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Final Four flashback: How Pat Summitt escaped a hairy situation

 
Coach Pat Summitt, left, and assistant Mickie DeMoss were very superstitious during Tennessee’s 1989 championship run.
Coach Pat Summitt, left, and assistant Mickie DeMoss were very superstitious during Tennessee’s 1989 championship run.
Published March 30, 2015

With Tampa set to host the women's Final Four, we offer a week's worth of vignettes on past tournaments:

The winningest NCAA basketball coach ever also may have been its most superstitious. Seems Pat Summitt never met a quirky, irrational custom she didn't like.

Except one. Try to follow along.

Down the stretch of the 1989 season, Summitt and two of her Tennessee assistants — Holly Warlick and Mickie DeMoss — had become enslaved to both routine and preposterous notion alike. An outfit worn during a loss was discarded; a certain shade of lipstick worn during a big victory was purchased in bulk supply.

"By the time the season is winding down, you're like, a freak," DeMoss said, "because you've got all these weird things that you're doing."

It got weirder. As the team arrived in Tacoma, Wash., for the 1989 Final Four, it dawned on the trio that none had shaved her legs since the Vols' last loss.

"We didn't really realize it until we got there and we were like, 'Oh, my god, we've got to shave our legs,' " recalled DeMoss, now an assistant for Summitt's son, Tyler, at Louisiana Tech. "Pat was like, 'No, you can't. Got to take a hit for the team, doesn't matter. Put some leg makeup on or whatever you've got to do.' "

In the end, vanity — and the Vols — won out.

UT topped Auburn 76-60 in the final for the program's second national title, but not before Summitt found a razor and furtively struck a blow to her superstitions.

"Holly and I are sitting there (before the title game), we look at Pat and go, 'You shaved your legs!' " DeMoss recalled.

"We just went nuts. We were like, 'How could you do it?! You put your personal pride over the team!' She goes, 'Y'all, we're okay.' I was like, 'How do you know?!' She was like, 'I know, we're gonna beat 'em, relax.'

"We beat 'em in spite of that."

More than a quarter-century later, the lesson seems lost on DeMoss, who remains as superstitious as ever.

"If there's a heads-up penny on a game day," Tyler Summitt said recently, "she will dive on the floor."