My Losing Season (17 page)

Just then, someone slapped my fanny, disrupting my reverie. A large, dark shape moved past me on the left—Mel Thompson, my college coach, smoking, that slap his wordless praise, my reward and trophy, and his acknowledgment of the hard work I'd put in that summer.

I left the mountains of Camp Wahoo thinking I had learned to play great defense. The following season, Johnny Moates would teach me otherwise.

CHAPTER 9

RETURN FOR SENIOR YEAR

I
T IS TIME ITSELF
I
AM TRYING TO RETRIEVE.

I long to pin it down in the surreal hyacinth-light of both memory and dream that now have faded where once they were three-dimensional and rich. I want to write down how I felt and thought as I made my way around The Citadel during my last time as a basketball player and my first that I thought of myself, with a sense of dread and unworthiness, as a writer. It was the year I woke up to the dream of my own life.

As I walked across the parade ground during the first week, I began the long, terrifying process of turning myself into the southern writer my mother had told me I would be since I was five years old. Always, she emphasized the word “southern” and told me I must never turn my back on her region of the rough-born South. During my three-year test at The Citadel, I had tried to transform myself, to drink in the landscape and tell exactly what it was to submit to the discipline of the Corps of Cadets. Since I had observed all those rites of submission, I could feel The Citadel's story forming on my tongue, and all the language of outrage and brotherhood cleaving to the roof of my mouth.

For the first time since becoming a cadet, I felt myself accepting the school for what it was. I no longer blamed The Citadel for not being the Harvard or Duke that my parents could not have afforded for me had I been smart enough to get into them. I experienced a rush of happiness each time I woke to bugles, as well as gratitude and belonging when taps played over the barracks at night. Next to the chapel across the parade ground, a whole library of books awaited my astonished inspection. I had promised myself to complete a single poem every day for Colonel John Doyle's poetry writing seminar in addition to improving the short stories I was writing for
The Shako,
the campus literary magazine. I would use the year to learn how to think and see the world as a writer. For the first time, I knew the repleteness that comes from filling up with words. Language became a honeycomb brightening the eaves of my brain.

But I was a college basketball player, too. From day to day, I was caught up with the rhythms of my game. Basketball provided the nearest approach I've ever made to the realms of ecstasy. The sport consumed the best part of my dreaming self, and I found myself in reverie after reverie moving swiftly in the flow and anarchy of games. My whole philosophy of life was caught up with what I believed were the responsibilities of a point guard—the importance of outhustling your opponent, watching for the unexpected, moving teammates to their proper spots on the floor, barking orders and calling the plays, exhorting and inspiring your team, and never quitting until the buzzer has sounded.

         

O
N THE LAST DAY OF PLEBE WEEK
, I received a note from an orderly of the guard to report to Coach Mel Thompson's office at 1500 hours. Being summoned to Coach Thompson's office was never good news, but I was a senior now, part of the senior leadership, and concluded that I would be spending much of my time in Mel's office discussing team attitude and personnel. I could not have been more wrong.

Before my last season as an athlete began, I sat outside his office conjuring a portrait of my fascinating, scowling, and unforthcoming coach, Mel Thompson. At the outset, I knew so little about him I found it bewildering. For three years, six months of the year, I saw him for three hours every day. He did not know either of my parents' names after those three years nor anything about my personal life. He had no interest in getting to know the individual members of his team, and required of us only that we fear, respect, and obey him. The terror we felt for him was real. His powers of ridicule were considerable, and his bitterly cutting dismissals of his players could feel like acid thrown in your face.

Something smoldered inside Mel Thompson. He was the type of man you would cut open and expect to see lava flow instead of blood. There was nothing soft about my coach. I studied him up close and came to know him only as mask and stone wall, as sphinx and empty vessel and hidden passageway. I watched for clues that would elucidate his character, but the graffiti that cut into the granite wall of him were written in a language not even he could speak. Mel Thompson is the insoluble enigma and the Rosetta stone of this book.

What I did know about Mel Thompson was that as a six-foot-three-inch player for North Carolina State, he was one of the best rebounders of the early fifties. For three years, he started for the Wolfpack in the best basketball conference in the country, coached by the legendary Everett Case who along with Adolph Rupp introduced big-time college basketball to the South. Everett Case referred to his player Mel Thompson as the “most competitive player I ever coached.” Case was famous for treating his players like dogs, yet a distinguished fraternity of coaches came out of his program, including Vic Bubas at Duke; Norman Sloan at The Citadel, Florida, and North Carolina State; and Les Robinson, Eddie Biedenbach, and a long list of others. Old man Case may have been hard-nosed and ornery, but something about his toughness made his team want to play for him. He made his teams feared in the ACC, and his boys went after you with everything they had. Everett Case exemplified a certain philosophy of coaching whereby a team of young players could be molded into greatness by the use of fear and intimidation. Case dismissed out of hand the softer ways of the lesser breed of coaches. Mel Thompson adored Coach Case and brought that philosophy to his job at The Citadel.

Mel was the assistant coach under Norman Sloan at The Citadel when Sloan directed the “Blitz Kids,” the best bunch of Citadel basketball players in the college's history. When Sloan departed for Florida in 1960, Mel took over the head coaching position, a year after he had taken over as The Citadel's freshman basketball coach. Mel led those same Blitz Kids to a 17–8 season, a remarkable achievement for a first-year head coach. But that was followed by an 8–15 season and a disastrous 1962–63 year in which his team went 3–20. Coach Thompson righted himself in the next two years and fielded two winning teams in a row. The 1964 team finished 11–10 and the team I played backup guard on as a sophomore went 13–11. It is a rarity that a modern Citadel basketball squad put a winning team on the floor for two consecutive years. Since 1940, only Norman Sloan ever won for three consecutive years, and Les Robinson cobbled together consecutive winning seasons in 1979 and 1980. Winning basketball games in a military college is as perilous a way to earn a living as exists in American coaching.

Mel Thompson appeared at the door and barked out my name. “Conroy, get in here.” No “how was your summer” or pleasant handshakes or idle chatter to break the ice after a long separation. “You know why I called you down here, Pat?” he said. He had not called me “Pat” since he tried to recruit me in high school.

“No, sir, I don't.” I was actually shaken by his friendliness.

“I'm thinking about making you captain of the team,” he said. “What do you think about that?”

It was a lifelong dream of mine to captain our team, but that is not what I said to Coach Thompson. “What about Danny Mohr? Or Jim Halpin? It might hurt their feelings.”

“Feelings, Conroy? I don't give a shit about feelings. I care about winning. I've always been a winner, and losing kills something inside me. Danny Mohr's not a leader. Halpin's got a gimp knee. I was depending on you for leadership. But the hell with it. You've always wanted to coach this goddamn team. Get the fuck out of my office.”

I got up to leave, until he held out his hand to stop me. “Except for your ball handling and passing, you're barely college material. You're just mediocre, and that's the truth of the matter.”

“The truth of the matter” burned through me like fire as I walked back through the shadow of the field house. As a boy, words had stung and lacerated me far too much, and I'd tried to learn to defuse their power when launched as weapons. “You're just mediocre” would echo in my head every minute of the season that had not even begun. My mediocrity stung me, which is why I'd worked so hard in the summer for my last year as a basketball player.

On Hell Night, I drifted from R Company over to Tango Company where three freshmen basketball players were having the worst night of their lives. In the chaos of the plebe system's first great disruption, I went to introduce myself to the three most highly prized recruits of the class of 1970. I watched as three cadremen worked over Jerry Hirsch and was standing in front of him when he rose after completing twenty-five pushups.

“Good evening, Mr. Hirsch,” I said.

“Good evening, sir,” he screamed.

“How you liking college?”

“Sir, I love it, sir,” he screamed.

“I'm a basketball player, Mr. Hirsch. A senior. My name's Pat Conroy, and I'm going to get you through this year. I was standing in this same spot three years ago. Think of it as a game. A joke. Some of the guys screaming at you tonight will be the best friends you'll ever have. Bend your knees. That's it. You're doing good. If I can help you, let me know. But you're going to make it. I hear you've got a great jump shot.”

Young Mr. Hirsch surprised me by saying, “Sir, one of the best, sir.” I knew that Jerry Hirsch was going to make it just fine. I had the same encounter with Willie Taylor and a mountain of a boy named Bob Carver, who looked both bewildered and terrified. “Mr. Conroy, sir, permission to make a statement, sir.”

“Please feel free,” I said.

“Sir, Coach Thompson said I wouldn't have to go through any of this, sir. He promised to keep me out of it, sir.”

I looked around at the cadre moving through the knobs in the stormy loosening of havoc in their ranks. “Mel doesn't seem to be doing a very good job, Mr. Carver.”

“Sir, he promised me,” Carver said with greater urgency.

“He lied, Mr. Carver. But he's consistent. He lied to every one of us, to every basketball player on this campus. But you'll get through it and I'll buy you a beer in June.”

On Friday at the end of plebe week, I went for afternoon tea at Colonel John Doyle's house on campus overlooking the Ashley River. Once a month Colonel Doyle and his wife, Clarice, invited me to their quarters for an afternoon tea as formal as an English garden. It was as a plebe, in the Doyles' living room, when I first discovered that not all tea came in bags and that it could be served without ice.

I was about to knock on the Doyles' door when a booming voice rang out, “Halt, bubba!”

The Boo's voice, always startling, had the same effect on me that a lion's roar had on a herd of wildebeest. I froze and awaited his approach as the smell of his Thompson cigar announced his arrival. I could feel the heat of the cigar as it drew close to my ear, and the Boo shrouded my head in a plume of smoke.

“Stop that, Nugent,” I heard Mrs. Courvoisie say to her husband. “Leave Mr. Conroy alone.”

“Bolshevik,” the colonel said, “I thought I sent you out of here to mess up Clemson. You are not Citadel material, don't you understand that yet?”

Because of my role in placing a coded but obscene poem in
The Shako
the previous spring, the Boo had recommended that President Hugh P. Harris kick me out of the Corps of Cadets.

“If General Mark Clark were still president, you'd have been long gone, bubba. Harris is new, still feeling his way around. He thinks of you cadets as human beings. He doesn't know you for the lowlife bums and scoundrels I know. You better not fart through cotton this year, bubba, or I'll crucify you without nails. Got that?”

“Nugent, we're late,” Mrs. Courvoisie said.

“One mistake, bubba,” the Boo said. “Just one and you're history. You ever walked tours?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Well, if I don't get you here,” he said, “look for me in hell. I'll be waiting for your Bolshevik ass.”

“Great to see you, Colonel,” I said as he walked back to his car. “My summer was great, sir. Thanks for asking.”

The Boo was laughing as he got into his car and I knocked on Colonel Doyle's door.

Colonel Doyle met me at his back door and warmly shook my hand and thanked me for the letters I'd written him during the summer. He was dressed in an ascot and a smoking jacket; I'd never seen a man dressed like him except in period movies. Clarice Doyle was wearing a dress, stockings, high heels, and pearls. I never saw this cultured couple let down their hair when I visited them. Entering their house always felt like stepping back a hundred years or more.

“Do you think Mr. Conroy will take to Darjeeling, John?” Clarice asked.

Colonel Doyle answered, “I think we can assume Mr. Conroy is the adventurous type.”

I cherished my time with John and Clarice Doyle at The Citadel, yet always felt clubfooted and inappropriate when I was sitting with them, the three of us talking like characters out of an unpublishable British short story written by a librarian with a stutter and a drinking problem. The conversation always seemed surreal and disconnected from all reality.

“John, have you lined Mr. Conroy up with some delicious courses for the new semester?” Clarice asked her husband. It made me happy to see how much she loved him.

Colonel Doyle beamed at her. “I think I may have come up with some tasty morsels, dear. Perhaps, even one or two bonbons.”

“Bonbons,” I said, having no idea what anyone was talking about, but wanting to be part of their close-knit yet inexplicit alliance. Always, I felt like the Doyles were telling jokes but letting me guess the punch lines.

“You will be in my modern novel class,” Colonel Doyle said.

“Now there's a bonbon,” Clarice said.

“You seemed enamored with Colonel Bowman last year, so I put you in his abnormal psychology class. I trust you will study the subject, Mr. Conroy, and try your best not to become abnormal yourself. We'll have none of that.”