My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  “In the championship game, unbeaten North Carolina, ranked no. 3 in the nation, downed Florida State 81–54. It was the seventh straight victory for the Tar Heels.” (I include this only because there is no other place that poor Conroy’s name is associated one paragraph away from the Carolina Tar Heels.)

  “Danny Mohr hit five points in overtime before fouling out. Then, with the Lions trailing by one point and a minute to play, Conroy hit both shots in a one-and-one situation to put the Bulldogs ahead.

  “After a Columbia shot, Conroy was fouled again and hit two shots. The victory broke a three-game losing streak for the Bulldogs and sent them home for Christmas with a 3–5 record.”

  Hooper and Bridges looked poleaxed and dumbstruck after the game. When Rat handed out the stat sheet as we dressed, I was surprised that Tee had only scored a single shot and Bridges had failed to score. These were the two most superb athletes on our team.

  MY BEST FRIEND AT BEAUFORT HIGH SCHOOL, Bruce Harper, had recently become engaged to the dazzling Melinda Lee Crowe of Tampa, and Melinda had invited me to a party after the game. I asked Melinda if I could bring along my team, and she said that would be wonderful because the party was thrown by some Converse girls home for the holidays. So my teammates gathered, handsome in their coats and ties, at a Tampa house, and I saw them dancing with pretty girls and mingling with other college students. I would listen to Bruce talk to Melinda and try to memorize the words that college boys said to their fiancées. I still turned mute when girls drew near me. The vastness of my shyness distressed me. Melinda’s face was as pretty as those profiled beauties in the stillness of cameos. Bruce was handsome and elegant in his movements. I would be in their wedding the following summer in Tampa. I will always remain grateful for Melinda asking my team to that party. It was the only normal college life we experienced in the year I am writing about, the only party we attended as a team.

  Al Kroboth sat down and played the piano with great skill, and I could not have been more surprised if he had made me a dress. My teammates, I thought, what lovely young men. We gathered around the piano and young women drifted toward us. It all felt so right and it would never happen again.

  CHAPTER 16

  CHRISTMAS BREAK

  FOR A CITADEL BASKETBALL PLAYER, THE CHRISTMAS BREAK WAS A disturbing, fragmented descent into nightmare. Mel Thompson will always rise up in Dickensian glory as my Ghost of Christmas Ruin. After The Citadel, I treated Christmas as though it were some fierce, gathering storm roaring up out of the Bahamas, the eye of the hurricane ineluctably headed for my front door, already named “Mel” by the National Weather Service. My basketball coach made Scrooge look like some prancing jim-dandy sentimentalist about Christmas. Few of my teammates can discuss Christmastime without wincing, without a searing memory of downfall and pain.

  In the Tampa airport, the managers, Al Beiner (“Albino”) and Rat, handed out our plane tickets home for the holidays. Mel huddled with us and warned, “Don’t play around too much when you go home and don’t eat too much of Mama’s home cooking. Because you know that food might end up on the gym floor when I get you back on Christmas Day.”

  For reasons still unclear to me, Mel always made us come back Christmas Day for a vicious practice at four o’clock in the afternoon. All of Mel’s practices were hard, but the Christmas Day practice became the stuff of legend. Dick Martini used to tell of a Christmastime lunch where Mel made sure his team ate their fill, then suddenly called for a surprise practice and told them to get to the gym and dress out immediately. Martini recalled that he had never seen so many boys puking at the same time when the practice ended.

  I flew on Delta to the inevitable stop in Atlanta, where I made my annual Christmas phone call to Terry Leite, a girl I had gone to Beaufort High School with, and who had come down for the Graduation Hop my freshman year. I, of course, had fallen for this beautiful, fascinating girl, and I think she had fallen for me a little bit. I wrote scores and scores of love letters to her when she attended St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana. Terry saved all these feverish, show-offy letters and recently let me use them to see a glimpse of the mysterious boy I was when I wore a Citadel uniform. Reading them made me understand perfectly well why Terry would choose to marry a Notre Dame man rather than me. But they were also the writings of a sweet boy trying to learn the mysteries of the way to a young woman’s secret heart.

  When Terry answered the phone that Christmas, she told me that she was going steady with a Notre Dame man in law school, and they were planning to become engaged the following summer. I congratulated her and told her I hoped that she would find great happiness in her life. She would not, and neither would I. I mention the annual Christmas phone call to Terry Leite because it represented the sum total of my sexual life over the course of three holiday seasons. I looked forward to those calls.

  MY FATHER, RESPLENDENT IN HIS Marine Corps uniform, met me at Washington National Airport and drove me to Falls Church, Virginia, where I would spend Christmas in still another strange house. My family had moved in late summer and I had written letters to another address I had not seen. Dad was never friendly or bantering with me when I was in college. I kept my hatred of him in a tight hermitage—I was his Northern Ireland; he was my England. We rode for ten miles without saying a single word. I turned on the radio, found a station I liked, and he snapped it off.

  Finally, he spoke. “Your team is shit.”

  “We’re having a little trouble getting it together, Dad.”

  “You’re shit. I saw the George Washington box score. You scored three big ones. I wouldn’t even let ’em put my name in the box score if I only scored three.”

  “We won that game, Dad,” I said. “By three points, I think,” I added cautiously.

  “You couldn’t carry my jock. I ate guys like you alive for breakfast,” he said, looking at me for a reaction. He got none.

  As a small boy I remember my father taking over every basketball game he played in, an intimidating figure who taunted enemy crowds with angry gestures and fighting words. My mother once moved my sister Carol and me out of a crowd of sailors who were screaming obscenities at my father, who was jawing back to them with gusto. My father was the dirtiest basketball player I have ever seen. It pleased him every time he heard me say it.

  In silence we drove another five miles before Dad said, at a light, “Florida State kicked the shit out of you.”

  “They sure did, Dad.”

  “You get in?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Score any?”

  “Twelve, Dad.”

  “Bullshit. Somebody on Florida State’s team would’ve had to die during the game for you to get twelve.”

  “Got lucky, Dad,” I said, staring straight ahead.

  “You beat those Ivy League pussies, though,” he said.

  “Columbia University.”

  “Ivy League. There’s pussy basketball at its best.”

  “Bradley at Princeton, Dad. Can’t forget that.”

  “You get in?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Score any?”

  “Twelve, sir.”

  My father looked at me to see if I was lying, then said, “Bullshit. They must have stunk up the floor.”

  “Got lucky, Dad.”

  “Hooper break a leg? He’s the one who beat you out.”

  “He’s been in a slump, Dad. Just a sophomore. He’ll be back. He’s great.”

  “He’ll beat you out again. He’ll sense that you’re a loser.”

  Thus I received my annual Christmas pep talk from my father, who drove the rest of the way home in silence.

  At home, my four younger brothers and two sisters engulfed me in a wave of sweetness that always felt cleansing and right. I hugged my mother, her eyes set with all the charm and hysteria and unhappiness that house could produce in its terrifying inadequacy. The family had picked up two tailless, feral cats named Wart and Halloween, who hid in the closets and u
nder sofas, periodically lunging out to claw or bite a passing bare foot. The pets were perfect metaphors for the damage being passed out all around. I felt the familiar tension of this house where none of the children felt safe. None of them were; nor was the wife.

  “Show Pat his room,” Mom told my brother Mike, who was about ten years old then, and some of the kids giggled.

  “You can’t expect to have the best room, Pat. You’re not part of the family now. You’re in college,” my mom said.

  One of the great surprises I had when I went away to The Citadel was that I never had a room or a bed in my parents’ house again. I followed Mike down the stairs to an unfinished basement where Mike had his bed. It was cheap and ugly and degrading to him.

  “Oh, this is swell,” I said.

  “It gets better,” my brother said. “Guess where you’re sleeping?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” I said, shaking my head, looking around the room for another bed.

  “In here,” Mike said, opening up his closet door. He reached up and grabbed two coat hangers and flung out both his hands in opposite directions. Then Mike pointed to a hole cut into the pasteboard large enough for a dog to get through. Mike low-crawled through the hole and I followed behind him. A shaft of light from a half window revealed a hidden, unfinished section of the basement. One of the tailless cats, Halloween, shrieked in the shadows, leapt at my foot, and bit me on the ankle. The cat then shot through the opening and raced under Mike’s bed. In my hideaway there was an old skinny mattress on the floor that Mike had dragged in there only that morning. There were no lamps, no lightbulbs, no electricity, or no furniture of any kind. The mattress smelled like dirty sweat socks.

  “Nice room, Mama,” I said to my brother. “Nice fucking room.” And my brother fell on top of the mattress giggling. I joined him in the stifled, softened laughter of children who grew up in dangerous houses. I was home for the holidays.

  CHRISTMAS MORNING WAS THE ONLY TIME OF the year when you could be absolutely sure that my father would not slap you. My two baby brothers, Tim and Tom, wrestled me awake on the dank mattress at four in the morning, begging me to get up and go upstairs, so they could begin unwrapping their presents. The house tingled with the buzz and excitement of young children, and my mother had already put the coffee on at 4 A.M.

  “Good morning, Pat,” my father said, his voice full of goodwill. Christmas transformed even The Great Santini, and for one day of the year, he masqueraded as a real father. He sang out the name on the first gift, which always went to the youngest child. “This one’s for a little kid named Toooooom. From Santa Claus.” And a loud cheer would come up from the seven Conroy kids. It was the one day of the year we seemed to have something—to have everything. All the collected madness of my family took the morning off and let us feel like something normal and mainstream. I soaked up the glimmer of the disorderly piles of wrapping paper, glittering bulbs, and strung lights, the streaming tinsel weaving silver fingers through the ceiling-high fir tree, and the precious noise of joyous children, happy among their gaudy pile of gifts. It seemed so healthy and ordinary, so unlike us, addicts of chaos and angst.

  When my parents opened my presents to them, I held my breath. As always, I had little money to spend for their gifts, but this year I thought I had lucked out. At the Tampa Invitational, the tournament committee had given each player a standing pen set and a white electric radio with plaques proclaiming that he had been a participant in the tournament. I coveted both gifts. Because I wanted to be a writer, the seriousness of that pen set, so erect and reputable, seemed almost mystical in importance to me. Because I did not own a radio, the tournament committee had brought the gift of music to my life.

  But I thought the pen set would look good on my father’s desk in Quantico, and that he would call other Marines into his office to display proudly what his son had given him for Christmas. Since Dad had played college basketball and I had followed in his footsteps, I thought the gift would link both us and our destinies as athletes and serve as some laurel of connection. “See what my boy got me, General. Yeh, he was in a holiday tournament down in Tampa. Yeh, the Tar Heels, the Seminoles, and some Ivy League school. Kid got twenty-four in two games. Wanted me to have this.” I could visualize my father having those talks with his colleagues in the corps.

  Likewise, I thought my mother could put the radio in the kitchen and listen to the classical music station while she did her housework. I thought she would think of me every time she read the plaque or heard the music with her hands in dishwater. It seemed like an act of generosity to surrender something I coveted so deeply. I was trying to turn myself into a young man who knew how to make the most correct and faultless gesture. I would link my mother and father to the disturbances of my love for them by giving up the two gifts that meant the most to me.

  My mother first opened the portrait I had paid two dollars for in New Orleans. I saw her study it, then frown slightly as she said, “Who is it, Pat?”

  “It’s supposed to be me,” I said.

  My mother held it into the air and my brothers and sisters cracked up all around me. I could see even more clearly now than I did in New Orleans that the drawing was a buffoonish caricature of my face.

  “It’s lovely,” she said, but could not help laughing. “How much did you pay for it?”

  “Two bucks.”

  “Son, you got taken for a ride.”

  “So did Barney.” Thirty years later I would learn that Dave Bornhorst had enough sense not to give his mother his own ridiculous portrait.

  My father finished opening the pen set and I saw him inspecting it. At the same time, my mother removed the white radio from its box. She seemed very pleased.

  “They gave us that radio and that pen set for participating in the tournament.”

  “It’s lovely,” my mother said.

  Dad said, “So it didn’t cost you one centavo, pal. El Cheapo rides again.”

  “Your father means thank you, Pat,” Mom said. “He really likes it.”

  “What time does your plane leave for Charleston, jocko?” Dad asked.

  “Eleven hundred hours, Dad.”

  My brother Jim said, “Dad, can we go to the airport with Pat?”

  “Negative,” my father answered.

  “Please, Dad,” Kathy pleaded.

  “That’s negative,” he repeated.

  “Everybody help me clean up this mess,” my mother said, inspecting the paper carnage of slain, opened gifts.

  “That’s affirmative. Let’s police this area.”

  An hour before we left for the plane, I took a huge box loaded with torn gift wrapping and broken ribbons to the front curb. My mother leaned out the front door and shouted, “Check through that stuff, Pat. Make sure none of the kids lost one of their presents in that mess.” Then she turned and went back inside.

  I sifted through the torn, balled-up paper, but hit something solid at the bottom of the box. It was the pen set I had given my father for Christmas. Wrapping it in paper, I sneaked it into the house and placed it in the bag I had already packed for the trip to Charleston. I never summoned up the courage in my father’s lifetime to ask him if he threw that pen set away on purpose or lost it due to negligence. I would never see the white radio again. But I kept that wonderful pen set for years and wrote my second short story with the pen as well as all the poems published my senior year and the senior essay I turned in that May. I took my father’s castaway gift and turned it into language and stories as I would one day do against him.

  After I said goodbye to Mom and the kids, Dad drove me to the airport in silence. When we pulled in front of the Delta terminal, he said, “We’re here. Get out.”

  I reached behind me and brought my bag out of the backseat. He offered me his hand and said, “I bet Hooper beats you out.”

  “He’s good, Dad.”

  “No one ever beat your old man out. No one,” he said, squeezing my hand harder. “You know what you ain’
t got?”

  “What’s that, Dad?”

  “The killer instinct.”

  “Bye, Dad. Merry Christmas,” I said, moving quickly into the terminal. My father was wrong about me. I had the killer instinct, but I called it something else. I called it my first novel. I called it The Great Santini. It would put a cruise missile into his cockpit that would change my father’s life forever. At the end of the novel, I killed the father. I had the killer instinct but it would take different forms with me than it had with Don Conroy.

  PRACTICE BEGAN PROMPTLY AT 1600 HOURS and it was a killer. Coach Thompson kept yelling that he was going to sweat the Christmas turkey out of us, but none of us had been able to eat Christmas dinner with our families. There was a strange new vanity to his raving. What my team needed was coaching and teaching and praise; what my team received once more was contemptuousness, rage, and abuse. The Christmas practices were a nightmare, a plebe system, one more boot camp run by one more sadist who drove us like dogs until we dropped from exhaustion and the dry heaves. Since the campus was closed down, there were no time constraints on Mel, and the sessions could be as long as he wanted them to be. The Christmas Day practice lasted three and a half hours. One of us had to puke before he would stop. In the first days back, we joked about selecting a designated puker. After that, we quit joking about anything. Those were dark, terrible days made worse by our utter isolation from the world. But that first practice was the worst, the most driven by shock and despair. I still dread Christmas with every cell in my body. Mel Thompson killed it for me.

  I had a great surprise waiting for me that first practice. For the first time in my varsity career, I was made a permanent member of the Blue Team. I felt like an absolute traitor to my Green Weenies when I turned my jersey inside out and wore the color I had come to despise as an agent of my humiliation as a basketball player. I was so completely committed to the idea of the Green Weenies that it shook me up to wear the enemy colors. The first Blue Team scrimmage brought me together with DeBrosse, Mohr, Zinsky, and Bridges. For reasons unknown to me, Tee Hooper’s demotion and humiliation would continue indefinitely. Hooper’s face could not mask his terrible pain. Long and thin and graceful, Tee would look like a single exposed nerve in all that December darkness. I had left my team, the Green Weenies, to join an unteam. When I put on the blue jersey, I did not realize that I was a marked man. It put me between the crosshairs of my coach, the one who seemed to envy the players who composed his starting five.