My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  “I bet not a single college scout comes to watch you play,” he said. “I think my baby boy’s going to wilt under all the pressure.”

  “I hope not.”

  “You’re a loser, son. Your mother can’t see it, but I’m a Chicago boy and I know a pussy when I see one.”

  My father’s laughter rang down the hallway as he walked toward the kitchen.

  AGAINST ST. PAUL IN THE OPENING GAME, before what seemed like the largest opening-night crowd in history, I faced my first double-team and realized that the St. Paul coach was gambling that if he could stop me, his team could defeat the Tidal Wave. But the two guards assigned to me had never double-teamed anyone for a whole game, and they found it harder to do than it looked on a blackboard. I kept busting through a seam up the middle and heading for the basket. During the game I kept hearing a voice through the noise of the crowd shouting, “Get Conroy, put Pat Conroy on the deck,” and recognized it as the voice of my father. A Marine brat by the name of Billy Swetnam had entered Beaufort High School and joined me in the back court. He could play the game and had a nice short-range jump shot that made teams regret double-teaming me. Our big men controlled the boards, Chris Edwards and Robert Padgett with finesse, and Benny Michael with the brute strength he brought intact from his fullback position on the football team. We defeated St. Paul 49–34. I scored a workmanlike nineteen points and knew that I was in for a far different season from the honeymoon of my junior year when I was one of the league leaders in scoring. But my team and I sustained each other and fought for each other and we were 3–0 going into our annual road trip to play Myrtle Beach and Conway.

  In Conway, the gym was packed with a rowdy, enthusiastic crowd as we loped out of the locker room for warmups. Their coach, Tom Eady, walked over and shook my hand as I moved to the back of the layup line.

  “Go easy on us, Pat,” he said. “You killed us last year.” Last year I had scored thirty-one points against Conway, by far the best game I’d ever played.

  Coach Eady, an elegant and handsome man who had a gift for the right gesture, had come to find me in the locker room to congratulate me. He was an excellent coach and that night proved it by stopping me cold. Coach Eady introduced me and my teammates to a defense called the box and one.

  An aggressive guard named Harold Branton was the one, and his only job that night was to bird-dog me all over the court. If I got around him, his four teammates were to move out as one in a disciplined zone to stop me until Harold recovered and got back into position. Conway encouraged my teammates to shoot often as Branton followed me around the court with the persistence of halitosis. I could not shake the kid and our offense had no way to get him off me. We never solved the problem of the box and one that night and lost to the Conway Tigers 52–39. I stunk up the floor, disgraced my school, only scoring eleven points by intercepting errant passes and taking the ball downcourt for layups.

  We lost three of the next four games; the league teams had figured out a foolproof way to contain me on offense. I grew accustomed to seeing two men inch out to intercept me when I brought the ball upcourt. My team grew worried and diffident around me. I could see in their eyes that I was failing to hold up my part of the unspoken covenant, lifting this team to victory. I scored seventeen in a two-point loss to Garrett, fifteen in a 49–41 victory over Berkeley, and fourteen in a 51–42 loss to St. Paul. My play was flat and undistinguished, and much worse, it was cowardly.

  My father recognized the cowardice, not me. In the disappearance of my game, I had submitted to a strange lassitude that fell somewhere between surrender and vagueness. I was lost somewhere in the fogs of myself and didn’t know how to recover. When my father picked me up to take me home to Laurel Bay, he asked how the St. Paul game went.

  “We lost, Dad,” I said.

  “How many did you score?”

  “Fourteen.”

  He backhanded me into the passenger-side window. His slap had caught me relaxed, and my nose started bleeding profusely. If the blood had not flowed, the beating would have continued. Because I was an expert in translating the fury of my father’s eyes, I knew that the first backhand was a warmup for a long night spent warding off his blows. I unzipped my bag and pressed my nose into my uniform shirt. I could always tell my mother that I’d been elbowed under the boards by St. Paul’s center.

  “You don’t get it, do you, mama’s boy? This is a kick-ass world that doesn’t have time to wait around for pussies like you to wake up and read the fucking headlines. You’re not as good a ballplayer as you were last year, pal. Understand that? These teams have your number. They’re eating your jock. Because you’ve got a pussy between your legs instead of a dick, it’s working on you. I’d’ve gone through this league like shit through a goose. Their teeth’d be lying all over the floor like Chiclets. I’d shuck teeth from their heads and make them believe it was corn. You listening to me, pal? Ah, you’re not crying, are you? Sweet little Pat. Mama’s little baby loves shortenin’, shortenin’, mama’s little baby loves shortenin’ bread. Itty-bitty baby feel bad? Daddy’s so sorry. You haven’t received one letter from one college about playing ball next year. Not one. No one’s scouted you because word’s getting out that you’re a quitter and a loser. You won’t be going to college next year, son.”

  There was nothing my father could not teach me about the architecture of despair. I knew all its shapes and its blueprints, the shadows of all its columns and archways. My father could send me reeling down its hallways and screaming into its bat-spliced attics with a curl of his thin-lipped mouth. He brought madness home every time he entered the many houses of my overlong childhood. His cruelty baffled me, shamed me, and I promised myself I would never be anything like him.

  I came back the next game against Walterboro with nineteen points, and our team won 69–41. My father was in the stands and I waved to him for the first time all season, enraging him. Against Georgetown I scored twenty-two of my team’s forty-four points as we won by eight points. Against Berkeley I scored twenty-one of forty-nine points, and I had found my way back to myself and my game again. In the middle of the Berkeley game with my friend Bruce Harper shooting two free throws, I walked over to where my father and family were seated among the hometown crowd and waved. I waited for the look of rage to cross my father’s face—and it was quick in coming. “Hey, showboat,” he yelled at me, “let’s get serious about the game.”

  In my secret self, the one my father didn’t know about, I said in silence, “Fuck you, Dad.” I smiled and waved again, but this time only to my father. At the end of the third quarter we were tied up with Berkeley 30–30. In the fourth quarter I scored twelve points and we won the game going away. On the drive home, my father critiqued every aspect of my game, slashing the air with his index finger to emphasize his points as he listed my shortcomings, his voice a soundtrack in the garden I was tending in the high-country of self that was lush and fatherless.

  IT WAS THAT SEASON, IN 1963, when I first met Mel Thompson, who came to Beaufort High School to do a scouting report on me in a game against Chicora High School. When Coach Thompson took his seat in the top row of the visitors’ section I had no way of knowing that my fate, inexorable and cat-footed, had come riding into town. The Citadel’s coach sat in silence and judged me as a player he might recruit for his team. Later, he told me he had been looking for a ball handler. I could have told him, if that was the order of the day, he had come to the right place.

  I was in the middle of the best week of basketball I would ever play, if the number of points scored is the measurement of achievement. On the previous Tuesday night in a small-town gymnasium, heated by a woodstove, I scored forty-three points against Ridgeland High in a game we won in the final minute. Every shot I made seemed to float magically through the basket. I felt possessed, enraptured, flush with gladness, and I did not think there was a boy in the whole world who could stop me.

  While we were riding home that night, my father, still in his Ma
rine uniform, bawled me out for thirty miles for playing lousy defense. I am certain my father was right because I’d not even begun to understand defense. I was accustomed to my father’s screaming after games but it couldn’t dull my pleasure at having scored forty-three points in a closely fought contest whose outcome was in doubt almost to the final whistle.

  It was the box score of the Ridgeland game that brought Mel Thompson into my life. What Coach Thompson would see during our next game against Chicora was not a true reflection of my ability. He watched a far better basketball player than I was on a daily basis, for again I found myself on fire against this team that was favored to beat us. I roared around that gym, magnetized, bewitched, and again, all but unstoppable. I ran the court as though my blood had turned to quicksilver. This night would prove the only time in my career that two such games occurred back-to-back, during the same week. I lay awake that week in sheer amazement at what my own body had done.

  The largest crowd in the history of Beaufort High School showed up for the Chicora game and the pep band put everyone into a state of near frenzy as my team burst out of the locker room high on Coach Jerry Swing’s emotional pregame speech. In this one glorious night, I lifted right out of myself and turned into the kind of basketball player who could change the way a town felt about itself. The score was close all game, and Chicora was coached brilliantly by Ray Graves, once a star forward at The Citadel.

  Every Chicora boy who played that night fouled me in my reckless drives through the lane. I was in the middle of a senior year when I would average twenty-two points a game, leading my team to a 13–3 record. When that final buzzer sounded, I always felt like Cinderella as the clock tolled the midnight hour and I’d find myself transformed back into the painfully shy boy I was, not a star who’d just scored thirty-six points that helped beat a superior team. In the locker room, I sat beside my open locker as my teammates pounded my back, not wanting to get dressed because I wanted to hang on to the sweetness of this one night. I had scored seventy-nine points in two games, something I never thought would happen.

  Coach Swing brought the tall, dark-eyed man into the locker room to meet me. I watched as Mel Thompson made his way through a locker room full of ecstatic boys. My fate approached me with a great, loping walk.

  “Pat, you remember that Citadel game I took you to last year?” asked Coach Swing. “Well, this is The Citadel’s head coach, Mel Thompson.”

  “Hello, sir,” I said. “I saw your team play George Washington in D.C. two years ago. I loved how Dickie Jones played.”

  “You reminded me of Dickie Jones,” Mel Thompson said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I told him all about you, Pat,” Coach Swing said. “They don’t make them any better, Coach.”

  “You’ll be hearing from me, Pat,” Coach Thompson said. “Good game.” He smiled as he left me.

  I played under Mel Thompson for the next four years, and he never again said “good game” to me. Nor did he smile at me again. Ever.

  IN MARCH, COACH MEL THOMPSON of The Citadel wrote me a letter inviting me to visit the college the first weekend in May. He did not mention the word “scholarship” but my parents thought that such an invitation implied a promise of financial aid. When I returned home from baseball practice each day, I’d ask my mother if there was any mail for me from a college, but there never was. Years later, my mother would admit that there had been letters of interest from Furman, Presbyterian, Wofford, and Erskine, but she and my father had thrown them in the trash because they were Protestant colleges.

  In April I was called out of Millen Ellis’s English class by a messenger from the principal’s office. I walked into Mr. Dufford’s office, and he introduced me to a tall friendly man by the name of Dwayne Morrison. His name was vaguely familiar, then Bill Dufford said, “Coach Morrison is Chuck Noe’s assistant up at the University of South Carolina, Pat. He wants to talk to you about playing for Carolina.”

  Stunned by this unexpected news, I stared at Coach Morrison with my jaw loosened and my mouth agape as I hunted for the proper words.

  “How’d you like to play for Carolina, Pat?” Coach Morrison asked me.

  “More than anything in the world, Coach.”

  “We hear you got the attitude, the heart, the will—everything but the jump shot, kid.”

  “Pat’ll work,” Mr. Dufford said quickly. “He spent the whole summer in the gym. He’s got the best work ethic of any kid we’ve had here.”

  “That’s what we like to hear.”

  Coach Morrison took me by the elbow and led me into the office next to Mr. Dufford’s. His personality and enthusiasm dazzled me; he was the kind of coach I’d dreamed of having since I was a kid. He made me feel like I was the best basketball player he had ever talked to, and he made me believe in every single aspect of Chuck Noe’s program. He talked about “redshirting” me for a year, putting me on a weight-training program, sending me to summer basketball programs for extra seasoning, and teaching me all the tricks of the trade that a point guard would need to know in the highly competitive Atlantic Coast Conference at the time South Carolina still held membership in it. He asked me if I would accept a scholarship from Carolina if one was offered, and I said yes sir. Coach Morrison asked me if I would give my heart and soul to make Coach Noll’s program take its place as one of America’s best, and I said yes sir. He inflated my ego to the breaking point, seeming to know everything about my skills and deficiencies as a ballplayer. When he talked about his university, he made it sound like some grand easement into paradise. When he asked me if I thought I could play against the Tar Heels of Chapel Hill and the Wolfpack of NC State, I told him I’d dreamed of playing those teams since I was a child. What I learned in that half hour was that Coach Morrison was a wizard in the art of recruiting. He could’ve talked me into walking across burning embers or a live minefield. When he left me that day he said, “We’re going to try to make this work, Pat. I can see you in a Gamecock uniform. We’ve got a couple of other kids we’re going to look at. But I can practically guarantee you, you’re the kind of guy we’re looking for. A good point guard’s worth his weight in gold these days. He’s the quarterback, the brains of the team, the guy who gets it done. It’s you we want, Pat. You. Got it, buddy?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  In my great naïveté, or innocence, or stupidity, I thought that the scholarship to South Carolina was a sure thing, and I made the mistake of telling my mother that USC was giving me a free ride when I got home from school that afternoon. To be perfectly accurate, I think most probably I confided to my mother that Coach Morrison had offered me a full scholarship but not to tell anyone until it was official. My mother danced around the kitchen when she heard the news, and in her ebullience, I felt the first shivers and pangs of confusion about the reality of the scholarship. I warned her not to tell Dad a thing until I received confirmation from Coach Morrison, but she told him the moment he arrived home from the base. My father walked up to me and put out his hand to shake mine.

  “A scholarship to the University of South Carolina,” Dad said. “That’s the best college basketball conference in the country, son. I was wrong about everything I said about you and your game.”

  “Ask him how the crow tastes, son,” my mother laughed.

  “It’s not official yet, Dad,” I said.

  “The guy offered you a scholarship, didn’t he?” my father asked.

  “He practically did, Dad. He sounded like he really wanted me, that the team really needed a guy like me.”

  “Well, sounds like a done deal to me,” my father said as he walked to the phone, where I heard him telling several of his brothers they’d better start making reservations for the ACC tournament next year if they wanted to see his son help defeat the North Carolina Tar Heels.

  In less than a month, I was the laughingstock of my father and his family. I never heard from Dwayne Morrison or received a single letter from the South Carolina athl
etic office. My father ended up calling Coach Morrison who regretfully told him that they had completed their recruiting for the next season, but he felt sure I would land a scholarship with a good program. “That’s a great kid you’ve got there, Colonel. He’ll go places.”

  But my father’s report to me had a sterner edge as he said, “Bottom line, pal. You’re not only a loser, you’re a liar. The coach said he never offered you a scholarship.”

  My father possessed a small genius for scab-flicking, for zeroing in on that tenderest spot of the psyche where healing was most difficult, exposing the rawness of the wound again and again. His cold blue eyes would twinkle with malice for long weeks after my imaginary scholarship to Carolina was exposed as fraudulent. He’d say, “The lawn looks like it needs mowing, ACC.” Or, “How ’bout opening me a beer, ACC,” or, “When’s your next baseball game, ACC?” “Looks like ACC could use a haircut.”

  To survive the long march of my father, I taught myself to be stoical and unreadable. I disguised my face even from myself. In April I quit asking about the mail and hadn’t a clue about where I was going to be the following year. Then Dad got orders to Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, and my despair was bottomless. Only when Dad received these orders did I realize the depth of my attachment to Beaufort. The next day, I opened a letter informing me that I’d been selected as one of the players to represent the South in the annual North-South All-Star game in Columbia that July. I ran around the house screaming with joy, a renewal of hope that I’d have one more chance to impress the college scouts who had missed me on the first go-round.

  “Write them back today,” my mother said. “Tell them you can’t play.”

  “What do you mean, I can’t play? I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “We’ll be in Nebraska then,” she said.

  “I’ll be in Columbia, South Carolina, then,” I said. “It might be my last chance to win a scholarship. Mom, I’ll walk from Nebraska to South Carolina if I have to.”