In modern history, there are two figures that belong on the Mount Rushmore of women’s sports -- Billie Jean King and Pat Summitt. No one else is close to third. | | | | | Pat Summitt, 1952-2016. (aaronisnotcool) | | | | | | “In modern history, there are two figures that belong on the Mount Rushmore of women’s sports -- Billie Jean King and Pat Summitt. No one else is close to third.”
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| | rantnrave:// PAT SUMMITT and BUDDY RYAN, the two legendary coaches we lost on TUESDAY, both turned the unglamorous into the glamorous through a combination of willpower, fierceness and hall-of-fame-worthy mean streaks. They were coaches; what else would you expect? She was so angry when her TENNESSEE LADY VOLUNTEERS lost in the first round of the 2009 NCAA basketball tournament that she ordered them back to practice the next day. The day after their season ended, that is. He told his football players, "if one of us got in a fight, don't hold our guy back. Hold their guy back, so our guy could hit him." SUMMITT and RYAN loved their players and their players loved them. SUMMITT is beloved in a much wider circle than that, of course. When she was hired at TENNESSEE, the NCAA didn't recognize women's basketball and the university's entire women's sports budget was $5,000. Her hiring wasn't reported in any newspaper. A feminist who didn't consider herself a feminist and a pioneer who didn't consider herself a pioneer, all she wanted to do was win basketball games and spread the word about the women's game, and she was zealous in pursuing both of those goals. After eight national championships and more wins than any Division I coach, male or female, the only argument left wasn't whether she was the best women's basketball coach of all time but whether she was the best basketball coach of all time, period. When she retired in 2012, she left behind an immensely popular sport and an immeasurably changed landscape for women's sports in general. RYAN, whose successes came as an NFL defensive coordinator (his short tenure as a head coach was forgettable), notoriously hated not only other teams' offenses but his own. "QB’s are over-paid, over-rated, pompous bastards and must be punished," one of his playbooks said, and his 46 defense was as successful a defense as ever conceived to do exactly that. When the BEARS won the 1986 SUPER BOWL, the BEARS defense carried him off the field on their shoulders while the offense carried head coach MIKE DITKA. "It seemed," writes the NEW YORK TIMES, "that the BEARS had two teams." Seven years later, while coaching the OILERS' defense, he punched his own team's offensive coordinator on national TV. His temper sometimes overshadowed his tactical genius, but he was that, too, and his defensive wizardry lives on both through the influence of his complicated defensive schemes and, of course, his sons REX and ROB. RIP to two of the greats... World #1 JASON DAY and SHANE LOWRY became the latest elite golfers to pull out of the OLYMPICS and both blamed the OLYMPICS' reigning scourge, the ZIKA virus. But what if they're not quite telling the truth? ESPN's JASON SOBEL and YAHOO's DANIEL ROBERTS both filed pieces TUESDAY suggesting the world's top players have never been keen on golf's inaugural OLYMPICS, and the virus has offered them the perfect cover story... 48-year-old man throws a 900. Which is especially impressive because we're talking about skateboarding, not bowling. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| She was one of sports' most accomplished figures but also universally beloved and humbly warm. To say there will never be anyone like Pat Summitt is not hyperbole. In fact, it seems inadequate. | | |
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| Excerpted from "Blood, Sweat & Chalk: The Ultimate Football Playbook: How the Great Coaches Built Today's Game," published in 2010 by Sports Illustrated Books. | | |
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| And it could cap an undeniable career. | | |
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| What is gender? It might sound like the kind of question that college students debate in a liberal arts class. But for the International Olympic Committee, it's a practical question that demands a hard and fast answer. | | |
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| Golfers might feel the Olympics aren't worth the hassle for multiple reasons, but the Zika virus is the only excuse that provides a free pass. | | |
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| On the destination boards at the Subte -- the underground system in Buenos Aires -- there are messages begging Lionel Messi to reconsider his decision to retire from international football. The Argentinian Prime Minister, Mauricio Macri, has called on his country's most famous active player not to quit the national side. | | |
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| First it was a strategy. Then a book. Then a movie. Now "Moneyball," Michael Lewis' tale of how the payroll-challenged Oakland A's used data to take on the big-spending Yankees, is a college major. Syracuse University has become the first school to award a bachelor's degree in sports analytics. | | |
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| José Altuve was once released as a teenager due to his height. For years he's produced, and his importance to Houston can't be overstated. | | |
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| A championship drought of 43 years is clearly significant, but in the age of Twitter, clowning the Knicks is just too easy. | | |
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| In 2006, former NBA star Stephon Marbury endorsed a revolutionary low-cost sneaker called the Starbury. $15 Kicks revisits the Starbury sneaker's altruistic mission and media frenzy. The film will highlight proponents and skeptics of the brand's humble gross margin and its tumultuous discontinuation in 2009. | | |
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| Equal parts superhuman athleticism and out-of-this-world precision, LeBron James' Game 7 chase-down block was the stuff of legend. Here's what was racing through the minds of everyone involved. | | |
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| Tough. Demanding. Loving. Legendary. Pat Summit was a trailblazer is every sense of the word and the world is better for having known her. | | |
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| Tim Lincecum used to obliterate the laws of physics. Now he's fighting them as he attempts to revive his career. | | |
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| By weighing 3 key themes in lead-up to the games in Rio. | | |
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| Every year, Trailblazers guard C.J. McCollum sits down with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver for an interview about the state of the league. This year, C.J. invited The Playes' Tribune to film the conversation. | | |
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| Buddy Ryan is best known as the man who brought the 46 defense to Chicago in the 1980s, creating perhaps the finest defensive unit the NFL has ever seen. But the entire story of Ryan, who died on Tuesday (Jun 28), is interesting enough to tell. | | |
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| I met Erislandy while I was exploring Old Havana. He is a pigeon racer and I am a photographer so naturally, I asked if I could shoot him and his birds. Pigeon racing is a very popular sport in Cuba, and every neighborhood of every city has its own notorious racers and breeders. | | |
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| If the Colts beat the Jaguars in Week 17 of the 2011 NFL season, it might've landed Andrew Luck with the Cleveland Browns. | | |
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| The 2016 Olympics will be a test of how well Comcast and NBC can deliver live programming in the digital, on-demand era. | | |
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| Feminists should remember Summitt most for not only breaking the glass ceiling in sports, but also shattering it over and over again. That's the thing about Summitt: She made it clear that anything men could do on the basketball court, she could do better. | | |
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