Wiedmer: Pat Summitt's hold on women's game should last awhile

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We have lost one of the greatest Tennesseans of all time.

Due to a class she was taking that semester at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Sharon Fanning found herself measuring the grip strengths of various volleyball players at the collegiate state tournament during the 1973-74 school year.

One of those players happened to be Patricia Sue Head of UT-Martin.

"Pat had the strongest grip strength of anyone at the tournament," said Fanning on Tuesday, the day we all learned of legendary former Tennessee Lady Vols basketball coach Pat Head Summitt's passing. "I guess it was from tossing around all those bales of hay all those years on the family farm."

That grip became metaphorical when it came to women's college basketball. As we've heard quite often over the past 48 hours, no one held up the women's game over the first 20 years of its NCAA tournament (1982 forward) more than Summitt, who made her sport so relevant on a national level that it eventually gave birth to the professional Women's National Basketball Association.

In one of those thoughts that only University of Kentucky coach John Calipari might consider, Coach Cal posed this question in his Tuesday tribute to Summitt: "She championed women everywhere and created opportunities for them. Would there be a WNBA without her incredible influence?"

And it's a fair point, particularly when you consider that such former Lady Vols as Tamika Catchings and Candace Parker have played such huge roles in the league's success.

This isn't to say Connecticut women's coach Geno Auriemma may not eventually be viewed as the greatest women's coach ever, because he has already won three more NCAA championships than Summitt's eight.

Auriemma's longtime friend and current University of Tennessee at Chattanooga coach Jim Foster also makes a fair point that the UConn-Tennessee games at the dawn of the 21st century created one of those Lakers-Celtics, Tom Brady-Peyton Manning, Red Sox-Yankees rivalries that every sport needs to both interest and excite the casual sports fan.

Asked where the women's game might be today had their been no Summitt, Foster smartly broke his answer into two parts.

"First of all, she forced people to pay attention," he said. "She forced athletic administrators to realize the sport mattered. But second, Pat versus Geno was great theatre. Right out of a Hollywood script. Every sport needs a rivalry everyone can identify with, and UConn versus Tennessee, Geno versus Pat, provided it."

But the foundation was built, the walls raised, the roof nailed down long before Auriemma guided the Huskies to their first NCAA title in 1995. By then, Summitt and the Lady Vols owned three. By the time UConn won its second in 2000, UT had won six.

As Auriemma told ESPN regarding Summitt's grip was on the women's game early in their rivalry: "From a competitive standpoint, (UT) was the one program, the one game that you each year you kind of measured yourself and your team. When you played that game, you knew if you were good enough to win a national championship or not."

But it was what he said about Summitt the person rather than the talent that gives deeper insight into why so many folks, especially women, are hurting this week.

"From a personal standpoint, I think you can see how difficult it was back then for a woman to try to do something that really no one had ever done before, and no one thought you could do it," he said. "Trying to juggle being a mom and being a coach and being a representative for the game. From all the different aspects of looking at what her career was, there were a lot of things that she was the first. There were other people that did it, but nobody did it better or did it longer."

Or had to come from a lower starting point.

When Fanning's UTC basketball and volleyball careers ended, she became a grad assistant for a year under the 23-year-old Summitt at UT in the fall of 1975.

"She drove the van and I drove the station wagon," Fanning said with a laugh. "There weren't many road games, though. I think our whole budget might have been $500. Players had to buy their own shorts.

"One thing I remember about that year was when I first got up there, and you'd go to get a Coke or Pepsi and you'd see all these skinny cheerleaders drinking Tab, which was a diet drink that I thought tasted awful. But one day I saw Pat drinking a Tab, so I started drinking Tab. Whatever she was doing I thought I should do."

Fanning did enough things like Summitt to amass more than 600 wins over a career that began at UTC, moved to Kentucky and wound up at Mississippi State.

"We all wanted to model our programs after Pat," she said. "She was the measuring stick. Pat Head Summitt set the standard for women's basketball."

The standard for the men's game has become Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, who has won more than 1,000 games and five NCAA titles.

But in his statement concerning Summitt's passing, Coach K - who shared a Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year cover with the Lady Vols coach in 2011 - said, "She's really the gold standard of women's college basketball. Obviously, Geno is doing an unbelievable job, but that would not have been (possible) without Pat."

In other words, even in death, her grip on the women's game's popularity and history isn't loosening any time soon.

Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.