Robin Roberts met Pat Summitt in 1987. Roberts was a young sports reporter at a local television station in Nashville.
Summitt’s Tennessee Lady Vols had just won their first national championship.
Roberts introduced herself after the game. Pat greeted her like they’d known each other for years, because that was Pat, she didn’t do strangers.
They stayed close for the next 29 years. Roberts was there for the championships and for the diagnosis and for the slow, cruel years after it.
She was one of the first journalists Summitt trusted enough to sit across from on camera after going public with her Alzheimer’s disease.
She produced the 2013 ESPN documentary about Summitt and her son Tyler. And now, a decade after Pat died, Roberts has made the film she has been building toward since that first handshake in 1987.
Breaking Glass: The Pat Summitt Story arrives on Hulu on March 25. It is produced by Robin Roberts.
Summitt Started With Nothing
Patricia Sue Head was from Henrietta, Tennessee, a town so small that her family had to move to Cheatham County just so she could play high school basketball, because Clarksville didn’t have a girls’ team.
She grew up on a dairy farm, harvested tobacco, and even milked cows. She loaded hay bales into the barn and played basketball on a makeshift goal against her brothers.
She carried that with her to the University of Tennessee at Martin, where she became the school’s all-time leading scorer.
She carried it to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, where she was a co-captain of the U.S. women’s team, the first time women’s basketball was ever played at the Olympics, and won a silver medal.
She was still carrying it when Tennessee gave her the head coaching job in 1974 at 22 years old, so young that four of her players were only a year younger than she was.
There was no money, no bus driver, no support staff worth mentioning. She drove the team van herself.
She washed the uniforms. She booked the hotels. She did everything, because the women’s program at Tennessee in 1974 was not a priority for anyone except Pat Summitt, and Pat Summitt was not the kind of person who waited around for someone else to solve a problem.
Summitt’s Amazing Achievements
She coached the Lady Vols for 38 seasons. When she stepped down in April 2012, she had 1,098 wins, more than any coach, men’s or women’s, in NCAA Division I basketball history at the time of her retirement.
She won eight national championships: 1987, 1989, 1991, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2007, and 2008. Tennessee appeared in 31 consecutive NCAA Tournaments under her watch. She never had a losing season. Not once.
She coached the U.S. women’s team to a gold medal at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
She was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999, part of its inaugural class. The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inducted her in 2000. That same year, they named her Women’s Collegiate Coach of the Century.
She was known for what players called the Summitt Stare, an icy, level look that could stop a point guard mid-dribble from thirty feet away.
She didn’t yell, at least not in her later years.
Candace Parker, who won back-to-back championships with Tennessee in 2007 and 2008 before becoming a three-time WNBA MVP, said Summitt got things out of you that you never knew were in you.
Every player who played for her said some version of that. And every player who completed her eligibility at Tennessee earned her degree. Summitt said that was the stat she was proudest of. Not the banners.
Geno Auriemma, her greatest rival, coached UConn in 22 games against Tennessee between 1995 and 2007, a stretch that produced some of the best women’s basketball ever played.
He said it was the one game every year that told you if you were good enough to win a championship. Summitt ended the series in 2007 on her own terms. That was also very Pat.
Summitt Receives Her Diagnosis
Sometime around 2010, things started slipping in ways that didn’t add up. She’d forget where she put her keys. She showed up late to practice, which had never happened. She started losing plays mid-game, unable to remember what she had called. She figured it was her arthritis medication.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
The doctors at the Mayo Clinic told her in the summer of 2011 that she had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. She was 59 years old.
She was still the head coach of the most successful program in the history of women’s college basketball. She had just won the SEC championship.
She went to her players first. She told them in the locker room. Senior Vicki Baugh stood up and said, “Pat, we’ve got your back.” Within days, We Back Pat was a movement that spread across the country.
She announced it publicly on August 23, 2011. She said, very clearly, that there was not going to be a pity party, and she would make sure of that.
Then she coached the entire 2011-12 season, with her longtime assistant Holly Warlick taking on increasing responsibilities, and she coached Tennessee to the Elite Eight, and she stepped down in April 2012 with a 1,098-208 record and zero losing seasons.
President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom that year. He said that because of people like her, his daughters were standing up straight, diving after loose balls, and feeling confident and strong.
She spent the next four years fighting her toughest opponent the only way she knew, with the same stubborn, relentless refusal to quit that had defined every season she ever coached.
She founded the Pat Summitt Foundation and threw herself into raising money for Alzheimer’s research. She showed up. She kept showing up.
Pat Summitt died on June 28, 2016, at a senior living facility in Knoxville. She was surrounded by the people who loved her most.
Tyler said she no longer carried the heavy burden of the disease. She was 64 years old. Two weeks past her birthday.
Why Create A Documentary Now?
This is not an outsider’s documentary. Roberts was not parachuted into this story. She was standing in the gym in Nashville in 1987 when it started.
She flew to Knoxville in 2011 to sit across from Summitt on camera for a 20/20 interview after the diagnosis, one of the most important sports interviews of that decade, and stayed for dinner after, because Pat invited her.
She produced Pat XO for ESPN in 2013, a film built around Summitt and Tyler going through a scrapbook of her life together on the couch.
Breaking Glass is something more complete than that. Whatever it contains, it comes from someone who was present for three decades of the story and understood what was at stake in telling it right.
Roberts appears on Live with Kelly and Mark tomorrow morning, Friday, March 20, to talk about the film.
The Hulu premiere lands on March 25, five days before the Women’s Final Four tips off in Tampa on April 4. Hulu and Roberts both know exactly what they have and exactly when the country’s attention will be on women’s basketball.
Pat Summitt spent 38 seasons trying to point that attention in this direction. It worked.
Breaking Glass: The Pat Summitt Story starts streaming on Hulu on March 25.
