Thursday, January 29, 2009

Rising to Her Own Level

To fully appreciate Pat Summitt's achievements, you have to stand in her kitchen on the day of a big game and watch her sweat over the stove like a fry cook. A large space with two ovens opens into a living room continuously packed with family, friends, old sorority sisters, former players, neighbors' children and what seems like a herd of galloping Labradors. On the stove top dishes simmer, because after the game Summitt will feed this mob, as well as any semi-orphans, foreign travelers and itinerant golden retrievers who stop by. On occasion, she has even fed the opposing team. Between stirring, Summitt dodges into the pantry and kicks the dryer shut. You wonder if John Wooden ever did laundry on game day.

Running late, she grabs her cosmetics bag, and in the car on the way to the arena she applies the last of her makeup. This is a terrifying trick, which she regularly performs at just over the speed limit, while steering with her knee.

"How do you do that?" I once asked her from the passenger seat, hands over my eyes and feet braced against the dashboard.

"It takes years of practice," she said, grinning.
ad_icon

Sometime in the next week or so, Summitt will reach 1,000 victories. She will do it in a characteristic rush, and with a great deal of characteristic shouting, and to waves of applause that she won't let inflate her fundamentally unpretentious, countrified head too much. "I'm just a P.E. teacher," she likes to say. Well, hardly. To borrow a phrase from sportswriting great Blackie Sherrod, that's like saying the Grand Canyon is a ditch. Summitt's coaching record likely will never be broken; no NCAA coach, male or female, alive or dead, has ever reached 1,000 victories.

It's for other more distant observers to say where such a feat places Summitt historically. To parse her monstrously competitive schedule and the fact that 40 percent of those 1,000 wins will have come against ranked teams. Or to dispute the merits of women's basketball. Or to discuss how many of those games were won with no financial wherewithal or incentive, just competitive heart. Her first victory came in the 1974-75 season in front of 53 people. She set up the chairs.

I can only contribute my personal impression, as the co-author of her autobiography, and a friend who has abandoned impartiality. I'm here to tell you that it's a nearly miraculous feat given how many things and people she takes care of every day, and the fact that she can never find her car keys.

"Are you tired?" I asked her by phone this week.

"Hell no," she said, laughing in that amazing voice, gravel raked in honey. "I'm full of life. I may look tired."

I don't know whether Summitt belongs in the same breath with a Wooden or a Bob Knight, I only know that she's matchless, there is only one of her. I also know that the private Summitt is surprisingly at odds with her on-court personality -- she is milder, and funnier than most people would believe, a throw-back-her-head laugher who enjoys jumping off the pedestal. Anyone who saw her don a cheerleader's outfit and sing "Rocky Top" on the court at a Tennessee men's game two seasons ago got a glimpse of that, and it accounts for her players' affection for her despite her demands.

Some of her male counterparts have seen it as well. A few years ago late one evening at a coaching clinic, Summitt kicked off her shoes and, in a white skirt, played a game of pickup with Denny Crum. Tragically, there is no video.

Nevertheless, Summitt has treated coaching women's basketball as serious business, and contained in her record is a narrative: She helped build a "women's" sport into just a sport, one that is shucking the reputation of inferiority. Her inexhaustible striving has something to do with busting out of category, the desire to erase old definitions about the capacities of women.

She resists the word "feminist" -- "I'm not a sign carrier," she says -- and insists on retaining the word "Lady" in front of Vols. Still, if there is a single driver in her coaching personality it's the determination to self-define, and force her players to do the same. It's the key to her famously fierce confrontations with them, and the reason why they accept her tirades: They understand the power in her expectations.

Recently, with Tennessee trailing Rutgers by 20 points, she told sophomore Angie Bjorkland on national television that she was "pulling a no-show." Bjorkland responded with 12 points in leading the Lady Vols to the biggest comeback in school history.

"She'll call people out for sure," Bjorkland said afterward. "She has high expectations for us and if I'm not exceeding those then she's going to get on me for it, but that's why I came here and that's why I like a challenge."

"I don't tell them what they want to hear," Summit says by phone. "I tell them what they need to hear. And the way I frame it is, 'You're . . . better . . . than this.' "

The interesting thing is that so many of her players seem to believe her. Summitt's former assistant, Mickie DeMoss, once remarked that Summitt could tell them to "take off their sports bras and run down the court waving them over their heads, and they'd just look at her and say, 'Okay, coach, sounds like a plan.' "

It's somehow fitting that Summitt will hit 1,000 in the midst of one of her most challenging seasons. It's the youngest team she's had in her 35-year career. But it brings the best out of Summitt, who swears that if she weren't a coach she'd be teaching public school back in Henrietta, Tenn. What you learn about Summitt is that she means it, she's a born instructor.

"The Baby Vols," she calls this team, and she doesn't always say it gently. She's been displeased with their habits, and believes some of them want to wear Tennessee jerseys without understanding the work that goes with it. So earlier this season she decreed that they launder their own uniforms. "I can't even think about a thousand wins," Summitt said. "My undivided attention is on this young team and teaching them it's a 40-minute game, and sometimes more."

The Tennessee kids come and go like autumn leaves, but Summitt doesn't change, she hangs on to an old-fashioned simplicity, preaching sport as ethic. When the freshmen arrive, they're head duckers who can barely meet your eye to say hello. Then they start standing up straighter, and their manners improve, and they turn into people like Nicky Anosike, who makes Summitt well up with pride, the daughter of a Nigerian immigrant from a Staten Island housing project, a 4.0 student and a crucial player on back-to-back national championship teams in 2007 and 2008. When Anosike is done with basketball, she wants to be a schoolteacher.

Last summer, Summitt stood in a small gym on the Tennessee campus, in front of 100 small girls 5 to 10 years old. Some successful coaches just lend their names to their summer camps, but Summitt actually shows up and puts in the work, spending long days with chaotic masses of children grade-school age and up. If you really want to get to know her and can't get an invitation to dinner, go watch her work her camp.

Summitt, 6 feet tall and laser-eyed, towered over the campers. "How many of you made your own beds this morning?" she demanded.

Only a half a dozen hands went up. Summitt counted them. "Now this," she began, "is a perfect opportunity to talk about discipline."

No comments: