My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  In the same article, Frank Selvy said that “he told his team at half-time to do what they were supposed to do. ‘Do it better, not differently.’ ” They followed his advice.

  They certainly did. With Dick Esleeck, I was making my own small contribution to a star being born. This kid was a quick study and he gained confidence playing against me as the game went on in its furious pace. With 12:43 left he came toward me at the top of the key, went to his left with a quick change of pace. But I cut him off and he did a quick crossover to his right that I lunged to anticipate, but crossed back over to his left, faked a jump shot that I went up to block, then twisted beneath me and shot a perfect, gliding jumper at the foul line that swished cleanly through the net. I was open-mouthed with astonishment.

  “That’s one of the nicest moves I’ve ever seen,” I said to him as he turned to go back upcourt. Naturally, Esleeck would not talk to or acknowledge me because he, like all Furman players, was still ticked off that The Citadel had killed their horse. But the move, in memory, remains otherworldly just as it was when Esleeck pulled it on me that night so long ago.

  In the last ten minutes of the game we made every mistake it was possible to make while pressuring another team. I tried to rally the troops, but even my exhortations began to seem hoarse and rattled. “The Citadel Stare,” Mel Thompson’s most despised manifestation of our school’s influence on his game plan, appeared on every face of every teammate. It was a game in which the slippery, breakneck Tee Hooper would score two points, as would the silky Doug Bridges. Zinsky managed to score only four points. Dan Mohr would put up only seven points, and DeBrosse would break into double figures with ten. Our vaunted and talented Blue Team, our original starting lineup, managed to put a total of only twenty-five points against the Furman Paladins. Our performance during the second half was an embarrassment to our college. We lost, 85–68.

  In the locker room, I was undressing, exhausted to the tips of my fingers, when Rat came up behind me and whispered in my ear, “You were a high scorer tonight, Pat. You had sixteen. Connor was next with fifteen. Go Green Weenies!”

  Greg Connor and I were exactly the same kind of basketball player, guys who hustled, who went for every ball on the floor, who gave it all we got, and who both had second-string written all over us. We knew it then and we know it better now that we are middle-aged men. But I carry a clear memory from that night at Furman. After I shook Dick Esleeck’s hand, someone slapped me on the behind and said, “Good game, Pat.”

  When I turned to see who it was, it was a startling encounter for me. I am the first novelist in the world who has ever been slapped on the fanny by the incomparable Frank Selvy, one of the few basketball players to score a hundred points in a college basketball game.

  THAT TUESDAY WE TRAVELED TO Greenville, North Carolina, to play the Pirates of East Carolina before we took a ten-day break for our midyear exams. Mel refused to let us do our usual warmup drills before the game and required us to run our offense over and over instead. We looked odd and bush-league, and the East Carolina crowd began to heckle us from the sidelines. Hecklers alone could not alter the stern demeanor of our sphinxlike coach, and he gave no outward sign that he even heard the taunts. Mel later would let us know in an aside that he had played ACC basketball where the crowds were truly massive and rowdy and hatred was just another art form that fanaticism could take.

  Up in the visitors’ stands, I watched my mother and father sit near Doug Bridges’s and Dan Mohr’s parents. It would be the second college game my mother had seen me play and the first for my father. My father’s eyes fell on me like soot left over from Ash Wednesday. We stared at each other and he gave no sign of recognition at all. I waved and he turned away, embarrassed. My mother spotted me and blew me a kiss, and I blew her one back. At that moment, I wished I could have chucked a hand grenade under my father’s bleacher. His presence made me as nervous as if someone had placed a cobra in my locker. He could change the weather of any room he entered. I feared playing a game in front of him.

  But I saw my mother’s surprise when I went out to meet the East Carolina captain. I held the position in the most tenuous and unofficial manner possible, but it pleased me that I was acting as the captain of my team in the first college game my father had ever seen me play. I made a silent prayer that I would not humiliate myself or my teammates before my father’s sullen gaze. I could take my father’s fury and had proven that over and over during the long, forced march of my debased childhood; it was his laughter and mocking contempt that unmanned me completely, that I would do almost anything to avoid. Again, I prayed for a decent game; a decent one was enough, Lord.

  But we were in trouble from the opening tip-off until the game’s final horn. No one on the floor came to play against East Carolina and I found myself in my usual role of head cheerleader, going from player to player, exhorting them to greater effort, applauding every rebound, and trying to be aggressive on the fast breaks. Mohr remembers me dragging my pivot foot near the Citadel bench, then Mel leaping to his feet to scream at me as the referee called me for traveling. I remember none of this; this night I had a man I truly feared in attendance.

  At East Carolina John DeBrosse seemed like he was floating in a disembodied fugue state, his eyes vacant and lost to the action on the court. He went through the motions, but he never registered his presence on the court with his usual bright authority, and he never got into the flow of the game at all.

  Our big men rebounded well and would pull in thirty-one rebounds to the Pirates’ twenty-one, but they were as blurry and intangible on the offensive end of the court as DeBrosse. Both Bridges and Mohr shot dreadfully. Mel screamed his way through the first half concentrating his rancor, as always, on the big guys in the middle.

  “Do something, Zinsky,” he yelled at Zeke, who also could not buy a basket, even though he hauled down a game-high ten rebounds. “Do anything. Get off your ass!”

  When I scored on a drive, I looked toward my parents. My mother cheered loudly, but my father was blank. It was a religious belief of my father’s not to show any sign of joy or pleasure when his oldest son made a basket during a game. Eventually, I quit looking at my father and concentrated on trying to rouse my sleepwalking team from its trance. I went from player to player when we lined up at the foul line and slapped their fannies hard, yet I could not touch their buried spirits.

  Point guards carry the responsibility for their teams showing up with their best games in their eyes. My team never got near Greenville, North Carolina, on January 13, 1967, and the fault lies with me. Tee came in off the bench and played his fiery, up-tempo game and scored twelve quick points in the second half. Mel became unhinged by the game because East Carolina was in a rebuilding year, and Mel expected us to beat the Pirates badly. But East Carolina hit 52 percent of their shots and beat us 80–72. Their victory seemed more lopsided than that. It felt like they had beaten us by thirty points. As I ran from the court, I carried a lingering feeling of shame that my father had witnessed my team receive such a thorough trouncing.

  The savage diatribe delivered by Mel Thompson in the locker room after that game marks for many of the players the low point of a season chock-full of them. Mel launched into a deranged, near psychotic rage that seemed half seizure and half cuckoo’s nest. I thought he would have a stroke before our eyes. My teammates sat with their heads in their hands and their eyes on the floor. We knew better than to make eye contact with Mel when all his demons were loose and our coach went crackers. He screamed about our lack of balls, courage, will, pride, or any of the other signs that imply honor among athletes. I heard none of it because he had begun the most raving, incoherent harangue against any team I would ever play on with the strangest words I had ever heard come from his mouth. “What I have to say to this team isn’t gonna be pretty, and it applies to everybody in this room . . . except Pat Conroy.”

  Thunderstruck by this unprecedented dispensation, I sat through his savage evisceration of
my teammates with a combination of shame and wonderment. In my four years with Mel, I had never once heard him excuse any player from one of his rambling indictments. We had almost hit rock bottom, the place where all the darkness of Mel’s coaching was leading us, like it had led all the teams of Mel’s I had played on at The Citadel. “I don’t even want to see you guys for the rest of the night. It makes me sick to my stomach that I got guys on this club who are just going through the motions. You’re nothing. All of you. Except you, Pat,” he said, again an extraordinary singling out unheard-of in Mel’s fiery career, which stunned me.

  “You guys are shit. You don’t have it. You never had it. And tonight, you played like you didn’t care one way or the other. You make me sick to my stomach.”

  For several minutes after Mel’s departure no one moved or spoke. Finally, Zinsky began to peel his jersey off and Root took his head out of his hands. DeBrosse looked perplexed and Tee would not smile for the rest of the year. Even the Green Weenies were shocked by the fierceness of the onslaught.

  I sat staring at the locker room when Rat came up behind me and squeezed my shoulders.

  “Why did Mel excuse me from his ass-kicking?” I asked.

  “Because you were terrific,” Rat whispered. “You scored twenty-five points. You made nine out of thirteen shots. Hit all seven of your free throws. You were good, son.”

  Rat moved down the line to soothe the frayed sensibilities of my teammates as I sat there in complete surprise considering the news he had brought to me. Long before, I had given up all hope of ever scoring twenty points in a college basketball game. I remembered the television interview when Mel had put his arm around me and told all of South Carolina that I was fully capable of scoring one or two points a game. A twenty-point game is a benchmark for every basketball player who ever played the game. It is like scoring a touchdown in football or hitting a home run in baseball. In the calculus of sport, it lets the world know in the thoughtless beauty of box scores that you have played one hell of a game. Rat’s news took my breath away because I had felt no sense of elation or heightened powers, nor was I even aware I was scoring a career high. I felt only the keen frustration of a point guard unable to rally his team around him.

  The head manager, Al Beiner, came up to me and said, “Great game, Pat. You were high scorer on both teams. Your old man’s outside. Wants to see you.”

  I got up and walked toward my father with my spirits rising. My father had often told me I was not good enough to be a college basketball player, so I felt lighter than air as I skipped across the cement floor to encounter him after I had lit up the scoreboard with my first twenty-point game in my college career. When I saw my father’s face, I could tell he was not in an ebullient mood. He looked at me as he always did, as though the mere sight of me filled him with revulsion.

  “You were shit tonight,” he said. “Your team was shit. Your coach can’t coach worth a shit.”

  “We had an off night, Dad,” I said.

  “You’re shit. You didn’t have an off night. Shit don’t have off nights. Your full-court press is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

  “We agree on that, Dad.”

  Dad put his hand on my chest, pushed me up against a cinderblock wall, and said, “You couldn’t hold my jock as a ballplayer. I used to eat guys alive on the court. I saw you help a guy get up tonight. Stuck out your hand to help him off the ground. I’d’ve laid his ass out.”

  My father was six foot four and I was five ten. He towered over me as he whispered these pleasantries in my ear. “What a southern pussy on the basketball court you turned out to be.”

  “We’ll get East Carolina when they come to our place, Dad.”

  “They’ll kick the shit out of you down there.”

  “Can I see Mom?” I said.

  “Negative. We got a long ride back to D.C. We wasted our fucking time coming to see this shit. You couldn’t hold my jock. Never forget it.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and my father walked out into the cold night.

  That night I spent at Danny Mohr’s house in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. The sweetness of Danny’s parents offered a vivid contrast to my father’s blitzkrieg against me outside the locker room. Both sensed that this basketball season was taking a tremendous toll on their hurt and sensitive son. I had no idea of the extent until I listened to Dan enumerate his list of grievances against Mel to his parents and the endless humiliations he had endured at the hands of our coach. Somewhere, on that long ride to Atlantic Beach, I realized that Danny’s disaffection with Mel Thompson was fast taking on all the aspects of sheer abomination. For over an hour, Danny emptied the frustrations of that year onto the laps of his soft-spoken parents. Their love of their son was tangible in that car. His father’s gentleness flowed like some rare form of honey over his son’s dark mood.

  When I prepared for bed, I brushed my teeth in their one tiny bathroom and saw that the shower floor was a wooden slat and that the water drained onto the ground beneath the house. I had never known that Dan Mohr’s family was as poor and struggling as it was. It explained why he never had a sports coat over the Christmas break. Before we went to bed, Mrs. Mohr kissed me and said it was a great honor to have another Citadel basketball player sleep in their house. She told me to wake her in the middle of the night if I needed anything. Mr. Mohr then hugged me and thanked me for watching out for his son for four years. It moved me powerfully when Mr. Mohr embraced me, but it was much later that I realized that I had rarely been hugged by a father before, and never by my own.

  IN OUR REMATCH WITH FURMAN ON February 19 in Charleston, Frank Selvy made a brilliant coaching adjustment and put the sophomore guard Dick Esleeck on me, and I got to measure how improved the young Esleeck was from our first game together. I was listless and leaden during the whole game. I had liked playing against Furman a lot more when Dick was guarding DeBrosse.

  I did a better job on Esleeck in this game on defense, but he got sixteen points, eight of them on foul shots. Esleeck improved as the game went along and no one guarded me better than he did since the magisterial point guard Bobby Buisson of Auburn, in the first game of the season, a hundred years ago. I scored six points and lost the game for my college. Kroboth had sixteen, Mohr fourteen, and DeBrosse eleven, but the team was exhausted. We should have beaten Furman on our home court and beaten them badly. But Esleeck was wallpapered to my back the whole night, and he shut me down with great effectiveness.

  Years later, I looked Dick Esleeck up in the Furman media guide and discovered that he was the first-team Helms Foundation All-American his senior year, was in the Furman Athletic Hall of Fame, was twice on the Southern Conference first team, and had been named South Carolina Player of the Year in 1969. I would like to say, Dick Esleeck, wherever you are, it was an honor to take the court against you.

  After the game was over, Tee Hooper went to the visiting team locker room and asked for an audience with Coach Frank Selvy. Again, Tee had hardly played and his sense of despair was deepening. “Coach Selvy, if I quit The Citadel, could I come play for Furman? Would you let me play for Furman?” Tee Hooper, who many believe was the greatest athlete in Citadel history, was begging for a chance to play for Furman.

  “Tee, you could play for anyone,” Frank Selvy said. Frank Selvy knew a little bit about the game.

  CHAPTER 20

  ANNIE KATE

  THE CITADEL IN WINTER WAS A REFUGE OF COLD, MONASTIC BEAUTY to me. As I made my way across the parade ground at night, the front-lit buildings looked as though they were sculptured palaces of ice and the mist was coming off the river. The cold burned my cheeks and the barracks fell silent as the cadets prepared themselves for exams with great resolution. Most of the time, the barracks were boisterous, noisy places, but always turned monastery-like when our trial by examinations began in earnest. Each night during exam week, I returned to the same desk in the library along the back wall on the first floor. I used it as getaway and pied-à-terre. For four year
s, it was at this desk where I tried to make myself smart during my Citadel years. The library spilled over with more books than I would ever be able to read in three lifetimes. My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books. The library staff knew me on a first-name basis; I felt as comfortable entering the Citadel library as a whelk entering its shell.

  On a Sunday evening after mess, I spread my papers in that corner of the world and began to memorize the notebooks that I had used to copy down every word my professors uttered in class. I was not happy about the academic progress I had made thus far, and I wanted to prove that I could excel in my coursework the last year I would attend college. In class, I had found myself distracted and unable to train my full attention on the voice of a boring professor. My faculty advisor, Colonel Doyle, had taken note of this and had designed my senior year with six of the most gifted teachers on campus. All were brilliant, self-dramatizing men, and I could not wait to get to class each morning to hear what they had to say about English drama, adolescent psychology, literary criticism, the history of England, the modern novel, and the writing of poetry. It still makes me happy to read that distinguished list of courses and think about the shapes of those textbooks and their varying smells as I marked them up on every page where the professor had placed greatest emphasis. That was the semester I encountered Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, fell in love with Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, followed Anna Karenina to her death in the trainyards of Moscow, and listened to the gregarious Charles Martin lecture about England with such passion and eloquence that I grew enamored of the country and its people long before I stood on Hadrian’s Wall and wrote thank-you notes to Colonel Martin for handing me the country of England as a gift. In a manila folder, I studied the ten poems I would hand over to Colonel Doyle in the morning. Though I was still a bad poet, I could see that there was something in my writing that had not been there before, and I felt euphoric as I read words I had written.