It was at once a moment expected and inevitable and yet one with no way to prepare. As Tennessee’s women’s basketball season marched on, it became clear Pat Summitt could not sustain her role as head coach much longer as she battled early onset Alzheimer’s and it became one long goodbye party, but one no one could acknowledge. And when the goodbye was finally uttered on Wednesday, with Summitt abdicating the throne she occupied for 38 years, the reality washed over everyone who is in some degree in her debt. And that would be everyone in the sport.
Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press
Pat Summitt after Tennessee defeated DePaul in the second round of the N.C.A.A. tournament in March.
Summitt’s announcement on Wednesday that she was stepping aside, taking on the title of head coach emeritus while her longtime assistant Holly Warlick became head coach, was as soft a landing as she could muster, her former assistant Mickie DeMoss described it. Summitt found a way to do it with dignity and class, David Climer writes in The Tennessean, as she always has. John Adams writes in The Knoxville News-Sentinel that Summitt always made the right choices to stick by her program, so this made total sense. She will turn her star power now on the fight against Alzheimer’s, writesDan Wetzel on Yahoo.com and if Summitt showed anything in her farewell season, it’s that she can teach people how to fight, Ann Killion writes on SI.com.
The task quickly becomes how to quantify Summitt’s legend, which isn’t as easy as counting victories (1,098) or national championships (eight), writes Gene Wojciechowski on ESPN.com. She changed the sport so profoundly and became such an icon that reaction to her stepping down drew reactions from people ranging from Peyton Manning to LeBron James. She was as much a force of nature as anything, an example of all the right ways to handle success and failure and everything in between, writes Gary Parrish on CBSSports.com.
It was hard not to appreciate how rare that is in sports, particularly with the maelstrom of everything else. Up in Wisconsin, Coach Bo Ryan was showing the ugly side of college sports’ control over its unpaid players, throwing every road block in his power in front of transferring player Jared Uthoff, as Jeff Goodman writes on CBSSports.com. Southern Methodist, meanwhile, was continuing its out-of-this-world crazy courtship of coaching vagabond Larry Brown, Pat Forde writes on Yahoo.com.
And if you’re looking for dignity and class, please don’t even pause at the N.H.L. these days. Yes, its three playoff games transpired without any players being hospitalized (after all, Gary Bettman wants us to think positively!! :) ), but the matter of how punitive a suspension the league will hand Phoenix head-hunter Raffi Torres for his brutal hit on Chicago’s MarianHossa still hangs in the air. It sounds good that he’s suspended indefinitely until you realize it’s just because they haven’t announced it yet, having pushed back his hearing until Friday. Yes, Torres will miss at least one game waiting for his hearing, and it won’t be a tough decision to throw a shelf-full of a books at him, but the N.H.L. usually falls on its face in such matters, so it’s best not to presume anything. Dave Shoalts of The Toronto Globe and Mailreminds us that this butchered set of offseason discipline is the product of a shiny new system of justice that produces the same old rusty results.
If you are looking for progress, Game 4 between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh produced a pebble of it. The referees decided to regain control by calling everything including crosswise glances which made the penalty box look like a mall parking lot on Christmas Eve. That didn’t prevent all boneheadedness — the Flyers’ Zac Rinaldo upheld that fine tradition with a vicious crosscheck, writes Adrian Dater on SI.com — but at least the ambulances weren’t necessary. The only alarms going off were in the heads of the Flyers, who responded to their chance to sweep the Penguins with a goalie meltdown of epic proportions, writes Phil Sheridan in The Philadelphia Inquirer. A 10-3 loss served to highlight the flailing of the Flyers goalies, writes Scott Burnside on ESPN.com, and sparked the debate whether this is a momentary lapse or the start of a momentous collapse, writes Greg Wyshynski on Yahoo.com. What we do know is, Sidney Crosby responded to everything by shutting his mouth and playing, a definite improvement writes Ron Cook in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and that we are going to find out a few things about the Flyers now, writes Rich Hofmann in The Philadelphia Daily News.
We found out a few more things Wednesday night in the Rangers-Senators game, namely that the Rangers let an overmatched opponent back in the series with an inexplicable lapse, writes Allan Muir on SI.com. We discovered that Vancouver’s off-the-mat victory over the Kings has probably settled the Canucks’ goaltending question in favor of Cory Schneider once and for all, writes Iain MacIntyre in The Vancouver Sun.
But what we mostly discovered on Wednesday was what we already knew about Pat Summitt, that the end of her reign was near and that the goodbye would be done well.
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