My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  Under Updike’s powerful sway, I wrote the best poem and the best story of my Citadel career. The poem was called “Ted Lucas,” and I can detect in that splintery stack of words a hint of the melody that would later come. In the short story “The Legend,” I actually see the starting point of my life as a fiction writer. A great high school basketball player, Jimmy Amansky, plays his last high school basketball game and performs heroically in the championship game, then finds, to his horror, the long and ruthless stretch of time laid out before him when he has done not a thing to prepare himself for a job or a career. Both my short story and poem are unartful homages to the hold that Mr. Updike’s poem “Ex Basketball Player” had on my imagination. But it had unhinged Mel when he read the short story and he screamed at me for several minutes for holding him up to such ridicule on campus. My writing career has proven to be riddled with such encounters with people wounded by the malice of my portraiture. I had conjured up Mel Thompson when I sat down to imagine the story of young Jimmy Amansky. Mel seemed to have lost part of himself when he lost the game of basketball as a player. I could tell that he thought coaching was a second-string way of staying close to the game.

  “Slim Coach Jim. A three-hundred-pounder. Laughed at by his players. Your way of letting me know I’d put on a few pounds,” Mel said.

  “Coach, listen to me. That coach wasn’t you. I based him on a guy who coached me in youth league.”

  “Bullshit, Conroy. You think you’re the only smart guy who puts his pants on in this Armory? That was me. You just don’t have the guts to admit it.”

  “Coach, I didn’t think of you once when I wrote about the coach in that story,” I said.

  “That’s crap, but it’s okay. I want to make a point with you. Have I held that story against you?”

  “There was no reason for you to,” I said.

  “Follow me on this one. Just a little way, Pat.”

  “Okay. No, sir, you’ve not held it against me.”

  “Do you know why?” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you know who William James is?” Mel asked.

  “He’s the brother of Henry James,” I said.

  “Who the fuck’s Henry James?” Mel asked angrily.

  “He’s a writer, Coach.”

  “Who gives a shit?”

  “Yes, sir. I know who William James is,” I said.

  “See?” Mel looked over at Ed. “I told you he was a smart guy. You find a player’s interest, Ed, and you work those angles. William James is the father of pragmatism.” Mel stared at me again. “I’m a pragmatist, Conroy. Do you understand? I have recently become a pragmatist by reading William James.” He said this in the same tone of voice he would’ve used while informing me that he had become a Presbyterian or a chiropractor. “Do you know what a pragmatist is?”

  “I think so, Coach. Isn’t it a guy that figures out the easiest, most basic way to solve problems, something like that.”

  “Bingo.” Mel nodded happily. “You get to know your kids, Ed. Get to know what makes them tick. Then you do your own problem solving.”

  I felt like a lab rat but then Mel turned to me and said, “Even though you fucked me with that short story, Conroy, I chose to ignore it. If I let that bother me, it would only hurt the team. But I’m a pragmatist, Pat. I’m reading a book on pragmatism right now. What do you think of that?”

  “That’s nice, Coach,” I said.

  “Go get dressed for practice,” he said. “And, Conroy? You ever write about me again, I’ll kick your ass.”

  Odd encounters with Mel were the stuff of legend in the locker room. Our beleaguered and tormented center, Dan Mohr, carried with him a memory of his most harrowing collision with Mel in his dreaded office. Mel’s incessant belittling of Root remains an agonizing memory for all his teammates, occurring with such frequency that it is simply part of the team memory of that year. It is most especially remembered by the aggrieved Dan Mohr himself whose memory about this year proved both encyclopedic and precise.

  Dan believes he received a summons to report to Mel’s office on the exact same afternoon as I learned that Mel Thompson had embraced the philosophy of pragmatism, and he has some convincing proof of this. With some frequency, Mel would require an explanation from our returning leading scorer about the disintegration of our season. When Dan entered the room, Mel immediately went after him with the curious Ed Thompson getting a much harsher lesson in the shaping of a college basketball player than he had with me earlier.

  “Mohr, I want you to explain to me why we can’t seem to get any senior leadership out of you and Conroy,” Mel said, catching Danny off guard and ill-prepared so that Danny made his first mistake.

  “I think the leadership on any team has to come from the guards. At least that’s how it’s been on every team I’ve ever played on.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Mohr. What a dumbo thought! Leadership always comes from the big men on a team. At NC State, I provided the leadership on the floor and the locker room. You earn the respect on the court. You fight for every rebound, you dive for every loose ball. People look up to you because you lay it on the line every single play. Big men rule this game. Understand that, Mohr? Tell me if you consider yourself a leader.”

  Then Root made a real tactical error when he said, “Well, Coach, when you didn’t name Conroy or me captains this year, it was a slap in the face in front of our teammates. It’s hard to be a leader when your own coach doesn’t believe in you.”

  I think my childhood prepared me to deal with the complexities of Mel Thompson’s mood swings a bit more adequately than Dan’s achingly sweet set of parents up in Carolina Beach. As Root recalled the moment in his den years later, he said, “Mel went apeshit, Conroy. Out of his mind apeshit. I’d seen him mad before, but nothing like this. He came around his desk and bent his face down where I was sitting on that cheap couch of his, his face an inch from mine. You know how he loved to intimidate people. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, then he started hissing at me. He said, ‘Mohr, none of your teammates have an ounce of respect for you. None of your coaches do. The cadets don’t respect you. The fans don’t. Doesn’t that bother you, Mohr? You know why it doesn’t bother you, Mohr? You’re soft all over. You don’t have the guts your team is looking for. You don’t got the fighting spirit where you leave it all out there on the court—your blood—your guts—your heart. No, Mohr. You’re a pussy and a weakling on the boards. You let smaller guys eat your jock every day at practice. They eat your lunch. They steal your candy because they know you’re gutless, Mohr. You ain’t got it where it counts. In the gut. In the heart. They know you’ll back off when the going gets rough.’ ”

  Dan told me this in his Greensboro home, mimicking Mel’s voice. When he paused I said, “Yep, that’s the Dan Mohr I knew.”

  “Kiss my ass, Conroy,” Dan laughed. “It gets worse. Mel pulls me off the couch and backs me into a corner near his desk. Then Muleface sticks out his chin at me with Little Mel looking on, and he says, ‘Punch me in the face, Mohr. Hit my goddamn jaw, Mohr. I want to see if you’re a man or the pussy I believe you are. I’m giving you the chance to break my jaw. A free sucker punch to see if you’ve got any fight in you at all. To see if there’s anything left to your manhood, your balls, your pride. You got anything left, Mohr? I’m challenging your fucking manhood right here in my office and you’re not taking a swing. Do something, Mohr. Do anything. Show me you got something, anything, between your legs.’ ”

  “Why didn’t you punch his lights out, Root?” I asked, incredulous at the story.

  “I thought about it, Conroy. But all I could see were headlines: Dan Mohr Kills His Coach in Office Brawl. Dan Mohr Arrested for Murder in First Battalion. Dan Mohr Named Captain of Prison Basketball Team. Mohr Named to Convict All-Stars. Prosecutor Asks for Mohr’s Death. They kept going through my head, Conroy. I also thought if I hit him I’d lose my scholarship for sure. Finally I said, ‘I’
m not going to hit you, Coach.’ Of course, that drove him nuts and he cussed me out for another minute. Same stuff. Pussy. No leadership. Didn’t have the guts of a hamster. Mel-odrama. Pure Mel-odrama. The whole year was a nightmare.”

  OF ALL THE SCHOOLS IN THE Southern Conference, a conference in which I take a fierce and partisan pride, there was no team I would rather play against than the Keydets of Virginia Military Institute. The campus itself formed an austere grotto of spartan military life in the pretty town of Lexington, Virginia. It was a sadist who placed the handsome, many-columned Washington and Lee, low-crawling with pampered frat boys, adjacent to VMI itself. I found the architecture at VMI to be so melancholic and bleak that it made The Citadel’s Moor-inspired buildings appear positively sunny in comparison. While I was walking with a VMI senior one Sunday morning in my sophomore year, a still-drunken SAE frat man from Washington and Lee waved a pair of girls’ panties at us from a second-story window as we passed below in our uniforms.

  “This is torture,” I said to the senior.

  “It makes us stronger,” the senior stoically replied.

  In fact VMI always struck me as a far weirder, eerier military college than The Citadel ever could be. I attributed this to its cutoff sense of displacement and isolation. The jocks of VMI had to endure the great scorn of their corps the same as we did. Jocks are second-class citizens in every military college in this country and in a secret, wordless accordance we acknowledged our aggrieved station in the chain of command by playing our best games against each other for the honor of our schools. Their Rat Line met our Fourth Class system head-on, and we paid homage to each other by raising the level of our games to the highest pitch. The VMI team we had come to play on February 4, 1967, was a team with some shortcomings and insufficiencies, but VMI’s fighting spirit could even the playing field.

  On the flight to Richmond, my sulky, looming fate received an invisible shiver when Jessica Lynn Jones was born in a military hospital in Kingsville, Texas, to J. W. Jones and his wife, Barbara, neither of whom had the slightest knowledge that our lives had inextricably intertwined with Jessica’s birth. Since I was dating no one at the time, it would have surprised me to learn that my first adopted child was nursing at her mother’s breast in Texas while I was airborne over Virginia. My flight was uneventful, but Captain J. W. Jones III would take a more meaningful one the following year when he was shot down while providing close air support for a group of beleaguered Marines in the Republic of Vietnam. The year after that, I would marry his widow and adopt the two children he left behind in his short, courageous life. Fate hides in veils and approaches from behind with cards marked and chess pieces disfigured. You never know when a door you left unlocked will usher in a lost exterminator, a deposed queen, or the love of your life. As I write these words my thirty-four-year-old daughter, Jessica, is swimming on the beach of my island home with my seven-year-old granddaughter, Elise, all of us bound when my fate, a work in torturous process, received an imperceptible notch, a marking of inevitability and mystery that makes me believe in both magic and the hand of God.

  The Citadel and VMI teams shared more in common than bad military haircuts. All twenty-four players were enrolled in ROTC programs, all could execute an about-face, clean a rifle, perform the manual of arms with precision, spit-shine a shoe to perfection, have an intimate relationship with Brasso—we shared the arcane language of cross webbings, shakos, cartridge boxes, and waist belts. We could speak fluently about four-inch intervals, thirty-inch paces, and a 9⁄16 arm swing, all the numerals of regimentation and the divine, obsessional symmetry so cherished by the military. In many ways both deep and surprising, we stood as mirror images to each other.

  As I stood at the entrance of the Pit’s (VMI field house) seedy visiting-team locker room, I looked back at my teammates lined up behind me and screamed, “Let’s show these guys how a real military school plays basketball.” With the roars of my teammates behind me, I led the Citadel Bulldogs into a firestorm of boos. While we were playing VMI, the venom of their corps was so toxic it felt like a form of praise. They rained down a steady flood of catcalls as Mohr dunked it home. We knew VMI had entered the arena when the cheering became deafening. Steve Powers led the Keydets out on the court and dunked the ball with authority.

  Secretly, I waved to Ralph Wright, Johnny Guyton, and John Mitchell, who had all been fellow counselors at Camp Wahoo the summer before. I had liked all three immensely. Mitchell possessed a pretty, textbook jump shot, and Wright was built like a weight lifter and was a man to be reckoned with under the boards, even among the visiting pros who used to drop in at Camp Wahoo. Coming back from a layup, I actually broke off from my team and ran over to shake hands with Gary McPherson, the coach who had worked with me at Camp Wahoo on my jump shot.

  “Hey, Coach, how you doing?” I said. “It’s wonderful to see you.”

  “Hey, Pat,” Coach McPherson said. Then Coach Gary stunned me by hugging me before the disapproving gaze of Mel Thompson. “Don’t you and Mohr kill me tonight, Pat.”

  “We’re throwing the game for you, Coach. We think that much of you,” I answered before rejoining the layup line.

  “What was that all about, Conroy?” Mel growled.

  “We got close at Wahoo, Coach,” I said.

  “So what?” he said.

  BENEATH THE LIGHTS OF VMI and the stormy velocity of an aroused enemy corps, a fast-talking young referee named Lou Bello threw up the ball. The Citadel basketball team got after the VMI team and by God, they got after us. We gave everyone in that gym a night to remember. The noise in the gym was oceanic. Kroboth had started for Mohr and was battling the powerful and accomplished Steve Powers who was the third leading rebounder in the nation at that time, one notch above the sublime Lew Alcindor of UCLA. He and Wright brought immense intensity to the art of rebounding, but my guys held their own under the boards. This game marked a coming-out for Al Kroboth, the real beginning of his greatness as a Citadel basketball player. Early in the game, he lost Powers after Bridges missed a jump shot and went under the basket to tip it up from behind on the other side of the hoop, a move so beautiful and unexpected that he received a begrudging cheer from the Keydets. Zinsky and Wright fought over the ball like tigers mauling the carcass of a fallen deer. It was basketball played at its highest level, and we fought each other with all the frantic joy you bring to a rival you respect. I found I loved playing in front of a corps who hated me. I grew flashy as the Keydets grew hostile to me and my team. When they booed me for dribbling behind my back, I dribbled through my legs when I changed direction on Peyton Brown the next time down the court. I blossomed when the jeers and hoots were rained down on me personally. I bathed in the contempt of that bawdy, raucous crowd. I strutted, I roostered all over that court, cocky and in charge, knowing what to do and when to do it, posturing and urging my teammates to be more than themselves, to turn themselves into heroes for a night, resistance fighters caught in the teeth of the enemy, and cornered champions who wore our college’s name on our chest and needed to prove ourselves worthy of that extraordinary honor. I did not want to be beaten by my college’s greatest rival on their home court. I did not want to see a smile on a single VMI Keydet’s face when that game ended. When the Keydets booed me after I drove the lane and put up a layup while being fouled by Wright, I swaggered toward the heart of their corps, and my eyes said, “Kiss my ass, VMI. Don’t fuck with this Citadel point guard. It ain’t smart.” Then I scooted back to the line and made it a three-point play.

  It was in the middle of this fierce and hard-fought game that I again realized that DeBrosse and I were suddenly becoming a big problem for the other teams in our league. Since our polar opposite skills had begun to merge fluidly, we were driving other guards crazy. I heard Peyton Brown, a VMI guard, yelling at John Mitchell after I set a pick for DeBrosse that hurt Peyton and embarrassed him at the same time. Mel taught us how to set a pick right, and we were locked and loaded when the defensive man
plowed into us. Brown had not seen the play coming, and he hit a wall when his shoulder crashed into me but it was Peyton who went down. DeBrosse was by himself when he swished a jumper from the top of the key.

  “Give me a little help, Johnny,” I heard Brown tell the milder-mannered Mitchell.

  A telepathy of immense subtlety was still at play between John DeBrosse and myself. I could look at John on the court, just look, and he would know what I wanted him to do. I would dribble toward him to my left and he would swing wide as if to go around me, then suddenly, John would change his angle of attack and bring his defensive man closer to me. In a well-tuned and well-executed maneuver, I would stop suddenly and pivot on my left foot swinging my body completely around—my back both to DeBrosse and his defender Brown. DeBrosse’s shoulder and body would pass by mine with millimeters between us, and his defensive man would crash into my back and buttocks. This move in the modern vernacular is called a moving pick or screen and is not legal. Guys like me and DeBrosse made it illegal, and we could run it as well as any two basketball players alive that day. I would hand the ball off to John like a quarterback handing off to a halfback on an off-tackle slant. He would dribble once, then put it up with one of the prettiest jump shots in the American South.

  An anonymous VMI sportswriter wrote in their newpaper that “Citadel guards Pat Conroy and John DeBrosse dazzled the Keydets with their fantastic drives and amazing jump shots.” Quite possibly, this is my favorite sentence ever written in the English language.