My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  As a sophomore, my spirit was puppylike and unbridled because, as Dick Martini liked to say, “Mel hasn’t had a chance to break your spirit yet. It won’t take long.”

  In the fall of my sophomore year, it was Dick, our Italian center and captain from Passaic, New Jersey, sitting beside me on the bus taking us to our game, who first told me of the pitfalls and dangers of playing at the Clemson Tigers’ gym.

  “I got something to say to you, weasel,” Martini said in a conspiratorial whisper. “You just listen to Uncle Dick and don’t say a word until I’m finished or I’ll crush your little guard ass like a roach. Now, you’re a rookie and have never played at Clemson in your putrid life. This ain’t like no other normal game, rookie. Clemson’s only got these big, mean, stupid redneck boys like yourself, only these boys are farm boys with no teeth. They grew up fucking sheep and who knows what else. These boys are so backward they major in agriculture and shit like that. Agriculture! Plow 101. Milk a Fucking Cow 202. Turn On a Tractor 303. Clemson guys are the meanest, dumbest, fightingest sons-of-bitches in the whole world.”

  “It’ll be that much more fun to beat them,” I said.

  Dick put a large hand over my mouth. “Don’t talk like that, midget. That’s exactly the kind of talk I don’t want to hear coming out of your stupid southern mouth.”

  “Dick, we beat West Virginia in Morgantown,” I protested. “We can beat Clemson up there.”

  “Midget, midget,” Dick said sadly. “You don’t understand. If we beat their team, the Clemson boys will storm the court and tear us apart with their bare hands. They’ll kill us. We just got to hope they don’t fuck us before they kill us. But when you get in the game, don’t do nothing stupid like trying to win. Got me, smackhead?”

  Looking into Dick Martini’s eyes, I saw to my astonishment that he was terrified. The largest, most powerful Italian man I had ever met had a grave, unappeasable terror of my mother’s southern people.

  “Agriculture,” he kept saying. “They go to college to major in farming,” said the tenth leading rebounder in Citadel history who once pulled twenty-two rebounds from the boards in a game against Richmond. “That’d be like me going to college to major in pepperoni.”

  I never knew what to make of Dick Martini’s metaphor about farming and pepperoni, but later that night, I knew everything I ever wanted to know about the heartburn and melancholy of playing basketball in Clemson’s satanic gym. When our uniformed team walked in carrying our bags, we passed in review of four thousand rabid Clemson loyalists. The freshman game was under way and we had to make our way single file to the locker room. The crowd was so close to the out-of-bounds line that the football team had to move their feet to let us pass. Of course, they refused and a couple of them actually tried to trip us. So, my whole team walked on the open court as the crowd began a thunderous, mocking chant: “Hup, four, hup, four, hup, two, three, four.” Captain Martini led us into the field house, staring straight ahead, as though he was following an invisible prison warden to his own execution.

  Clemson murdered us that night of my sophomore year, 90–75, but the game was not nearly that close. I got in the game late in the second half and tried to lead the effort to catch up. When Wig Baumann told me to take the ball out of bounds, I received my first lessons in the manual of courtesies and virtues of Clemson’s fans. I had to jump among the raucous fans who churned along the sideline. Two of them pinched my butt hard and two more put cigarettes out on the back of my legs. I went flying toward a referee and shouted that someone had burned and pinched me, but I could not even hear my own voice above the crowd. The referee simply shrugged his shoulders, and I could see he carried some of the same terror of the Clemson crowd as Martini did. Five cigarette burns branded my legs before that game was over, and Clemson fans had depilated a third of the hair from the back of my legs.

  In the final minute, I was racing after a ball going out of bounds when I dove for it near Clemson’s basket and slid along the floor and into the football team. Clemson guys dove out of the way and my wet jersey slalomed me along the slippery floor. I disappeared through a hole beneath the bleachers and the Clemson football team made me fight through their legs to get back onto the court. The crowd at Clemson was not just hostile; they were lunatic in their advocacy of the Tigers.

  On December 3, 1966, my team walked into the Clemson visiting team locker room, a testament to the disdain the Tigers felt for their opponents. The sheer dinginess of the room was nearly heroic. The whole building had the feel of a place designed by a testy little man who had flunked all his engineering courses and hated basketball players with a passion. But we could hear the stands filling up above us.

  Our trainer, Coach Billy Bostick, was taping ankles when Doug Bridges opened his bag and discovered he had forgotten to pack his uniform shirt. Forgetting one’s shoes or uniform was a high crime in Mel’s list of commandments.

  “Mel’s gonna kill me, Barney,” Doug said to Dave Bornhorst.

  “Yeah, but it won’t take long,” Barney said.

  “Bridges forgot his jersey,” Bob Cauthen said to the whole room. “What an idiot.”

  Bridges said, “Watch your mouth, Cauthen.”

  “Take Conroy’s,” Danny Mohr said, on the taping table. “He sure as hell won’t need it.”

  Cauthen said, “Bridges would forget his dick if it wasn’t attached.”

  When he received the bad news, Al Beiner, our head manager, went looking for Mel, then returned, saying, “Coach wants to see you. Right now.”

  Mel glowered as Doug approached, which did nothing to assuage the younger man’s terror. The relationship between the two of them was surly and vinegary in the best of times.

  “Bridges,” Mel said scowling, “you never, ever forget the tools of the trade. Got it? You’ll owe me some laps for this one.”

  “Sorry, Coach,” Doug said, lowering his eyes.

  Coach Ed “Little Mel” Thompson entered the locker room with a most unpleasant task. “Dave,” he said to Bornhorst, “Coach says you have to give up your shirt to Doug.”

  “Sure, Coach,” Dave said with such brio and generosity that he turned a painful moment into a lesson in the subtle, but difficult, art of teamwork. In his clumsiness and self-deprecation, Dave’s deficiencies as an athlete faded into nothingness when placed beside the essence of his character.

  The two Coach Thompsons entered the dark locker room. “DeBrosse, you’ll be the captain tonight.”

  Mel’s announcement cuts me deeply even thirty years later, and still wounds Dan Mohr. I felt like Mel had slapped me in the face in front of my teammates. I am sure it made John DeBrosse as uncomfortable as it made me and Danny. To appoint a junior the captain of a team when two seniors were sitting in the same room is as huge and personal an affront as a coach could deliver, especially in the strictly hierarchal world of The Citadel. Though I thought it was a serious mistake not to name Danny and me co-captains for the Auburn game, I had wrongly assumed the captaincy was my booby prize for riding the bench.

  It was the second straight game that Mel Thompson had gone out of his way to insult Danny Mohr, his highest returning scorer from our previous year. I do not remember a single word of Coach Thompson’s pregame pep talk on that long-ago Saturday night, but I remember my darkly burning face and my eyes on the floor as Mel went over the defensive assignments and the scouting reports on the Clemson players. Because this was my final season and I’d played these boys before, I did not need to listen to any in-depth assessment of the Clemson team. Beating them was a snap. All you had to do was stop Randy Mahaffey and Jim Sutherland. Stop those two magnificent athletes and the rest was mop-up time for the Green Weenies. Theories of how to do so flowed easily from Mel’s lips; executing them, however, was a far more complicated matter.

  So far, I have spoken with awe and nostalgia about my terrific freshman team. Our only loss that season came at the hands of the Clemson freshmen where we found that we could not handle the power
ful six-foot-six Mahaffey under the boards, or the formidable six-foot-five Sutherland at shooting guard on the outside. They were aggressive, banked with all the necessary competitive fires, and were uncannily graceful.

  Jim Sutherland served as president of the student body at Clemson, made straight A’s in his premed courses, and had averaged over fifteen points a game in the ACC his junior year. I hoped I would get the chance to play tonight because I wanted to tell my children I had once guarded Jim Sutherland.

  “Conroy,” Dan Mohr said as we waited our turn to do layups, “can you believe he named DeBrosse to be captain? What the hell’s he doing?”

  “He’s the boss, Root,” I said.

  “It ain’t right,” Dan said. “It just ain’t right.” Then, looking down at the Clemson team, “Goddamn, Mahaffey’s a big son-of-a-bitch.”

  In Randy Mahaffey, the third Mahaffey brother to attend Clemson on a basketball scholarship, all the grace and speed of impalas and lions combined nicely with the strength of water buffalo. He was long-limbed and long-strided and was a natural meat-eater under the boards. When I was a sophomore I tried to block him off the baskets for a rebound and he sent me reeling out of bounds with the barest movement of his hip.

  As we gathered together by our bench and placed our hands in a circle before the first tip, Mel issued our final instructions. The Tiger Pep Band, sitting directly behind the visiting team’s bench, repeatedly and maddeningly kept playing “Tiger Rag,” Clemson’s famous, repetitive fight song.

  The referee approached the crouched centers, formal as candelabras in their stillness, and lofted the ball upwards as Mohr and Mahaffey sprang toward the lights. The game began in ugliness and unsettledness. From my seat on the bench, I watched Clemson forward Randy Ayers foul Mohr hard when he went to put the ball on the floor. Danny made the free throw and we led 1–0. Then Randy Mahaffey slashed and dazzled for the next ten minutes with radiant backup play by Jim Sutherland.

  The Clemson offense was fluid and smooth and worked efficiently to get the right man open—often Mahaffey, who would post Mohr up then back him into the paint with elegance and precision. Mohr was overmatched physically; Mahaffey was fast, explosive, and intimidatingly strong. His sheer physical presence overtook the game almost as soon as it began. It helped both Mahaffey and Clemson that in Mel Thompson’s defensive scheme, we were not allowed to help our teammates out unless a complete breakdown occurred.

  The pace of the game was brutal from the start, and the mood quickly turned malevolent as the big guys roughhoused on the boards. As peasantry from The Citadel, we were not supposed to mix it up with the lordly squires of the ACC. Mahaffey’s face bristled with resentment if Danny even attempted to block his movement to the board. ACC refs could be as fair as those rabid Nazi judges who screamed obscenities at the men accused in the attempted assassination of Hitler. Early in the game, it became readily apparent that all close calls would go to Clemson.

  If Mohr was having trouble with Mahaffey, sophomore Tee Hooper was in the process of learning profound lessons from a seasoned Jim Sutherland. As always, Sutherland was far quicker than it seemed he should have been. Not quite as quick as Tee, Jim used his edge of sixty games of varsity experience to great advantage. Jim would pump fake on a jump shot, then lean into the leaping Tee, and Tee was in foul trouble early.

  Five minutes into the game, a moment of exceptional beauty took place when Danny Mohr brought down a fought-for rebound with Mahaffey on his back, then he pivoted and found DeBrosse in place on the wing. He threw to DeBrosse, who hit Tee with a dead-on pass as Tee assumed the point, and the fast break developed with textbook perfection.

  Zinsky and Bridges filled the outside lanes, then broke for the basket at the exact same time. Tee hit Zinsky with a superb pass on the left side of the basket and Bill laid it in, even though he was fouled. Zinsky hit the free throw and the ideal execution of the play gave my team a sudden infusion of energy.

  But the rebounding grew more militant and hostile. So brutal was the play under the basket that it made me happy to be a guard on the bench. Whenever any contact or collision occurred under the boards, the referee almost always called the foul on one of the Citadel big men, drawing a huge roar of approval from the crowd. If you do not think that contempt of home crowds does not file down the rough edges of a referee’s psyche, then you know little of the game of basketball.

  It was a shooter’s night for John DeBrosse, and his form was immaculate every time he went up and his hand flicked the ball toward the basket and his wrist bent and held there until the ball split the net. He looked lit up from the inside. I watched all this from the bench, with two trombone slides whizzing past my ears, playing the ugliest fight song in the country. That is one of the most important of the point guard’s duties: knowing which of your teammates carries the hot hand in the game of the moment. Being hot as a shooter is an exalted state that has a brief and fragile life span and the point guard must be able to mark his teammates when struck by this unpredictable and transient condition. For shooters like DeBrosse and Mohr, it is what they live for. But we point guards learn to discern it in the eyes of our teammates and get them the ball when the fever reaches full pitch.

  Mel’s halftime talk was blistering. He complained about our many turnovers, when we had thrown the ball away or had it stolen from us. Mel’s speech, although contemptuous and sneering, never approached the volcanic heights which he was fully capable of scaling. To some of us, he even seemed content that we were only ten points behind them at the half. The big guys’ uniforms were soaked with sweat. I had not even broken a sweat during the warmups. An undamp uniform is only one of the humiliations of sitting on the bench. A dry basketball player is a loser and a benchwarmer and that is how I viewed myself when we trotted out to begin the second half.

  Tee had his hands full trying to stop Sutherland, who was always strangely wonderful even on his worst night. “Try to make him go to his left, Tee,” I advised. “He’s good going to his left, but not great.”

  Tee nodded but I was not sure he heard me above the roar of that unruly crowd—that, and the accursed trombones that awaited the poor Green Weenies on the bench.

  “Let’s beat up the fucking band,” Cauthen suggested as we sat down to watch the tip-off.

  Both teams spent the next half snarling at each other and grappling fiercely under the baskets. Among the Citadel players, John DeBrosse was in the middle of the best college game he would ever play. He performed with an aristocratic elegance on this night, delighting me with the perfect fluidity of his shot. So hot was DeBrosse that he later told me he expected to see smoke coming off his fingers. He made thirteen jump shots over the much taller Clemson guard, and he carried himself on the court like a man possessed.

  Barney leaned over and yelled over the sickening din of the trombones, “Beaver shot. Eleven o’clock. Another one. Two o’clock.”

  Bornhorst handled the shame of sitting on the bench by becoming an aficionado of spotting the panties of coeds with casually parted legs. The piety of my young Catholic and southern manhood was so extreme at the time that I never once looked into the stands for that secret and harmless thrill that gave us Green Weenies our only pleasure as we sat and watched our lives pass by without us.

  With fourteen minutes left to play, Tee fouled out. As I entered the game to replace Tee, I saw a look of unadulterated suffering cross his face. The game had wounded this high-strung competitor.

  “You get Sutherland,” DeBrosse said to me as Sutherland shot his foul shot.

  “Thanks a ton,” I said. “I want Ayoob.”

  “Not a chance. Get me the ball, smackhead. I’m hotter than shit.”

  “Think the kid didn’t notice?”

  The game got nastier for both teams and I thought both Zinsky and Bridges were going to start swinging at the men guarding them. John and I posed a slight matchup problem for Clemson. Though Jim was seven inches taller than I was, and Ayoob five inches taller than John,
we were both much quicker than they were. I started setting picks on Ayoob that DeBrosse would use to perfection, coming off me like we were part of the same body. I would flip him the ball and John would dribble once, then leave his feet, the mechanics of his flawless jump shot textbook, and the ball would arch high over Sutherland’s outstretched hand, then split the net with the sound of razored cotton.

  When Sutherland saw I was guarding him, he looked at me like I was an hors d’oeuvre. He called for the ball as he was supposed to when he found himself guarded by a midget, which is what I felt like as he began to back me toward the basket. I tried to use my quickness to flick the ball from him, but he was Jim Sutherland, and I was me, imprisoned in a body that had little business on a college basketball court. He faked right, then spun in a tight, sweet move to his left and went up for a jump shot. Far below him, I grabbed his shooting arm, deciding that he would earn his points on the free throw line, which he promptly did.

  “We’re losing by a million. Where’s our big man?” I asked DeBrosse.

  “Over there,” DeBrosse answered, pointing to Mohr on the bench.

  Mel had taken Danny out with more than thirteen minutes to go and never put him back in the game. This was unfathomable to me. I started seeing various members of the Green Weenies reporting in at the scorers’ table as DeBrosse and I went into high gear and began fast-breaking every time we got the ball, playing sloppy, catch-up basketball.

  But the fast break was my native land, the country where I felt most at home in my chosen, lovely game. Fleet of foot, I loved pushing a basketball up the court as much as I have loved anything in this life. That night Zinsky and Kroboth were like racehorses on the wings, and I could always depend on them filling the lanes. I hit them whenever they were open.

  The Green Weenie Brian Kennedy got in for his first minute of playing time in his varsity career, joined by Greg Connor. Looking for his first college rebound, Brian was matched against the peerless Randy Mahaffey. Brian flung himself at the ball, but Randy got to it first and ripped it out of Brian’s grasp. Randy caught Brian’s jaw with an unconcealed elbow and one of the referees called a foul on Brian. Then Brian surprised the entire gym, and especially Mel Thompson, by throwing a punch that, had it landed, would have taken Mahaffey’s head off.