My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  Many of my teammates wish that year had never happened. I consider it one of the great years of my life, if not the greatest. If I could change history, if I could change everything that happened that year, if I could bring us a national championship, I would not do it. I would choose again the same teammates I had in 1966–67. I would take to the court with them forever, these same guys. It was the year I learned to accept loss as part of natural law. My team taught me there could be courage and dignity and humanity in loss. They taught me how to pull myself up, to hold my head high, and to soldier on. I got dizzy from loving that team, and I never told them.

  But my team taught me most importantly to accept my fate with valor and resoluteness, and I say this to all of you and believe it with every fiber of my humanity: I came to the right college, to play ball with the right players, and I was born to be coached by Mel Thompson and to learn everything about loss and life and everything in between as we struggled and limped and staggered toward March, brothers of loss and, so much more, bound forever by our losing season.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The essential, life-sharing family and friends: Anne Rivers and Heyward Siddons; Doug, Melinda, and Jackson Marlette; Greg and Mary Wilson Smith; Cliff, Cynthia, Norman, and Rachel Graubart; Terry and Tommye Kay; Jane, Stan, Leah, and Michael Lefco; Zoe and Alex Sanders; Suzanne, Peter, Pete, Christopher, Charles, and Caroline Pollack; John and Barbara Warley; Scott and Susan Graber; Dr. Marion O’Neill; J. Eugene Norris; Bill Dufford; Harriet and Richard Anderson; T. Nugent Courvoisie; Tim Belk; Sylvia Peto; Irene, Ryan, and Patrick Jurzyk; Colonel Joe and Jean Jones; Morgan and Julia Randel; Bert, Julie, Randy, and Julia Legrone; Skip Wharton; Nan and Gay Talese; Julian Bach; Carolyn and Babe Krupp; Anne Torrago; Jeff and Kathleen Kellogg; Marly Rusoff and Mihai Radulescu; Linda Andrews and Michael Melton; Bill and Loretta Cobb; Tom and Carol Harris; Kerry Payne and the SSGs; The Citadel tailgaters; the Fish House Gang; the staff of the Surrey Hotel; the women of T. T. Bones, my hangout on Fripp Island: Kathy Wise, Sylvia DeCost, Jackie Chrisman, Carolyn Summerall, Kazue Cottle, Beverly Edwards, Mary DeRosa, Georgeanna Mills, Ashley Schwartz; Barbara Conroy and Tom Pearce; Kathy, Bobby, and Willie Harvey; Mike and Jean Conroy; Mrs. Jean Shealey; Tim and Terrye Conroy; Jim, Janice, Rachel, and Michael Conroy; and Carol Conroy, poet extraordinaire; and to all of my mother’s and father’s far-flung families.

  The girls and their families: Jessica and Elise; Melissa, Jay, and baby Joseph Wester Jones or Lila Blaine; Megan, Terry, Molly Jean, and Jack; Susannah, Gregory, and Emily.

  My first cousin, Ed Conroy, a Citadel point guard in the eighties, now assistant coach at the University of Tennessee, and one of the hottest young basketball coaches in the country.

  My college coaches who gave me their time and devotion when I was a young man: Mel Thompson, Ed Thompson, Paul Brandenberg, Bob Gilmore, and Chal Port.

  My new Alabama family, though I will not say “Roll Tide!”: Tony King; Beckie, Reggie, Eric, Kyle, Matt, and Elliott Schuler; Jim, Nancy Jane, and Will Hare; Tyler and Michael Ray; and the you-know-what stepsons, Jim, Jason, and Jake Ray.

  To Alex and Zoe Sanders; Zoe Caroline and Bill Nettles.

  Lastly, Peter Olson of Random House who asked me if I would ever write a book specifically about sports.

  Read an excerpt from

  The Death of Santini

  By Pat Conroy

  Available from Doubleday

  October 2013

  Prologue

  I’ve been writing the story of my own life for over forty years. My own stormy autobiography has been my theme, my dilemma, my obsession, and the fly-by-night dread I bring to the art of fiction. Through the years, I’ve met many writers who tell me with great pride that they consider autobiographical fiction as occupying a lower house in the literary canon. They make sure I know that their imaginations soar into realms and fragments completely invented by them. No man or woman in their pantheon of family or acquaintances has ever taken a curtain call in their own well-wrought and shapely books. Only rarely have I drifted far from the bed where I was conceived. It is both the wound and foundation of my work. But I came into the world as the son of a Marine Corps fighter pilot as fierce as Achilles. He was a night fighter comfortable with machine-gun fire and napalm. He fought well and honorably in three wars and at one time was one of the most highly decorated Marine aviators in the corps. He was also meaner than a shit-house rat, and I remember hating him even when I was in diapers.

  For a long time, I thought I was born into a mythology instead of a family. My father thundered out of the sky in black-winged fighter planes, every inch of him a god of war. My mother’s role was goddess of light and harmony—an Arcadian figure spinning through the grasses and wildflowers on long, hot summer days. Peg Peek and Don Conroy brought the mean South and hurt Ireland to each other’s bloodstreams. Peg came from snake-handling fundamentalists in the mountains of Alabama, while Don brought the sensibility of rosary-mad Chicago into a family that would be raised on military bases through the South. But the myths of our lives had no stories to support them. I’ve no memory of my father sharing one story about his growing up in Chicago, while my mother would simply make up stories of her own privileged upbringing in Atlanta. There, she was the belle of the ball during the seasons of society when the Pinks and Gels crowded into the ballrooms of country clubs before World War II. This was fantasy and an untruth. My mother was dabbling in fiction long before I tried my hand at that slippery game. Mom was always writing a plot where she was a daughter of wealth and privilege. Her actual South was utterly unbeautiful, but we never knew it, because my mama wrote her own mythology, making it up as she went along. My childhood was storyless except I was being raised by an Irish god of fire and a Georgian goddess of the moon. Their marriage was composed of terror and great violence, storm-tossed and seasoned with all the terrible salts of pain.

  Both of my parents were larger-than-life to me. Dad prepared me for the coldheartedness of tyrants, for the spirit of Nero contained in the soul of every man, for the Nazi with his booted foot on the Jew’s throat, for the mass slaughters of the Tutsis by the Hutus, the collective roar of the ayatollahs—for the necessity of understanding the limits of cruelty as well as the certain knowledge that there are no limits at all.

  In the myth I’m sharing I know that I was born to be the recording angel of my parents’ dangerous love. Their damaged children are past middle age now, but the residues of their fury still torture each of us. We talk about it every time we get together. Our parents lit us up like brandy in a skillet. They tormented us in their own flawed, wanton love of each other. This is the telling of my parents’ love story—I shall try to write the truth of it the best I can. I’d like to be rid of it forever, because it’s hunted me down like some foul-breathed hyena since childhood.

  My childhood taught me everything I needed to know about the dangers of love. Love came in many disguises, masquerades, rigged card tricks, and sleights of hand that could either overwhelm or tame you. It was a country bristling with fishhooks hung at eye level, mantraps, and poisoned baits. It could hurl toward you at breakneck speed or let you dangle over a web spun by a brown recluse spider. When love announced itself, I learned to duck to avoid the telegraphed backhand or the blown kiss from my mother’s fragrant hand. Havoc took up residence in me at a young age. Violence became a whorl in my DNA. I was the oldest of seven children; five of us would try to kill ourselves before the age of forty. My brother Tom would succeed in a most spectacular fashion. Love came to us veiled in disturbance—we had to learn it the hard way, cutting away the spoilage like bruises on a pear.

  It took a world war to arrange my parents’ accidental meeting on Atlanta’s Peachtree Street in 1943. Don Conroy was a hall-of-fame basketball player at St. Ambrose College in Iowa when he heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He left the gym that day, walked down to the recruiting office in Davenport, and joined the Marine Corps. He learned to fly at the Naval Air Sta
tion Great Lakes. After practicing a series of aerial acrobatics over Lake Michigan one day, he returned to his squadron and announced, “I was better than the Great Santini today.” It earned him his first and only nickname among these fighter pilots, who would compose his circle of fierce brotherhood. These pilots could kill you and do it fast. The original Great Santini had been a charismatic trapeze artist who performed in a circus act my father had seen as a boy. In his death-defying somersaults, the Great Santini had seemed fearless and all-powerful—with a touch of immortality in his uncanny flair—as he vaulted through the air on a hot Chicago night, always working without a net.

  I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate. My mother would later claim that I refused to learn the word “Daddy” until after my first birthday. From the start he was a menacing, hovering presence, and I never felt safe for one moment that my father loomed over me. I don’t think it occurred to him that loving his children might be part of his job description. He could have written a manual on the art of waging war against his wife and children. I can’t remember a house I lived in as a child where he did not beat my mother or me or my brothers; nor do I believe that he would’ve noticed if both his daughters had run away from home. My mother raised me, the oldest child, to be the protector of her other kids, to rush them into secret hiding places we had scouted whenever we moved into a new house. We learned to hide our shame in the madness of our day-to-day lives so that the nuns and priests who ran our parishes everywhere we went considered us an exemplary Catholic family.

  Sometimes on the long car trips we spent rotating between Southern air bases, my father would tell the romantic story of his chance encounter with Peggy Peek as she drifted out of Davison’s department store on Peachtree Street. He said, “I was in Atlanta getting some extra training before they shipped me out to the Philippines. I asked a barber where I could hunt up some broads and he told me the best place was down on Peachtree, right in the middle of the city. So I hopped a bus and got off and started walking around, sort of scouting the place out. Then your mother came out of a store in a red dress, carrying some shopping bags. Man, what a package. What a figure. I mean, this was one fine-looking Southern girl. So I followed her across the street. She was walking with two other girls. They were sisters, but I didn’t know that then. I started up a conversation with her. You know. Showed her some suave moves of a Chicago boy. Told her I was a pilot—getting ready to go to war. Back then, it was always a sure pickup line with the broads. But I couldn’t get your mother or her sisters to even talk to me. I mean, talk about three cold fish! But they’d never met a Chicago boy, especially one as charming as me. So I kept going, ratcheting up the pressure, throwing out my best lines. I told Peg I was heading off to war, would probably be dead in a month or two, but was willing to die for my country, and wanted to live long enough to bomb Tokyo. Then I saw a bus coming up to the stop and watched in panic as your mother and her sisters got on. No air-conditioning back then, so all the windows were raised. Jesus Christ, I was starting to panic. Your mother sat by the window. So I started begging, begging, which I’m not ashamed to admit. I begged her for an address, a telephone number, the name of her father, anything. We could go dancing, to a movie, maybe make out a little bit.

  “The bus took off and I took off with it, running my ass off, pleading with this broad. I didn’t even know her name and she hadn’t said a word to me. The bus began to pull away from me and I felt like I had struck out big-time when your mother stuck her pretty head out of the bus window and said, ‘BR3-2638.’ Ain’t it a bee-you-tu-ful story? And we lived happily ever after.”

  From the backseat of our station wagon, Carol Ann always wailed out into the night: “Tell him the wrong number, Mom. One digit. Just one digit and none of this had to happen. None of us would’ve been born. Tell him the wrong number, Mom. Please. For all of us, tell him the wrong number.”

  In the driver’s seat, my father responded to Carol Ann, “Shut your trap. I can always count on you to be Miss Negative.”

  I thought Dad would stop the car and beat her, but now I think he never gave much thought to what his daughter felt. That would change later.

  What made Dad’s temper dangerous was its volatility and unpredictable nature. Anything could set it off and no weatherman in the world could track its storm warnings. His blue eyes were born to hate. Because he was a fighter pilot of immense gifts, he was also born to kill. When I was four years old, my father was stationed at El Toro and my parents liked to take me and Carol Ann to the San Diego Zoo on family outings. The animal world held rapturous powers over my mother, and a zoo was one of the happiest places on earth to her. My mother was pushing Carol Ann in her baby carriage, with my father in charge of looking after me. When my father stopped to get a drink of water, I took off running, then heard my mother screaming for me to stop. Exhilarated, I ran faster and missed the moment my father sprinted into action behind me, unamused by my defection. Looking back I saw him lunging at me; then I fell hurtling down a long flight of stone steps that led to the big cats. When I reached the bottom step, Dad was on me in an instant and went crazy when he saw I was bleeding from a head wound I sustained in the fall. He started slapping my face harder than he ever had before. My screams and his slaps brought two sailors running to my rescue as Mom was crying from the steps above. When the sailors pulled Dad off me, he turned to fight the two intruders into his family business.

  “Hey, squids,” he said as he raised his fists, using the contemptuous name he used his whole life for members of the navy. “This is my kid and I’ll do anything I want to him.”

  My mother got between Dad and the two sailors with Carol Ann in her arms and said to the sailors, “Please just leave. Everyone just leave and calm down.”

  Carol Ann and I both were screaming, and my dad started yelling that if my mother did not shut us kids up, he’d give us something to cry about. From that day, I carried a lifelong affection for sailors, a mortal fear of my father, and the selection of a dog, Chippie, from a litter of mongrel puppies. Chippie was my reward for surviving the fall and the beating at the San Diego Zoo. In a farmer’s backyard, my mother and I examined a crush of puppies, but my eye was caught by the runt of the litter who was eyeing me from the back of the enclosure. I walked over and picked the dog up, who licked my face, beginning a fourteen-year love affair with the Great Dog Chippie.

  · · ·

  My mother’s physical beauty played counterpoint to my father’s powerful fists. Her loveliness made her delicious cunning both possible and dangerous. In my mother, I caught glimpses of Becky Sharp, Lady Macbeth, Anna Karenina, and Madame Bovary long before I read those works that introduced them into world literature. My brothers and sisters do not all share in my adoration of my mother, for reasons both painful and legitimate. She could camouflage the blade of beauty in the folds of a matador’s red cape. Often she was an unreadable woman who could use silence to declaw her ungovernable husband. When I was a boy, she used me as helpmate and confessor to let me know of her desperate unhappiness with her life with Don Conroy. At least once a week, she swore she was going to divorce him as soon as she saved up enough money. Almost every year, she found herself pregnant, leading me to wonder if my father ever saw a condom. Soon there were too many children to feed and not enough money to save. But my heart would leap like a jackrabbit every time Mom said she wanted to divorce my father. It gave hope to a childhood not filled with much. The last time I heard her say it was on March 10, 1956, when we lived on South Culpeper Street in Arlington, Virginia—one of the nightmare years.

  It was my sister’s birthday and Mom was lighting eight candles that had Carol Ann dancing around the table, waiting to blow them out. My father was reading the sports section of the Washington Post in the living room and kept refusing to come to the table to sing “Happy Birthday.” The barometer within me felt the pressure in the room changing, and I watched my father’s eyes turn predatory.

  “You’re
going to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to your daughter, Don,” my mother said, the register of her voice rising a pitch.

  “Shut up,” Dad said. “And don’t make me tell you again.”

  Carol Ann began crying, which brought Dad to the boiling point of his sulfurous rage. He got up and backhanded my mother to the floor, the first overture in the long dance of my childhood. Over the years the choreography of this musical set piece hardened into grotesque and mistimed rhythms. My steps had been easy to learn, but they darkened my whole life because I had to learn them. As Mom struggled to rise, I ran and got between my parents. He knocked me with another backhand that sent me sliding across the living room floor. All the kids were screaming and the pandemonium unleashed in that house had reached a pitch of hysteria. When Dad pulled Mom to her feet to resume the beating, he shoved her into the very narrow kitchen. When I got between them again, there was barely room for all three of us as I pounded my fists against Dad’s chest before he slapped me out of the kitchen with his right hand. Somehow, I got the feeling during those years that my mother’s love for me depended on how many times I placed myself between them when Dad was beating her. Taking an ugly turn, the beating became the worst one I ever witnessed. From my vantage point it looked to me like my father was going to beat my mother to death. I was hitting against him as hard as I could, now crying and screaming loudly, joining the tribal wail of my brothers and sisters, in a house undone by pure bedlam. Looking up, I saw my father’s hated face getting ready to slap the living hell out of me when I saw something else rising into the air above him. It was a butcher knife. I saw its flashing blade slashing in the artificial light. A jet of blood hit my eyes and blinded me. I had no idea if it was the blood of my mother or my father.