re: Pat summit passed away.

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What did she die of? It's my understanding that Alzheimer's/Dementia affects the mind, but it isn't fatal. Is that not correct?

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From SI's Alexander Wolf: As Summitt settled into her seat in the first row, waiting for takeoff, the flight attendant in the jump seat opposite her began to sob. “What is it?” Summitt asked. “Tell me, what’s the matter?” It turned out that years ago, upon leaving the floor after a game at Louisiana Tech, Summitt had spotted a girl in a wheelchair at the mouth of the tunnel. She walked over, dropped to one knee, and said, “Don’t let the way you are now define who you will be. You can overcome anything if you work at it.” That little girl grew up to be the woman who would soon be getting out of that jump seat to work that flight, and for the moment she was overcome with emotion at having the chance to thank this woman who foretold how she could control her fate.

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Here comes this lady into your life. You don't know that she has been up all night peeing, racked with pain in her lower back. You don't know how many people told her she was nuts to get on an airplane and fly to your hometown at a time like this. You don't know that an hour ago, when her water broke, she was crouched in an eight-seat King Air blotting her legs with paper towels. Hell, you're 16. You don't know that she's spitting Nature in the eye and kicking Time in the teeth.

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You look back at the life of Pat Summitt and you see the modern history of women’s basketball right before your eyes. Her father, Richard Head, was a tough and silent old dairy and tobacco farmer, county water commissioner and general store owner in Clarksville, TN, and he believed with the Methodists’ fury that a girl could do everything as well as a boy. This played out in various ways. He often whipped Pat (then known as Trish), and whipped her harder if she cried. She would sometimes tell the story of being a 12-year-old, and having her father drop her off in a field of hay. He handed her a rake, and said without any further instruction: “Do it.” She would remember that days would go by where her father did not say a single word to her. Pat Summitt would say that she and her father did not hug until she was 43 years old. But, he also built a basketball hoop on top of the hayloft, and he moved the family to nearby Henrietta because the high school in Clarksville did not have a girls basketball team. It was before Title IX, before women could earn athletic scholarships, before the NCAA took women’s basketball under its banner. Patricia Sue “Trish” Head was a fantastic high school basketball player, one of the nation’s best. The family pulled together enough money to send her to college at Tennessee-Martin.

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BigOrangeBri

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Former Tennessee men’s basketball player Brian Williams, who played for former coach Bruce Pearl from 2007-11, went on Facebook to share one of his favorite memories of Summitt, who died early Tuesday morning. It was the time she took over a men’s practice. “We was goofing around and Pat was watching,” Williams wrote via 247Sports. “She got fed up and threw the ball and everyone stopped. She said, ‘Run sprints, and run them fast.'” The players looked at Pearl, hoping he’d step in. But he didn’t. “He looked back at us and walked away and sat down, and Pat ran the rest of practice,” Williams wrote. “I remember I threw up twice that day.” Williams added that he and the men’s team always respected Summitt — even before she made them run. “The amount of respect we had for her was unmatched, and the lives she created for thousands will never go unnoticed,” he wrote. “Thanks for everything, Pat.”

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To be honest, I knew her as a WBB coach. reading these stories legit will bring you to tears

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