Rocky Top: A Tribute to Pat Summitt. (Yes. Seriously.) by Ally Auriemma

[Are_grits_groceries]

Note: I have never told this story outside of my family.  It seems appropriate, given that Coach Summitt received the Arthur Ashe award for Courage at this past weeks' ESPY awards.  It's also appropriate because this year is the 40th anniversary of Title IX, something I will be discussing in another post.

When I was eleven years old, Pat Summitt called me.
I don't mean she called my house looking for Dad, or called home by mistake in search of an office phone.  No.  This was a deliberate phone call, by Pat Summitt, looking for me. "Hello, Alysa, this is Pat Summitt from Tennessee."  Verbatim.

I was eleven.  We had just started our rivalry with Tennessee.  To say I was terrified of Pat Summitt is understating the point.  She is an icon of the sport.  She's naturally terrifying because of her intensity, her drive, her winning history...it's PAT SUMMITT.  I mean, cripes!

And I say this as a kid who had spent the past four years on a bus with Rebecca Lobo, so I tend to be unfazed by athlete superstars.  This was a whole different kettle of fish.

This is also coming from a girl who spent the ENTIRE very first UConn/Tennessee game on January 16th, 1995, in the Gampel student lounge playing SuperMunchers on a Compaq computer.  So if this nerd was freaked out by Pat Summitt, it was a very, very, very big deal.

She had heard, I'm assuming from my father, that I had been saying to people that The University of Tennessee looked like a really good place to go to school.  I knew this information from two sources - the games I had seen on TV of the Lady Vols playing, and the media guides I had stolen from press rooms when I snuck back there during games to hunt for food or Diet Coke.*
*some kids collect stamps, I collected media guides of women's basketball programs and and tried to memorize the school mascots of every single Division 1 program.  It became a huge game with the team to see if they could stump me.  I could not be defeated.
<snip>
Much more and well worth the read:
http://theculturebarista.blogspot.com/2012/07/rocky-top-tribute-to-pat-summitt-yes.html?spref=fb&m=1

She was raised right and that's a very high compliment. Geno, you done good!

[reflection]

1. There's something in my eye.

Thanks for sharing this. Much appreciated.

[CTyankee]

2. Here in CT Geno is a near-God. We've been fans for YEARS!

Watching that woman's basketball team over those years has been one of the nicest things about living here. With all the scandals in men's sports, it is such a pleasure to see these women and the high standard setting coach operate.

[Are_grits_groceries]

3. I think Pat and Geno are a lot alike.

They are both great coaches and motivators. They keep their programs clean and demand excellence from the players in all areas. Both are people that their players and others can count on. They also don't back down from anybody.

The differences are more cultural. An Italian-American from the city in the North is very different than a Southern country girl. I think they misread each other and never knew how to really communicate. That's on both of them.

I want to say this carefully. Geno built a great program in an area that had never seen such. He deserves all credit for that. I believe what bothers some is something that his daughter recognizes but he never seemed to. She knows that Pat was a huge reason for the growth of WBB. I believe Geno knows that too, but he has never really expressed it until recently. I am not talking about bowing and worshiping her. I am just talking about him seeing that UConn owes her a debt too in a way.

That's not a debt about the success he has achieved or anything on that level. I am just talking about the reason that WBB has gotten to where it is on the whole. Geno has certainly pushed this devlopment forward a great deal and deserves credit for that. All of WBB has to move forward to keep up.

I also think that Geno had a hard time fitting in to the group of WBB coaches. It isn't completely a gender thing. Andy Landers and Leon Barmore were easily accepted. I don't think Geno truly knew how to fit in and others weren't sure how to help him. I know some of them weren't helpful on that front.

A lot of the coaches now and earlier were connected to Pat or some other early mainstay. The connections overlapped and created a group with many things in common. It is getting better as different coaches are hired and the sport grows.

I was glad to see them talk at the Final Four. That was a breach that needed to be healed before Pat became too hard to reach. I wish it had come earlier.

Good luck to UConn and UT!

[CTyankee]

4. thanks for the insight. I don't usually "do" sports so I am less likely to know these things.

My husband, otoh, is enormously into it...

[Are_grits_groceries]

5. When I was reading the comments,

there was a common theme in many of the UT ones. Many people said they felt a lot more favorable towards Geno. Some said UConn but most said just Geno.

I think he was undecipherable to them. When I said his daughter was raised right and that it was a high compliment, I wasn't kidding. When people read that, they knew her ideas weren't out of whole cloth. They knew she would never have felt as kindly about Pat if her daddy had raised her to despise her as a person. Any negative personal feelings were not drilled into her. Tyler has been raised the same way.

That blog probably did more to help UConn/UT relations than anything else could have. Geno and Pat were stubborn far too long. This is a bridge that has given UT fans a look at what is really important to his daughter and by proxy to Geno. They liked what they saw a lot.