My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  Dressed in my shorts and T-shirt and basketball shoes, I ran out of the house and jogged toward the Broad River and the path into the forest that began when base housing made its last encroachment. The sun had oiled the calm river with a last forfeiture of gold as it slid behind the banked clouds in the west. I passed the tabby ruins of an abandoned fort and came to a small beachhead hidden by the bonneted roots of fallen water oaks where I retreated when I wanted to think. Five porpoises hunted schools of baitfish, causing a silvery panic along the sandflats. The sun caught the velvety green backs of the porpoises in sudden trapezoids of fire. I danced for myself and gave myself up to a rapture of what seemed like pure joy. I began screaming at the porpoises and the sun and the river, something I had wanted to give voice to since I got the letter, something I was dying for my mother to say to me, but she had not understood what the true measure of the letter was, or what it could have meant to me. But, by God, I knew what the letter meant as soon as I read it, and I shouted at the top of my voice words I needed to hear said, screaming aloud: “I’m All-State! I’m an All-State basketball player from South Carolina. Did you hear me? I’m All-State and no one can take that away from me. I’m an All-State selection. I’m All-State!”

  When my father got home that night, I positioned myself in the living room as he read the day’s mail with maddening slowness. He read four or five letters before he got to the one naming me to the All-State team. I watched him as he read it over twice, and Mom came out of the kitchen to measure his reaction.

  “What do you think about our boy, Don?” my mother asked. “Not bad, huh?”

  My father folded the letter up carefully and replaced it in its envelope, then said as he put the mail on the coffee table in front of him, “Mister ACC.”

  MY MOTHER TOOK GREAT STOCK IN the significance of my official visit to The Citadel in the middle of May. For a week, she put me through a short course on the courtesies and mannerisms I should display when being escorted through the campus. Since I was almost oily with politeness anyway, I suffered no lack of confidence that I would revert to the etiquette of a Cro-Magnon simply because I was out of my mother’s sight and control. But she had become desperate that there be some kind of satisfactory resolution to the dilemma surrounding my college education. I think my whole family, myself included, had suffered some incalculable wound when no college had stepped forth clamoring for my services on their basketball team. Somehow I had let my family down.

  When my mother dropped me off in front of the Armory at two o’clock the following Friday afternoon, she told me, “I think The Citadel’s your only chance for college, Pat. I really do.”

  I stepped out of the car and into a fierce recruiting war in which I played no part. A splendid guard from Lima, Ohio, named Bill Taflinger had come to The Citadel accompanied by his working-class family, and I soon learned that a number of midwestern schools were interested in signing Bill to a grant-in-aid. Coach Mel Thompson met both Bill and me in his office and told us what he had planned for us over the weekend. Our guide around campus was to be the captain of next year’s team, Mike West. Mel was charming and solicitous. He handled Mr. and Mrs. Taflinger’s questions about the rigors of the military lifestyle at The Citadel with alacrity. “We keep our boys away from the military as much as we can, Mr. Taflinger. They’re over there and we’re over here. Two different worlds with two different purposes and never the twain shall meet. It gets a little dicey during plebe week, but that’s like fraternity rush, then it’s over. Bill’ll do just fine here. I’ve seen him play and this is one tough kid. These military guys won’t make a dent on him. C’mon, let’s go see a parade.”

  Before the parade started, Mike West joined our group with an easygoing charisma that made leadership an instinct with him. I liked him from the moment I met him and had already fallen in love with his game in the four Citadel home games I’d witnessed in the past year. The whole campus seemed both drawn to and mesmerized by him.

  At that same parade as the companies marched out from all four barracks to the beat of the drummers, Mike West suddenly sprinted through the crowd to embrace a young man I knew I’d seen before. Mike brought the man back with him and introduced Bill and me. “This is Dickie Jones, one of the best athletes to attend The Citadel. He was captain of the basketball team my sophomore year.”

  “I hear you’ve been named captain next year, Mike,” Dickie said. “Congratulations. Maybe one of you’ll be captain your senior year at The Citadel.”

  “Mr. Jones, I saw you play George Washington up in D.C. You were terrific, sir,” I said.

  “You saw me play up there?” Dickie said. “I’d do anything to be playing college ball. You boys enjoy every bit of it. You won’t believe how fast it all goes.”

  Bill and I drifted back to watch the parade as Mike continued to talk to Dickie. I wanted to ask Dickie Jones what he had majored in at The Citadel, and I walked up behind the two men and waited for them to finish their conversation before I interrupted them. I heard Mike telling Dickie, “Thompson’s hot to trot to sign Taflinger. Conroy’s just along for the ride.”

  I took a few steps backward then rejoined Taflinger and watched the rest of the parade, hurt beyond all telling. But the parade gave me time to compose myself and gather my thoughts as the companies passed in review in perfect order. I finally admitted to myself that my chances of going to college the following year were growing dimmer by the hour. It was the middle of May and I hadn’t applied or been accepted for a calendar year that was to begin again in three months. I tried to imagine myself as an ex–basketball player and couldn’t conjure the image, just as I could not reconcile myself to missing out on college. My accidental overhearing of Mike West’s insider information helped me prepare for the inevitable scene when Coach Thompson informed me that he couldn’t offer me an athletic scholarship. I tried to think of alternatives, but there were none. I had come to the end of the line and had come up short and had thirty-six hours to prepare myself for Coach Thompson’s farewell address to my basketball career. I think I would’ve gone to pieces in his office if I hadn’t gotten Mike’s bulletin as an early-warning system. My optimism could often be a form of neediness that did not always serve me well. For no reason whatever, I had assumed that Coach Thompson was going to offer me a scholarship and had already planned an acceptance speech in which I told him that I was honored to be selected and would make him proud of his decision and would never let The Citadel down under any circumstances—those unspoken words dried up.

  On Sunday morning, the Taflinger family and I waited outside of Mel Thompson’s office together. They had taken me to breakfast, invited me to visit them in Lima, Ohio, and told me I could stay with them for the whole summer if I so desired. They were a large-hearted midwestern family written in bold capital letters, and they smiled broadly when Coach Thompson called them in for a “little powwow.” Alone, I sat in the hallway on a bench in the otherwise deserted building. I was trying to find the proper words to tell my father that I had failed to land a scholarship from The Citadel. It would make for a difficult ride back to Beaufort, but I hunted for the right way to say that I had let my family down in the most humiliating way.

  I heard a roar go up from the Taflinger family and knew that Bill must have signed his grant-in-aid. Soon, the whole Taflinger family boiled out of Coach Thompson’s office, Bill wearing a broad grin. Mr. Taflinger said, “Bill just inked his name. A full four-year ride. Isn’t that great news, Pat?”

  “The best,” I said. “Congratulations, Bill.”

  Bill surprised me by taking me by the shoulders and saying, “I want you on my team, Pat. Let’s make The Citadel great.”

  “I’d love to play on the same team as you.”

  “Let’s load up, kids,” Mr. Taflinger said. “We’ve got a long ride back to Ohio.”

  “But it’ll be a happy ride,” Mrs. Taflinger said. “Go see Coach Thompson, Pat. He’s in there waiting for you.”

  “You’
ll take the scholarship if he offers you one,” Bill asked, “won’t you?”

  “I’ve got a couple of other offers I’m looking at, Bill,” I said, the lie embarrassing me the moment it passed my lips.

  “Sign here,” Bill said. “That’s an order, smackhead.”

  His family and I both laughed as I went into Mel Thompson’s orderly office.

  “Good morning, Coach,” I said as he motioned for me to sit down on a chair in front of his desk.

  “Good morning, Pat,” he said. “Did Mike West show you a good time?”

  “A great time, Coach. What a great guy he is.”

  “I agree. Did Bill tell you he just signed on for a scholarship?”

  “Yes, sir, he did.”

  “That was our last one, Pat. I don’t have any more scholarships to give. We’ve had our best recruiting class ever and we got boys to sign up we didn’t think we had a prayer of getting,” Coach Thompson said. “We got us some real blue-chippers.”

  “That’s great, Coach,” I said.

  “But it leaves you with the short end of the stick, Pat,” he said. “We wanted you since we first saw you. If I had you, I wouldn’t worry about a full-court press for the rest of my life. But I just ran out of scholarships. If you come to The Citadel as a walk-on, we’ll take care of you. We’d like to have you.”

  “I’d love to come here, Coach,” I said. “I’ll have to talk it over with my parents.”

  “In my opinion, Pat, the boys we signed have skills that make them much better basketball players than you are at this point.” Coach Thompson said it with tenderness and kindness. “But you could find a place on this team. We liked your heart.”

  “Thank you, Coach,” I said. “I’ll let you know what my folks decide.”

  I stood up and shook his hand, then walked out of the gym and saw my father waiting in our car. I was hoping for some time to compose myself before facing him, but he was there waiting for me. Entering the car, I tried to make conversation. “Isn’t this campus pretty, Dad? You should’ve seen the parade on Friday. These guys march as well as Marines do, I swear they do. I was introduced to General Mark Clark by the captain of next year’s basketball team and . . .”

  “Cut the yappin’,” my father said. “Did you get the scholarship or not?”

  “Coach Thompson wants me to come out for the team as a walk-on next year. He said he liked my heart, Dad.”

  “Hey, jocko, I didn’t ask for the directions to China and back. Did you get a scholarship or not? Negative or affirmative?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I didn’t get a scholarship.”

  The slap caught me with my mouth wide open and staring out the front window, another humiliation in a lifetime in which my father brought nothing but an accumulation of both public and private embarrassment. My full-blown hatred of him bloomed as my mouth filled up with blood. We did not exchange a single word or glance on the seventy-mile run back to Beaufort.

  When we entered the house, my mother was waiting to hear the good news, but read the signs when I tore past her and retreated into my bedroom, but not before hearing Dad tell her, “Your sweet boy dropped the ball again, Peg. He didn’t get zip. Nada. You need to look for a home ec scholarship for the kid. No one wants him to play ball for them in this loser state. No one.”

  Two weeks later on June 4, 1963, I graduated from Beaufort High School, a school that had taken me in and cherished me and loved me at the end of a shameful boyhood. The town of Beaufort was the first place I’d ever come to that had the authentic feel of a homeplace to me. Leaving Beaufort was a killing, irrevocable act to me, yet my father’s car was packed for the move to Omaha when I walked across the stage that night. At the ceremony, I received the senior class Sportsmanship Award that my father immediately dubbed “The Pussy Award,” and claimed he would have shoved it back into Bill Dufford’s face if he’d tried to give the medal to him. I received my diploma and had not yet applied to a single college. My brilliant class had more scholarships than any graduating class in the history of Beaufort High, ranging from Princeton to Stanford.

  When the ceremony ended I took off my graduation gown and burst into tears as I said goodbye to Gene Norris and Bill Dufford and Millen Ellis and Grace Foster Dennis and Dutchin Hardin and Marty Moseley and all the other wonderful teachers who’d made me happy in their classrooms. My father had commanded that I skip all the graduation parties, that it was more important that we hit the road and make good time on the trip to his family’s home in Chicago. My brothers Mike and Jim and my sisters, Carol and Kathy, waited for me in the car with my father. Mom and the two babies were flying to Chicago the next day.

  “Say goodbye to this loser burg, kids,” my father said. “We ain’t never coming back to this place.”

  Wanna bet? I said to myself as my father pulled away in darkness.

  “You’re the navigator, pal,” he said to me. “Any mistakes, you face a court-martial.”

  “There won’t be any mistakes, sir,” I said, opening the map. Twenty-four hours later, pausing for pit stops and gas, my father pulled our station wagon to the front of his brother Willie’s house in Chicago, where we stayed for a week. Then we went to Uncle Jim’s remote cabin on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River across from Clinton, Iowa, where Uncle Jim was the Catholic chaplain of Mercy Hospital. My mother and her seven children spent two of the most miserable and isolated months of our lives in that ill-equipped cabin as Dad went on to Offutt Air Force Base to begin his new job. I fumed all summer about my future and could not get my mother to talk to me about college because she had no news to report on that front. “Your father’s working on college,” was all she’d say.

  In July, I took a long train ride to Columbia, South Carolina, to participate in the North-South All-Star game. The game was good for me and taught me lessons in humility that the realm of sport can always teach its athletes. I discovered I was not the best basketball player in South Carolina as I had thought, I was the fifteenth or sixteenth best. I played on the same team as Don Whitehead and John Bloom and Hyman Rubin, all superb players. I played against the gifted Jim Sutherland and Mike Muth and Bob Cauthen for the North team. It was during that game that I noticed the apartheid nature of athletics in South Carolina sports and wondered aloud where the black All-Star game was being played.

  I was out of shape and disillusioned and played the game without distinction except for three driving layups I made in the second half. But after the game, a well-built, handsome man wearing a Citadel polo shirt came up and introduced himself as Hank Witt, an assistant football coach at The Citadel.

  “Pat, great game, son. You’re just what the doctor ordered. Mel Thompson apologized for not being here. But he wanted me to welcome you to The Citadel.”

  “What do you mean, Coach?” I asked.

  “Your father enrolled you at The Citadel yesterday, Pat,” he said. “You’re going to be a Bulldog. You’re part of the Citadel family now, son.”

  I was going to college. Thanks to my academic scholarships, I was going to be a “college” basketball player, and I thought I was headed for the big-time.

  CHAPTER 7

  PLEBE YEAR

  I ENTERED THE CITADEL AS A WALK-ON, A PLAYER WHO MAKES THE team without the benefit of scholarship. My first year, Mel hadn’t offered me a scholarship because, as he told my father, “I signed two guards a lot better than Pat,” and he was telling the truth. “Walk-on”—this still remains the proudest word I can apply to myself. Walk-on—there are resolve and backbone in that noun.

  My parents never considered the possibility of accompanying me to my first day at The Citadel. Instead, they found the cheapest mode of transportation to get me from Omaha to Charleston during plebe week in August. My mother, a bargain shopper of heroic proportions, found a southern version of the slow boat to China and, weeping hard, put me on a train in Omaha that made its ponderous way through the American Midwest, stopping everywhere to take on freight and passeng
ers. For two and a half days I slept sitting up, eating a box of saltines and the banana sandwiches my mother had packed for the trip.

  That journey through the heartland was my first great adventure. Aloneness itself seemed like a prize possession to the oldest of seven children, and I drew in the rolling beauty of the American landscape as it sped past the train window. I spoon-fed myself with lush, fabulous images of my country spinning by me in ever-changing light and shadow. On my own for the first time in my life, the exhilaration I felt lent an air of bright enchantment to the passenger compartment. I was on my way to play college basketball, and I didn’t think that life could get any better.

  But it did. Somewhere in Ohio a young black woman came into my car and sat in a seat across from me. Like me, she was going to college in the South, so we began to talk with an ease I didn’t often achieve with other young women. Her personality enchanted me, her outspokenness charmed me and caught me by surprise as we talked about politics and books and the state of the world. Whenever the train stopped she and I would go out to the platform and listen on her radio to reports of the March on Washington that was taking place at the same moment we were moving toward Cincinnati. I had long grown accustomed to being silent around girls, but I marveled as this uncommonly pretty girl dragged things out of me that I did not even know were there. Right away, she told me since she’d never met a southern white boy, there were a lot of questions she had for me. She shared the fried chicken her grandmother had made and I tried to foist one of my mother’s banana sandwiches off on her. Together, we listened to the great Martin Luther King speech and fell silent afterwards. I told her I’d met Dr. King at Penn Center in Beaufort, South Carolina, when my English teacher took me to a community sing at Penn Center on St. Helena Island. My brother Jim would later say that we were lucky to be raised in the South by two people who didn’t have a racist bone in their bodies. That day, I tried to tell this loveliest of women the same thing, but youth had engineered barriers that cut me off from thoughts that surged around me in that inland sea where hormones raged. My words kept tripping over her loveliness.