B. 1952

The Lives They Lived

During a Final Four basketball game against the University of North Carolina, on April 1, 2007, Pat Summitt, the coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team, found her team down by 12 points with 8:18 to go. She was fuming — her gold rings were dented from being banged on the parquet floor. Summitt was a screamer. She loved to win. Over 38 years at Tennessee, she won 1,098 games — more than any other coach in N.C.A.A. Division 1 history. She also understood winning as a far more potent and radical act than even the most rabid male football fans would understand while pounding their painted chests.

“We are not going home without a championship!” she yelled at her players a minute later during a timeout, her hair still sprayed into a TV-ready helmet, her white cuffs protruding just-so from her pinstriped pantsuit. This was not rhetoric. This was directive. Summitt’s plan: Her players would get five straight stops, meaning the Lady Volunteers would prevent U.N.C. from scoring the next five times it had the ball. The Lady Vols nodded. “If Mom said do A, and you did B,” Tyler Summitt, Pat’s son and only child, told me, “you were going to hear about it right away.”

Summitt’s genius stemmed from her ability to perform multiple jobs at once. She could track 10 players and the clock, recall an entire season’s worth of plays and see patterns evolving. She could watch tape, take notes, make recruiting calls, joke with reporters — media were always welcome; the real goal was promoting women’s sports — and console a player whose grandmother was sick. She could help Tyler, as a youngster, with his homework, do laundry, cook dinner, make recruiting calls (she was always making calls), churn homemade ice cream and shoo raccoons off the porch. She could also drive 120 miles per hour while applying mascara, steering with her knees or talking on the phone.

Her commitment to the Lady Vols was consuming. Summitt continued chatting up one prospect at her home in Pennsylvania well after she, Summitt, went into labor. She enlisted players’ parents as deputies. No, ma’am, you’re staying, she instructed them to tell their daughters when they called home after brutal practices, wanting to quit.

Summitt referred to her father as Tall Man, and he was preposterously stern. His core philosophy was: Discipline yourself so no one else has to. He didn’t believe in birthday celebrations or sick days from school. Summitt and her four siblings worked nonstop on the family farm. If she missed picking a sucker off a tobacco plant, her father was sure to find it, and if she cried when he spanked her, he spanked her harder.

Summitt traveled with five VCRs so she could watch tape of her opponents to prepare for games.

Summitt was 5-foot-9 in third grade and played on the eighth-grade basketball team. The University of Tennessee hired her, at 22, to be the assistant women’s basketball coach; when the head coach unexpectedly quit soon afterward, Summitt took her job. She supplemented her pay — $250 a month — by winning poker games. She took the Lady Vols to the Final Four in her third season.

Summitt avoided overt politics and the word “feminism.” She made statements through victories. She filled the arena, secured lucrative TV contracts and became the first female coach to earn $1 million a year. She refused offers to coach the University of Tennessee men’s basketball team and made sure everybody knew she did not consider the job a promotion.

She forbade the cutting of corners. She once benched her star player, the 6-foot-4 forward Candace Parker, for the entire first half of a game in Chicago — Parker’s hometown, with Parker’s family and friends in attendance — because Parker missed bed check by 20 minutes two nights earlier.

Her team was ready when it reached that crucial moment at the 2007 Final Four, down by double digits with less than eight minutes left. At practice, she had put them through persistence drills: two or three Lady Vols trying to keep five male practice players from scoring on five straight possessions. So her players had the experience and confidence to do the same against U.N.C. During those last minutes, they confronted U.N.C. with shifting defenses. Their opponents became flustered; the Vols remained calm and got their five stops. Summitt’s players outscored U.N.C. 20-2 and won the game. Two days later they won again. Summitt cut down the championship net.

The following season, the Lady Vols won the N.C.A.A. finals once again. It was Summitt’s eighth title, her last. Over the next few years she grew a little less sharp, a little more withdrawn. “I did notice she stopped yelling at me,” one of the Lady Vols from that era says. Summitt started losing her key ring three or four times a day. “She went from Wonder Woman, juggling 10 things at once, to normal person,” Tyler says. Everyone hoped this was a side effect from her arthritis medication. But after the 2010-2011 season, at age 59, Summitt found out she had early-onset dementia.

She announced her condition to the world and coached one more season. She knew the power of performing before an audience, whether as coach or middle-aged woman with dementia: If you play hard, with discipline, you command respect. So Summitt continued pacing the sidelines in her impeccable pantsuits. She kept wanting to do TV interviews, even as the words came more slowly. She kept trying to talk to the reporters who attended practices, determined to raise awareness about Alzheimer’s, just as she had done for women’s athletics. But she could not win. Nobody defeats dementia through hard work. But even in later years, when Summitt could no longer walk because of rheumatoid arthritis, she demanded that Holly Warlick, a former Lady Vol and now the head coach, wheel her in to watch practice. “Warlick, I ain’t going away,” Summitt told her.

Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the magazine.