Daedra Charles, a Hall of Fame basketball player who helped the University of Tennessee win two national championships under its indomitable coach, Pat Summitt, died on Saturday in Detroit. She was 49.
Her death was confirmed by the University of Tennessee, which did not specify the cause.
Charles, who went by the surname Charles-Furlow after her marriage to Anthony Furlow, was a powerful center with a soft touch who became a critical part of the Lady Vols, a team characterized by relentlessness and an unflagging work ethic under Summitt, who by the time she retired had won more games (1,098) than any other Division I college coach, male or female. (She died in 2016 at 64.)
Charles was twice an All-American pick and in 1991 was named the Southeastern Conference’s Female Athlete of the Year. (The male honoree was Shaquille O’Neal, of Louisiana State University.) That same year, she won the Wade Trophy, an annual award given by the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association to the best women’s college player in the country.
Charles went on to play for the United States Olympic Team, winning a bronze medal in the 1992 Games in Barcelona, Spain. She was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007.
The N.C.A.A. did not allow Charles to play as a freshman during Tennessee’s 1987-’88 season because of her low score on the ACT admissions test, but Summitt recruited her anyway, and Charles was appreciative.
“It wasn’t all about ‘I want you to play ball,’ ” Charles was quoted as saying in “Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective,” a 2013 memoir Summitt wrote with Sally Jenkins. “It was, ‘I care about you as a person and an individual and want you to have both, to be successful at both.’ And they never gave up on me.”
Charles trained and studied hard and became an example of enthusiasm and grit for her Tennessee teammates.
“She was such a strong, mature leader for our team,” Summitt wrote, “that I could actually delegate responsibility for team discipline to her — she became my partner-enforcer on the floor, and you didn’t want to mess with Daedra. She was a muscled six-three center from Detroit, Michigan, whom we called ‘Train,’ which was short for ‘Night Train,’ because she was so forceful around the basket.”
Charles played mostly in reserve as a sophomore, helping the Lady Vols to a 35-2 record that season and scoring 13 points in their 76-60 victory over Auburn in the 1989 N.C.A.A. championship game.
Bridgette Gordon, Charles’s teammate and the tournament most valuable player that year, called her “just a terror for the opponent.”
“She had a nice, soft jumper that she could extend to 15, 17 feet and good hands,” Gordon said in a telephone interview. “She could face up, take people off the dribble — agile enough at that size to get a shot off and get around bigger defenders. She had it all.”
The next season, Tennessee compiled a 27-6 record and won the Southeastern Conference title. But the Lady Vols lost to Virginia, 79-75, in overtime, in the regional finals of the 1990 N.C.A.A. tournament.
During her senior season, Charles scored a career high 28 points in two games and pulled down 22 rebounds in another. Tennessee went 30-5 that season and avenged their 1990 defeat by beating Virginia, 70-67, in another overtime game to win the 1991 N.C.A.A. title.
In her three-season college career, Charles averaged 14.2 points and 8.2 rebounds per game and accumulated 1,495 points, 858 rebounds and 95 blocked shots. Tennessee had a record of 92-13 in that period.
After her college career, she played professionally in Japan, France and Italy from 1991 to 1997. At the time, there was no professional league for women in the United States.
“I think it’s a shame that after college we have to go to someone else’s country to play,” she told Newsday in 1993.
But she got her chance to play American pro basketball in 1997, when she joined the Los Angeles Sparks for the inaugural season of the Women’s National Basketball Association. It was her last as a professional.
Daedra Janel Charles was born in Detroit on Nov. 22, 1968. She was a star at St. Martin de Porres High School there and also lettered in volleyball and track and field.
Charles, who lived in Detroit, is survived by her mother, Helen Charles; her sister, Danene; her husband, Mr. Furlow; and their son, Anthonee.
After her playing career ended, Charles-Furlow was an on-air game analyst for Comcast Local and a coach and athletics administrator at Auburn and other universities. She was an assistant coach at Tennessee from 2008 to 2010 and then director of character development for the women’s basketball program until 2012.
When she returned to Tennessee, she said, she had a lot to learn, even though she had spent her life around basketball.
“We played 94 feet of defense,” she told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2008. “But we weren’t running and gunning. We didn’t have athletes like that.”
“The game has evolved,” she continued. “That’s such a beautiful thing.”
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