PHILADELPHIA — The coach is tough as nails on players stereotyped to have their days ruined when they break them. In all it’s implied sexism, this is what makes Pat Summitt, the Mommy Dearest of women’s hoops, so fascinating in her ability to make players jump through them.
“That’s probably so,” the Tennessee coach said yesterday. “I’ve often said that if I was Rick Pitino on the sidelines, they’d probably go, ‘Wow, she’s intense’ and nobody would think anything else about it. I just have to be who I am.”
Which is, the most recognizable and successful coach in women’s college basketball history; a six-time NCAA champion working on a seventh tonight against UConn; an Olympic medalist as both coach and player, a torch-breathed, torch-bearing, Ms. Liberty for the women’s athletic movement; and the not-entirely-mythological Goddess of Tough Love.
This is a woman whose water broke in a living room on a recruiting trip, who jumped back on the chartered jet and for the only time in her life, resisted the urge to push, whether it be a baby, a basketball or a freshman point guard. She made it two hours back to Knoxville before giving birth to her only child, a son.
This is a woman who once kicked her team out of its own locker room and into a cramped visitors room for five weeks because the players didn’t deserve the nicer digs, who demands her players sit in the first three rows of all classes and denies them a single unexcused absence. When Summitt found out about an all-night team party, she set up trash cans at corners of the court as a convenience to the players she then ran until they stuck their heads in them and heaved. Once, she refused them a single bathroom stop on an 81/2-hour van ride back from a bad loss.
There is crying in women’s college basketball, a lot of it being done by recruits to Knoxville as this 49-year-old wife of a bank executive obviously secure in his gender, breaks down egos and prototypes and, off the dribble, slow girls not good enough to waste her time at Tennessee. During an NCAA tournament game, Summitt once even seized the perfect photo opportunity to make herself the Wicked Witch of the SEC, doing a basic Bobby Knight-without-the-chair, grabbing a point guard by the blouse and giving her a good shake.
The coach did call the parents to explain, but not to apologize for the ends that justify her means. She had a father who ran three farms, grocery and hardware stores, a beauty salon and the local water authority who never let her or three brothers miss a single day of school because he simply didn’t believe in being sick. When Summit suffered a torn ACL during her senior season at Tennessee-Martin, a man’s injury they never fixed for girls, Dad told the surgeon to do it right because his daughter was going to play for the first U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team in Montreal.
She did the rehab while teaching four phys-ed courses, taking four classes herself for a Masters, and moving up to head coach at Tennessee when the woman she assisted suddenly quit. So the night Summitt took out the wet and smelly uniforms that had been locked in the trunk overnight, told the girls, ‘Now you’re going to play the half you didn’t play last night’ and made them put them on for practice was only Pat, as she insists the players call her, being Pat, not necessarily inhumane punishment. It wasn’t like she made them wear them to graduation, where those women followed every single one who has ever played for Summitt.
“They will tell you I’m tough,” she said yesterday, “I think they like to say it. But they also will tell you I love them and care greatly about what happens to them in life.”
She commands fees for corporate speeches and such respect that two seasons ago, Summitt was invited to speak to the Tennessee men. “She’s such a great coach,” said Geno Auriemma, the UConn coach, “that getting the respect [to run] a men’s team wouldn’t be difficult at all.”
It’s just that she chooses otherwise. “People are people and it’s all about motivating them,” she said. “While I don’t know if anyone would approach me, I’m the type of person who would tell you, ‘Sure I could [coach a men’s team].’
“But what I want to do is continue to grow our sport. We’ve had to clear a lot of hurdles. I have three older brothers who competed and all got scholarship offers and my mom and dad paid for me to go to college. That’s when I realized, ‘This isn’t fair.'”
Perhaps it was part of her inspiration to make a career out of being unreasonable, at which she has excelled like no college coach other than John Wooden.
“Pat’ll make you feel really bad at times,” said point guard Kristin Clement. “But she brings out the best in you. So you really grow to love her.”
