by Pat Conroy
In a hard-fought game, the fifth grade of St. James School beat the haughty sixth graders by one point. I scored the layup that won the game and felt the glorious rush of teammates trying to hug me all at once, the first taste of the ecstasy of victory, of prevailing over a better opponent.
After the game, I sprinted the mile to Livingston Street, the length of that tree-lined street, to that house, to the arms of that pretty woman who loved avocados. Bursting through the back door, I ran straight up to her, breathless and heaving, and said, “Mom! Mom! We beat the sixth grade. We really did. No one thought we could, Mom, no one! I was the high scorer. The high scorer. You’ve got to write Dad.”
Before she could respond, I burst into tears of joy and threw myself into her arms.
My parents wrote to each other every day. That night when my younger brothers and sisters had been put to bed, I oversaw the writing of Mom’s letter to Dad. I made sure that she emphasized the underdog role of my small-boned fifth-grade team and yes, the sixth-grade boys had been like a race of mean-spirited, taunting giants to me. With great care, I told Mom where I had scored each one of my points including the first foul shot I ever made. “Nine points, Mom. No one on either team scored that many. I was the high scorer.”
“You’ve told me that a hundred times, Pat,” my mother said. “That’s the first thing I wrote to your father.”
“Won’t Dad love it, Mom? He’ll just love it.”
If my father loved it, he never acknowledged it in any of his many letters to my mother. He never mentioned that game until I drove him to the spot on the playground of St. James School, in 1997, and told him how we defeated the sixth-grade team. Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry, and like him, I grew up court-savvy and predatory and ready to rumble in any game that came my way. Though I tried to incorporate my father’s big-city, Chicago-coarsened game into my own, I grew up in a South where basketball was still in a stage of infancy. I would hear his voice raised in mockery and vituperation with every step I took. Dad was happy to step into the role of “the sixth grader” no matter where I went or how far I took the game I had once watched him play so uncommonly well. His greatness as a ballplayer was thrown in my face each time I achieved some new milestone as a player.
When my father returned from his tour of duty overseas he had a new assignment and my mother had to extract me from Orlando like a tooth. The year had been a fatherless idyll and I begged Mom to let me stay in the city with Aunt Helen and Uncle Russ and my beloved four cousins, the Harper boys. On his first day back, my father slapped my brother Mike in the face for the first time. Mike was four years old and did not realize that Dad was establishing his authority over a house that had gone soft in his absence. After he wept, Mike approached my father and said to him, “I want you to go back to the seas. I don’t like you.” In two sentences my brother had summoned up the courage to say out loud what I had always suppressed, and I waited for Dad to kill my brother or beat him into unconsciousness. My father surprised me by laughing as Mike shook with a four-year-old’s helpless fury. I knew Mike’s look and I shared his anger. My father looked like the strongest man in the world to me. When I asked Dad to come with me to the playground at St. James to shoot around before dinner, he appraised me, saying, “You come to me when you can give me a game. Then I’ll kick the shit out of you.”
My father had played on the Parker High School team that won the city championship in Chicago in 1938. He is still considered, by some, to be the best basketball player to attend St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa, and his name hangs in its Athletic Hall of Fame. His college friend Ray Ambrose told me often that “when your father came to this part of the Midwest, everyone shot with two hands. When he left, everyone shot with one hand. Your old man brought the one-handed shot to Iowa.” In a practice game against DePaul Dad outscored a young sophomore by the name of George Mikan, the first great big man in the game. George Mikan was named the best basketball player in the first fifty years of the twentieth century. The incomparable Michael Jordan took the honors over the next fifty years. My father had outscored the best basketball player of his time. “I caught Mikan young, before he became George Mikan,” was all my father would say about it.
With my father’s great gifts, he could’ve taught me everything about basketball I’d need to know, beginning that education in the schoolyard of St. James. Instead, he taught me nothing, and I went to The Citadel not knowing what a pivot was or how to block out on a rebound or how to set a pick to free a teammate for a shot or how to play defense. A beautiful shooter, a fierce rebounder, and a legendary defender, my father chose not to pass these ineffable skills on to any of his five sons. We grew up overshadowed by his legend and that legend did not lift a finger to help us toward any patch of light our own small achievements might have granted us. The Conroy boys learned their game in the streets. The Conroy girls grew up unnoticed and unpraised. Their brothers envied them.
My father pulled the ’55 Chevy station wagon out of the driveway at 945 North Hyer Street as Uncle Russ and Aunt Helen stood with the four Harper boys waving a tearful goodbye to their five cousins and their favorite aunt and uncle. It was the first trip to a new assignment that we started in broad daylight. Normally, we left at midnight when the roads would be empty and we could “make good time,” according to my father. He drove straight through to Arlington, Virginia, where he began a new job at the Pentagon as his family built a new life on Culpepper Street in Arlington. The Culpepper Street years were stormy ones between my parents—the only calm years they ever had was when Dad was called overseas. My mother and I had grown exceptionally close in the year he’d been gone, and now when Dad beat me it seemed like a punishment meted out for being liked too much by his wife.
But the basketball was wonderful in Virginia, with outdoor courts everywhere. Culpepper dead-ended onto the grounds of Wakefield High School, and in the first summer I shot around with a bunch of high school kids, one of whom was the son of a coach. The Wakefield gym was the first time I had ever played the game on a wooden floor or dribbled a regulation leather basketball. When the gym was closed I’d settle for an outdoor court by Claremont Elementary School. By myself, I would shoot all day, happy as a boy could be.
For three straight years, I attended Blessed Sacrament School in Alexandria and played in the church leagues from sixth through eighth grade. I did well in those leagues and was the star in my last year. Neither of my parents attended one of my games. My mother was overwhelmed with small children; my brother Tim was born in the hospital in Bethesda in December of 1957; and I was grateful my father was too overworked by his job at the Pentagon to be at my games.
It was during my Arlington years that I discovered the vast difference between the way black kids played the game of basketball and the way white kids did. The black kids would drift onto the courts near Blessed Sacrament and I would walk over to “Green Valley,” the black neighborhood near Claremont where I’d be the only white kid in sight. From the beginning, I took to everything about basketball as it was played in the ghettos. It was high-speed, rough-around-the-edges, tough-talking, hand-checking, kick-ass basketball, the way the game was supposed to be played. It was hard for me to get into a game in Green Valley because I was white and because I was little. But sometimes I’d luck out and they’d need my body to complete a team. I’d get the ball to the best shooters on my team and do it quickly and often. Very early on, I learned that all shooters—black or white—value guys like me who get them the ball. I mimicked the showmanship and style of the fifty or so black kids I played against for the next three years. I loved their heart and their aggression and the fierceness of their bantering and back talk. They called me “white boy,” “cracker boy,” and “white fuck,” as in: “Shit, we’ll take the little white fuck.”
The guy that called me “white fuck” was a grown man, unemployed and sad-faced, who pla
yed with the boys and young men of Green Valley because he had nothing to do and because he had a glorious jump shot, high and hanging and architecturally perfect. I fed him the ball every chance I got. When a new kid came to the court, he elbowed me, an eighth grader, in the back of the head and I went somersaulting out of bounds, sliding across concrete. The new kid walked toward me with his fists clenched and I prepared myself as well as I could for the beating. Then someone grabbed him from behind, a muscled arm around the kid’s neck. “The rule, new boy. Don’t fuck with the white fuck. That boy gets me the ball.”
AFTER MY GRADUATION FROM Blessed Sacrament, the gypsy caravan that disguised itself as my family started up in earnest as though to punish us for our three years on Culpepper, the longest amount of time I’d ever spent on a single street (even though we had lived in two separate houses). After years of going to night school, my father had applied for the Operation Bootstrap program which sent officers whose college studies had been interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War back to school to earn their diplomas. From far-flung sources, my father collected all the credits he’d earned at St. Ambrose and beyond and found a college that would allow him to graduate after taking a single year off from the Marine Corps.
Leaving again at night as was his habit, my father took us to the road once more, driving us down country roads through Virginia until he pulled into the driveway of the smallest house the Conroy family would ever live in, on Kees Road in Belmont, North Carolina. My father would spend the year as an undergraduate senior at Belmont Abbey College. I had only known my father in his mythological, unconquerable ideal of the Marine Corps fighter pilot so I had a difficult time making the adjustment to him as a college student who had trouble making C’s. Among my brothers and sisters, we now conduct polls to discover which were Dad’s worst and most violent years as a father. Belmont always ranks high on the list. It was the year my restless father had too much time on his hands.
My sister Carol became expert at excavating my father’s graded essays which he went to great length to bury under his huge stack of intimidating college textbooks. Once she found an early essay from his American literature class and announced to the family: “Hey, everybody! Dad got a C– on his English paper. What a dope.” I got to Carol before Dad did and sent her hightailing it to her room.
On the first day of school I walked into the comely entranceway of Sacred Heart Academy, a junior college for women with a boarding high school for girls. Several years before, the Sisters of Mercy had begun taking day students, including thirty boys from the local communities. Sacred Heart did not have enough boys to field a football or baseball team and barely enough to make up a basketball team to compete in the Catholic League of North Carolina. I followed a flow of students and found myself in the student lounge when the song “Poison Ivy” boomed out from the record player and smooth, good-looking Bud Wofford walked up to pretty Louise Howard and asked her to dance. The school was so intimate that I knew almost everyone by the end of the first week, and they knew me. I’d never seen such pretty girls, and walking down the hall of Sacred Heart was the happiest thing a ninth-grade boy could do. It was the year I would reach puberty and the last year I’d entertain my Catholic-boy fantasies of becoming a priest. The Catholic Church could fill up its seminaries if it forbade God from making women look as fabulous as they do. Even the nuns were pretty at Sacred Heart as well as being the kindest women wearing habits and rosary beads who ever taught me.
I tried out for the varsity basketball team in October and surprised even my father when Coach Ted Crunkleton chose me as his tenth player. In this school of thirty boys, the sisters of Sacred Heart had found seven neighborhood kids who could really play the game. No one was great, but all played with determination and all hustled every moment on the court. I was five feet three inches tall when I arrived at Sacred Heart and I would be five ten when the season ended in February. It was the year I grew into the body I would carry into adulthood, and my game improved at a faster rate than it ever had because I was playing against juniors and seniors every day. My teammates never teased or hazed me because of my size or age; rather, they took me in and cherished me and helped me get better in my chosen game.
The point guard was the matchlessly named Johnny Brasch who was cocksure and arrogant the way the good ones are supposed to be. He took care of the ball and directed traffic and got the ball to the guy with the hot hand. The other guard was Bud Wofford, the boy I had watched dancing on the first day of school, whose game had a touch of elegance and who possessed the best jump shot on the team. No one on the team was over six feet two inches tall; Sam Carr, Ted Frazier, and Buddy Martin made up the front line. Nicky Vlaservich was the sixth man and he and Buddy served as the team co-captains.
Though Coach Crunkleton knew very little about the game of basketball, he knew a lot about bringing a team together. He let us in on the fact that he found it a pleasure to coach us, and thought we might surprise some teams that year. In the first game of the season against Cherryville High School in their gym, we beat them so soundly that even I got into the game with a couple of minutes to play. Wofford passed me the ball at the top of the key and I threw up the first jump shot of my high school career. It swished through the net and Wofford cuffed me on the back of the head in celebration as we ran down the court.
Though the Sacred Heart Ramblers started out fast that year, we entered a phase of ennui and uninspired play in the winter months. We were 13–8 entering the Knights of Columbus Tournament in Charlotte that would bring some of the best Catholic schools in the South together, including the habitual powers Bishop England of Charleston and Benedictine of Richmond.
Coach Crunkleton prepared us for this tournament in the oddest, most unconventional way imaginable. At some time toward the end of the season, he became convinced that our team was not in shape, so he spent the week before the tournament running us up and down the country roads around Belmont. We never touched a basketball once and looked more like a cross-country team as Ted Crunkleton would call out of the window of his car, “Meet me at Belmont Abbey.” Then he would scratch out of his parking spot and drive to the college to wait for us. When the team ran up to his car at the Abbey, our coach would yell out, “Meet me in Mount Holly.”
“Mount Holly!” the team would scream, and our coach would scratch off toward the small town three miles to the west. We bitched and cussed and grumbled for the next three miles. By the fifth day, Crunkleton had us doing ten miles of roadwork every afternoon and none of us touched a basketball during that crucial week leading up to the tournament. Only God’s name was taken in vain more often than Crunkleton’s as we jogged along country roads without a sign of life except the encroachment of impenetrable forest that crowded them.
“This isn’t basketball,” Bud Wofford said. “It’s track and field.”
“God, I could use a cigarette,” Johnny Brasch said, causing the whole team to laugh.
Sam Carr said, “Let’s go up to Charlotte Catholic and challenge them to a footrace.”
Vlaservich and Martin led us down the back roads, upbeat and enthusiastic, and taught me how the captains of teams should act when the bellyaching got too loud. Always, Coach Crunkleton would drive to a spot several miles ahead and park his car on the shoulder of the roadway. When we would reach his parked car he’d be smoking a cigarette and would allow us to rest for five minutes. Then he’d say, “You know where that old stone quarry is? Run past that quarry and I’ll meet you at the Old Gastonia Road.”
With great symphonic moaning, the ten of us would start the four-mile run as Crunkleton’s car disappeared in the distance. I heard every joke Johnny Brasch carried in his vast repertoire that week and I listened to tales of the greatness of Bishop England and their six-foot-eight center, Tommy Lavelle, and the classiness of the undefeatable Cavaliers of Benedictine of Richmond who had won the Knights of Columbus tournament for two straight years. To my freshman ears the names “Bishop England�
� and “Benedictine of Richmond” sounded much like the words “Troy” and “Sparta” would sound to an Athenian child in ancient Greece. The Sacred Heart Ramblers ran in good order the four miles past the stone quarry and toward Ted Crunkleton’s car that sat on a slight rise beside a farmhouse on the Old Gastonia Road. Though none of us knew it on that final run on Friday, we were about to surprise our school, our coach, our league, and ourselves.
In a dangerous ride through snow, we arrived at Charlotte Catholic just in time to get dressed for our game with Asheville Catholic. Though we had beaten Asheville Catholic twice during the regular season, both games had been closely contested, and their point guard, Jerry Vincent, was one of the best players in the league. I received a shock to my system when Coach announced that I would start the game in place of Buddy Martin, who had hurt his hand over the weekend and was in a cast. It embarrassed me to be starting when both of our co-captains, whom I hero-worshiped, were sitting on the bench watching me. Yet it was Martin and Vlaservich who slapped my fanny hardest when we gathered for the final pep talk by the bench.
“We’ve got a great team here,” Coach Crunkleton said. “I’ve known that all year long. Let’s prove it to ourselves and everyone else.”
When we walked out on the court and I shook hands with Jerry Vincent, it surprised me that I was taller than he was. When Johnny Brasch came over to encourage me, I saw that I was an inch taller than Johnny. Our center, Sam Carr, controlled the tap and Ted Frazier made a jump shot for our first basket. Vincent answered with a jump shot from the top of the key. Despite their two losses to us, Asheville Catholic had come to play. Jerry Vincent played a smart swift game and his teammates lifted up with him to play their finest basketball of the season. I drifted through the first quarter, surprised to be there, feeling inadequate to fill the shoes of our co-captain Bud Martin. Then Carr took down a rebound, hit Wofford on the wing, who threw me a half-court pass after I slipped behind my man and took off downcourt. Bud’s pass was perfect and I took it over my shoulder, dribbled once, and laid the ball in. Running back downcourt, I passed our bench and both Martin and Vlaservich popped me on the fanny as I ran past them.