Eyes Of The Storm

A year has passed since she tore her anterior cruciate ligament during her senior season at Tennessee-Martin. A year since the orthopedic surgeon examined the knee and told Pat, "Forget it." It's 1974, and many men playing big-time sports are finished after tearing an ACL. A woman? Just forget it.

Fix it, Tall Man told the surgeon. Tall Man is what the hired help called her father, Richard. Fix it right, he said, because Pat's going to play for the U.S. in Montreal in 1976, when women will play basketball for the first time in Olympic history. Pat swallowed hard because until Daddy said it, she didn't know she was going to do that. When her best friend, Jane Brown, walked into the hospital room a few minutes later, Pat blurted, "That doctor's crazy as heck if he thinks I'm not going to play ball again!" Then everyone left her room, and she hobbled to the window, drew the curtains and cried herself to sleep.

Now she has to make Tall Man's prediction come true. She has to lose 15 pounds, rehabilitate her knee and work out twice a day to make the Olympics...while she's teaching four phys-ed courses at Tennessee, while she's taking four courses to get her master's degree, while she's coaching the women's basketball team. Three-mile run at 6 a.m., weights at 6:30, shower, rush to the gym to teach, dash to the lecture hall to take the exercise-physiology and sports-administration classes, sprint back to the gym to coach a 2½-hour practice, hop in the car to go scout a local high school player, burn rubber back to the gym for two hours of basketball and sprints, shower again and hightail it home by midnight to study for the biomechanics midterm.

She's 22. She was hired to be the women's assistant basketball coach, only to learn a few weeks later that the head coach had resigned to pursue her doctorate. She has never coached a game in her life. She has no assistant. She's scared, the way she was that day when she was 12 and Tall Man dropped her off in the middle of miles of hay, pointed to the tractor and the hay rake and said, "Do it," then drove away. What's she going to do now, 10 years later? The only thing she knows. She'll be her father. Her players can be her.

At first it's glorified intramurals, a tryout sheet posted on a bulletin board inviting women to play in front of four or five dozen fans on a shadowy floor crisscrossed by badminton, volleyball and basketball lines. Pat digs in. She sweeps floors, tapes ankles, sets out the chairs and towels, washes the uniforms on road trips. She drives the team to road games in a van, her head poked out the window to keep her awake on the drive home at 2 a.m. Behind her, her players glance at each other when the rain stops and the windshield dries and the wipers keep squeaking, squeaking, squeaking. No one musters the courage to utter a word.

She doesn't lose 15 pounds. She loses 27. She sits on the edge of a table, pokes her foot through the handles of a sack full of bricks and lifts till her knee screams, but never when her players are around to see her. She makes the '76 Olympic team—a co-captain and the oldest player, at 24, on the U.S. roster that shocks the field and comes home with a silver medal. She takes the Lady Vols to the Final Four seven months later, in her third year as coach. She gets her master's degree in physical education. She has learned she can do it: She can overpower Nature and out-muscle Time—at least for a while, just like men do. She has learned, thanks to her father, about human will. How can she settle for filling her players with want now that she knows the psychic power of expect?

You think she's tough now, Michelle? Oh, please, the Lady Vols with crow's feet tell her at the annual alumnae reunions. You should've seen Pat back then! How about that time she found out we had that all-night party, and she set up trash cans at each corner of the court and ran us till we puked in them? How about that all-night, 8½-hour drive home after we lost in Cleveland, Miss.—no stops, bladders and bellies be damned? What about the 2 a.m. practice after we drove three hours back from the loss at Vandy, the game Pat's father saw and told her he'd seen a better game the night before between sixth-graders? Yeah, ever notice how quick she was, after the games her father attended, to ask people, "What did my dad say?" What about that time we fell apart in the second half at South Carolina, went straight to the locker room when we got back the next day and had to put on those smelly uniforms that had been locked in the trunk all night, and Pat hollered, "Now you're going to play the half you didn't play last night!"

Pat leads the Lady Vols to the Final Four six more times over the next nine years—and wins none of them, her teams always just a little short on talent. Forget the first Olympic gold medal in U.S. women's basketball history, the one won by Pat's '84 team—heck, a half hour later Pat forgets it. Just imagine what all those fruitless Final Fours do to Tall Man's daughter. If you're Pat's roommate during the early years in Knoxville, before Pat has a husband at age 28 and a child at 38, before there are videos of opponents to watch until she's cross-eyed, you love it when another big game's approaching. Because when you wake up, the white tornado has struck again—the whole apartment's gleaming!

Price tag? Oh, you bet. Don't you think there are times, when the grease stain on the baseboard has her on her knees at 1 a.m., that she wants this thing that's got hold of her to let go? "Times," as Pat's brother Charles puts it, "when you want to knock Daddy's head off." Times when the pain from tension in Pat's left shoulder grows so sharp that she must schedule a deep massage—like, five hours before every game. Times when she's sitting on an airplane next to two women who are solemnly weighing the floral pattern against the plaid for the master-bathroom drapes, and their relationship to Time is so dramatically different from Pat's that she feels as if she's from another planet. Times when people talk about her as if she's a freak, as if she's a man.

As if she's, say, Bobby Knight. That's what they say when she seizes Michelle by the front of her jersey, twists it and snarls at her during the game against Louisiana Tech in the NCAA regionals in Michelle's sophomore year. The photograph runs in newspapers all over the country. "Spinderella and her wicked stepmother," the Knoxville press calls Michelle and Pat. From all over the country friends and relatives send the picture to Michelle and her parents, demanding, What is this woman doing to Michelle?