay with me that fall. Michelle is an impressively busy young woman, an entrepreneur with her own textile business, but a couple of times a year she visits me in Knoxville and stays over as my houseguest. One night we sat up until about midnight catching up on life. We talked about her family, how her mother and father were doing, over a glass of wine.

  The next morning she wandered into the kitchen. There were a few people standing around, as there usually are, friends, neighbors, colleagues—and dogs.

  Somebody said, “Michelle, how’s your family?”

  Pat had just walked into the kitchen and was pouring herself some coffee. She said, “Yeah, Michelle, how is your family?” And it just was like, boom. I froze. I thought, what’s going on? And then I started noticing other things from that point on.

  —MICHELLE MARCINIAK

  I had always struggled to keep track of my car keys and cell phone, but now I lost them three times a day; I could never remember where I had put them last.

  At first I thought it was funny, and totally in keeping with my character. I’d always been so hyperfocused on coaching that I didn’t even know the weather outside. I’d wear short sleeves in an ice storm. I was a working mother who juggled too many responsibilities and obligations, and it was natural to have moments when I got a little overwhelmed. I’d never known the date, or the name of my hotel—there have been so many of them, and they all look the same, and they are all called Radisson or Clarion or Hyatt or Hilton. Reporters would ask me, “Pat, who’s going to win the Super Bowl?” I’d say, “Fellas, who’s playing?”