FBI records: Threats made to Pat Summitt's life in 1996

Brittany Crocker | Knoxville

On March 31, 1996, legendary Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt led the Lady Vols to their fourth NCAA championship with a victory over Georgia.

To get there, the Lady Vols beat the University of Connecticut in overtime 88-83 in the semifinals two days earlier in UT's fourth game against UConn and first victory over the Huskies.

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Days after the championship, Summitt and UT received letters from a seemingly unhinged UConn fan, intended to threaten and possibly extort Summitt, according to FBI files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act for a special Freedom of the Press Foundation transparency project called "FOIA the Dead."

What were the threats?

"You and the whole University of Tennessee team....are (expletive) dead!" the letter, postmarked April 2, 1996, began. "You've made the last (expletive) mistake of your miserable life! For Beating Uconn and winning the title the sentence is death!"

In both letters, the writer proceeded to scrawl across torn-out notebook paper, calling the Lady Vols victory over UConn an "unforgivable sin," accusing the team of "dirty" tactics and referring to Summitt with a slew of profanity.

He threatened to kill Summitt, her family and members of the team.

The writer enclosed newspaper clippings from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about Summitt's championship win. The clippings' margins were covered with more scribbled obscenities and insults.

"This is the end of the line for you and the University of Tennessee," he wrote, before signing off the letter with another threat and obscenities.

Summitt and the Lady Vols won championships the next two seasons and later in 2007 and 2008.

Pat Summitt: A Champion's Life A look back through archive photos and videos of legendary coach Pat Summitt, who spent 38 seasons as the head coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols, with a 1,098-208 record.

Hesitant to involve authorities

The FBI did not receive the letters from University Police until two months after they were postmarked.

R.B. Summitt, who was married to Pat at the time, remembers it.

"(The writer) was many states away, and the letters were very ugly, awful," he said.

R.B. said he didn't think those were the only letters Summitt had received from the mystery menace.

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"Pat was always focused on the kids, on the team, and on their academics," R.B. said. "This was at the bottom of the list."

He said they knew threatening letters and hate mail "came with the territory" of coaching. In those situations, R.B. said, Summitt deferred to something her mother, Hazel, told her when she was afraid to go near a graveyard as a child.

"Hazel would tell them, 'It's not the dead that will get you, it's the living,'" R.B. recalled.

Furthermore, they believed the letter from a cowardly stranger on the West Coast was not so serious at first.

But the content of the letters submitted to the FBI might give some hint as to what made her finally alert the authorities. The April 1996 letters not only threatened Summitt, they threatened assistant coaches, the team, and her family.

At the time, her only child, Tyler Summitt, was five years old.

"We wondered if it was more trouble than it was worth to bring in the authorities," R.B. said, "but the guy bringing her family into it may have been the trigger point."

Letters' author never arrested

R.B., who was married to Pat for 26 years, said the one thing he knows is that the letters stopped.

But, it is unclear what happened with the case beyond that. Authorities went to the house the letters were postmarked from, where a suspect, whose name has been redacted, lived with his parents.

He no longer lived there, but they brought him in for a handwriting exam which was inconclusive.

Special Agent Jason Pack said the FBI did ultimately discover about eight months later who had written the letter to Coach Summitt, and it was not the suspect mentioned in the 1996 FBI file.

"After a review of all the facts of the case," Pack said the individual responsible was not arrested.

Pack said neither person's name is being released.

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Resilient as always

Summitt's career was marked by resilience to hardship and adversity.

At the time she began playing basketball, women's rules were built on the foundation that female players were weaker. When she became the Lady Vols coach in the 1970s, the rules were beginning to change to end discrimination, but women's basketball was not yet an NCAA-sanctioned sport.

Summitt made $250 a month to coach along with her graduate assistant obligations. She and the team sold doughnuts to purchase uniforms, which she washed for players herself. She drove them to road games in a van, and, she told TIME Magazine, they spent nights in sleeping bags in other team's gyms.

She suffered several miscarriages before she had her son, and went into labor while on a recruiting visit to Pennsylvania. She cut the visit short and had the pilot fly her back to Knoxville so Tyler could be born in Tennessee.

In 2005, she lost her father, and, the following year, separated from R.B. Later, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, which caused her severe mobility issues, but did not impact her coaching.

A few years later, she separated her shoulder defending her dog from a rabid raccoon.

Pat Summitt remembered as motivator, legend and fighter Legendary basketball coach Pat Summitt lost her battle with dementia "Alzheimer's Type" at the age of 64. She made NCAA history with eight national championships and a 1,098-208 record.

She was a fighter, and when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, she fought publicly for the benefit of others afflicted and voiced her faith in God often.

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She died the "winningest coach" in NCAA Division I history, male or female, with 1,098 wins.

Her family and friends have since remembered her for her irrepressible, "keep moving forward," attitude despite life's obstacles.