Sum It Up

I don't know what happened to me but, pre-high school, I was a very well-rounded young person, interested in art and nature and science and sports and all sorts of things. This wonderful memoir - well-written, amazing story, tearjerker! - reconnected Present Day Angela with Sports Angela Of Yore. Yo, I used to love basketball - I had basketball playing cards, and played on my middle school team, and thought it was great. What happened!?

Pat Summitt was one of those inspiring people that I'm sorry to only become aware of after her death. Her life ran parallel to an explosion in women's athletics: from growing up as a farm girl in the 1950s to playing college basketball with, like, zero university resources, to the passage of Title IX and the sudden explosion of women's basketball - it's just amazing.

The book opens with Pat Summitt learning of her diagnosis of Early Onset Alzheimer's. (She died from this a few months ago, in June 2016.) It then intersperses the narrative of her life with first-person interviews from the people around her, as well as short chapters from the present day (2012? 2013?) with the co-author interviewing Summitt about her diagnosis. Pat was a forceful, incredibly competitive personality, and so there are numerous funny moments; Pat going into labor during a scouting visit to a high school senior's house was quite hilarious. And there are a bunch of inspiring, “let's get pumped!!!” moments of huge NCAA victories. It makes me wish I had been a University of Tennessee basketball fan since the 1990s (since, oh man, did they crush it)!

Definitely my fave memoir from the stash of memoirs I just read.