Remembering Pat Summitt: Once again, with feeling

A brush with a legend

FEB. 13, 2009 (SOUTH COUNTY TIMES)- It went unnoticed last week, a sports milestone lost in news of steroids and stimulus packages.

But not here. University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt won her 1,000th game Feb. 5, making her the winningest college basketball coach of all time. Summitt, 56, has been coaching since 1974. In 35 years, she has 1,000 wins and 187 losses — she wins 84 percent of the time she leads a team onto the court.

If you’re a Vols fan, you’re cueing up that cute “Rocky Top” song. I prefer something from Helen Reddy, because never was there a case for “I Am Woman” girl power as this one.

I have a Pat Summitt story, having had the privilege to meet her on a few occasions, the first in 1995 when Tennessee was in the Women’s Final Four.

That April, I was at the Target Center in Minneapolis for the women’s national championship game between Tennessee and the University of Connecticut, seated in the first press row directly behind the Lady Vols bench. It was like having a front-row seat to every motivational informational seminar known to man – or woman. Pure, unadulterated passion mixed in spirit and intensity. And I had a 40-minute survey.

At one point near the end of a back-and-forth game, Summitt took out one of her starters and sat her on the bench. In the midst of the frenzy of about 23,000 screaming fans, she squatted down to eye level and with passion, intensity and a screaming southern drawl said, “This is the biggest game of your life. If you let it pass knowin’ ya didn’t give it your all, how ya gonna feel? How ya gonna FEEL?”

So there it was, the pinnacle of college basketball, and the coach was not just talking strategy, she was talking FEELINGS.

Therein lies the difference between a man and a woman. A man may, in the heat of a battle, tell you to go to h-e-double-hockey-sticks. A woman will tell you the same thing, but worry about how you’re going to feel making the trip.

I loved that moment.

Tennessee lost the game, UConn won the title. But I learned an indelible lesson that night: Never let any moment pass without giving it your inspirational, perspirational, 110-percent all.

A postscript:

I covered the women’s game for TSN for the better part of the 1990s, and somewhere along the line got a handwritten note from Pat Summitt thanking me for taking the time to promote women’s basketball in a national magazine. I was flabbergasted that she would write someone she met in passing a few times.

It’s tucked away in a box somewhere. I don’t know precisely what it said, but I remember exactly how it made me FEEL.