My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  “Even a little pip-squeak like Conroy can take a rebound from a giant like Lenny. It takes guts and heart. You got the guts, Conroy?”

  “Yes, sir,” I screamed, my butt level with Lenny Chappell’s knees. I tried to back Lenny out farther into the lane, but he felt like a parked Chevy truck.

  Bones threw two rebounds off the backboard and I got the first two, drawing the cheers of the campers.

  On Bones’s next shot, Lenny Chappell put his huge hand on my shoulder and vaulted up toward the rim and dunked the ball through the basket while driving me to the floor.

  “Guts, Conroy, you got,” Lenny Chappell said, bowing to the applause of the campers. “But no damn heart.” I basked in the glow of his jesting voice for the rest of the day because an NBA player had said my name out loud for the first time in my life.

  In the morning with the sun rising up from the Virginia tidelands, I couldn’t wait to take to the court. My days at Camp Wahoo passed in a dreamy blur of pivots, stutter steps, crossover dribbles, and outlet passes. The language of my chosen sport flowed out of me in psalms of pure melody and praise. Though overwhelmed by my lack of knowledge and being outclassed by the other counselors, I was taking something into the pores of my skin that seemed like the very essence of sport. That first summer, when I competed against players the caliber of Hot Rod Hundley, Rod Thorn, Lenny Chappell, Jerry West, John Wetzel, and Art Heyman, my game improved. I was a baitfish struggling upstream with the silvery, leaping wild salmon, but I was swimming in the same river and happy as a sunbeam to be there.

  It took me hours of lonely practice to incorporate new moves into my arsenal of attack. I tried to memorize every single trick or feint or backdoor move that each coach drilled into us, but only by breaking a move down into its component parts, only by practicing it over and over again during thousands of precise repetitions could I incorporate it into my own flawed game. In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you react, you recover, you drive, and the thinking is seamless and invisible in the secret codes of your game.

  My second summer—the summer after a dreadful 1965–66 season—I’d returned to Wahoo with an unshakable sense of mission. My time on the bench during my dismal junior year had frustrated me greatly, and the modest dreams I’d entertained as a player were quickly slipping away. So I used that summer as a springboard to remake myself as a basketball player. I needed to improve my jump shot and learn how to run a basketball team and play smothering defense on the opposing guard. After Camp Wahoo was finished I signed up to be a counselor at Vic Bubas’s basketball camp at Duke as well as the one at Dartmouth College run by Doggie Julian and a young Rollie Massimino. My summer was dedicated to my sport and my sport alone. I had one year left as a basketball player and I desperately desired to salvage something of value from it. The world of sports lacks compassion; its judgments are pitiless. I was mediocre, a benchwarmer, a loser—and I could absorb all that—but I wanted to be on the court with games on the line. I had never played a college varsity game from start to finish. But determination—a need to see how far desire alone could take me—burned like pure ore in my psyche. If the call came, I would be ready.

  THAT SECOND BLISSFUL SUMMER AT WAHOO, I hung on every word spoken by the coaches and pros who conducted clinics as though they were bringing me newly discovered gospels which would point me the way toward my salvation as an athlete. Again I was placed in the ball-handling clinic, with Coach Gary McPherson of VMI, who at twenty-seven was the youngest head coach for Division I. But Gary also taught defense and shooting. Our station is where the point guards came to learn the intricacies of their positions, and I memorized every word Gary spoke. After practice each day, Coach McPherson, with a generosity that moves me to this day, stayed late to work with me on my shooting. I had confessed to him that no one had ever taught me the proper way to execute a jump shot.

  “Square your shoulders, Pat. Pick a spot just over the rim. Bring the ball up over your head. Keep the movement fluid. The great shooters do the same thing every time. The shot is part of who they are. Concentrate. The hands are always in the same position on the ball. Be comfortable. Stay loose. Now release. Snap the wrist. The index finger points the exact spot you want the ball to go. The wrist bends toward the basket. Your hand looks like a duck head as the wrist snaps it forward. Every time you shoot, you think it’s going in. Develop a shooter’s mentality. Practice your ass off.” Like a mantra, I repeated those words until I was left with the shot itself. I wanted the jump shot to be the center of my game. In the coming season, if the opposing guard anticipated me driving the lane and dropped off, I wanted to pull up and stick in a jumper. I wanted to hurt that sucker and make him come out to play me so when he came out to cover the jumper, I could drive past him, in the lane, tenacious and loose in the country of the big man, my native land. I had it all planned.

  DURING THAT SECOND SUMMER OF fiercely contested night games with the campers filling the stands, the counselors split up into evenly matched teams and went to war against each other. I have never enjoyed the game of basketball as much as I did in those post-twilight games in the Virginia hills, nor have I ever played it so well or against players any better.

  I was a bottom feeder among the counselors, one of the journeyman players—fact, not modesty. Because I passed the ball during those run-and-gun games, I often played on the team selected to highlight the visiting pro. The star that summer was Art Heyman, Duke’s fast-talking, gum-chewing first-team All-American who won the basketball Player of the Year award his senior year, beating out such greats as Walt Hazzard and Bill Bradley. When Art entered the room the barometric reading rose, and his outrageous big-city ways became the focus of every eye. His arrival at Camp Wahoo is still the stuff of legend. I remember him driving his convertible beneath the porte cochere with a blonde looking like the embodiment of original sin seated next to him. Often I’d read the word “floozie” in certain kinds of novels but had never encountered one in the flesh. The car, the floozie, and the All-American were all part of a package deal: Art Heyman was to teach us all a new sensibility that was then making its presence known in basketball circles across America. With no apologies, Art’s game was urban black, big-city, kiss my ass and hold the mayo, in your face, wiseass Jewish, no-holds-barred and a hot dog at Nathan’s after the game. He seemed to delight in and feed off the hatred of those southern boys who filled up the ranks of the counselors—boys out of VPI, Hampden-Sydney, Wake Forest, and Richmond—much more at ease with the aw-shucks, pass-the-biscuits-ma’am variety of heroism embodied in Jerry West and Rod Thorn. Art Heyman would stride among us as antihero heart of darkness, the harbinger of all that terrified us about the chain-netted boroughs of New York. His West Side Story stormed down to do battle with our Wahoo Walton Family. Heyman came up to me before the jump ball and whispered, “It’s show time, peanut. Get me the ball.”

  I knew what my job was and for forty whirlwind minutes I threw passes to the best college basketball player of 1963. Everyone on my team knew the unwritten rules and that we simply provided filler on the court, bodies to clog up lanes and grab rebounds. Our real job was to let everyone in the gym marvel at the extraordinary gifts of Art Heyman.

  Our opponents seethed with a loathing of Art that he seemed to take for granted. John Wetzel, the dazzling forward from Virginia Tech who would later play for the Los Angles Lakers and serve as head coach of the Phoenix Suns, was first to guard Heyman, and he did it with a rabid intensity. He covered Heyman in the first half like a sheen of sweat. UVA’s Chip Conner drew the assignment the second half. The loathing for the All-American was palpable all over the court, and Heyman, who seemed to enjoy it, ran his mouth the entire game. Art was the first trash talker I’d ever met, and there’s nothing white southern boys hate more than a trash talker. But take it from me, Art Heyman could back it up.

>   That night the court shimmered with competitive zeal, like sheet lightning shooting through the overheated gym. I brought the ball upcourt, fast, but I was guarded by Virginia Tech’s Spider Lockhart, a six-five jumping jack with long arms who was always a threat to steal the ball. But my dribbling—always the best part of my game—got me around him. The moment I was free I’d look for Heyman, who’d be engaged in a wrestling match with John Wetzel on the left-hand side of the court. Wetzel fought hard to front Heyman, but Heyman used his body brilliantly and always got himself in a perfect position. Then with a call of “Right here, peanut,” he’d motion with his huge hand where he wanted the ball. And I would fire Art Heyman the ball, right there.

  At that moment, Spider and I would retreat to the other side of the court and become spectators in a gymful of transported boys as Wetzel and Heyman battled for control of the boards. For acolytes in the game of basketball, watching two athletes as gifted as Heyman and Wetzel was like being in church.

  I learned that night that I looked like an All-American point guard when I was flipping the ball to Heyman because he was a great player. Though Wetzel and Chip Conner were excellent defenders, the great offensive player will always have the advantage over the defender for the simple reason that it is easier to go forward than backward. Heyman could score, almost at will, even though all five opposing players dropped back to block his move to the basket. But the cocky Heyman would pivot, then throw up a pump fake, then again, then another with Wetzel not taking the bait. Then Heyman’s whole body would seem to rise up toward the rim, and Wetzel would leap high in the air for the block. But Heyman had faked again, this time pure artistry and cheap trick combined.

  One play stands out in my mind. Heyman stole a pass intended for Wetzel and raced downcourt with a breakaway move that did not quite spring him free. Both Chip Conner and Wetzel ran with him, step for step, bird-dogging his every move, matching his cuts and hard, headlong charge. Both men were faster and better leapers than Art. I’d broken right behind Heyman and found myself filling the center lane, trailing the play ten feet behind.

  At the top of the key, Heyman lifted up with a slight change of pace, then drove hard for the rim, rising upward with Conner and Wetzel matching his every move with countermoves of their own. To me, a breathless foot soldier of the lowest rank, the three men were kingly in their skills, lords of a highborn dance. I didn’t even see the moment when Art Heyman at the top of his leap flipped the ball back to me. Running full speed, I caught the pass belt-high, as soft as an exchange of feathers between children. As the three players crashed to the floor in a pile of tangled limbs, I laid the ball into the hoop without a soul around me. It was the most beautiful and precisely delivered pass I had ever seen. Art Heyman, who was rumored to have thrown about four or five passes in his whole career, had just taught me a lesson about passing I’d never forget. His intuition and uncanny court sense had informed him that I was coming up behind him. It was not something he thought about or planned for, but he made that pass with the instincts that genius grants to very few.

  As I watched Heyman make his way downcourt, I studied his immersion and ease in himself and the game. I saw that he understood his indisputable place in the game, his right to be on center stage with the game centrifugal to his every move. Because he was fearless and gifted, Heyman could surrender himself to his game fully. He could risk everything, because he had taken possession of his time on the court and had perfect faith in his skills and instincts. The important thing was to be alive in the moment, open to every possibility and configuration, and make that moment yours only, again and again. You cannot risk what does not belong to you, so I took that pass from that man and tried to apply its lessons to my life. I needed to open myself to all the possibilities around me, to hold nothing back, to live in the moment at hand with my art and my game on the line.

  Since every athlete learns by theft and mimicry, I stole that pass from Art Heyman. His pass did not even register in his consciousness, it was simply show business, part of the razzmatazz and the glitter of big-city hoops that he brought to the game. But I used that pass four times my senior year, and it worked every time.

  My second task that summer at Camp Wahoo was to learn how to play tough, no-nonsense defense. Until college, no one had instructed me in the art of defending a man on offense. The coaches of Camp Wahoo were both passionate and eloquent about its importance. I attended every clinic on defense I could. Tom Carmody, who coached at Bethel Park High outside of Pittsburgh, was highly respected for his knowledge of defense. What defense required, Coach Carmody said, was hustle and desire and sacrifice. It took courage and commitment and the heart of a Siberian tiger. Hearing nothing to keep me from being a member of the club, I burned that summer with a desire to help my team win games by refusing to let my man score even a single point. This had never happened to me, and was revolutionary in the advancement of my game. For me, defense was the boring grunt work of the sport, while offense was a race to the dessert line. At Wahoo that last summer, I vowed to become a defensive specialist.

  I lived for those night games. All I wanted to do was make beautiful passes to my teammates and to shut out the man I was guarding. I stayed low and in my man’s face the whole game. I shadowed him every inch of the court. Defense became something I dreamed about at night. I stopped Spider Lockhart on a Tuesday, and Hugh Corliss of LaGrange College on a Wednesday, and the gifted Paul Long on Thursday.

  On Friday night, I faced off with Johnny Moates of the University of Richmond whom I had guarded on occasion in the Southern Conference for the past two years. The games that summer were an offensive show put on for the enjoyment of the campers, a factor that worked in my favor. None of the pros or the counselors put much effort on the defensive end, except in those rare encounters with the big cats like Heyman and Wetzel. My sudden dedication to defense struck some of the players as weird. Johnny Moates did not like it worth a damn.

  I picked Moates up full court my last night at my beloved Camp Wahoo, and I stuck to him like a wood tick the entire night. No one set a screen for Johnny the whole game. No one helped him to get open or to get me off of him. Johnny’s frustration turned to anger. He was a great scorer and the great scorers need shots the way otters need streams. They fall apart when denied the basketball. The game was an agony for Johnny Moates, and he began to push me away from him when I got too close.

  “Just play ball, Conroy. This is bullshit,” he yelled, then pushed me off him again.

  The more he pushed the closer I stuck. If he put a hand up high to receive a pass, I raised a hand up to intercept it. I was not a step away from him the entire game, and Johnny Moates did not score. When the final whistle sounded I was the happiest son-of-a-bitch in the state of Virginia.

  Only two people would remember my defensive play that summer: Mel Thompson and Johnny Moates.

  Five of my Citadel teammates were at Wahoo that summer. Mel never spoke a word to any of us. None of my Citadel teammates knew if Coach Thompson watched the counselors games or not. He never sat where we could see him. After the Friday game I went out into the darkness and looked over at the buildings of Miller School, watching the campers and counselors drift slowly toward the dormitories. Young boys called my name and reached out to touch me as they flowed past me.

  Just then, someone slapped my fanny, disrupting my reverie. A large, dark shape moved past me on the left—Mel Thompson, my college coach, smoking, that slap his wordless praise, my reward and trophy, and his acknowledgment of the hard work I’d put in that summer.

  I left the mountains of Camp Wahoo thinking I had learned to play great defense. The following season, Johnny Moates would teach me otherwise.

  CHAPTER 9

  RETURN FOR SENIOR YEAR

  IT IS TIME ITSELF I AM TRYING TO RETRIEVE.

  I long to pin it down in the surreal hyacinth-light of both memory and dream that now have faded where once they were three-dimensional and rich. I want to write down how
I felt and thought as I made my way around The Citadel during my last time as a basketball player and my first that I thought of myself, with a sense of dread and unworthiness, as a writer. It was the year I woke up to the dream of my own life.

  As I walked across the parade ground during the first week, I began the long, terrifying process of turning myself into the southern writer my mother had told me I would be since I was five years old. Always, she emphasized the word “southern” and told me I must never turn my back on her region of the rough-born South. During my three-year test at The Citadel, I had tried to transform myself, to drink in the landscape and tell exactly what it was to submit to the discipline of the Corps of Cadets. Since I had observed all those rites of submission, I could feel The Citadel’s story forming on my tongue, and all the language of outrage and brotherhood cleaving to the roof of my mouth.

  For the first time since becoming a cadet, I felt myself accepting the school for what it was. I no longer blamed The Citadel for not being the Harvard or Duke that my parents could not have afforded for me had I been smart enough to get into them. I experienced a rush of happiness each time I woke to bugles, as well as gratitude and belonging when taps played over the barracks at night. Next to the chapel across the parade ground, a whole library of books awaited my astonished inspection. I had promised myself to complete a single poem every day for Colonel John Doyle’s poetry writing seminar in addition to improving the short stories I was writing for The Shako, the campus literary magazine. I would use the year to learn how to think and see the world as a writer. For the first time, I knew the repleteness that comes from filling up with words. Language became a honeycomb brightening the eaves of my brain.