On Dolly Parton, Pat Summitt, and the room they built for the rest of us
Written by TOGETHXR Co-Founder Jessica Robertson
I grew up in a small town in western Kentucky that exists, geographically, as a kind of hinge. A few hours one way and you're in Sevierville, in the Appalachian foothills where Dolly Parton was born the fourth of twelve children in a one-room cabin. And just over an hour in another direction, barely a stone's throw past the state line, is the stretch of Tennessee that raised Pat Summitt, the daughter of a dairy farmer, hauling hay before she became, for a time, the winningest coach in the history of NCAA basketball.
Tennessee wasn't only proximate to me, either. I spent much of my childhood and formative years in Nashville, and went to college in the state. Pat and Dolly were backyard icons, two women sprung from the same landscape who showed me entirely different versions of what a woman from that place could become. I grew up somewhere inside the distance between them.
Pat was famously tough. Steely and immovable. Still, she called her players her girls and meant it. Demanding everything from someone and loving them are not opposing acts. There was something instructive in that. Pat didn't soften herself to make her strength easier to accept, and that made it impossible to question.
Dolly held the same kind of complexity, albeit from an opposite direction. She was spectacle and substance, something entirely exaggerated wrapped around something profoundly honest. The wigs, the rhinestones, the sheer hyperbole … She was the opposite of camouflage. She had built the loudest possible exterior around the plainest truth. I know I look totally artificial, she once said, but I'm real where it counts.
I was a queer kid still trying to understand myself, with few examples of what it looked like to live honestly as who you were. Dolly wasn't an example of who I wanted to be, per se, but she was an example of what it looked like to know who you were. Pat showed me the strength in knowing.
Part of the truth about growing up gay in a small Southern town is that you go looking for permission in unexpected places because the obvious ones are closed. Dolly offered it without ever making it a campaign. She spoke about gay people, trans people, addicts, and anyone the world around her had been taught to judge. And she made little ceremony of doing so. There was no hierarchy to it. She didn't treat belonging as something that was hers to grant. They belonged because … they belonged.
There’s something in that ethic that feels native to women's sports.
Women's sports has spent most of its history making something from what it wasn't given: visibility, investment, infrastructure, legitimacy, room. So many of the people who built it knew what it was to exist beyond somebody else's idea of the center. They knew the particular violence of being told that who you were made you less credible, less marketable, less worthy of being seen. Less worthy, in general.
And yet, they built anyway.
What Dolly understood, and what women's sports understands in its best moments, is that another person's fullness does not diminish your own. There isn't a finite amount of dignity to divide up. Making room is not the same as giving something away. The room just gets bigger.
Pat and Dolly weren't best friends, but Dolly said they shared “a very special bond.” Just two Tennessee girls, each proud of what the other had built. When Pat died in 2016, Dolly ended her tribute simply: “Glory to you, Pat Summitt.”
I'm writing this a day after Dolly died herself, and I keep thinking about those two women, gone within a decade of each other, who came from roughly the same patch of earth and stretched the boundaries around them in entirely different directions.
Women's sports has always known that boundaries tend to say more about the people drawing them than the people expected to live inside them. Dolly lived something even simpler: people don't need permission to be who they are. They just need room to be.
Glory to you, Dolly Parton.