My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  In the second overtime, I drove the lane and was knocked into the stands by both Ralph Wright and Steve Powers. Wright, whom I knew well from Camp Wahoo, leaned down and said, “Don’t pull that shit on me, Conroy. Don’t come in here again. I own the paint.”

  I laughed, got up, and sank the two free throws. Wright answered by hitting a jump shot of his own. We missed a shot on our end and were surprised when VMI went into a slow-down offense where the guards held it and waited for the clock to run down. Mel screamed for DeBrosse and me to pressure their guards. So I went out after Kemper and chased him until he threw it to Mitchell, and DeBrosse got to go center stage. I overplayed Kemper trying to block any passing lane to him. With ten seconds left, VMI ran a play with a double pick for Kemper. I got by the picks and tried to keep Kemper from getting a good angle for his layup and knew I could not foul the guy. The angle was bad and that was my only hope. With two seconds left, John Kemper’s layup bounced off the rim and I loved him for it.

  In the third overtime, VMI used the same tactics and stalled the ball, once again putting pressure on the Citadel guards. Johnny and I worked hard to contain Kemper and Mitchell while Zinsky covered a third guard, Peyton Brown, that Coach McPherson had inserted to help with the ball handling. In agony, Johnny and I tried to pressure the VMI guards into a mistake, but they were good at what they did. As time died on the clock, I lived in the rarest of states—full consciousness of the extraordinariness of the moment. I was in the center of myself. Bill Zinsky got called for goaltending with fifty-five seconds left in the third overtime. DeBrosse threw me the ball from out of bounds and I hustled it up the court and threw a pass to Zinsky, who drove hard to his left and was fouled by Wright while shooting, with forty-four seconds left. When Bill was at the foul line, he recalled later that I came up behind him, ordered him to sink the two shots, and slapped him on the butt so hard that he carried a bruise shaped like my handprint for a week.

  Zinsky, showing immense heart for a sophomore, sank both free throws. VMI set up another play to get Kemper open. Again, he got around me on the double pick but Kroboth knocked it down his throat when he went for the layup with three seconds left. The buzzers sounded and the howling Corps turned the Armory into a receptacle of exquisite chaos.

  Mel never had a new play for us to run, and The Citadel never offered any surprises or new wrinkles to our offense. “Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s working for us out there,” he said. But Mel’s eyes blazed with the excitement of the moment. Coach Ed Thompson was pacing behind the bench and checking with the scorekeeper about foul trouble. Rat stroked the sweat from my head and eyes. I was wet enough to qualify as a member of the swim team. When the buzzer sounded for the fourth overtime, Cauthen and Kennedy again pulled me from my seat. I do not believe I could have gotten up without their help.

  Johnny and I put our arms around each other’s waist as we walked to the center of the court to deafening applause. When I shook hands with Kemper, I put my arm around his waist. Johnny Mitchell came over and we hugged each other. DeBrosse came over and said, “I’m dying, son.”

  “That’s because you didn’t have a real plebe system in D Company,” I gasped. “We’ve got to end this one, Johnny.”

  Before the referee went to center court for the jump ball, I looked at my teammates, the ones on the floor and the ones on the bench. The Green Weenies were standing, screaming and urging us on, their spirits marked by both generosity and the hurt of not playing. My team on the floor was spent and fatigued, but still game, still on our feet, and I lifted a prayer to the dome of the Armory. I said a silent prayer that screamed out of me, “I love my team and my teammates, Lord. I love these boys and thank you for bringing each one of them into my life. They’re teaching me how to be brave, Lord.”

  The fourth overtime again saw VMI stalling and setting up for a last shot. Again Johnny and I chased the VMI guards all over the court as they continued to play keep-away. But I could see that Kemper and Mitchell were so exhausted they could barely control the ball. Mel kept screaming for me and Johnny to pressure the guards, but we were losing our legs fast. I turned around once to see all the big men, theirs and ours, simply staring out toward the guards where all the action was.

  When the clock passed the one-minute mark, Mel jumped up and started yelling for me or Johnny to foul someone. When the clock hit thirty-seven seconds, I leapt out and tried to steal the ball from Peyton Brown but slapped him on the wrist instead. We senior guards liked to put the sophomores on the line with the outcome of the game in the balance. When Peyton went to the line, the Corps thundered at him in its most untamed, barbaric voice. I went up to Al Kroboth and said, “Get it to me, Big Al. I want it.”

  “No prob,” Kroboth said.

  “I’m taking off,” I said.

  Since VMI had stalled it for three overtimes, it occurred to me that everyone on both sides of the ball had become accustomed to the engines of the game idling down as the maddening pace of VMI’s stall frayed the nerves of everyone watching or participating. When Peyton moved toward the line, I had a premonition of what was going to happen, and I let myself be seized by it. I was going to be the one to end this game. The ball was going to come to me, the runningest boy in this part of the world, the basketball-lovingest boy in this Armory was going to get the basketball and take it where it was supposed to go. I watched as Peyton bounced the ball twice on the floor, then looked up toward the rim. I’m going to end it. I’m going to end it. I know how to do this. Peyton shot and the ball rolled off the rim to the left and was taken by Al Kroboth. I took off.

  Kroboth hit me with a perfect pass that I caught deep on the wing. I took off as fast as I could with the Corps exploding around me, the Corps breaking as I ran, and the noise held me aloft in its hallucinatory power. I sped along on its amazing wave as the surprised VMI guards scrambled back to get into defensive position.

  I came slashing and ready and at full speed and heard DeBrosse filling the lane to my right and Zinsky calling on my left and Kroboth trailing behind me. All around me my teammates were streaking toward the heart of VMI in letter-perfect formation. But the point guard was the key to the success of the fast break, and it was the point guard who made the decisions that would lead his team to either victory or defeat.

  John Mitchell stepped to the top of the key to try to stop my headlong charge. From Camp Wahoo the previous summer, I had learned I was quicker than this superlative shooter and that would help me at this moment. Behind him was the sophomore guard, Peyton Brown, who had just missed the free throw. While dribbling hard, I turned my head to the right as though I were telegraphing a pass to DeBrosse. It was a trick that all point guards master. When I saw Peyton drift to the right, I knew he had fallen for the trap. With a crossover dribble, I went to the left hand and went by Mitchell in a flash. Before Brown could recover I was going up for the basket. As he lunged to stop me, I pump-faked, took his hit, and put the basketball high off the backboard with an underhand scoop. I was on the ground when I saw the ball slip through the net. The Armory approached meltdown. The score was 72–70.

  Only when Root lifted me off the floor did I realize how tired I was. I looked out to the Corps and I drank in their applause through the pores of my skin as I tried to memorize how I felt at the happiest, most fabulous moment of my life. I sank the free throw. In what seemed like seconds later, the buzzer sounded to end what is still the longest basketball game in Southern Conference history. We won, 73–70.

  Then my team and the Corps engulfed me and they lifted me into the air and into the pure exultancy of that triumphal, ecstatic march to the locker room where I looked down at the faces of teammates who looked happier than I had ever seen them. Cadets leapt in the air to touch me, maddened to be part of this one delirious moment in the history of my college. The noise and the madness of joy, and the transcendent elation of a four-overtime basketball game kept me high in the air. My feet never touched the ground as I was borne off the court like a
king.

  In my novel I gave the final scene of that chapter to Rat, and I’m going to give it to Rat again. My teammates talk about Rat often because it disturbs us greatly that he died without having a clue how much he meant to us. It was Rat who undressed me that night. I could not lift my arms to take off my jersey, so Rat pulled it over my head. Rat untied my shoes and removed both shoes and the nastiest socks in the city. I undid my belt buckle and Rat helped me stand up and my shorts dropped to the floor. My jockstrap followed and I lifted one foot, then another. Rat turned and gently sent me toward the shower room.

  “The sixty-minute man,” Rat said. “You played all sixty minutes, Pat. You never came out once. You, DeBrosse, and Dan Mohr. All sixty-minute men. That was the greatest game ever played in the history of the world.”

  “C’mon,” I said.

  “That’s just my opinion. I get to have any opinion I want because this is a free country,” Rat said.

  And it was a free country, one that Joe “Rat” Eubanks thought enough of that he went to Vietnam as a combat helicopter pilot. An Army unit got itself surrounded by some North Vietnamese regulars and were taking on a murderous fire from a numerically superior force. The patrol was about to be annihilated when Captain Joe Eubanks arrived on the scene in his Huey slick. He went in the first time and was repelled with heavy machine guns, RPGs, and small arms fire. Joe pulled back, circled around, and went back in with the same predictable results. He repeated the maneuver a third time when—in the spirit of the college that shaped him—Joe Eubanks, the assistant manager of my basketball team, was shot down and killed. He was awarded the Silver Star and the Purple Heart for valor. Not a single member of my basketball team attended his funeral, and we can barely forgive ourselves for that indefensible fact. I did not learn of Joe’s death until a year after it happened.

  “Rat was the best of us, Conroy,” Doug Bridges says over and over again. “The very best one of us. Your book won’t mean shit unless you tell them about Rat. More than any of us, Rat turned out to be the real Citadel man.”

  Whenever I approach the Wall in Washington, D.C., I carry a list of all the names I came to see etched in the black marble, and I always come alone. The first name I visit is the father of my two eldest daughters, Captain J. W. Jones III. I bring him news of his pretty daughters and, more recently, of his beautiful granddaughter, Elise. Then I visit my classmates from The Citadel. I am shaken by the names of Bruce Welge, Dick O’Keefe, and Fred Carter because I had admired them when they were boys and knew them well. I trace their names with my fingers the way other visitors do.

  The last two names belong to two of the managers of my basketball team. I touch Carl Peterson’s name then move to the last on my list. I move my finger to Joe Eubanks’s name, the orphan from Concord, North Carolina. I come to the Rat. Last, I always come to the Rat.

  It is always here, at this name, that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial unhinges me and I weep as though I will never be able to stop. My weeping is so public and visceral that I always draw the attention of other visitors, and they put their arms around me to try and console me. Veterans ask me if Joe was a member of my unit and I shake my head no. Women ask me if I lost a brother. The sons and daughters of men whose names are on the Wall want to know why Joe Eubanks meant so much to me, and all look disappointed, even dismayed, when I blurt out in a tear-strangled voice, “He gave me towels. The Rat gave me towels.”

  WHEN I BEGAN THIS BOOK I DID NOT realize that I would come to look upon my twenty-one-year-old self as simply another fictional creation. But now that I am dressed in my middle-aged suit that will change and weaken and deteriorate until I can officially refer to myself as an old man, I have felt an eerie tenderness for the lost, vague boy I was at that age. At times, I would sit down to write about myself and see myself as I am today, then have to countervail that image by restoring my vigorous young manhood by an act of will. After the glorious VMI game, I wanted to walk myself out of the gymnasium where I would dance and glide and sing my way home to the barracks. When I went onto the floor of the now-empty gym, I found myself middle-aged and heavy and red-faced and was about to transform myself when I looked up in the stands and saw the figure of Will McLean sitting in the shadows waiting for me. Will was waiting for the novelist, not the young basketball player.

  “Hey, Will,” I said, “how’d you like the game?”

  “Your wife’s right,” Will said. “You don’t write fiction.”

  “There was no reason to change it,” I said. “The game was perfect. I never felt that way before or since. I wanted the reader to know how it felt.”

  “You let me know how it felt,” Will said. “It was great. Just great. I was worried that it was all bullshit. That you never got off the bench and just made the whole thing up.”

  “John DeBrosse thought he made the winning layup. When his kids told him Will McLean won the game after four overtimes in The Lords of Discipline, John told his kids, ‘Bullshit. Conroy’s making that up. I won that damn game!’ That’s how confusing memory is, Will. That’s how unreliable it is.”

  “We’re not really having this conversation, are we, Mr. Conroy?”

  “No, we’re not. I’m making it up. You can see how it works for yourself, Will. This really is fiction,” I said. “But I’m going now.”

  “Why do you write these books?” he asked.

  “It’s the form that praying takes in me,” I said, walking out of the gym across the shining floor. Then Will McLean surprised me as fictional characters often do.

  “Hey, Mr. Conroy,” he said.

  “Yeah, Will?”

  “Nice game, sir.” Will delivered a salute, a sharp one, the way it’s done at a good military college. I stopped and bowed deeply, then walked back into my life.

  CHAPTER 25

  EAST CAROLINA

  THROUGHOUT MY SENIOR YEAR, I HAD TO HIDE FROM MY BASKETBALL coach the number of activities I participated in outside of the Armory. Mel considered basketball as our paramount consideration and had no interest in our becoming well-rounded in the process. Mel knew I was poetry editor of The Shako because he teased me about it, saying, “I guarantee you you’re the first and last jock ever to hold that position, Conroy.” But I went to great lengths to hide the fact that I was an active member of the Fine Arts Committee, the Round Table, the English Club, the honorary cadet member of the Charleston Ballet Board, and had delivered a long paper on Thomas Wolfe to the Calliopean Literary Society, one of the nation’s oldest societies. I had delivered this talk on a Thursday night before the William and Mary game; it was important to me that I was a member of the oldest club on the Citadel campus and part of a cadet tradition that stretched back to 1845. The Calliopean Literary Society was older than my game of basketball, and I knew that, too.

  By then, I had a strong sense of myself as a cadet and as a member of the Citadel family. Since I refused to participate in the plebe system in any way except by being pleasant and helpful to knobs (at VMI I would be known as a Rat Daddy, but The Citadel had no equivalent term), I had to find other outlets to be a valuable, contributing citizen of my realm. Given the antipathy to jocks at The Citadel, I tried to prove my worth in areas where athletic ability gave me no advantage or currency. I wanted to make a mark on the only college I would ever have, and I wanted that mark to represent the highest standards of achievement. Because I grew up with the United States Marine Corps, I was fed the word “excellence” constantly.

  But it was my work in the Honor Court during my senior year that would have brought Mel Thompson to the point of apoplexy and beyond. Mel would not have understood that work, or liked it, or approved of it, and I think it likely that he might have gone to General Harris to get me relieved of my duties, at least during the season. Nothing in my cadet career had shocked or perplexed me as much as the cadets of Fourth Battalion electing me to the position of battalion honor representative. The Honor Court was both the most feared and the most respected organization on camp
us, but the fear may have been preeminent. I tried to figure out what signals I was giving off to indicate to anyone that I was honorable. In those days I lacked all powers of insight or self-knowledge and saw myself as a kind of cipher, a hollowed-out shape of a boy waiting for personality to be poured into the empty shell of the man I might become. Inside, I thought something was developing in the depths of me the way diamonds formed under pressure in the earth’s crust, but I could not give it a name. When I was tagged with the word “honor” by my peers, I spent many hours considering the question of whether I had any or not.

  I tried to imagine myself sitting in judgment of one of my classmates and whether I could actually vote to kick him out of school when graduation was only months away. If I could not pass judgment on a classmate’s guilt, then I thought I was not worthy to serve on the Honor Court and should resign from it immediately. I studied the honor code which said: “A Cadet shall not lie, steal, or cheat or tolerate anyone who does.” It was a stern code, but I thought then and I think now, it is a good one. Since I took my oath as a cadet, I had tried to live by this code and thought, for the most part, I had lived up to its standards. In the barracks, we cadets were forbidden to lock our doors, and I had never lost a stick of gum or an M&M peanut nor had I taken one from another cadet. The honor code seemed like a logical extension of the Ten Commandments as a foundation to my ethical life, so I decided to accept the choice of my battalion and join the court. If the members of my battalion paid me the high compliment of considering me to be a man of honor, I would strive to prove them right. My service on the Citadel’s Honor Court changed my life forever.

  When I told my roommates Mike Devito and Bo-Pig Marks that if they ever appeared before the Honor Court and the evidence proved them to be guilty I would have no choice but to vote against them, there was some tension in the room until Mike said, “We already know that, asshole. That’s why we voted for you.”