My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  We started running again, and the team began to make a spirited go at Davidson. In movement, my team fired into life. In stillness, we lapsed into mediocrity. But we had righted ourselves when Zinsky pulled a rebound away from Youngdale, fired a pass to DeBrosse on the right flank, who hit me with a perfect pass to center court as my team was off to the races for the last shot of the half. Huckel and Moser had dropped back quickly to defend against the fast break and I could hear my teammates filling in the lanes around me. Zinsky called out that he was filling the lane to my right and I heard Kroboth stake out the left lane while DeBrosse was shadowing me as a trailer on the play. In the dead center of our lives as Citadel athletes, my team was assembling around me in a classical, textbook fast break and we were looking good doing it. The Corps was on its feet, and I dribbled toward the Davidson guards borne along by the noise in the throats of the Corps. I came low and fast, and I kept my eyes on Huckel who was deep and Moser who moved out to the key to stop me. I went by Dave in a blur then turned my head toward Zinsky who was making his move to the basket on my right.

  As I looked toward Zinsky, Huckel moved out to intercept my pass, forgetting about Kroboth filling the lane to the left. I put the ball in my right hand to shovel it softly to Zinsky, but hurled it behind my back in a perfect bounce pass that landed in the hands of Al Kroboth. The pass took Zinsky and Huckel by surprise, took Moser and DeBrosse by surprise, took Kroboth and Driesell by surprise, and took the Corps and Mel Thompson by surprise.

  Al Kroboth was completely alone and I watched as he went up to dunk the ball with two hands. In the middle of preparing for the dunk, I saw the moment of recognition when poor Al remembered that the silly-assed rules committee of the NCAA had just outlawed the dunk because they thought it gave seven-foot Lew Alcindor of UCLA an unfair advantage over earthlings like me. It certainly did. I was part of this misbegotten rule change when it became illegal for the big men of the game to shoot the most emphatic and fabulous shot my sweet game possessed. The dunk to basketball is like the thunderbolt to the gods of storm. Kroboth went up for the slam dunk, remembered the rules committee of the NCAA, tried to alter the course of his shot in midair, and ended up throwing the ball awkwardly up by his wrists, the ball missing both the rim and the backboard to the vocal disappointment of the Corps. The buzzer sounded before Davidson could get off another shot.

  “Goddamn, Conroy,” I heard Mel scream. “You know I hate your nigger basketball.”

  Big Al came up to me in the locker room and squeezed my shoulders. “Good pass, Pat. I was going to dunk it. Forgot. Couldn’t recover.”

  “We’ll get ’em in the second half, Al,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Little Mel” Thompson put his hand on my shoulder and whispered to me, “We’ll have no more of that, Pat. Coach is still upset.”

  “Coach, it was a perfect pass,” I whispered. “I faked out the whole Davidson team.”

  “But we didn’t score,” Ed said. “You’ve got to admit that.”

  “Al missed the layup, Coach,” I said. “But I got him the ball. I delivered it perfectly.”

  “We don’t go behind the back on this team. You’ve done it three times tonight. Once on the pass. Twice off the dribble. We don’t need fancy, just good sharp passes. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  When Coach Thompson came in, I could tell he was pleased with our first-half effort. He offered us no praise, but he implied it by toning down the volume of his usual harangue. Rat crept up behind me, squeezed my shoulders, and whispered, “Pat, you scored eleven points the first half.” The news gave me exquisite pleasure since I had never scored in double figures in the first half during my entire college career. Whatever joy Rat’s announcement brought me vanished when Mel substituted Tee Hooper’s name for mine for the second-half starting lineup.

  My cheeks burned in a fury I could barely contain as I considered the clear injustice of the move. I had played as well as I ever played in my life in the first half, and I could blow by Huckel any time I chose to. Mel’s benching me was to his mind a fitting punishment for my temerity at throwing a pass I had learned while playing with black kids. I thought the banishment would be “temporary removal,” and that once I had realized the seriousness of my indiscretion, I would be back in the game. But this was not to be. In the bewildering architecture of whatever chaos theory Mel Thompson brought to coaching, I had crossed an invisible line. I would not be forgiven this night. At the end of the bench, enraged and hurt, I watched my team sleepwalking through the opening minutes of the second half. Though DeBrosse and Zinsky played with brilliance, scoring twenty-one of the team’s last thirty points, and Greg Connor had a stellar performance under the boards, we still lost by four points.

  In his postgame interview with Louis Chestnut the next morning, Mel was positively giddy in his assessment of the game: “After the exciting DeBrosse-Zinsky windup, generated off the pressing defense, Thompson had nothing but praise.”

  (This marks the first time in my career I saw the pairing of the words “Mel Thompson” and “praise.”)

  “‘If the kids give that kind of effort from here on out,’ Mel said, ‘we will do all right in the conference. We had a lull in our offense on occasion and I guess that cost us the game because we were forced to play catch-up basketball. But the most pleasing thing was the way we stayed in there and battled. We’ll be a problem for some people.’

  “DeBrosse, who apparently has decided that he is the man Thompson has been looking for as a floor leader, again led the cadets in scoring with 21 points. The little scatback made 9 of 17 floor and was 3 of 4 from the free throw line.”

  In a red-faced snit, I showered and dressed quickly and walked in darkness behind the barracks toward Fourth Battalion cussing with every step I took. Then the voice made its third appearance of the year, again surprising me because it was my father’s voice, a voice I had loathed since childhood. Yet this voice came to me like some kind of attendant angel. “Relax, pal. Let’s go back to the game plan. You keep forgetting. You’re never going to listen to Mel Thompson again. Got it? Nothing he does is going to affect your game. See? He got under your skin again. You play well when you go by instinct. Don’t think. Especially don’t think about him. Next game’s Furman, pal. Think about that game. Got it?”

  I calmed myself.

  I walked toward my barracks.

  I got it.

  CHAPTER 19

  FURMAN PALADINS

  NO TEAM IN AMERICA HATED THE CITADEL BULLDOGS MORE THAN the Furman Paladins. When the Furman players took the court against us, they did everything but foam at the mouth. Fights erupted regularly between the two teams and Furman started all of them. To Furman athletes, it was a matter of high honor to loathe and do harm to a Citadel athlete. As a Citadel athlete I could hardly blame them.

  The same year I arrived at The Citadel, a small band of cadets stole the Furman mascot, a high-strung and beautiful horse that cantered up and down the field during football games with a helmeted knight astride his lovely back. Though the cadets were successful in their abduction, their knowledge of horses proved haphazard and unlucky. The legend of this infamous encounter took on a life of its own. When I was a sophomore and on a bus heading to Greenville, my team captain Dick Martini explained to me why a Furman center had tried to decapitate me when I drove the lane: “We killed their horse, midget.”

  “How horrible, caveman,” I said, in shock. “Why did we do that?”

  “An accident, leprechaun. It was a bunch of Yankee boys, like me. They had big balls to plan and carry out the mission. But none of them had any experience with livestock. The cadets brought a car to Furman, but no horse trailer. They tried to put the Paladin in the trunk of the car. The horse thrashed around and blinded itself, dumb bastard. The cadets had to shoot the horse. That’s why Furman hates our asses.”

  Martini’s version is a perfect illumination of how a story blossoms out of control at The Citadel and
grows jungly with wild orchids and pitcher plants that feed on rhinoceros beetles and canaries. I believed every syllable Martini told me and did not question its veracity.

  When I wrote Beach Music, I took Martini’s memory of the death of the Paladin and added it to the history of a Citadel raid to paint the Furman campus a couple of years before the capture of the Paladin. A state trooper pulled up behind some carloads of cadets going 110 mph on I-26 and realized that he had stumbled onto a prank against his alma mater. Instead of pulling over the speeding cars tattooed with Citadel markings and stickers, the trooper simply radioed north, alerting the entire Furman campus to the danger of the approaching cadets.

  When the cadets climbed a fence and made their way with paint buckets and brushes toward the center of the vast campus, they did not know of their betrayal until they noted the presence of a thousand Furman boys approaching them from the front and a thousand more approaching their flank. The beatings those Furman boys gave to those luckless cadets were still being talked about with awe in the barracks when I arrived there in 1963. I can attest that Furman teams still hated our guts long after the student body had intercepted this ill-fated raid, and it got worse after we abducted their horse. Jim Stewart, writing for Furman’s alumni magazine, went deeply into the Furman archives to reveal the truth behind my fictional account of those fractious events between the two schools.

  “In the fall of 1963,” writes Mr. Stewart, “Citadel cadets did kidnap the Furman mascot, affectionately known to the Furman students as ‘Waldo,’ from the stables near the campus the week of the Furman-Citadel football game. Their plan was to return Waldo to Furman officials during the game in Charleston that Saturday. However, after the horse was accidentally blinded during the course of the prank, those responsible decided to limit further damage and return the horse early. . . . As for the Furman men successfully outflanking the Citadel’s paint-bucket brigade, a similar event happened in 1961. According to the Hornet (which became the Paladin the following year), the ‘entire male population of the student body’ turned out to meet a convoy of cadets. As in the book, the Furman students were tipped off and the convoy was monitored all the way up the interstate and captured once it came inside the gates. The Furman rout of The Citadel was so complete, the Hornet reported, that Dean Francis Bonner allowed free cuts for Saturday classes.

  “Conroy even told the Greenville News that he has heard a zillion variations of the Furman-Citadel tales—and he isn’t sure what the truth is. But we suspect that, deep down inside, Conroy may believe his version to be true.”

  THE FURMAN BASKETBALL PROGRAM still carried the aura of a big-time program since the era of Frank Selvy and Darrell Floyd had culminated in glory ten years before. Selvy and Floyd were two of the most prolific scorers in the history of college basketball. The hundred points that Selvy scored against Newberry College on February 13, 1954, still stands as the record for points scored in an NCAA game. When I was a boy living in North Carolina, my father took me to see Selvy play, and his smoothness on the court seemed ethereal. When he shot a basketball, it was like he was folding silk scarves to put in a drawer.

  Road trips always provided the best chance to catch up with the sleep lost in the barracks. After sleeping on the four-hour bus trip to Greenville, we went straight to the Greenville Memorial Auditorium, a cavernous yet intimate gym with a seating capacity of 5,344. DeBrosse walked the entire court bouncing the ball hard as though he were expecting the floor to answer him back. He was checking the floor for dead spots he would avoid during the game.

  Mel put us through a rigorous four-hour practice that Mohr, years later, remembers as brutal and exhausting and unnecessary. I remembered nothing particularly annoying about the practice, but I do recall that the dinner the team ate afterward was one of the bright spots of that capricious season. Tee Hooper was a Greenville native and favorite son and one of the best all-around athletes to come out of that green and leafy city that prefigured the coming of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His parents had invited the whole team over to their house at 5 Marshall Court to eat a steak dinner with all the fixings.

  The team bus deposited us at the bottom of a hill and his uniformed teammates whistled in awe as we walked toward the lovely, suburban home where Tee had spent his simple but privileged childhood.

  On the patio of his well-landscaped and spacious backyard, Mr. Hooper entertained the coaching staff while Frances Hooper conducted the team on a tour of the house. Later, Mrs. Hooper served the meal on her finest china and set the table with her family’s silver place settings and napkins of the softest linen. That the Hoopers made such a fuss over their son’s team continues to move me so many years later. They went out of their way to make each of us feel welcome in their home, and told us we could come back to their house on Marshall Court whenever we felt like it.

  My team relaxed and began talking to each other as though the possibility of friendship actually existed for us, beyond the spell and thumb and tyranny of our powerful coach. That night I watched Cauthen and Bridges engage in a civil conversation, outside of all competition and misunderstanding that drove them apart. The sophomores became playful and loose among themselves even though we upperclassmen could observe and pass judgment on their every move. Goofy and raw, with a touch of earthiness, they seemed sophomoric for the first time all season. They seemed like young boys instead of prematurely old men.

  The coaches ate apart from us on picnic tables in the backyard while their team took over the Hooper dining room on the only night anyone ever did anything that reflected decency or kindness to the Citadel basketball team of 1966–67. We never saw the inside of the house of any coach or general or colonel or anyone else who belonged to the Citadel family in a year we fought and scrambled and shed our sweat and blood in the name of the Bulldogs.

  The Furman game in Greenville is emblematic of everything that went wrong in my last year as a basketball player. It also marks a turning point for me as a Citadel athlete, a game I can point to and say, There. That game. That’s when it changed for me. Against Furman, I felt like I belonged for the first time. A Blue Teamer at last. A starter for my college team.

  It also marked a culmination in Greg Connor’s long fight for recognition as a rebounder and scorer and player to be reckoned with. Zinsky was beginning to fade, to soften and dissolve during his ordeal by Mel Thompson, as the season wobbled through January. Bridges played as though he was unaware that he was one of the best shooters in the country when his game was on. Mohr, exhausted from the four-hour practice the day before, could not get his “legs” even though the Furman gym’s floor was famous for its bounce and beloved by the great rebounders and leapers of our time. Our big men outrebounded Furman in the first half 30–18, but fell apart in the opening minutes of the second half.

  Our team was a sorry defensive team overall, but we bordered on the pathetic when we jumped into our wobbly 2–3 zone. I had never heard of Furman’s sophomore guard, Dick Esleeck, when the game began but after he made three straight shots over our zone, I knew he was for real.

  When we changed back to man-to-man defense, DeBrosse said, “You get Esleeck, Conroy.”

  So I spent the entire game shadowing this elusive guard who seemed huge to me. He sprang out at me suddenly as I was guarding him, put moves on me I had never seen on a court, and got open so quickly that he seemed schooled in the mysteries of snakes and all the quick-striking species. I muttered through the whole game that this kid was a hell of a player, but Dick was having some difficulty keeping up with me. So we fought each other for forty minutes—not evenly—he was a much better basketball player, but he knew he was in a game. He knew that much.

  Greg Connor, built more like a football lineman than a basketball player, stormed the backboard that night, played with complete abandon. After missing the Christmas practice and drawing Mel’s wrath, Greg figured he had nothing left to lose and tried to win back our coach’s approval. Though only six feet four inches tall, Greg was
built like they tried to build all their athletes in Illinois, solid and silo-shaped, and that night he played like a freeman, one who has torn away the shackles that bound him. Like me, he played as though Mel Thompson was not his coach. He played to prove his worth to himself and his teammates.

  Greg’s performance held our team together during the first half with his stellar brave work under the boards. With ten minutes to play, Connor committed his fifth foul, and Mohr followed him to the bench twenty seconds later, the buzzer indicating that he, too, had fouled out of the game.

  All discipline vanished, all fire dissolved as Mel ran player after player into the game, looking for some combination that would click. The humiliation of Tee Hooper continued at an accelerated rate; Mel barely let Tee into the game for a token appearance before his hometown crowd of 2,400 fans. In agony, Tee sat on the bench, his face looking up to the stands to see his disappointed high school friends, his parents, and his sweet-faced sister, Jill. Once I looked over and Tee had covered his head with a towel. That is what public shame can do to a boy.

  We tied the game five times in the second half, but Furman kept coming back on us, then started pulling away. Soon our game turned nasty and brutish, and our big men showed signs of exhaustion under the hoop.

  In the Greenville News, reporter Jim Anderson quoted Mel Thompson as saying, “Greg Connor went out early and then Dan Mohr and we were definitely hurt. Doug Bridges was not having a good night. We had to use three sophomores on the front line. We might have lost our poise. I’m inclined to think we did.”