My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  In all the years I played sports, I have never seen a team in less condition to be bawled out for poor play than this one. We had guys with tears streaming down their faces as some of the other guys said, “We’ve got to get it together . . . We’ve got to stop this.”

  Until this moment, no one on the basketball team knew that Doug Bridges possessed such a chameleon gift of mimicry. No one.

  Then Rat appeared in the doorway. “Coach’s coming. For real this time.”

  Some of the guys tried coughing to stifle their laughter. Others threw their warmup jerseys over their heads, some wheezed, but the sudden suppression of enormous laughter into the shamed silence of a team being beaten by an inferior foe left the atmosphere brittle and perilous. Of course, Mel had no idea of Doug’s drop-dead imitation of him, but when I looked up and saw my coach enter the locker room exactly as Doug Bridges had, I knew I was going to have a difficult time. I was strangling on my own laughter as strange noises that sounded like a possum being asphyxiated came from my throat. My mistake was to watch Mel do exactly what Doug had just done. Mel carried the towel draped and folded carefully over his left shoulder, and he smoked his cigarette with deep and brooding detachment. His slouching, forward-leaning amble had all been stolen perfectly by Bridges. When Mel made the turn and we heard him pissing in the urinal, the team broke one more time. The laughter was in every face, but subterranean and forbidden, and we had only seconds to right ourselves.

  I was too near hysteria as Mel crossed over to the sink to wash his hands, but I was desperate to come up with a foolproof way to calm myself. Mel treated laughter like some capital crime. He was wiping his hands with the towel as he began his slow, deliberate promenade the length of the locker room, smoking his cigarette expertly as he moved in his oddly shuffling gait toward the blackboard. I made it through the cleaning of the board and I think I would have gotten through the whole thing cleanly except that I had not counted on the completeness of Doug Bridges’s genius in his spooky parody of Coach’s behavior. When Mel took the last puff of his cigarette and threw it on the floor, I was in control of myself. But when I saw Mel’s huge, tasseled wingtip on his right foot solemnly crush that cigarette with exquisite thoroughness, I laughed as loudly and as completely and as idiotically and as hysterically as I ever have in my life.

  Only me.

  My outbreak was met by the stoical silence of my teammates. Coach Thompson looked at me as though I had told him that I had cooked and eaten the baby Jesus for breakfast that morning. But I kept laughing and the more I tried to hold it back, the more the high tide of hysteria poured out of me in guffaws and belly laughs and snorts. Snot oozed from my nose and tears rolled down my cheeks.

  Then Mel exploded. “Conroy, you think it’s funny? You think it’s funny that fucking Old Dominion is kicking our asses to hell and back? Losing’s funny to you? Losing eats my guts out and makes me want to puke. I’d rather die than be a loser, Conroy. Die! Get the fuck out of this locker room. Get out, now. I won’t have you on my damn team.”

  Laughing still, I staggered out of the locker room thinking I had just ruined my life.

  When the team returned to the court, I went into the empty locker room, removed my uniform, and showered alone for the first time. The second half started and I could hear the sound of the basketball hitting the oak floor, one of the loveliest sounds to me. Devastated, I dressed and walked the long way back to the barracks by the baseball field and the obstacle course and behind the mess hall.

  In memory, that walk looms colossal in importance. Now I knew the dismayed horror of being the agent in the destruction of my own life. I wondered if Mel would revoke my scholarship tomorrow. In the darkness I tried to form the words I would use to tell my mother that I had been kicked off my college basketball team. From bitter past knowledge, I knew my parents would not spend a dime on my college education. From even bitterer knowledge, I thought of my bullying, brow-beating father’s reaction and thought that in his rage, The Great Santini might try to beat me to death. I imagined the fist fight I would have with the strongest Marine colonel I had ever met, and it surprised me that I was even thinking about fighting back. Then a sudden surge of pure fear shot through me as I realized the Vietnam War was raging in Southeast Asia and that I would be drafted the day I told the comptroller’s office I could not pay the tuition for the final semester of my senior year. I could see the headline in The Brigadier on the day my death was announced in the mess hall: “Conroy killed by mortar fire because he laughed at Thompson.”

  The sheer absurdity of my situation overwhelmed and sickened me. I kept having imaginary conversations with my mother, who had not gone to college. My graduation day was as important for her as it was for me, and I imagined telling her what had happened, trying to make her understand what had taken place in the locker room.

  On that long walk to the barracks, I knew in my bones Peg Conroy would never get it.

  THE NEXT DAY IN THE TRAINING AREA WHERE the jocks gathered to be fed, Rat came up to me and said, “Coach Thompson wants to see you at 1500 hours, Pat.”

  “Been nice to know you, Conroy,” Mohr said, from the opposite side of the table.

  “You’re history,” Cauthen said.

  “Hey, Bridges,” I said to Doug. “How do I explain to Mel why I was laughing my ass off last night? I’m having trouble with this.”

  “Your ass is grass, and Mel’s the lawn mower, bubba,” DeBrosse said.

  “It doesn’t look good, Conroy,” Bridges admitted. “I’ve never been more afraid as I was last night. I thought Mel was going to kill you. Did you see the look on his face? He wanted you dead. Dead, Conroy.”

  “I couldn’t see the look on his face because I was laughing so hard,” I said. “Bridges, I’ve sat by you at mess for a couple of years now, and practiced with you every day. Don’t let this hurt your feelings, but you’ve not demonstrated the greatest wit or personality. When did your ass turn into fucking Jack Benny?”

  “The guillotine, Conroy,” Bob Cauthen said, drawing a bony finger along his throat.

  “You gonna tell Mel what happened?” DeBrosse asked me.

  “I can’t do that. It sounds too nuts. Do you know that what happened to us last night never happened to another team?”

  “Bouncy,” DeBrosse said to Bridges, “you got nineteen last night. Hell of a game.”

  “Doug finally got to play among his own people,” Cauthen said.

  “Fuck you, Zipper,” Bridges said, shooting a bird.

  “Fuck you, Bouncy,” Cauthen said right back.

  And my team’s happy journey across time continued on course.

  At exactly 1500 hours I was in Mel Thompson’s office, sitting on his couch, enduring his intimidating scowl. The air in the room felt tamped down. I had erred egregiously and I knew it. Whatever punishment, no matter how severe, I had earned it fair and square.

  “Well?” Coach Thompson said.

  “I can’t explain what happened, Coach. It was so painful to be losing like that. So I tried to think of some joke I’d heard in the barracks, one that really tickled me.”

  “What’s the joke, Conroy?” Mel asked.

  This question caught me off guard. I am one of those men doomed to walk the world crippled by a dazzling inability to remember jokes. Jokers are not my favorite companions as I make my weary, tear-stained way through this world.

  “You surprised me last night,” Ed Thompson said from his desk in the corner. “You’re one of our solid citizens.”

  “If we can’t depend on you, Conroy,” Mel said, “what’re we supposed to do?”

  “Let you down. Let the team down. Let my school down. I can’t tell you how bad I feel about it.”

  “What’s the joke, Conroy?” Mel asked. “The one you heard in the barracks?”

  “I have two Italian roommates, sir. Bo Pig and Mike Swine.”

  “What’s that got to do with the price of corn?”

  “Sir, they’re very se
nsitive about being Italian. So I collect jokes to tease them.”

  “This is going nowhere fast, Conroy,” Mel said.

  “I told them this joke the other night. There was a pig farm that was the stinkiest, smelliest place on earth. An Englishman decided to find out which race could stomach garbage and filth more than any other. So he sent an Englishman, an Irishman, and an Italian to live with the pigs.”

  “This better be good, Conroy,” Mel muttered.

  “You’ll be on the floor, Coach,” I said.

  “After the first day, the Englishman came running out puking his guts out, saying he couldn’t stay another minute. At the end of the second day, the Irishman came running out vomiting and smelling like shit. And, on the third day, the pigs came running out,” I said.

  Mel Thompson looked at me in soundless disbelief, but Ed Thompson chuckled from his chair in the corner of the room. Mel turned and glared at his young assistant, but I think Ed’s chuckle saved me.

  “That’s the worst joke I’ve ever heard,” Mel told me.

  “It really isn’t that good,” I agreed.

  “We’re gonna forget about last night, Conroy. You’ve been a model citizen for this team since you got here. That was out of character. Don’t let it happen again.”

  “Coach, that’s a promise I give you my word on.”

  “Okay, get the hell out of here. Get ready for practice.”

  “I can’t thank you enough, Coach.”

  Mel dismissed me with an angry gesture, and I left his office moving fast. But the writer who was secretly blooming inside me had noticed something in that office. I could smell my own fear as I entered Mel’s office, and I know he smelled it, too. But for a single instant, I felt something new register on the screen where all the data and fragments of my four-year encounter with Mel Thompson were stored. The writer, not the basketball player, took note of it, a fast blip of insight and consciousness. Mel Thompson had not kicked me off the Citadel basketball team. Not because I didn’t deserve it, but because he loved the boy I was and the player he had helped shape. He could not help it. The writer was busy sending news from the depths that day. As I walked slowly to the locker room I was shaken to the core by my urgent and material affection for my coach; no, I was overwhelmed by the profoundness of my own strange loyalty for Mel Thompson. In my life thus far there was nothing odd about this; love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most, and I feared few men as I feared Mel Thompson.

  In the locker room, I packed for the trip to New Orleans, the road trip that would change my life and destiny as an athlete forever.

  PART 3

  THE POINT GUARD

  FINDS HIS VOICE

  CHAPTER 13

  NEW ORLEANS

  ON THE FLIGHT TO NEW ORLEANS, I READ A STREETCAR NAMED Desire. I was kindling in the hands of Tennessee Williams. Because I was going to the mythical and flamboyant city for the first time, I wanted to read the play before I began prowling the back streets of the French Quarter searching for the chance encounters and rich images that would one day add salt and ambience to my future. All year long, I escaped into books the way a cat burglar would take to the woods at the first sign of trouble. My teammates thought my reading habits both odd and off-putting, another way of not inhabiting the world around me.

  “Isn’t the guy that wrote that book a faggot?” Bob Cauthen asked me with more curiosity than meanness.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  DeBrosse said, “Conroy, I love these road trips because I don’t have to read.”

  Barney Bornhorst, sitting behind me, said in a low voice that only the players could hear, “New Orleans, boys. Naked women. Strip shows. Liquor flowing in the street. Barney’s kind of town.”

  Our laughter was boyish and forbidden. Then I returned to the country of literature where Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski were locked in a powerful dance of bizarre and tragic attraction. They seemed so much more alive and animated and dangerous than my poor teammates and I. The dialogue crackled across the page, laced with sweet malice in every scene. I finished the play almost at touchdown in the city of New Orleans.

  As we waited for our luggage, I thought it sad that life had set me down among such dullards and laggards, and the poor colorless bastards on my basketball team. I needed to be hanging around people like Colonel Sartoris and Lady Brett Ashley and Amanda Wingfield instead of Bridges, Bornhorst, and Cauthen. It never occurred to me a single time in the year I am writing about that I was in the dead center of living out my own life, accruing the experiences and gathering the raw materials to form the only life I was ever going to have. As I saw it then, my life had not yet started. I had not escaped my parents’ death grip on my imagination.

  I had arrived in New Orleans to search for the literary haunts of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. I ended up leaving the city thinking I had encountered one of the best basketball teams I had ever played against in my life. We had not studied Loyola on film so none of us knew that we were facing one of the hottest teams in the nation. Loyola had already beaten Texas Christian and LSU when we came to town.

  In the wake of my shock at again being named team captain, especially after my disgraceful behavior in the locker room during the Old Dominion game, everything about the Loyola game seemed surreal and otherworldly. The floor of the field house was raised, the first I had ever played on where you had to run up a flight of stairs to enter the game.

  Mohr and Zinsky started out strong, The Citadel was leading 17–12 with 12:59 to play in the first half when the sky fell in for the Blue Team. For the next ten minutes, we could not seem to make a shot or pull down a rebound or stop the Wolfpack from scoring at will. First we looked hapless, then we looked hopeless, then we looked like we had no business even being on a court. Our starting team seemed drugged and lifeless. For the second game in a row, Hooper and DeBrosse were battling two much taller guards, both of whom turned all-world against our smaller guards. In fact, Ronnie Britsch and Charley Powell dominated this game more than even Pritchett and Speakes had for Old Dominion. Tee Hooper guarded Powell, a smooth, sweet-shooting black kid who was averaging twenty-two points per game. He was quick coming off the ball and got his shot off in a hurry. Again, poor Tee from Greenville, South Carolina, was getting far too many lessons on integration far too quickly for a southern white boy. DeBrosse had his hands full with Ronnie Britsch who was a flashy, cunning white guard.

  I had never seen a Citadel basketball team get overwhelmed so quickly and so thoroughly. The game turned into a rout and then a comedy routine. Then it began to have the makings of a tragedy. When Mel called time-out and the Green Weenies swarmed around the first team, shouting encouragement to them, patting their rear ends, trying to jump-start them into life, they could barely respond. Even Mel’s screaming took on a desperate cast that had rarely been there before. Our first team had simply vanished out of themselves. They were not only being beaten; they were getting killed in every phase of the game.

  The atmosphere in the locker room at halftime felt like midnight at Gethsemane. I had never seen my teammates closer to despair. Tee held his face in his hands, humiliated beyond measure. The rocklike DeBrosse seemed lost and tentative. In agony, Mohr stared at the concrete floor, a towel draped over his head, hiding from his coach, his team, and perhaps most of all, himself.

  But the one we were losing fastest was the one I thought untouchable to the raw malice of Mel Thompson, the sophomore Bill Zinsky. “Zeke?” I said to him. “You okay, son?”

  Zeke nodded his head sadly, barely lifting his eyes to acknowledge me. Something seemed broken in a player I had thought would make first-team All-Conference in our league. If self-combustion was possible, Mel Thompson would have entered the locker room as a pillar of flame. There was a choler and rancor to his fury that night that none of us had seen before. His tantrum seemed more nervous breakdown than halftime talk. He seethed and screamed and snarled at us until he was left staring
and sputtering and raging at a roomful of boys. “Does anybody in this room have any pride left? Do you have no guts, no balls, no manhood, no nothing? How can I appeal to gutless wonders? What the fuck am I to do? We got plays, don’t we? Can we just run the goddamn things? Can somebody guard somebody out there? Is that too much to ask? Jesus Christ. Just guard somebody. Anybody. Jesus Christ. That’s the most embarrassing play out of a team I’ve ever seen. They’re kicking your asses to hell and back, and you don’t seem to even fucking care,” he screamed, throwing a folding chair across the room and into a bank of lockers. “Son-of-a-bitch! Son-of-a-bitch! Son-of-a-fucking-bitch, this beats anything I’ve ever seen. Mohr, can you get off the fucking line? Zinsky, can you show any sign of life? Bridges, quit giving me that Citadel stare. Wipe it off your fucking face. Bridges— All of you. Get it off your faces. I won’t stand for it. We’ll start over, by God. Jesus Christ! What am I supposed to do with these goddamned guys, Ed? No guts, no balls, no points, no rebounds, and what do we have? Not zip. Not shit. Goddamn it!” He hurled another chair. “I might even play the Green Weenies. What quitters—what fucking losers.”

  Mel threw a towel that landed between me and Dave Bornhorst, then stormed out into the night like a Tennessee Williams character—Mel Thompson starring as Stanley Kowalski, misanthropic, brutish in his exit, in his manner, in his essence. Taking his own cue, Ed Thompson drifted out in Mel’s wake, leaving us to marinate in the acids of our coach’s wrath.