My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  The Keydets booed us lustily as we left the court at halftime with us leading 38–31. Things were breaking our way; Mel was happy with the way we were playing because his screaming at us at halftime seemed more rote and underfed than usual. Looking around at my teammates, I noticed that Root was still wearing his warmups. Mel had not even put Danny into the game, an oversight so obvious that Wright and Powers came over to Danny right before the start of the second half to ask him if he was hurt.

  The game stayed fast-moving, and we ran along the surge of the VMI corps’ urgent tidal roar. When VMI scored, the earth would move with their corps’ saber-rattling applause. They spoke in one thunderous voice, then quieted when Zinsky put in a jumper and Bridges followed with one of his own.

  VMI made two strong runs at us in the second half, pulling about even with us after we built a ten-point lead. We finally worked back to another ten-point lead with 3:58 left when I scored on a drive to make it 68–58.

  The VMI team asserted itself and came for our throats. They fought us and hounded us and scrapped us all over that basketball court. Exhausted, Powers and Wright and Denny Clark fought our big men for everything that went up on the boards, and I found myself in a pileup with Mitchell and Brown when a ball skittered across the court and was heading out of bounds. We grunted and snorted and made inhuman sounds as we fought each other because our schools instilled a fighting spirit in our bloodstreams. It was the pledge and anthem and benchmark of all the men who wore the rings of these two singular colleges. The gym was a vessel of tumult and pandemonium. VMI’s corps clamored like some terrible new beast set loose on the world, vociferous, jungly, and magnificent. The VMI players lifted their game to be worthy of such praise and they closed it to two when Steve Powers scored to make it 68–66 with 1:16 left in the game.

  Then John DeBrosse showed why he is still remembered as one of the best guards to ever suit up for the Citadel Bulldogs. He took over the game for us and in a gymnasium turned to uproar and bedlam, he drove the ball down the length of the court, saw an opening, and made a jump shot from the top of the key. It takes the courage of a special kind of player to shoot a jump shot under those conditions with a corps of Keydets screaming for you to miss. The headline in the next day’s News and Courier said, “John DeBrosse lifts Bulldogs over VMI.”

  The reporter wrote, “Denny Clark matched DeBrosse’s shot for VMI after Pat Conroy had made a free throw to give The Citadel a 71–68 lead. DeBrosse clinched it with a pair of free throws on a one-and-one situation with six seconds left.

  “Al Kroboth and Pat Conroy shared scoring honors for the night with 17 points apiece for The Citadel with DeBrosse collecting 16 and Doug Bridges 11. Top scorer for the night, however, was Ralph Wright of VMI who had 24.”

  Before I followed my teammates into the locker room, I took a delicious moment watching the corps of Keydets filing out of the gym to walk back to the barracks. It pleased me that I could not find one of them who was smiling. I ran to find Coach Gary McPherson.

  “You call that throwing a game, Pat? What a great game for everyone. But we’re going to get you when we come to Charleston.”

  “We’ll be waiting for you, Coach,” I said. “Tell your team they were wonderful.”

  Before I got on the team bus, Rat stopped me and whispered, “Root didn’t even get in the game. Can you believe it?”

  On the bus, I saw Root sitting in the very back by himself. I took a seat near him and tried to think of something to say. Dan Mohr had been a star to me since I saw him at our first practice during our plebe year. He possessed the prettiest turnaround jumper I had ever seen on a big man and I still have not met the man I thought could keep Dan from scoring during a basketball game. Though not a good leaper, he had long arms and massive hands, and I saw him score at will on Lenny Chappell of the NBA during a counselors game at Camp Wahoo. Root should have averaged twenty points per game his senior year, but something had gone fundamentally and terribly wrong with his season even though he was still averaging a respectable fourteen a game. When the basketball issue of Dell Sports, the bible of basketball reporting at that time, issued their annual scouting reports, they listed thirty-three guys as the leading players in the South. These included Clem Haskins of Western Kentucky; Louie Dampier and Pat Riley of Kentucky; Bob Lewis and Larry Miller of North Carolina; Jay McMillen of Maryland; and the boy sitting beside me on that bus outside the VMI field house, Danny Mohr. Dan Mohr, who had already received a letter of inquiry from the Denver Nuggets, had finally met the center who could keep him from scoring. His name was Mel Thompson.

  CHAPTER 24

  FOUR OVERTIMES

  THEN THERE WAS THE GAME OF ALL GAMES ON THE NIGHT OF ALL nights in the waning hours of the longest season in the last year I would ever call myself a cadet. VMI came to Charleston to try to beat us on our home court to pay us back for embarrassing them in Lexington. Because we had beaten them at VMI, I gave them very little chance of handling us with the whole cold-blooded fury of our corps behind us. Our house was tough on visiting teams, but our house was hell on VMI. There was no such thing as a bad game when the only two military schools in the South got together. But on February 13, 1967, I played in one of the most exciting basketball games I’d ever seen. I watched the boys on both teams honor the character and nature of their schools by playing a game that glitters in remembrance.

  I have written about the second VMI game in Charleston in what I call the basketball chapter of The Lords of Discipline. Yet on a return visit to my twenty-year-old novel, I discovered that I combined two games of my Citadel career to craft the single basketball game I shoehorned into the plot of the novel about my college. As I reread the chapter for the first time since the book came out, I kept stumbling across the half-hidden skeletal remains of the final game of my career when I faced the indomitable Johnny Moates for the last time. In the fictional version, I called my nemesis Jimmy Mance, and I placed him in the position of an All-American shooting guard for VMI. Fact and fiction have been engaged in an abnormal and fanciful dance since I first began my writing career. There are lost geographies in my psyche because I fictionalize events stolen from my actual life. The fictions have caused the actual memories to melt like icebergs that have drifted into the temperate water of the Gulf Stream. My made-up doubles and stand-ins and understudies, from Ben Meecham to Will McLean to Tom Wingo to Jack McCall, have stolen all my stories and taken all my wives and girlfriends and hijacked a trainful of all my friends and tampered with and whittled away at and changed the punch lines of my brightest bumper crop of stories.

  When I tell you about the single greatest game I ever saw played at the Armory, I find the character of Will McLean—the protagonist of The Lords of Discipline and a boy that I created with a fountain pen while sitting at a desk—standing at the door of the locker room, dressed for the game, ready to lead his Bulldogs out to the lights and the feral hum of the Corps. I finish tying my Chuck Taylor Converse All Stars, the ’57 Chevy of basketball shoes, and I approach my changeling who stood in for me when I wrote about my tortured and deeply lived-in time as a cadet. The kid was fired up and ready to go and there was both resolve and a blaze in his eyes.

  “Will,” I said. “Will McLean.”

  He met me with a ready, half-amused gaze, then said, “You Coach’s father? How’d you get in the locker room?”

  “I’m your father, Will. I created you out of words. I made you up.”

  He considered this, then said, “If you made me up, then why am I standing here? Why am I talking to you? Listen to the band out there. I saw the bus drop the VMI players off. They’re getting dressed over in the visiting team room. Coach Bynum gave us the pep talk. I’m guarding Jimmy Mance, and I’ve got to think about the game. It’s my last game. It’s important to me.”

  “Coach Bynum doesn’t exist. I made him up, too. I based him on my coach, Mel Thompson, but he softened as I wrote about him, became much nicer and more sympathetic than Mel.”

&
nbsp; “My teammates are counting on me,” Will says. “I can’t let them down. My school is counting on me. I won’t let her down.”

  “I’ve got to sub for you tonight, Will.”

  He looked at me with contempt. “You’re an old man. You can’t play this game. You’d make a mockery of it.”

  “I’m not going to play it,” I say. “I’m too old for that. But I’m going to try to remember it accurately. You’ll get in my way, Will.”

  Will McLean nodded his head slowly and I struck him as mute as Lot’s wife. His blood began to ice up and his liver convulsed when the heart began to slow and the eyes filmed over with the inconsequence and irresponsibility of fiction. I began to erase Will McLean from the world, then thought better of it. I restored the boy to his shining, radiant young manhood again. “I’ve got to rescue this VMI game from you and your teammates, Will,” I say.

  “Thanks for thinking of my teammates. Do they get benched, too?” he says.

  “No, Reuben Clapsaddle is Dan Mohr. Johnny Debruhl is actually Johnny DeBrosse,” I answered. “Doug Cummings is Doug Bridges. Dave Dunbar stands in for Dave Bornhorst. But I have to take your team back, Will. I’ve got to make it my own again.”

  Will McLean threw the basketball to my suddenly twenty-one-year-old self and looked back into the locker room where my teammates were dressing for the game.

  “I’m trying to find out who I was back then,” I say. “I was something like you, Will. But not completely. I really like you, Will McLean. I liked you best of all.”

  “Why didn’t you make me happier?” he says. “Why didn’t you let me stay with Annie Kate? Why did you kill Pig Pignetti?”

  “Annie Kate led a very happy life, Will,” I say. “I keep in touch with her. Pig’s great, too.”

  “Did you, Pat? Did you live a very happy life?”

  “No. It didn’t happen for me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Will says, looking around. “It’s odd being fictional.”

  “No odder than being real,” I answer and watch as Will McLean walks out into the Armory and disappears into the light.

  I returned to my teammates to finish dressing when Dave Bornhorst, dressed only in his jockstrap and Converse All Stars, rose suddenly by his locker and cried out, “Hey, guys, I forgot to tell you. I got me a date for this Saturday night. And you guys are going to turn green with envy when I tell you what her hobby is.”

  “I bet she’s a hooker,” Bob Cauthen said.

  “Wrong, Zipper,” Barney said.

  “Don’t rain on Barney’s parade,” the Bean said. “This is his first college date.”

  “Close,” Barney said. “Any other guesses?”

  “General Harris’s dog?” Kroboth asked.

  “No, my horny teammates. Ole Barney’s got himself a date with a Greek belly dancer. Can you imagine it? Can you imagine what it would be like to make love to a real live Greek belly dancer?”

  As he spoke these words, Dave Bornhorst, Catholic boy out of Piqua, Ohio, engaged in the lewdest, bawdiest, and most obscene dance I had ever witnessed. As he thrust his pelvis back and forth, looking like a warmup act at a strip show, Dave moved across the cement floor up and down the row of lockers, his head thrown back in ecstasy and moaning like a dog in heat. His teammates began clapping and cheering in time with the orgiastic thrusts of his groin.

  Our locker room was a happier place after Dave started dating Maria Kirlis, and we hungered for the stories of this hilarious and sexy girl. Dave and Maria were married on June 14, 1970. They recently celebrated their thirtieth anniversary.

  That night it relieved me when I saw Mel write Danny Mohr’s name on the blackboard as the starting center. In four straight games, Mohr had ridden the bench, and it had not strengthened our team at all. I still believe the benching had more to do with malice than strategy.

  Before I led my team out on the court I did what I always did that year, I lifted the Wilson Special I held in my hands and put it up to my face to inhale its delicious odor. The smell was the sacred fragrance of my boyhood, the distilled essence of the thing that made me most happy when I was growing up.

  “Get ’em, Pat,” Rat said as he flung the door open. I felt Rat’s hand slap me on the ass as he did to begin every game, and I led the Citadel Bulldogs into the thunderous greetings of the Corps of Cadets and the rollicking, rip-roaring performance of “Dixie” by the Citadel band. I took enormous pride in being named the team captain against VMI, being the one boy at The Citadel named to lead his team against the school where Stonewall Jackson once taught and whose Keydets once answered the call of their Confederate nation by putting down their books and marching off to war at the Battle of New Market.

  As in every game we played against VMI, the Keydets came at us hard and fast from the opening tip-off. DeBrosse told me to guard John Kemper because Kemper was that rarest of guards we faced that season, he was quick as we were and an inch smaller than us at five nine. He had a pretty jump shot and Ralph Wright set bone-jarring picks for him during the whole game. But under the boards, the play was fierce and merciless. Steve Powers was a relentlessly persevering rebounder, but Root was fighting him hard and Kroboth was hanging tough against Wright.

  Then a guy I had not paid much attention to in the first VMI game, the forward Denny Clark, started playing like an All-American. Clark was ubiquitous on offense and defense and he hit the boards as hard as his two teammates, Wright and Powers, and would light up the scoreboard with twenty-four points that night. There were very few teams in the country who could outrebound a Mel Thompson–coached team. But on this night, VMI fought our big men for every shot taken. VMI was magnificent but so were we. And the Corps, my God, the Corps.

  There were times when the Corps could rise up in one cyclonic voice of such partisanship that it made you feel that you could take on the Bruins of UCLA and throw Lew Alcindor’s head into the crowd as a token of your affection. The Corps could reach a fever pitch of perfect hatred in a heartbeat and there was a volcanic immensity to its voice that gave us courage and VMI pause. Its voice passed through us and washed over us and lifted us in the sheer integrity of its standing shoulder to shoulder with us.

  Each time Zinsky or Kroboth hauled down a rebound, the Corps would bless them with its bone-chilling roar. Whenever I would break past Mitchell and pass it to Mohr when Powers came out to deck me, the Corps would scream for both the assist and the basket. When I would set a pick for Kemper and slide the ball to DeBrosse who would take his single dribble then go up with his glorious jump shot, the Corps would will the shot in, ride it home on pillars of unimaginable noise and air.

  I saw DeBrosse intercept a pass for Kemper and John saw me break downcourt. He threw me a perfect pass that I caught on the full run over my shoulder like the tight end I was in high school. I saw the Green Weenies leap from their seats screaming out my name, and I knew that no one in the world loved me like the Green Weenies did. But it was the Corps that saw me break and rose as one to fly down that court with me. I ran straight at the heart of the Corps, toward the indefectible pride of their affirmation, their violent, bestial love of teams that wear their colors and bear their name. I wore the name The Citadel on my chest, and I blazed with the pride of my school as I put a layup in that brought the Corps to its feet.

  We led VMI by five at the half.

  But VMI came out ready to hunt for lions in the second half and the VMI team that the Institute put on the court that night was worthy of everything their college stood for. We would go up by six, then VMI would fight back to take the lead by one. The score changed hands a dozen times. Though we led by six with two minutes left to play, Denny Clark hit a spectacular jump shot and was fouled by Bridges. His three-point play narrowed our lead by three with 1:08 left in the second.

  Al Kroboth tied the score at 63 all when he made the first of two free throws with 1:01 remaining. Then both teams missed a shot to send the game into overtime. As I went to the bench, our manager, Al Beiner, ga
ve me a Coke and I drained it and asked for another. Exhausted, I looked down the bench and could see that the big guys had really taken a beating.

  Johnny popped me on the fanny as we waited for Root to jump with Powers.

  VMI controlled the tip and John Kemper put a terrific move on me and hit a jumper during their first possession of the overtime. Kemper put the same move on me his second trip down the court, and I was ready for it this time and blocked the shot, but fouled him with my body. With great poise, Kemper hit the two free throws. You learn about courage during the close games. Kemper had it, and he had it in spades.

  My team fought back to within two and had to find a man of courage. It found him in John DeBrosse. I drove the lane with Mitchell in pursuit and saw Kemper drop off DeBrosse to help his teammate. DeBrosse drifted to his favorite spot on the court to shoot and I got him the ball. With fifteen seconds on the dying clock, DeBrosse showed the Corps that he was steadfast as he swished it home. VMI did not get off another shot and as we went to the bench I wanted to French-kiss DeBrosse for the sheer Ohioness of his broad, steely face.

  When the buzzer sounded for us to return to center court, two of the Green Weenies, Cauthen and Kennedy, had to help me out of my chair.

  As we took to the court, the volume of the Corps seemed to grow louder and it was not until I got back to the barracks that night that I learned why. When news of the overtime reached the four barracks, cadets sprinted out of their rooms. Later, a cadet guard would tell me that it looked like a track meet dashing toward the game in progress. When news of the second overtime reached the cadets who were studying or playing cards or who just didn’t like basketball, they poured out of the barracks, running harder than the first group.

  Of all the images I carry from my years at The Citadel, the one of cadets leaving the barracks to watch the best basketball game my sad and humiliated team would ever play is one that resonates most thrillingly. Whoever those tardy cadets were, they got their money’s worth that night. The Bulldogs and the Keydets were fighting each other with everything they had.