My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  “I’ll play my ass off,” Greg said. And he was as good as he promised.

  When I walked into the Jacksonville Coliseum that night for the game, Karen was waiting for me by the door. I was last off the bus and she surprised me by kissing me squarely on the lips, becoming the first and last girl ever to kiss me in a college gymnasium. I was both delighted that she had done so and grateful that Mel had not witnessed this singular event.

  “I told the girls in my dorm that I’m dating a college basketball star,” Karen said.

  “Player. You’re dating a college basketball player, not star. And Karen, my coach may not let me go out with you,” I explained.

  “That would be terrible,” she said.

  “It certainly would,” I agreed, then saw a cadet from Jacksonville that I knew.

  “This is my friend, Karen,” I said to the cadet. “If I can’t go out with her after the game, would you set her up with one of the cadets who came down for the game?”

  “Be glad to,” the cadet said.

  “I’m sorry I wear thick glasses,” she said quietly to me. “My mama promised me contacts for my birthday.”

  “I have two sisters who wear thick glasses, Karen,” I said. “They’re both beautiful girls, just like you.”

  “My father used to call me beautiful,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. On our homecoming date, Karen had wept for twenty minutes when she told me of the recent death of her father, whose parachute had failed to open in a skydiving accident. I do not think it ever had occurred to me how much a daughter could adore a father until Karen’s grief proved it to me.

  “Your dad was right,” I said, then saw Rat running toward me in his manager’s uniform.

  “Pat, have you gone nuts? Mel’s looking for you,” Rat yelled.

  “See you after the game,” I said to Karen as I broke out into a jog for the dressing room.

  As the team was shooting jump shots before the game began, DeBrosse approached me with the strangest look on his face.

  “Conroy,” John said, “what’s that I’m hearing?”

  I listened for a moment, then said, “Down South, we call them elephants. I don’t know what they’re called in Ohio.”

  “Fuck you,” DeBrosse said. “How many elephants have you ever heard at a basketball game?”

  “This is a coliseum, DeBrosse. They got all kinds of things going on here. I saw a poster saying that the circus was in town for tomorrow.” And then I heard the answering call of a pair of lions.

  “Elephants and basketball. Jesus Christ, Conroy,” John said.

  Before the opening tip-off, Greg Connor pointed out his date who was sitting among the small cluster of Citadel fans. Despite the time span of over thirty years, that young woman’s fresh good looks still have not lost the capacity to move me. Without knowing it, she carried all the incalculable and breathless power of a woman’s loveliness with her. As she waved down at us, she changed the way Greg and I thought about the world. Three rows above her, my Aunt Evelyn sat with my Uncle Joe and my four cousins Carolyn, Evelyn, Joey, and Johnny. I blew them a kiss. I had left tickets for the whole Gillespie family, and it always made me feel like a big shot that I could do it. My Uncle Joe, who was not a shy man, bellowed out to the crowd, “That’s my nephew, Pat Conroy, and you’d better watch out, Jacksonville. He’s going to teach you some tricks.”

  I thought I would collapse from embarrassment, but one of the refs came looking for me, and I went over to shake hands with the Jacksonville captains as Uncle Joe kept screaming out my name and telling the city that I was his nephew. Uncle Joe gave new meaning to the word “irrepressible.”

  Ed “Little Mel” Thompson came up to me in the pregame huddle. “Hey, Pat, who’s that guy calling out your name?”

  “That’s my Uncle Joe.”

  “Could you make him stop?” Ed said. “He’s getting on Mel’s nerves.”

  “You don’t do anything to stimulate my Uncle Joe,” I said. “It’s best to ignore him.”

  When Kroboth went up for the opening tip against the very game Dick Pruet, I heard a muffled “Pat Conroy’s my nephew,” then my Aunt Evelyn regained a measure of control over her husband. Dan Mohr was not starting at center, and his dejection was so obvious that it stood out like a simple sentence etched across his face. The ruination of Dan Mohr’s senior year had hit its full stride.

  My Citadel team had come to play that night, and we gave the Dolphins the game of their lives. I had never seen my team move with such swiftness, vivacity, or dash. We got after them from the opening tip and I felt like a point guard who belonged on that court as I directed my team.

  But the night belonged to the bullish, well-muscled Greg Connor who threw his body at every rebound for the glory and well-being of the Citadel Bulldogs. It was a joy to watch him. He astonished the big men of Jacksonville as he attacked the boards with a relentlessness that bordered on masochism. He scored from everywhere, and I got him the ball as many times as I could. Greg’s play made me look brilliant that night. My whole team was cooking, and the fast break was taking care of itself. I could see in the Jacksonville players’ eyes that they knew they were playing a different team than the one they had beaten earlier at The Citadel’s field house. Connor had not been a major factor that game, but he was as hard to move away from the boards as a freight car on this night. I was the only one in the gym who knew that the brilliance of Greg’s performance emanated from the glow of a pure sexual intoxication. He was playing for that pretty Jacksonville girl and no one else. When he was shooting one of his seven free throws that night, I made a mental note that we could win a bunch of games if I could get Connor laid after every game. We pulled away to a 38–31 lead at halftime. We played as good a half as we had all season.

  That year Jacksonville’s Coach Joe Williams was turning his school into a big-time program that would soon showcase the likes of the great Artis Gilmore, teams that would take Jacksonville deep into the NCAA tournaments in the early seventies. Already he had two players, Wayne Kruer and Dick Pruet, who could play on the best teams in the country. Kruer was a six-foot-five guard who DeBrosse graciously told me I would be guarding.

  Kruer was a new kind of guard in the world that was fast proliferating in college basketball. He would have easily been the second or third tallest man on my team, but he had learned to handle the ball well enough to play outside the lane. His jump shot was wonderful to watch and hard to block. When Wayne saw that I was going to guard him, he looked as though someone had given him a free lunch. He taught me that night what it meant for a larger man to post up a smaller man. During the entire game, he would take me under the basket, establish his position just outside the paint, and call for the ball. Because he was six five, he had played forward and center in high school, and he knew what to do when his teammates got him the ball. All night, I tried to front him, but his teammates would lob it over my head for a score. The guy could play the game and once again, I found myself in over my head. Only one guard on my team could stop a scorer like Kruer. His name was Tee Hooper, and he watched the game from the bench, his year in shambles. He watched helplessly as Kruer ate my jock throughout the first and second half. Though he does not know it, I have had nightmares about Wayne Kruer.

  But I fought him, and my team played heroically against the much better Jacksonville Dolphins. Greg Connor led our team in scoring with twenty-one points, final proof of the great potency of sex in the life of an athlete: it hurt our team when Greg fouled out with 1:40 to play. Greg ran to the bench exhausted, a spent, depleted warrior. He had enjoyed the finest game of his Citadel career with his first date sitting in the stands.

  Though we led Jacksonville 38–31 at halftime, Jacksonville fought back to a 44–44 tie in the opening minutes of the second half. Though we led most of the second half, once by six points at 65–59, Jacksonville rallies kept us from putting the game away. The game was tied nineteen times before the final buzzer.

  Everywhere I
looked that night I ran into the courage of my beaten-down teammates. Zinsky played like the magnificent athlete he was born to be. When Kroboth got into foul trouble, Mohr came in and scored fourteen points in the second half alone. DeBrosse was a thoroughbred guard and I was lucky to play in the same backcourt with him that night. Steady as the internal workings of a clock, DeBrosse hit jumpers at vital times when his team had to call on his outside shooting.

  A sophomore guard for Jacksonville named Alan Treece hit two free throws with a minute left and put Jacksonville up by two. We ran down and missed a shot, Jacksonville controlled the ball, but not the clock. Instead of freezing the ball, Kruer took me deep to the right side of the court and did not let enough of the clock run off and missed a jumper that was rebounded fiercely by Zinsky. He shot me the ball with less than fifteen seconds left, and I did what point guards were trained to do.

  I brought the ball up the court at full speed, made eye contact with Dan Mohr, and Dan read my look with matchless precision. Root made a move against Pruet, and I slipped a pass under Kruer. With sweet efficiency, Root faked left, then pivoted to the right. His beautiful jump shot swished through the net, sending the game into overtime.

  In the roar of the crowd I heard a faint cry of “Pat Conroy’s my nephew” coming from my indefatigable Uncle Joe, but Aunt Evelyn put the clamps on him once again, to my great relief. Mel was animated in the huddle. The game had excited him, and he screamed at us as though he liked us again. We led three times in overtime, but each time Jacksonville came back with a bucket to even the game. With less than a minute left, Kroboth committed an offensive foul. Jacksonville ran out the clock, then called time with four seconds remaining.

  I knew what that play was going to be and so did everyone else who was present in the Jacksonville Coliseum. Fronting Wayne Kruer, I tried to prevent him from receiving the inbound pass from Alan Treece. Treece had to lob it over me and Kruer received the pass deep in his backcourt. Forcing him to his left, he took an off-balance jump shot, and it careened off the rim and went high on the backboard. In the drama of the last shot, one of my teammates forgot about the elusive Mr. Treece who was waiting under the boards by himself, and he tipped the ball in as the final buzzer sounded.

  Treece’s shot felt like a knife in the abdomen. I fell to my knees, exhausted and beaten and disillusioned in every cell of my body. I had been positive we were going to beat Jacksonville. The Dolphins’ team and cheerleaders were mobbing Treece as Barney and Zipper helped me to my feet. Wayne Kruer sought me out to shake my hand, a gesture of sportsmanship I truly appreciated. As I walked toward the locker room, weaving through the jubilant crowd of Dolphin fans, Karen found me and planted a French kiss on me at center court. To say this act took me by surprise is understating my complete astonishment at finding this young woman’s tongue in my mouth. My first thought was that Aunt Evelyn and my cousins had witnessed this and would report it in all of its salacious detail to my mother.

  Karen then said, “You lied to me, Pat. You are a basketball star.”

  “I’m not, Karen,” I said.

  “You looked like one to me,” she said. “Can you go out?”

  “I’ll have to talk to my coach.”

  “A girlfriend lent me her apartment at Jacksonville Beach,” she said.

  When I reached the locker room, my team had begun the rituals of undressing. Some of the Green Weenies, notoriously fast dressers after a game, were in the showers already, but Connor was standing beside my locker.

  “Conroy, when’re you gonna ask Mel if we can go out on a date?”

  “Let’s give him some time, Greg,” I said, looking over at Mel and Little Mel as they spoke in disconsolate whispers to each other on a bench across the locker room. Mel looked more gaunt and haggard than he usually did. It was clear the game had taken its toll on him. I decided to shower and put on my uniform before I approached Mel about Connor’s and my sex lives. Then disaster struck. My eyes were suddenly engulfed in an aura of cheap light, and I looked up in horror to see my Uncle Joe filming me and my naked and half-naked teammates in living color. Uncle Joe was well known in my family for filming the entire waking lives of his children. I cannot ever remember him when he was not sticking a camera into my face.

  “I told you that you shouldn’t mess with my Jacksonville Dolphins. The ol’ Dolphins sure came through for the city by the St. Johns River tonight. Hey, Coach,” Uncle Joe said, turning the light from my astonished head to my coach’s enraged one. “Hey, if you’re going to cry about it, Coach, you’re in the wrong profession, pal. Crybabies don’t make good coaches, I can tell you that. . . .”

  I went for the plug in the wall that Uncle Joe had found before he began his impromptu postgame shoot. I saw a look pass on Mel’s face, and I thought he was rising up to kill my uncle, so I grabbed my uncle and my cousin Joey and ran them both out of the locker room. Outside, I kissed my aunt and hugged my cousins while trying to move them deeper and deeper into the coliseum. Before I went back to the shower room, my Uncle Joe said, “I saw your father play ball for the Navy Olympic team, Pat. He was never as good as you, and that’s a promise.”

  It was not true, but it’s what my Uncle Joe said that night so long ago in Jacksonville. I am still grateful for his saying it. I went back to the locker room and heard the elephants again, and that alien sound so deep in the bowels of the coliseum did not augur well for the love life of Greg Connor.

  After dressing I approached Mel who was smoking a cigarette outside the locker room. I was direct, and simply said, “Coach, a couple of the guys have dates tonight and wanted me to ask you if they could go out.”

  “Good,” Mel said. “You asked me. Now go tell them no way in hell.”

  “One of them’s Greg Connor, Coach,” I said. “He hasn’t had a date since he got to The Citadel.”

  “Conroy, you deaf?” Mel said, his voice rising. “How can you even think about women after losing a close game like this? You guys need rest.”

  “I think Greg’s close to cracking, Coach,” I said. “The Citadel’s getting to him.”

  “You think I’m going to make any exceptions to the rules, Conroy?” Mel asked. “A rule’s a rule for a reason.”

  I walked across the gym to where Karen was waiting with the other cadets and their dates. Apologizing to Karen, I told her that there was a party over at a Citadel cadet’s parents’ house, and that it would be easy for her to find a date for the night. A year later, I heard that Karen had met another cadet that night and that he had gotten her pregnant and abandoned her.

  When I went outside in the cold, I found Greg Connor pleading his case with Mel Thompson. Coach was shaking his head and Greg was looking more and more desperate. His voice sounded whiny and reed-thin as he fought for his right to spend some time with his pretty date. It was not until the team pulled into our unspeakable motel that I learned that Greg had actually brokered a deal with Mel. Our coach allowed Greg to sit with his date, out by the drained swimming pool on broken-down pool furniture, for one hour and one hour only.

  Greg and I still remember this girl’s beauty. Greg remembered her kindliness for even agreeing to the ridiculous stipulations of that undermined date. I looked out my window and saw Greg talking with great animation as this pretty young woman listened to him on a cold January night after he had just played the best basketball game of his life. At fifteen-minute intervals, Coach Ed “Little Mel” Thompson would come out to check on the two lovebirds, making sure they weren’t having too much fun. The hour passed swiftly, and the pretty young woman walked out of Greg’s life forever.

  CHAPTER 22

  WILLIAM AND MARY

  IN SECRET, I USED TO STUDY MEL THOMPSON TO SEE IF I COULD FIGURE out what made him so deeply feared and grudgingly respected by his team. From the beginning, I noted how easily Mel got along with other men, especially the sportswriters and sports information directors he met as we traveled around the league. He laughed easily and was garrulous without bei
ng coarse; his laughter rang through hallways after games when he had gathered reporters, coaches, and friends into his hotel room. Sometimes, I would eavesdrop beside a half-open door while Mel told side-splittingly funny tales of his brilliant career with the Wolfpack of North Carolina State. Relaxed among other males, Mel was a masterful host who seemed to have a real affinity for friendship. In those far-flung hotel rooms, made pungent by cigar smoke and good liquor, Mel Thompson was a different man when he was not with us.

  We had a hard two-hour practice on Friday after the Jacksonville loss when William and Mary was coming into town the next day. “Hey, Mel. Give us a break. We’ve got to get up at reveille and march to breakfast with the Corps. How about a shoot-around on Friday?” I said to Root as we dressed for practice.

  That Friday, Mel took off his whistle and took to the court among the Green Weenies. The Weenies were unbeatable by themselves, but they transformed themselves into a splendid basketball team when Mel Thompson of the Wolfpack took his formidable place at center. When I played for the Green Weenies and Coach played for my team, I looked like an All-American guard by getting him the ball every single time we came down the court.

  “Catch, Coach,” I would say and put a pass into his waiting hands. He played the game like a bird of prey flying over a henhouse and he went for rebounds like it was a blood sport. When he played against the Blue Team that day, we did our best to raise our competitive fires against him. Whenever the ball went to Mel, five of us dropped off on him and DeBrosse and I hectored him like wrens tormenting a crow whenever he put the ball on the floor. Our big men fought him heroically for every rebound. Once when he went to the floor, all five of us jumped into the pileup beneath the basket. Although we played much harder when our coach scrimmaged against us, I still do not see the wisdom of having such a practice the night after we lost in Jacksonville, two hundred miles to the south.