Wow. Pat Summitt Is Gone.
“HOLY MOTHER.. I just stood up and cheered for a women’s game!”
That’s the text my freshman roommate sent the night Tennessee outlasted LSU in the 2008 NCAA Women’s Final Four Semifinal. On a near buzzer-beating tip-in, the Lady Vols snuck past the Tigers, then went on to beat Stanford two days later for their 8th NCAA Championship — ultimately Pat Summitt’s final title.
For weeks, I pestered my roommate about watching Tennessee. In Candace Parker’s final season, the Lady Vols were not just fun to watch but flat out dominant. So naturally, the game he finally got around to watching was one of the ugliest, low-scoring games — the kind that illicit the ‘men’s-games-are-more-competitive’ canard from the casual drive-by fans. Eventually, though, he tuned in out of exhaustion because I never shut up about the woman chasing John Wooden. The woman whose “Definite Dozen” built a program that, at the time, deserved as much or more attention than a men’s team.
“HOLY MOTHER.. I just stood up and cheered for a women’s game!”
Behind my own mother and grandmother, Pat Summitt was the woman I looked up to most. My mom had Mary Tyler Moore, turning the world on with a smile, but I lived for Pat Summitt winning championships with a stare. She was tough yet fair, and fiercely loyal, but the thing that resonated most was her insistence on being treated with respect and treating others with it.
She was a towering figure for a generation of Title IX women who grabbed a ball and dribbled, kicked or ran with it. But she’s also responsible for people like me — men who found women’s athletics. She was the reason I made friends with the girls basketball players in high school and went to every game, the books about her populated my summer reading list and became Christmas gifts, and she was the motivation to wake up at 4:00 am on a Saturday and drive across the Midwest just to see her coach against my alma mater. A friend recently commented that I’ve only worked for women bosses, and didn’t that seem strange? Not really. I thrive working with strong women who are teachers and mentors— probably because it’s the closest thing I can find to working for someone like Pat Summitt.
Having worked in women’s athletics, with student-athletes and coaches who benefit from a foundation of funding, facilities and support that were earned by people like Summitt, her impact is pervasive. Aside from Billie Jean King, and maybe the 1999 U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, there’s no one who inspires more appreciation and reverence from women and girls in sports jerseys — and those of us who enjoy watching them.
Her stat list is staggering: 8 NCAA Championships, 7-time NCAA Coach of the Year awards, 1,098 wins to only 208 losses, an Olympic gold medal, a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a diploma for every player she coached. All of those contribute to a body of work by a human being who seemed to do all that and more. Is there an award for shouldering the emergence of an entire sport, and inspiring a generation of women and young girls? There should be.
So I’m going to miss Pat Summitt. I’m going to miss the glare. I’m going to miss those garish orange blazers and the endearingly off-key renditions of Rocky Top. The sport of women’s basketball will miss the mystique of Pat Summitt stepping foot onto any court and the NCAA will miss crowning champions coached by someone with integrity, tenacity and, yes, grace. But I think the thing this world will miss most is the person who lifted so many up and who made it possible for a guy, who otherwise never would have, to text their friend, “HOLY MOTHER.. I just stood up and cheered for a women’s game!”
