My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  “Mohr, did I stutter?” Mel said in disbelief. “I said sports coat and tie. Did you hear me say anything about sweaters? We’re still representing The Citadel and we should do it with some class.”

  Then Mel spun around and saw me by a column near the center of the room. Some said I waved and lifted my eyebrows. Then Danny said, “Coach, I left it back in the barracks. I forgot to pack it with my uniforms.”

  “My two seniors. You guys are supposed to be setting the example,” Mel said. “What’s your excuse, Conroy? Look, even the sophomores managed to get it right.”

  “No excuse, Coach,” I said. “I just screwed up.”

  “You making it a habit, Conroy?” Mel said.

  “No, Coach, promising you I’m not.”

  “I’ve got to run you for two hours before the Christmas practice,” Mel said. “You both understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” we both answered since we had run two hours in our last two Christmas practices.

  “Okay, get on the bus. We’ll see what you got for Florida State.”

  Neither Danny Mohr nor I owned a sports coat or a pair of loafers, but we wouldn’t tell each other that for thirty years.

  Danny and I, three times inducted into the brotherhood of the sweater, rode together on the bus to face Florida State in the opening game of the Tampa Invitational. The whole aura of the tournament had the clean, good feel of the big time to me, and I was as impassioned about the games to be played as any I had encountered in my life. I had written a letter to my family, and I can remember my hand tingling with pleasure when I wrote the words, “If we manage to beat Florida State, we’ll go up against the Tar Heels in the championship the next night.” The North Carolina Tar Heels, the Cadillac of southern basketball, were warming up when my team entered the Curtis Hixon Convention Center.

  “The AP poll came out today, Root,” I said. “The Tar Heels are ranked number three in the nation. If we beat Florida State, we’ll play them tomorrow night.”

  “Yeah, fat fucking chance,” Root said.

  “That’s the spirit, Root. Never say die.”

  Before going into the locker room to suit up we watched the Tar Heels warm up. I studied two players and two players only. I had seen the ethereal and vastly gifted Bobby Lewis play for St. John’s in Washington, D.C., when I had played on the junior varsity of Gonzaga High School. At Chapel Hill, Bobby had averaged thirty-six points a game in his freshman year, then twenty-seven points per game as a sophomore. He had extraordinary leaping ability and moved on the court with all the presence of a young king. Then my eyes moved to number 44, Larry Miller, who fired jump shots from the corner, a darker, more brooding court presence than the sunnier Lewis. They were the stars of this tournament; the true stars of basketball have all eyes in the building studying their every move because of the sheer magnetism of their great gifts. I turned to the invitational rosters and found the names of Bob Lewis and Larry Miller, then with my finger I went down the page and saw my own name printed along with the other Citadel Bulldogs. In one night I had tied my destiny to the lives of two legitimate All-Americans and it thrilled me to see my name listed on the same page as theirs.

  When the game began, it took only a couple of times up and down the court for North Carolina to establish its superiority over the Columbia Lions. Columbia was missing their seven-foot-one pivot man, Dave Newmark, because, as the Tampa newspaper said, “of the giant’s toenail problems.”

  Miller and Lewis, together on a basketball court, blended like balsamic vinegar and the richest olive oil. Miller’s darkness matched Lewis’s lightness and speed on the court and their congruent talents made everyone around them better basketball players. Bill Bunting and Dick Gruber and Rusty Clark had to raise their own games to a higher level and that was part of Lewis’s and Miller’s genius—they wove their brilliance through the moves and passes of their teammates, wonderful basketball players all, but mortals like me.

  So hello, Bobby Lewis, and hello, Larry Miller. I salute you from the secret place to which lost nights go. I tell you how splendid the two of you were that night and the next night and all through that long season. I have never forgotten the dark fire of Larry Miller or the breathtaking swiftness of Bobby Lewis and I did not deserve to be in the same building with them. It was with great reluctance that I followed my team into the locker room to suit up for the game against Florida State.

  Mel’s promise to start the Green Weenies proved an empty one. This felt like a great mistake to me that night and it strikes me the same today. Before I had mistrusted my coach’s unimaginativeness, but I had never once doubted his word. Distrust poisoned the air around my team. That and the great sudden pain of the wonderful sophomore guard Tee Hooper. This night would mark the beginning of Tee’s dismantling. He put his hands over his face and eyes in a gesture of cautionary despair.

  I looked to the blackboard and received my greatest shock of a season that would contain many. My name was written in the starting lineup. Slyly, I tried to check my teammates for any sign that they recognized the wrongness of the moment. When Mel gave us his pregame talk, I could tell he had still not forgiven us the fiascos of Loyola and Old Dominion, nor did he believe we could beat Florida State. He inoculated us with a sense of hopelessness before we took the court. We could feel him losing faith in us as a team. In turn, we were not a team, we were much more like a lost archipelago, floating islands sharing straits and bays and rivers, but not linked together in any cohesive way. Tee’s sudden and surprising demotion was an amputation. In my own estimate of my talent, I could not wear Tee Hooper’s jock, and we all knew it.

  The Green Weenie in me, the realest part of my image as an athlete, stirred and I said to myself, “Does this mean I have to play with the damned Blue Team?” as Mel named me team captain for another night.

  When we took to the court for warmup, I made the first layup and Danny made the second, then we sized up the Seminoles on the other end of the court. They looked like a race of well-fed giants to me, long-limbed and stately. They carried themselves with the confidence of a team who knew The Citadel was not in their league.

  “That team makes you look short, Root.”

  “How do you think it makes you look, midget?” Root shot back.

  When I went to center court that night as the starting point guard, I felt a small sense of a shifting of my fate, though I could not tell you what it was. After shaking hands with their guard Jeff Hogan, I lined up for the tipoff with an anthem or mantra going through my mind: “I’m the starting point guard against Florida State.” My Green Weenie identity had not allowed me to hope that a moment as distinguished as this would ever fall to me as a college athlete. Florida State won the tip and would win every tip on this less than brilliant night.

  I spent the evening, self-conscious and tentative, trying to look like I belonged on the court. DeBrosse told me to guard Brian Murphy, a five-ten guard from Pompano Beach, and this was the first time I realized that John always picked the defensive assignments of the guards. Later, he would say to me, “Conroy, why do you think you always guarded the biggest guy they had or the highest scorer? I wanted to conserve some of my energy for offense, so I always gave you the guard with the most height or firepower. Think I wanted to look like shit on defense? Hell no. I wanted you to look like shit, baby. It was a great system. Conroy busting his ass all night on defense while DeBrosse got some much-needed rest.”

  If this was indeed the system, DeBrosse made a serious error of judgment in this Florida State game. Brian Murphy and I were evenly matched, his smallness and quickness mirroring my own, two Irish Catholic boys locked all night together in competition that was clean and fast moving. He was better than I was, but I stayed in there with him.

  Because he had known him in Ohio, DeBrosse put himself on Jeff Hogan of Akron and I spent the entire game grateful that I was not guarding that classy, well-schooled guard who played an astonishing game with poor DeBrosse scrambling to
keep up with him. Somewhere in the first half, I realized that Hogan was the lord of this December night. His game flowed with quiet brilliance and he was shooting the eyes out of the basket all night.

  At a time-out, I whispered to DeBrosse, “Anybody tell you you’re supposed to be guarding number ten, DeBrosse?”

  “Goddamn, he’s good,” John said, in pure admiration.

  Jeff Hogan scored twenty-five points, and we could not do a thing to shut him down. Under the boards the Seminoles killed us. They were simply too big and fast for us. Theirs was a big-time program; we were bottom feeders. Mohr and Bridges played as though they were sleepwalking and kept looking to the bench every time Mel yelled at them, which seemed to be every time downcourt. Their faces were glum with confusion and hurt and they never seemed to be able to place their hearts in the center of the fray. Their legs seemed gluey and unresponsive. Mohr scored six and Bridges four—and both of them were fully capable of scoring twenty a game. Kroboth and Zinsky both played hard and busted their humps under the basket. With his bird-of-prey face and his fiery intensity while rebounding, Al Kroboth was still my biggest surprise of the season. I felt no pressure as a point guard to get the ball to “Big Al” because his perpetual hustle kept him always near the center of action, and his points came from his fierce nose for the ball. He held his ground while rebounding against Florida State and he was beautiful to watch.

  It was the first game in which I counted the shots my teammates took. It was a trick I had learned at a clinic for point guards at Camp Wahoo. Rod Thorn had talked about the importance of the point guard in distributing the ball evenly to his teammates, making sure that the shooters got their fair share of the allocated shots. “Shooters need to shoot. It’s the nature of the beast,” he had said. I had three shooters on my team: DeBrosse, Bridges, and Mohr. If I was going to be successful at the point, I had to involve my shooters in their game. So I began the silent count that would go on for the entire year: “Ten shots for Mohr, six for Bridges, eight for DeBrosse,” I would say during the course of the game. “Get it to Doug.”

  We lost the game 83–67, and we never made a real run at the Seminoles. Their coach, Hugh Durham, ran a very disciplined team. DeBrosse scored 18, Kroboth 14, Zinsky 13, and I had 12. John and I provided 28 points from the backcourt, which was nothing to be ashamed of against such a team. We moved like a matched set. I had earned DeBrosse’s respect for the night, and it felt good. I had gotten through the game without humiliating myself or my team. I shook hands with all the Florida State players. Trotting off the court, I realized I had lost all chance to play the Tar Heels in this lifetime.

  CHAPTER 15

  COLUMBIA LIONS

  THOUGH I HAD LOST MY ONLY POSSIBILITY TO TAKE THE COURT against the North Carolina Tar Heels, I was the one guy on the Citadel basketball team who fully understood what the Ivy League meant in our country’s intellectual life. For that reason, I took the consolation game in Tampa against the Columbia Lions with seriousness and wanted to go through life crowing proudly, “Conroy, undefeated by the snot-nosed Ivy League.” Because I also know about the culture of basketball as it was played on the courts of New York City, I knew that Columbia could pick and choose among thousands of high school boys who grew up playing the game the way it was meant to be played. Those New York boys could all take it to the hoop and they carried irregular, melting-pot names as they drove the cement lanes toward the chain nets of the great city. I studied Columbia’s roster with the curiosity of the rube southerner unfamiliar with the dazzling, singing rhythm of the foreign names I would find in the New York telephone directory in later life. I shivered with pleasure as I got ready to play boys with real immigrant attachments in the rush of consonants to their names: Gamaramuller, Florial, Garsricus, and Walaszek. Basketball had always been a game for the poor kids of the big cities, the game where the boys of immigrant families could prove themselves while navigating their ways along the mean streets and fierce ghettos whether they were Jews, Irish, Poles, Lithuanians, or the soon-to-be-dominant black kids.

  There was another thing I knew about the Columbia players that cut my pride deeply: I knew that their team was a lot smarter than my team and that only two or three of my teammates could have cut the mustard with SAT scores high enough to be accepted by Columbia, and I certainly was not one of them. Because I was worried that my attendance at The Citadel would hurt my career as a novelist, I was keenly aware of the other young men and women of my generation who shared my ambition and were in the process of getting fabulous, life-changing educations at the Ivy League schools that would open up deep, unbridgeable abysses between their preparation for the lives of writers and mine. My jealousy of the whole Ivy League was the driving force that fueled my secret descent into class war against the Lions before we took to the court against them.

  Our team came out cold and tentative. It was the first time I had ever started two straight games, and I was as puzzled by it as Tee Hooper. Because I had never been called on when I was not supposed to break up a press at the end of a game, I still felt unwanted on the court, a ghostly presence filling in for Hooper until Thompson could forgive him for whatever crime poor Hooper had committed. Columbia’s team were all Yankee boys, and they knew how to play the game. In the first half we played sluggishly, as though we were wearing wingtip shoes. Nothing flowed, nothing seemed to come out of our offense. Mel screamed and screamed, but I was shutting him out now and not listening to him. It seemed to me we were getting throttled again, but I tried to keep myself loose and in the flow of things.

  I give myself up to the anonymous reporter from the AP who wrote about that game: “The Bulldogs were quick to get into foul trouble in the first half, drawing seven in the first six minutes of the game. The Lions, however, had trouble hitting the free throws when they had the chance to break away early. With the Lions missing, the Bulldogs stayed close, until with about ten minutes left to play in the half, the Lions pulled away. Two field goals and a pair of free throws by Roger Walaszek suddenly stretched a four-point lead into 10 points.

  “DeBrosse countered with a field goal, but John Dema made good on a three-point play and Walaszek got consecutive baskets while limiting the cadets to one free throw. That gave the Ivy League their biggest lead of the half—13 points at 35–22.

  “With about three minutes left to play in the half, the Bulldogs came alive. Bill Zinsky got three points, while DeBrosse got two field goals. With three seconds in the half, Pat Conroy got inside for a shot that closed the gap six points 39–33 at the half.”

  I do not remember one moment of this game just described, not even my heady arrival in the narrative account of the game with three seconds left. Its vanishing is complete and unrecoverable and I can add no credibility to this description of a game where I was both witness and participant. What I do remember was something that happened in the second half.

  Back to the unnamed reporter: “The Bulldogs had stretched their lead to five (the boys had come back) on goals by Kroboth, Conroy, and Mohr before the Lions came back to tie the score 53–53. But Kroboth went to work again and got five points, while Mohr and Conroy added two each and the Bulldogs moved ahead by seven. Then lightning struck in the form of a Columbia press, and the Bulldogs’ lead disappeared. The Lions put eight straight points up in the board before Mohr finally broke the streak with a pair of free throws. Hoffman put the Lions up by one with a long jumper, but Zinsky hit a free throw with 50 seconds to play to make it 65–65 and send the game into overtime.”

  It is the moment of the lightning strike that I recall with fierce clarity. All game long, the Lions had thrown at us a 1–3–1 half-court zone press that took some adjusting to since I had only seen full-court presses at the end of games. I loved breaking up full-court presses, but the half-court press presented the obvious physical problem of less space. The Columbia guards were taller and longer-limbed than John DeBrosse and me, and it took a while to figure out that if I broke by the guard, I was quick e
nough to break through the three-man alignment that would close in on me driving the lane with their center coming out to meet me, leaving Mohr open in the middle with Zinsky and Kroboth on the wings.

  But in the last minutes of lightning, the Columbia Lions had made a wickedly effective adjustment on their half-court press. They brought the other guard out to meet me at the half-court line, forcing me to pass it to the wide-open John DeBrosse on my left wing. As soon as I threw to DeBrosse, the Lions swarmed him. I tried to run to DeBrosse, but Walaszek defended the passing lanes well, his long arms flailing as John kept looking for help from the big men who were having trouble of their own. It was only after four straight turnovers and eight straight points that I realized Columbia wanted me to throw it to DeBrosse and had adjusted their defense to make sure I did.

  The next time down the court when I burst across the line, they tried to trap me in the corner, but we little guys who know how to dribble are hard to trap. I went through them again, getting quickly into the lane and forcing their center to decide whether to block my layup or stay back on Mohr. He came at me and I slipped the ball to Danny, who would have scored if a forward had not recovered and fouled him hard. The ball never went to DeBrosse again with that devastating press on. But the press was the place where I was born to be, and the Columbia Lions had run the best one I’d ever come up against.

  I am looking at a clipping of this game played so long ago where my name is in the headlines for the first time in my college career: “CONROY GIVES CITADEL VICTORY.”

  The article continues, “Pat Conroy dropped in four free throws in the final minute of an overtime period here last night to give The Citadel a 74–71 victory over Columbia University in the consolation game of the Tampa Invitational Basketball Tournament.