My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  The room was deadly quiet when I finished praising Halpin, and when I walked back into the sunshine from that meeting, I thought I had won Jim Halpin the Senior Class Sportsmanship trophy. It was a killing thing to me when I interviewed Jim for this book, and he told me that the injury that ruined his basketball career in the 1960s was easily treatable with modern sports medicine. I cannot walk by the wall of plaques that honor the Citadel Hall of Fame inductees without thinking that Halpin’s name would be on that wall if I could take back one ruinous moment during a single scrimmage of our sophomore year. Though Halpin was unlucky, his grace under misfortune was moving and inspirational. If my class wanted sportsmanship, Halpin helped write the book on that particular virtue, found only in athletes who knew how to handle both success and misfortune with wordless, uncomplaining class.

  Then The Citadel began to prepare me for my life as a writer. Though my college is well-known for the militancy of its spirit, no college in America has had as powerful an influence in pushing one of its sons or daughters in the direction of the writing life as The Citadel exerted on me in my final month as a cadet. The dean of the college, General James W. Duckett, called me into his office in the beginning of May to tell me The Citadel Development Foundation had selected me as the first recipient of their CDF Fellowship. The foundation would pay for me to receive my master’s degree if I would promise to come back and teach for two years in The Citadel’s English department. I sprinted across campus to Colonel Doyle’s house to tell him the amazing news. Colonel Doyle and Clarice had already received the news and were waiting for me. I picked Colonel Doyle up and danced around as Clarice pleaded with me to put her husband down. Clarice fixed me a cup of English tea, and they toasted me with two dainty glasses of Amontillado sherry.

  “I knew you would catch the Poe reference, Mr. Conroy,” Colonel Doyle said.

  “I’ll have a cask of Amontillado when I teach here, Colonel,” I promised. “Not just a bottle. A whole cask.”

  Colonel Doyle raised his glass and said, “I look forward to the day when I can call you colleague.”

  The following week The Citadel dispatched me to Columbia with six other cadets to represent the college at the annual conference of the South Carolina College Press Association, with representatives of all publications on college campuses throughout the state. I was sent as the official representative of The Shako, The Citadel’s only literary magazine. It was exhilarating for me to represent my college in something besides an athletic uniform. I sat beside a beautiful young woman named Donna Fuller from Converse College who had been elected co-editor of her yearbook the next year, and she was mysterious and ambitious. She was the first southern girl I’d ever met who talked of New York and Europe and a life far removed from the South and its steely, unbending tyranny over the lives of its girls. She did not utter a single uninteresting word the entire night. She picked me up that night, and there has never lived a young man any riper for the picking. As I sat there falling for this blond flame of a woman, the president of the organization announced the winner of the award for the short story, and I heard my name called. I was numb with surprise as I walked toward the head table to receive my award for the story that had only won me the wrath of Mel Thompson until that moment. When I returned to my table, Donna Fuller squeezed my hand and said, “I didn’t know you were a writer.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “It’s a wonderful thing to be.”

  The following weekend, at The Citadel’s annual awards day ceremony, General Hugh P. Harris announced that I had won the Shako Award for creative writing in both poetry and the short story. I walked to the stage in full dress and was met by Major William Alexander, the faculty advisor to The Shako. The major presented me with two medals, then held my wrist and said, “This is only the beginning for you, Mr. Conroy. The Citadel expects great things from you. Great things. Do not let us down.”

  JOHN WARLEY AND I HAD BECOME INSEPARABLE during our last months at The Citadel. We saw each other every day and often rode off into the Charleston night on weekends to talk of the lives we were about to begin living in earnest. In those months leading up to our graduation, our souls locked into place and our friendship deepened and held, and John became one of those friends that I call on when I am most limping and troubled. John turns to me when he needs a friend who will not turn his back on him, either. It is friends like John Warley that make me wish I had a dozen Citadel educations.

  Toward the end of the pollen-scented days of that long spring, I walked with John Warley beneath the avenue of live oaks that ran between Third and Fourth battalions to the mess hall. Final exams were upon us, and John had been accepted into law school at the University of South Carolina. My mother had just written to tell me that I was on my own in graduate school, that my family would not help me with any expenses I incurred while seeking my graduate degree. Suddenly, the future seemed like enemy territory. Because I thought a graduate degree would make me smarter and make me read even more of the greatest books and read them with a mordant eye and an ear for cant and sentimentality that’d serve me well, I looked toward graduate school as some place of deliverance. Though I felt that there were books locked inside me, they needed coaxing or luring out toward the light. I needed a final seasoning, a deepening, before I sat down to play in the fields of language.

  John and I entered the mess hall in the great gathering of the jocks and lettermen who were pumped and noisy as they took their seats in a disorderly fashion for the Athletics Award Banquet. The teams were all folded into each other, basketball players towering over golfers, swimmers looking svelte and raffish beside linebackers. Warley and I grabbed seats at a front table near the dais. I waved to Cauthen and Kennedy, who sat at the end of our table. Across the room I spotted Root and blew him a kiss. He rewarded me with his giant middle finger. The trophies glittered on their own special table. I had never won a trophy at The Citadel although I had come to this event nursing the secret hope that I might win the basketball trophy for “Most Improved Player.” Even though I was proving my own pettiness by harboring such a wish, I couldn’t help it. I had walked away from three previous award banquets with an unquenchable lust for the flashy gold of trophies. I wanted one and wanted it badly. This was my last chance.

  The swimmers and the golfers and the soccer players and the other minor sports went first, and friends of mine held their trophies aloft and shook them to loud cheers. The wrestling team drew a standing ovation of several minutes in duration when they were recognized for their undefeated season and Southern Conference Championship. The Corps knew how to praise and when to praise and whom to praise. The wrestlers stood on their chairs to receive our applause.

  Then, the president of the senior class, Ed Cole, rose to present the Senior Class Sportsmanship trophy. I looked over to where Jim Halpin was sitting. I wanted to make sure I was watching Halpin’s face when his name was called. I was watching it closely when Ed, after giving a brief history of the award, said, “This year’s sportsmanship trophy goes to a great guy, a great cadet, a great basketball player, and a great writer—Pat Conroy.”

  Through warm applause, I staggered toward the dais to receive the trophy, wondering where I went wrong with my fiery endorsement of Jim Halpin, and how in the hell Ed Cole knew I was a writer. It was a point of pride in the Corps that no one read The Shako, yet Ed became the first person to announce to a roomful of people that I was a writer. With a great sense of shame, I brought the large trophy back to the table and set it down beside Warley, who said, “I’ll help you carry it back to the barracks. It’s going to take two of us.”

  The basketball trophies were awarded last. I held my breath as Mel Thompson gave a lukewarm speech about our team’s dismal year. He tried to be generous and businesslike, but I could feel his disappointment and the bitter aftertaste as his words settled over the crowd. Mel announced that the first trophy was to go to the most improved basketball playe
r on the team. I held my breath and lofted a prayer toward the stars. I bit my lip, then bit it harder when I heard Mel say: “The most improved player on the 1966–67 basketball team is . . . Greg Connor.” With everyone else, I applauded, though I was crushed that my best chance of winning a basketball trophy had just slipped through my fingers. I touched the sportsmanship trophy, tracing my name on the plaque with tenderness.

  Then the mess hall grew quiet as Mel lifted the largest trophy to the dais. It was a gleaming gold basketball, regulation-sized, mounted on an oak base. The Coca-Cola Bottling Company gave it out every year to the most valuable player on the basketball team. I had watched Mike West, the splendid point guard, win it in 1964; Dick Martini had walked it to the barracks in 1965; and in 1966, Wig Baumann had accepted it. I looked across the room at John DeBrosse and Danny Mohr. Their faces were both taut and drained of color. I thought DeBrosse had an edge, but Danny had come back strong at the end of the season, so he had a real shot at it, too.

  Mel played the moment and took his time. Then, he said in a slow, deliberate voice, “The most valuable player for the 1966–67 Citadel Bulldogs is . . .” And he held this secret for several long moments until he sent one last thunderbolt through the heart of his damaged team when he said these two shocking words: “. . . Pat Conroy.”

  Blushing deeply, utterly horrified by the injustice, I made my way toward my coach. In my head I heard my own voice silently reel off some facts of my season: “I didn’t even play against Wofford. Two points against Old Dominion. One point against Jacksonville. One against Georgia Southern. Three against George Washington.” I was grateful that my teammates did not roar with laughter or walk out of the mess hall in protest as I approached my coach. I wanted to say something, argue with Mel and make a case for DeBrosse or Mohr or both, but I was still reeling from the concussion of my name being called, catching me completely unprepared.

  Mel handed me the trophy, smiling at me warmly when he said, “Congratulations, Pat. You were a lot better than I ever thought you were. A lot better.”

  “Thanks, Coach,” I said, and turned back toward my table and the applause.

  So, I rose and began the slow, miraculous, even triumphant walk back to Fourth Battalion, with John Warley at my side, a friend for the ages. Slowly, we moved beneath a colonnade of oaks, the air spiced with tidal creeks and hidden gardens. John had won the first Frank Murphy Award, honoring the football captain who had been killed in Vietnam. Trophy-laden, Warley and I made our drifting promenade of gold last as long as we could, both of us with full knowledge that we were holding fast to what would certainly be one of the best days of our lives. On the walk, I let myself, at last, be taken by the utter wonder of the moment and how I must let it teach me the urgency of dreaming hard and dreaming big.

  When we reached the guardroom, I put in a collect call to my parents’ house in Falls Church. When my mother answered, I could not control my excitement and blurted out, “Mom, you’re not going to believe the next thing I’m going to tell you! I can’t even believe it myself. It’s a miracle, Mom. I got the Most Valuable Player Award for the basketball team and the Senior Class Sportsmanship Award.”

  “My Lord, Pat,” my mother said. “You must be so proud. You worked hard for those awards.”

  “I didn’t deserve it, Mom.” I wanted to talk to her about the enormous guilt I felt about DeBrosse and Mohr, when I heard my father’s voice on the extension: “You sure didn’t deserve it, pal. What a shitty team to have you as its MVP! The way I rate talent, son, you were the twelfth best basketball player on that team.”

  “Don, don’t you dare ruin Pat’s night.”

  “He knows what I’m saying is right, don’t you, son?” my father asked.

  “Yes, sir. I do know that,” I said.

  “What was the other award you got?” he asked.

  “The Senior Class Sportsmanship Award, Dad,” I said, bracing for what I knew was coming.

  “The Senior Class Pussy Award. You won that in high school, too. If there’s ever a pussy award for a ballplayer, it always goes to my favorite little girl.”

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Big day tomorrow. I’ll see y’all at graduation. Say hi to the kids.”

  I took my two trophies, one in each arm, and walked out to the quadrangle and slowly made my way across the textured, moonlit landscape of my cadet life and toward the history of the one to come. Then, I heard the cheering begin along the galleries of Romeo Company. Word had come to R Company that I had won the two trophies, and my company poured out of their rooms to greet me. The applause grew louder as I climbed the stairs to my room on fourth division. I walked through the joyous noise of my shouted name, of boys who liked me because I was one of them and had brought honor to our company.

  Entering my room, I saw my roommate Mike Devito studying for his English history exam. He was surprised when he noted the size of the trophies I bore in my arms. Wordless, Mike rose and approached, my handsome and powerful roommate, my protector, my wingman, my paisan.

  Mike picked me up by the waist and hoisted me into the air. Mike, who had known of my great self-doubt as a basketball player, who had awakened when he heard me crying in the lower bunk after I didn’t get in the Wofford game, and who comforted me with soft words from a rough yet tender boy who made the word “roommate” a holy one. Mike walked from the door to the window with both me and my trophies high above him. Then he turned and walked me back to the door. He and I didn’t say a word, and I let him do it twice more because I understood the necessities of ritual. I was so moved that I couldn’t have spoken if I’d wanted to when I realized that my roommate was honoring me for my struggles and disappointments. He was giving me a one-man parade at the end of my losing season.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER MY GRADUATION from The Citadel, Mel Thompson was fired as head basketball coach. Louis Chestnut wrote: “The fact that a change was taking place had been known positively by the Evening Post for some months but, in deference to the school’s recruiting program, and Thompson’s own negotiations for other employment, confirmation was withheld.”

  Chestnut quoted Mel as saying: “I have talked to a number of people, but I have not determined in my own mind if I’ll remain in coaching or take a job in private business. When you make a change, you want to make the right one. Anytime you change, you must consider what is best for your family. I do not think anything is open in basketball right now that I would be interested in.”

  I sat down to write a letter to the Charleston News and Courier telling that newspaper exactly what I thought of The Citadel firing Mel Thompson. Though I did not know it then, it began a long and honorable letter-writing exchange between me and that newspaper. Whenever I wrote a letter, I found out that I had a small talent for bombast and petty fulmination. In this letter, I tried to tell Charleston and The Citadel about the overarching difficulty of putting together a winning basketball team at a military college that prided itself in having the world’s toughest plebe system. I told of watching six-foot-ten centers walking out of Lesesne Gate, and five-foot-ten guards like me with small hands and no outside shot deciding to stick around for four years. I raged about playing on the best freshman basketball team in history and losing half that team to the plebe system. I told the story of how we’d lost Donnie Biggs to Florida State. How could a coach win under such circumstances, and why didn’t anyone in this city understand the impossibility of Mel’s situation?

  Then I segued into a long disquisition on the traditional hatred of athletes that every military college embraces as one of the secret gospels of the long gray lines. I spoke of scoring twenty-two points against the Furman freshmen and finding a group of cadremen waiting for me back in the barracks to put me through my own personal sweat party so I wouldn’t feel that I was superior to my classmates. It happened to DeBrosse and Bridges and Mohr and Zinsky and Kroboth and Hooper—it had happened to every jock I knew at The Citadel. If the Corps hated its jocks, how were the athletes and coache
s supposed to win in such an alienated environment?

  I wrote far into the night. I postured, I railed, I tongue-lashed and blistered General Harris for firing my coach. That Harris had dared fire the only college coach I’d ever have did not sit well with me. There was something about Mel’s dark, unapproachable solitude that touched me as I launched even more deeply into my passionate and out-of-control defense of him. I finished my letter at three in the morning, addressed it to Thomas Waring, the editor of the News and Courier, and mailed it the next morning before I left for work. It was my first letter to any editor.

  A week later Mr. Waring answered my letter with one of his own. I wish I had saved his letter, but I was so humiliated by its demure arguments that I buried it on the bottom of the garbage can. It said something like this:

  Dear Mr. Conroy,

  I would have liked very much to publish your letter to the editor. But I’m afraid we’re loath to publish thirteen handwritten pages, written on legal sheets, on our editorial pages. You understand, I pray, that we have certain space limitations. I found your letter interesting. Have you ever thought about writing with economy and restraint? Have you ever thought about the power of concision? The elegance of simplicity? Would you consider resubmitting your letter? Could you say in three paragraphs what you said in thirteen pages? Could you drop the anger, the self-righteousness, and that irritating didacticism? I would appreciate your attention on this matter.

  Yours very truly,

  Thomas Waring

  That letter marked my final act as a Citadel basketball player. Mel Thompson simply walked out of our lives forever. As a coach, Mel was lord and master of his environment at the Armory. There was not a player on my team who was not afraid of or intimidated by him. His will to win boiled over in his black-eyed fury to push us to our physical limits at practice. Mel wanted with all his heart for us to be warriors on the court the way he was at NC State, and it frustrated him that we sprang from a softer, less driven tribe. My team, that began the season with such wide-eyed wonder and optimism, became Mel Thompson’s Achilles’ heel, his pass at Thermopylae, his OK Corral. When the shouting was done, Mel left town with his family none of us knew and returned to Richmond, Indiana. Like a storm center, he drifted out of the sea lanes of Charleston and moved all the eerie power of his darkness toward the plains of the Midwest. My misguided, hopeless awe of him had nowhere to go, and my team broke up like an archipelago of volcanic islands formed out of heat and chaos. Not one of my teammates said goodbye to me when I graduated. My team was an accurate and flawless reflection of our coach’s theory of coaching: we lacked all unity, camaraderie, and fellowship. Mel was suspicious and paranoid, and he discovered that these rueful gifts were easily transferable to his team’s unstable psyche. His paranoia proved reality-based, and his firing loosed him from the moorings of his game. Mel Thompson never coached another basketball team. Mel never got to know us at all, and it seemed against his most basic philosophy to try. Abruptly, he left as a stranger to us, and even worse, left his players as strangers to each other.