Vols’ Phillips learned from the best — his mother
It shouldn’t be this way. When you’ve just won SEC defensive lineman of the week honors, as Tennessee senior Kyle Phillips has, and you’re about to host No. 1 Alabama for the final time in your career, your mother should be on hand to watch.
Unfortunately, Teresa Lawrence Phillips will spend Saturday doing what working mothers must too often do during their children’s biggest moments — work.
“That’s our homecoming game,” said Lawrence Phillips, the longtime athletic director at Tennessee State University in Nashville. “So I’ll be in Nissan Stadium, making presentations and fulfilling my athletic director duties.”
But that doesn’t make the former Girls Preparatory School and Vanderbilt athletic great any less thrilled with her son’s honor following his career-high nine tackles and strip-sack that led to a Volunteers defensive touchdown in their 30-24 win at Auburn.
“We’ll take it,” she said Monday night. “There have been lots of ups and downs. “But this is such a positive, fun thing to happen for Kyle off a really big win.”
Impressive as her son’s award is, he has a long way to go to begin to match his mom in athletic honors. The first black female athlete at Vanderbilt, Lawrence Phillips is already in the GPS, Lookout Mountain, Greater Chattanooga and Vanderbilt sports halls of fame.
She also became the first woman ever to coach an NCAA Division I men’s basketball team in 2003 when the Tigers’ interim coach that winter, Hosea Lewis, was suspended for one game along with several players for a fight at Eastern Kentucky. With three key Tigers forced to sit, Lawrence Phillips still stayed within 71-56 at Austin Peay.
“I’ve always wished I’d had those three players,” she said. “We might have made it interesting.”
She made life interesting for the rest of the Ohio Valley Conference women’s teams by guiding the TSU women to back-to-back OVC titles and their first-ever NCAA berth before she became AD in 2002.
“I know about what my mom did at GPS, TSU and Vanderbilt,” Kyle said Monday. “She was a great coach and player.”
His mother sometimes wonders how great her son might have been throughout his career without all the injuries he’s endured. After all, as a true freshman in 2015 he was the first Vols rookie to have the black stripe removed from his helmet, that honor occuring on Aug. 10, which meant he was no longer playing like a freshman.
“Kyle had one surgery when he was still in high school,” she recalled of his prep days at Hillsboro, “then two more before his sophomore year at UT. We talked about it some this evening. He’s had some really depressing times. Lots of physical pain, lots of setbacks. He’s been criticized by some because they didn’t think he was living up to being a fourstar recruit. He could have quit, but he was always going to give his all.”
Those shoulder issues now seem to be behind Kyle. And while the Auburn game was the best of his career, his mother — who was in the stands at AU’s Jordan-Hare Stadium last Saturday — heard him say something about his performance that made her more proud than she was of his subsequent award.
“He told me he knows he can play even better,” she said. “As an old coach, I like hearing that.”
She even somewhat liked hearing back in the winter of 2015 that he would be attending Tennessee instead of her alma mater.
“Kyle really liked Vanderbilt,” Lawrence Phillips said. “But when James Franklin went to Penn State, he kind of cooled on them. It came down to Tennessee, LSU, Ole Miss and Ohio State. I didn’t want to go to Ohio State and sit in the cold. But I was fine with the others.”
So why Tennessee? According to Lawrence Phillips, her father, Reuben Lawrence, always has been a huge UT fan. Her mother passed away about the time Kyle was considering where to go to college.
“I think one big reason he chose Tennessee was to make my father happy,” she said.
Long before Kyle grew to be 6-4 1/2 and weigh 273 pounds, mother and son would quite happily mix it up pretty good in one-on-one battles on the driveway basketball goal.
“That time’s long gone,” Kyle said.
Countered his mom: “I could probably still beat him when he was 11 or 12, but he broke my pinky finger about that time when he backed into me with that big ol’ behind of his. We had to quit playing after that.”
Even if she can’t be inside Neyland Stadium on Saturday, she won’t quit watching Kyle play against Bama whenever she can steal a few minutes away from her AD duties with the Tigers.
“We don’t kick off until 5:30 Eastern time, so I’ll have some time to watch before our game starts,” she said. “After that, I hope our fans will understand if I get distracted now and then by what’s going on in Knoxville.”
Maybe it hasn’t all worked out the way everyone thought it would for Lawrence Phillips’ youngest son, though the SEC lineman of the week honor could be a taste of things to come. Yet whenever Kyle’s athletic career ends, she feels good about his future.
“All of this is going to make Kyle be an awesome man, which he already is,” she said.
If so, it might be because he’s always had an awesome mom.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.