My Losing Season (23 page)

It was the first game in which I counted the shots my teammates took. It was a trick I had learned at a clinic for point guards at Camp Wahoo. Rod Thorn had talked about the importance of the point guard in distributing the ball evenly to his teammates, making sure that the shooters got their fair share of the allocated shots. “Shooters need to shoot. It's the nature of the beast,” he had said. I had three shooters on my team: DeBrosse, Bridges, and Mohr. If I was going to be successful at the point, I had to involve my shooters in their game. So I began the silent count that would go on for the entire year: “Ten shots for Mohr, six for Bridges, eight for DeBrosse,” I would say during the course of the game. “Get it to Doug.”

We lost the game 83–67, and we never made a real run at the Seminoles. Their coach, Hugh Durham, ran a very disciplined team. DeBrosse scored 18, Kroboth 14, Zinsky 13, and I had 12. John and I provided 28 points from the backcourt, which was nothing to be ashamed of against such a team. We moved like a matched set. I had earned DeBrosse's respect for the night, and it felt good. I had gotten through the game without humiliating myself or my team. I shook hands with all the Florida State players. Trotting off the court, I realized I had lost all chance to play the Tar Heels in this lifetime.

CHAPTER 15

COLUMBIA LIONS

T
HOUGH
I
HAD LOST MY ONLY POSSIBILITY TO TAKE THE COURT
against
the North Carolina Tar Heels, I was the one guy on the Citadel basketball team who fully understood what the Ivy League meant in our country's intellectual life. For that reason, I took the consolation game in Tampa against the Columbia Lions with seriousness and wanted to go through life crowing proudly, “Conroy, undefeated by the snot-nosed Ivy League.” Because I also know about the culture of basketball as it was played on the courts of New York City, I knew that Columbia could pick and choose among thousands of high school boys who grew up playing the game the way it was meant to be played. Those New York boys could all take it to the hoop and they carried irregular, melting-pot names as they drove the cement lanes toward the chain nets of the great city. I studied Columbia's roster with the curiosity of the rube southerner unfamiliar with the dazzling, singing rhythm of the foreign names I would find in the New York telephone directory in later life. I shivered with pleasure as I got ready to play boys with real immigrant attachments in the rush of consonants to their names: Gamaramuller, Florial, Garsricus, and Walaszek. Basketball had always been a game for the poor kids of the big cities, the game where the boys of immigrant families could prove themselves while navigating their ways along the mean streets and fierce ghettos whether they were Jews, Irish, Poles, Lithuanians, or the soon-to-be-dominant black kids.

There was another thing I knew about the Columbia players that cut my pride deeply: I knew that their team was a lot smarter than my team and that only two or three of my teammates could have cut the mustard with SAT scores high enough to be accepted by Columbia, and I certainly was not one of them. Because I was worried that my attendance at The Citadel would hurt my career as a novelist, I was keenly aware of the other young men and women of my generation who shared my ambition and were in the process of getting fabulous, life-changing educations at the Ivy League schools that would open up deep, unbridgeable abysses between their preparation for the lives of writers and mine. My jealousy of the whole Ivy League was the driving force that fueled my secret descent into class war against the Lions before we took to the court against them.

Our team came out cold and tentative. It was the first time I had ever started two straight games, and I was as puzzled by it as Tee Hooper. Because I had never been called on when I was not supposed to break up a press at the end of a game, I still felt unwanted on the court, a ghostly presence filling in for Hooper until Thompson could forgive him for whatever crime poor Hooper had committed. Columbia's team were all Yankee boys, and they knew how to play the game. In the first half we played sluggishly, as though we were wearing wingtip shoes. Nothing flowed, nothing seemed to come out of our offense. Mel screamed and screamed, but I was shutting him out now and not listening to him. It seemed to me we were getting throttled again, but I tried to keep myself loose and in the flow of things.

I give myself up to the anonymous reporter from the AP who wrote about that game: “The Bulldogs were quick to get into foul trouble in the first half, drawing seven in the first six minutes of the game. The Lions, however, had trouble hitting the free throws when they had the chance to break away early. With the Lions missing, the Bulldogs stayed close, until with about ten minutes left to play in the half, the Lions pulled away. Two field goals and a pair of free throws by Roger Walaszek suddenly stretched a four-point lead into 10 points.

“DeBrosse countered with a field goal, but John Dema made good on a three-point play and Walaszek got consecutive baskets while limiting the cadets to one free throw. That gave the Ivy League their biggest lead of the half—13 points at 35–22.

“With about three minutes left to play in the half, the Bulldogs came alive. Bill Zinsky got three points, while DeBrosse got two field goals. With three seconds in the half, Pat Conroy got inside for a shot that closed the gap six points 39–33 at the half.”

I do not remember one moment of this game just described, not even my heady arrival in the narrative account of the game with three seconds left. Its vanishing is complete and unrecoverable and I can add no credibility to this description of a game where I was both witness and participant. What I do remember was something that happened in the second half.

Back to the unnamed reporter: “The Bulldogs had stretched their lead to five (the boys had come back) on goals by Kroboth, Conroy, and Mohr before the Lions came back to tie the score 53–53. But Kroboth went to work again and got five points, while Mohr and Conroy added two each and the Bulldogs moved ahead by seven. Then lightning struck in the form of a Columbia press, and the Bulldogs' lead disappeared. The Lions put eight straight points up in the board before Mohr finally broke the streak with a pair of free throws. Hoffman put the Lions up by one with a long jumper, but Zinsky hit a free throw with 50 seconds to play to make it 65–65 and send the game into overtime.”

It is the moment of the lightning strike that I recall with fierce clarity. All game long, the Lions had thrown at us a 1–3–1 half-court zone press that took some adjusting to since I had only seen full-court presses at the end of games. I loved breaking up full-court presses, but the half-court press presented the obvious physical problem of less space. The Columbia guards were taller and longer-limbed than John DeBrosse and me, and it took a while to figure out that if I broke by the guard, I was quick enough to break through the three-man alignment that would close in on me driving the lane with their center coming out to meet me, leaving Mohr open in the middle with Zinsky and Kroboth on the wings.

But in the last minutes of lightning, the Columbia Lions had made a wickedly effective adjustment on their half-court press. They brought the other guard out to meet me at the half-court line, forcing me to pass it to the wide-open John DeBrosse on my left wing. As soon as I threw to DeBrosse, the Lions swarmed him. I tried to run to DeBrosse, but Walaszek defended the passing lanes well, his long arms flailing as John kept looking for help from the big men who were having trouble of their own. It was only after four straight turnovers and eight straight points that I realized Columbia
wanted
me to throw it to DeBrosse and had adjusted their defense to make sure I did.

The next time down the court when I burst across the line, they tried to trap me in the corner, but we little guys who know how to dribble are hard to trap. I went through them again, getting quickly into the lane and forcing their center to decide whether to block my layup or stay back on Mohr. He came at me and I slipped the ball to Danny, who would have scored if a forward had not recovered and fouled him hard. The ball never went to DeBrosse again with that devastating press on. But the press was the place where I was born to be, and the Columbia Lions had run the best one I'd ever come up against.

I am looking at a clipping of this game played so long ago where my name is in the headlines for the first time in my college career: “
CONROY GIVES CITADEL VICTORY
.”

The article continues, “Pat Conroy dropped in four free throws in the final minute of an overtime period here last night to give The Citadel a 74–71 victory over Columbia University in the consolation game of the Tampa Invitational Basketball Tournament.

“In the championship game, unbeaten North Carolina, ranked no. 3 in the nation, downed Florida State 81–54. It was the seventh straight victory for the Tar Heels.” (I include this only because there is no other place that poor Conroy's name is associated one paragraph away from the Carolina Tar Heels.)

“Danny Mohr hit five points in overtime before fouling out. Then, with the Lions trailing by one point and a minute to play, Conroy hit both shots in a one-and-one situation to put the Bulldogs ahead.

“After a Columbia shot, Conroy was fouled again and hit two shots. The victory broke a three-game losing streak for the Bulldogs and sent them home for Christmas with a 3–5 record.”

Hooper and Bridges looked poleaxed and dumbstruck after the game. When Rat handed out the stat sheet as we dressed, I was surprised that Tee had only scored a single shot and Bridges had failed to score. These were the two most superb athletes on our team.

         

M
Y BEST FRIEND AT
B
EAUFORT
H
IGH
S
CHOOL,
Bruce Harper, had recently become engaged to the dazzling Melinda Lee Crowe of Tampa, and Melinda had invited me to a party after the game. I asked Melinda if I could bring along my team, and she said that would be wonderful because the party was thrown by some Converse girls home for the holidays. So my teammates gathered, handsome in their coats and ties, at a Tampa house, and I saw them dancing with pretty girls and mingling with other college students. I would listen to Bruce talk to Melinda and try to memorize the words that college boys said to their fiancées. I still turned mute when girls drew near me. The vastness of my shyness distressed me. Melinda's face was as pretty as those profiled beauties in the stillness of cameos. Bruce was handsome and elegant in his movements. I would be in their wedding the following summer in Tampa. I will always remain grateful for Melinda asking my team to that party. It was the only normal college life we experienced in the year I am writing about, the only party we attended as a team.

Al Kroboth sat down and played the piano with great skill, and I could not have been more surprised if he had made me a dress. My teammates, I thought, what lovely young men. We gathered around the piano and young women drifted toward us. It all felt so right and it would never happen again.

CHAPTER 16

CHRISTMAS BREAK

F
OR A
C
ITADEL BASKETBALL PLAYER, THE
C
HRISTMAS BREAK WAS A
disturbing, fragmented descent into nightmare. Mel Thompson will always rise up in Dickensian glory as my Ghost of Christmas Ruin. After The Citadel, I treated Christmas as though it were some fierce, gathering storm roaring up out of the Bahamas, the eye of the hurricane ineluctably headed for my front door, already named “Mel” by the National Weather Service. My basketball coach made Scrooge look like some prancing jim-dandy sentimentalist about Christmas. Few of my teammates can discuss Christmastime without wincing, without a searing memory of downfall and pain.

In the Tampa airport, the managers, Al Beiner (“Albino”) and Rat, handed out our plane tickets home for the holidays. Mel huddled with us and warned, “Don't play around too much when you go home and don't eat too much of Mama's home cooking. Because you know that food might end up on the gym floor when I get you back on Christmas Day.”

For reasons still unclear to me, Mel always made us come back Christmas Day for a vicious practice at four o'clock in the afternoon. All of Mel's practices were hard, but the Christmas Day practice became the stuff of legend. Dick Martini used to tell of a Christmastime lunch where Mel made sure his team ate their fill, then suddenly called for a surprise practice and told them to get to the gym and dress out immediately. Martini recalled that he had never seen so many boys puking at the same time when the practice ended.

I flew on Delta to the inevitable stop in Atlanta, where I made my annual Christmas phone call to Terry Leite, a girl I had gone to Beaufort High School with, and who had come down for the Graduation Hop my freshman year. I, of course, had fallen for this beautiful, fascinating girl, and I think she had fallen for me a little bit. I wrote scores and scores of love letters to her when she attended St. Mary's College in South Bend, Indiana. Terry saved all these feverish, show-offy letters and recently let me use them to see a glimpse of the mysterious boy I was when I wore a Citadel uniform. Reading them made me understand perfectly well why Terry would choose to marry a Notre Dame man rather than me. But they were also the writings of a sweet boy trying to learn the mysteries of the way to a young woman's secret heart.

When Terry answered the phone that Christmas, she told me that she was going steady with a Notre Dame man in law school, and they were planning to become engaged the following summer. I congratulated her and told her I hoped that she would find great happiness in her life. She would not, and neither would I. I mention the annual Christmas phone call to Terry Leite because it represented the sum total of my sexual life over the course of three holiday seasons. I looked forward to those calls.

         

M
Y FATHER, RESPLENDENT IN HIS
Marine Corps uniform, met me at Washington National Airport and drove me to Falls Church, Virginia, where I would spend Christmas in still another strange house. My family had moved in late summer and I had written letters to another address I had not seen. Dad was never friendly or bantering with me when I was in college. I kept my hatred of him in a tight hermitage—I was his Northern Ireland; he was my England. We rode for ten miles without saying a single word. I turned on the radio, found a station I liked, and he snapped it off.

Finally, he spoke. “Your team is shit.”

“We're having a little trouble getting it together, Dad.”

“You're shit. I saw the George Washington box score. You scored three big ones. I wouldn't even let 'em put my name in the box score if I only scored three.”

“We won that game, Dad,” I said. “By three points, I think,” I added cautiously.

“You couldn't carry my jock. I ate guys like you alive for breakfast,” he said, looking at me for a reaction. He got none.

As a small boy I remember my father taking over every basketball game he played in, an intimidating figure who taunted enemy crowds with angry gestures and fighting words. My mother once moved my sister Carol and me out of a crowd of sailors who were screaming obscenities at my father, who was jawing back to them with gusto. My father was the dirtiest basketball player I have ever seen. It pleased him every time he heard me say it.

In silence we drove another five miles before Dad said, at a light, “Florida State kicked the shit out of you.”

“They sure did, Dad.”

“You get in?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Score any?”

“Twelve, Dad.”

“Bullshit. Somebody on Florida State's team would've had to die during the game for you to get twelve.”

“Got lucky, Dad,” I said, staring straight ahead.

“You beat those Ivy League pussies, though,” he said.

“Columbia University.”

“Ivy League. There's pussy basketball at its best.”

“Bradley at Princeton, Dad. Can't forget that.”

“You get in?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Score any?”

“Twelve, sir.”

My father looked at me to see if I was lying, then said, “Bullshit. They must have stunk up the floor.”

“Got lucky, Dad.”

“Hooper break a leg? He's the one who beat you out.”

“He's been in a slump, Dad. Just a sophomore. He'll be back. He's great.”

“He'll beat you out again. He'll sense that you're a loser.”

Thus I received my annual Christmas pep talk from my father, who drove the rest of the way home in silence.

At home, my four younger brothers and two sisters engulfed me in a wave of sweetness that always felt cleansing and right. I hugged my mother, her eyes set with all the charm and hysteria and unhappiness that house could produce in its terrifying inadequacy. The family had picked up two tailless, feral cats named Wart and Halloween, who hid in the closets and under sofas, periodically lunging out to claw or bite a passing bare foot. The pets were perfect metaphors for the damage being passed out all around. I felt the familiar tension of this house where none of the children felt safe. None of them were; nor was the wife.

“Show Pat his room,” Mom told my brother Mike, who was about ten years old then, and some of the kids giggled.

“You can't expect to have the best room, Pat. You're not part of the family now. You're in college,” my mom said.

One of the great surprises I had when I went away to The Citadel was that I never had a room or a bed in my parents' house again. I followed Mike down the stairs to an unfinished basement where Mike had his bed. It was cheap and ugly and degrading to him.

“Oh, this is swell,” I said.

“It gets better,” my brother said. “Guess where you're sleeping?”

“I haven't a clue,” I said, shaking my head, looking around the room for another bed.

“In here,” Mike said, opening up his closet door. He reached up and grabbed two coat hangers and flung out both his hands in opposite directions. Then Mike pointed to a hole cut into the pasteboard large enough for a dog to get through. Mike low-crawled through the hole and I followed behind him. A shaft of light from a half window revealed a hidden, unfinished section of the basement. One of the tailless cats, Halloween, shrieked in the shadows, leapt at my foot, and bit me on the ankle. The cat then shot through the opening and raced under Mike's bed. In my hideaway there was an old skinny mattress on the floor that Mike had dragged in there only that morning. There were no lamps, no lightbulbs, no electricity, or no furniture of any kind. The mattress smelled like dirty sweat socks.

“Nice room, Mama,” I said to my brother. “Nice fucking room.” And my brother fell on top of the mattress giggling. I joined him in the stifled, softened laughter of children who grew up in dangerous houses. I was home for the holidays.

         

C
HRISTMAS MORNING WAS THE ONLY TIME OF
the year when you could be absolutely sure that my father would not slap you. My two baby brothers, Tim and Tom, wrestled me awake on the dank mattress at four in the morning, begging me to get up and go upstairs, so they could begin unwrapping their presents. The house tingled with the buzz and excitement of young children, and my mother had already put the coffee on at 4
A
.
M
.

“Good morning, Pat,” my father said, his voice full of goodwill. Christmas transformed even The Great Santini, and for one day of the year, he masqueraded as a real father. He sang out the name on the first gift, which always went to the youngest child. “This one's for a little kid named Toooooom. From Santa Claus.” And a loud cheer would come up from the seven Conroy kids. It was the one day of the year we seemed to have something—to have everything. All the collected madness of my family took the morning off and let us feel like something normal and mainstream. I soaked up the glimmer of the disorderly piles of wrapping paper, glittering bulbs, and strung lights, the streaming tinsel weaving silver fingers through the ceiling-high fir tree, and the precious noise of joyous children, happy among their gaudy pile of gifts. It seemed so healthy and ordinary, so unlike us, addicts of chaos and angst.

When my parents opened my presents to them, I held my breath. As always, I had little money to spend for their gifts, but this year I thought I had lucked out. At the Tampa Invitational, the tournament committee had given each player a standing pen set and a white electric radio with plaques proclaiming that he had been a participant in the tournament. I coveted both gifts. Because I wanted to be a writer, the seriousness of that pen set, so erect and reputable, seemed almost mystical in importance to me. Because I did not own a radio, the tournament committee had brought the gift of music to my life.

But I thought the pen set would look good on my father's desk in Quantico, and that he would call other Marines into his office to display proudly what his son had given him for Christmas. Since Dad had played college basketball and I had followed in his footsteps, I thought the gift would link both us and our destinies as athletes and serve as some laurel of connection. “See what my boy got me, General. Yeh, he was in a holiday tournament down in Tampa. Yeh, the Tar Heels, the Seminoles, and some Ivy League school. Kid got twenty-four in two games. Wanted me to have this.” I could visualize my father having those talks with his colleagues in the corps.

Likewise, I thought my mother could put the radio in the kitchen and listen to the classical music station while she did her housework. I thought she would think of me every time she read the plaque or heard the music with her hands in dishwater. It seemed like an act of generosity to surrender something I coveted so deeply. I was trying to turn myself into a young man who knew how to make the most correct and faultless gesture. I would link my mother and father to the disturbances of my love for them by giving up the two gifts that meant the most to me.

My mother first opened the portrait I had paid two dollars for in New Orleans. I saw her study it, then frown slightly as she said, “Who is it, Pat?”

“It's supposed to be me,” I said.

My mother held it into the air and my brothers and sisters cracked up all around me. I could see even more clearly now than I did in New Orleans that the drawing was a buffoonish caricature of my face.

“It's lovely,” she said, but could not help laughing. “How much did you pay for it?”

“Two bucks.”

“Son, you got taken for a ride.”

“So did Barney.” Thirty years later I would learn that Dave Bornhorst had enough sense not to give his mother his own ridiculous portrait.

My father finished opening the pen set and I saw him inspecting it. At the same time, my mother removed the white radio from its box. She seemed very pleased.

“They gave us that radio and that pen set for participating in the tournament.”

“It's lovely,” my mother said.

Dad said, “So it didn't cost you one centavo, pal. El Cheapo rides again.”

“Your father means thank you, Pat,” Mom said. “He really likes it.”

“What time does your plane leave for Charleston, jocko?” Dad asked.

“Eleven hundred hours, Dad.”

My brother Jim said, “Dad, can we go to the airport with Pat?”

“Negative,” my father answered.

“Please, Dad,” Kathy pleaded.

“That's negative,” he repeated.

“Everybody help me clean up this mess,” my mother said, inspecting the paper carnage of slain, opened gifts.

“That's affirmative. Let's police this area.”

An hour before we left for the plane, I took a huge box loaded with torn gift wrapping and broken ribbons to the front curb. My mother leaned out the front door and shouted, “Check through that stuff, Pat. Make sure none of the kids lost one of their presents in that mess.” Then she turned and went back inside.

I sifted through the torn, balled-up paper, but hit something solid at the bottom of the box. It was the pen set I had given my father for Christmas. Wrapping it in paper, I sneaked it into the house and placed it in the bag I had already packed for the trip to Charleston. I never summoned up the courage in my father's lifetime to ask him if he threw that pen set away on purpose or lost it due to negligence. I would never see the white radio again. But I kept that wonderful pen set for years and wrote my second short story with the pen as well as all the poems published my senior year and the senior essay I turned in that May. I took my father's castaway gift and turned it into language and stories as I would one day do against him.

After I said goodbye to Mom and the kids, Dad drove me to the airport in silence. When we pulled in front of the Delta terminal, he said, “We're here. Get out.”

I reached behind me and brought my bag out of the backseat. He offered me his hand and said, “I bet Hooper beats you out.”