My Losing Season (24 page)

“He's good, Dad.”

“No one ever beat your old man out. No one,” he said, squeezing my hand harder. “You know what you ain't got?”

“What's that, Dad?”

“The killer instinct.”

“Bye, Dad. Merry Christmas,” I said, moving quickly into the terminal. My father was wrong about me. I had the killer instinct, but I called it something else. I called it my first novel. I called it
The Great Santini
. It would put a cruise missile into his cockpit that would change my father's life forever. At the end of the novel, I killed the father. I had the killer instinct but it would take different forms with me than it had with Don Conroy.

         

P
RACTICE BEGAN PROMPTLY AT 1600 HOURS
and it was a killer. Coach Thompson kept yelling that he was going to sweat the Christmas turkey out of us, but none of us had been able to eat Christmas dinner with our families. There was a strange new vanity to his raving. What my team needed was coaching and teaching and praise; what my team received once more was contemptuousness, rage, and abuse. The Christmas practices were a nightmare, a plebe system, one more boot camp run by one more sadist who drove us like dogs until we dropped from exhaustion and the dry heaves. Since the campus was closed down, there were no time constraints on Mel, and the sessions could be as long as he wanted them to be. The Christmas Day practice lasted three and a half hours. One of us had to puke before he would stop. In the first days back, we joked about selecting a designated puker. After that, we quit joking about anything. Those were dark, terrible days made worse by our utter isolation from the world. But that first practice was the worst, the most driven by shock and despair. I still dread Christmas with every cell in my body. Mel Thompson killed it for me.

I had a great surprise waiting for me that first practice. For the first time in my varsity career, I was made a permanent member of the Blue Team. I felt like an absolute traitor to my Green Weenies when I turned my jersey inside out and wore the color I had come to despise as an agent of my humiliation as a basketball player. I was so completely committed to the idea of the Green Weenies that it shook me up to wear the enemy colors. The first Blue Team scrimmage brought me together with DeBrosse, Mohr, Zinsky, and Bridges. For reasons unknown to me, Tee Hooper's demotion and humiliation would continue indefinitely. Hooper's face could not mask his terrible pain. Long and thin and graceful, Tee would look like a single exposed nerve in all that December darkness. I had left my team, the Green Weenies, to join an unteam. When I put on the blue jersey, I did not realize that I was a marked man. It put me between the crosshairs of my coach, the one who seemed to envy the players who composed his starting five.

Mel began the Christmas practice in a black mood made fouler by a phone call he received from Greg Connor. Greg's mother had driven him to O'Hare from the Illinois farm country where Greg's father was a veterinarian who spent his life among midwestern herds of cattle, hogs, and horses. A combination of bad weather and unforeseeable traffic delays made them late for Greg's flight to Charleston. Greg had called Coach Thompson and explained his predicament and was surprised when he realized that Mel thought he was lying, that Greg had conjured up the story so he could spend an extra day with his family. Mel talked about Connor's absence as though Greg had strangled a show dog.

The following day we started what Mel called “the two-a-day.” We would be on the court at nine in the morning, practice for three and a half hours, then go back to the visiting team room to sleep, be awakened by the managers at 1515, be on the court by 1600 hours, then released at 1930.

“Conroy,” Mohr said to me recently, “we were on the basketball court for seven hours a day. We didn't get breakfast. We got these shitty box lunches for lunch and supper. An apple. Two baloney sandwiches. A Coke. A bag of potato chips. A Snickers bar. Zip. That's it. Sometimes we lucked out and got ham and cheese.”

“I remember you and Bridges running all the time.”

“We'd get into fights under the board. Mel would scream and scream at us to get tougher, push harder, fight to get the ball. Tempers flared. Doug and I would punch at each other in frustration. Then Thompson would scream, ‘Start running.' It was the worst time of my life as a ballplayer. For all of us, I bet. There was no reason for it, Conroy. No reason in the world. He wanted to break us and he did. On Christmas Day, he ran you and me for two hours before practice. Because we didn't own a sports coat.”

In those Christmas practices, Mel screamed at me every time I took an outside shot or drove the lane, which pretty much took care of the full arsenal in my offensive game.

“Pass the damn ball, Conroy. Quit shooting it. Get the ball to the big men inside or set something up for DeBrosse. You contribute nothing to this team when you shoot.”

The phrase “Don't shoot, Conroy” I carry as both tattoo and motto from that dispiriting time. My teammates and I grew quieter and less playful and tolerant of one another as each day passed with agonizing slowness. We ached and hurt and fought each other in scrimmages that sometimes ran over two hours long. Our heads hung in exhaustion in the shower room, and I once saw Mohr, Bridges, and Zinsky taking showers, all of them leaning on the wall for support. They looked like boys who had nothing left to give, as though someone had let the air out of their hearts.

But the next day awaited them and the next day and the next. At the end of every practice, the team would emerge to pure December darkness. At night, the Citadel campus can exert a field of disturbance and eeriness that can unsettle even the most fiercely loyal alumnus, but The Citadel during Christmastime, emptied out of cadets and purpose, was as surreal and barren as a moonscape. The barracks were dark, the library dark, Bond Hall dark, darkness everywhere. Starlight, moonlight lit the sidewalk that led to the squalid dormitory room that poor visiting teams used.

One memory stands out from the Christmas ordeal. Every night at three in the morning a freight train would pass ten feet away from the visiting team room. Its lights would illuminate the room and its whistle would blast in the night. Our cots would shake and jiggle until the caboose would pass the second-story window and the lion would roar in the zoo in Hampton Park.

On the first night back, it took us by surprise and woke us all in confusion and terror. The room filled up with the profanity of exhausted boys, but laughter followed quickly when Kroboth's mocking, New Jersey–accented voice cried out, “Merry Christmas, guys, and to all a good night.”

Finally, on New Year's Day, our ordeal was over. Jacksonville was coming in the next night. Mel believed he had made us tougher. I knew different. He had cut my team's throat.

CHAPTER 17

JACKSONVILLE TO RICHMOND

I
N THE
N
EWS AND
C
OURIER
ON
J
ANUARY 2, 1967, THE SPORTSWRITER
Evan Bussey wrote, “The Citadel basketball team will try to pick up where it left off before the Christmas holidays when it plays Jacksonville University in the Armory.

“Game time is 8:15.

“The Bulldogs have four men in double figures as they have averaged 79 points a game. The leading scorer is senior center Danny Mohr with a 14.5 mark, followed closely by John DeBrosse with a 14.1 average. A pair of sophomores, Al Kroboth and Bill Zinsky, are the other two in double figures with 11.1 and 12.7 averages respectively.

“The Bulldogs got a boost in the last few games before the holidays from Pat Conroy, a 5-11 senior guard. It was Conroy who iced the victory over Columbia by dropping in two free throws in the closing minutes of an overtime period. Conroy is averaging 8.1 points per game.”

         

T
HE
J
ACKSONVILLE AND
G
EORGIA
S
OUTHERN
games were
the worst two I played in college. I could smell the stench of my own game as I disconnected from the game-possessed boy who loved basketball as he loved nothing else. My legs had lost all spring and freshness and dash, and I played point guard as though I were in a coma. Every time I crossed midcourt with the ball I would hear Mel yell at me, “Don't shoot, Conroy.” And despite my strange epiphany in New Orleans, I had begun listening to my coach again. In each contest, I scored only a single free throw. For much of both games, I rode the bench with the Green Weenies as Tee Hooper replaced me and played brilliantly. His slashing, passionate style brought my team to life.

Against Jacksonville, Tee led the Green Weenies to a dazzling rally with Zipper and Brian “Bean” Kennedy and Connor all over the boards and flying down the lanes on every fast break. But Jacksonville pulled away in the final two minutes, defeating us 87–80.

But let the sportswriter tell the tale: “Finally in an effort to shake some life into the lethargic Bulldogs, Coach Thompson went to the bench with about 10 minutes to play.

“The starters, all except DeBrosse, found themselves watching from the sidelines as Brian Kennedy, Greg Connor, Tee Hooper, and Bob Cauthen scratched and clawed their way back into the game. It wasn't pretty, but it was effective as the huge Dolphin lead slowly melted.”

The translation of this is our Green Weenies were kicking the hell out of their Green Weenies, and I felt like a deserter for being on the bench when my real team was on the floor. The malaise of the Blue Team had infected me like some insupportable virus. I felt humpbacked and aghast at my play. Hurt of spirit, I found myself consumed with self-loathing and haunted by the words of my father that Tee Hooper would sense that I was a loser and find taking my place on the first team an easy task.

When I guarded the six-foot-four Wayne Kruer, I had never felt quite so overmatched by an opponent and he was the first guard ever to post me up under the basket. My defense stunk, my offense stunk, and I could barely get my muscles to respond to commands I sent them in the urgency I felt to keep Kruer away from the baskets.

I was even worse when we played against Georgia Southern in Statesboro a couple of nights later. In fact, I think I lost my team that game with my inexcusable, cowardly play. Some paralysis gripped me, and I went through the motions without inspiration or flair or any sense of mission. Hoping to make something happen for myself—myself, not my team—in desperation I drove past the ethereally gifted Jim Rose, a two-time little All-American, and I saw the center Jim Seeley move off Dan Mohr to intercept me leaving Mohr wide open in the lane. But so frantic was I to join the game in any way that I broke every rule of every point guard in the history of the game and did not get it to the open man. Dan would have had a layup but I elected, in an act of pure distress, to try to take it to the hoop myself. Because there is such justice in sport, Mr. Seeley rammed the ball down my throat and sent it sailing into the stands. For thirty-two years, I have felt lousy about not getting Dan the ball, but I was in the dead center of the two worst games I would ever have as a basketball player and I did not feel like myself. In those first two matchups of January, I was a disgrace to my college, my coaches, my teammates, and myself. I let all of them down and we lost those two games because of my incompetence. I had died as a basketball player and no one had bothered to show me the results of the autopsy. In my death, Tee Hooper had found something in himself, and I got to witness his own resurrection as the bold, hellbent nature of his game made its reappearance. He was all over the court against Georgia Southern, flamelike, intense, relentless. We were twenty-one points down at one time, but my team—not me—my team fought back and we lost by one in overtime, 79–78.

Dan Mohr played a magnificent game against Georgia Southern and displayed his immense gifts under the boards all night. His shot was so soft that night that the action looked like a transfer of pillows. He pulled down thirteen rebounds against bigger players from Georgia Southern. It was a joy to watch him and to know him and to have him as a teammate. That game demonstrated how good Dan Mohr was against terrific competition and how amazing his whole senior year could have been if Mel had not crushed his spirit. Mohr had the best game of his season, scoring twenty-five points. Jim Rose ate me alive and his game had a strange sweet grace to it and his jump shot was picture-perfect.

On the bus back to Charleston, I sat on the back seat trying to beat down a sense of hopelessness I had not been able to shake since the Christmas Day practice. Later experience would teach me that I had entered one of those black depressions that would long plague my adult life and bring me to my knees with alarming frequency. I could summon no fire or energy or passion, and my body felt more fatigued and lifeless than at any other time. That Tee had beaten me out for my position I could accept, but that he had done so without the fight of his life made me writhe with shame. In darkness, I let Georgia pass into South Carolina and I thought about quitting the team, telling Coach Thompson that I did not deserve a scholarship and did not deserve to be on the floor with these much finer players. I could no longer bear to hear Mel's words, “Conroy, don't shoot.”

Then I heard the voice again, the one that had sprung alive in New Orleans, the one I would come to call my writer's voice, the one that would come to me when I sat down to write my books. “Hey, pal,” it said, “I thought I told you not to listen to a single thing Mel Thompson says to you. Let's go over it again. He's bad for you. He gets under your skin. He lowers your morale. Got it? Do I make myself clear? One more time. Tune Mel out. Play the game because you love it. You're thinking too much. Don't think. Play. Get into the rhythm of the game and let it flow through you. Be natural. Be loose. Get yourself back. You've lost yourself.”

Again what surprised me most about the return of this interior voice was that it sounded much like that of my father. It was a voice that would come and go for years until I realized what it was, the truest part of me, the most valiant flowering of my character, a source of pure light and water streaming out of unexplored caverns deep within me. Unlike me, this voice knew nothing of shyness or reserve or shame or despair. This voice rang with authority and spoke with a blazing, resonant accuracy, with the clearness and certainty of church bells heard on bright Sundays. It riveted me with its absoluteness of vision, its breathtaking assurance. It left me as quickly as it had come, and as I sat in darkness, the strangeness of the encounter and its eerie nature of intervention and miraculous visitation gave me great pause. Because I was taking a course in abnormal psychology and because my family produced psychotics the way some families pass down freckles, I wondered if that unbidden voice was a sign of paranoid schizophrenia. But the voice offered advice too good to have any connection with mental illness. The voice knew what was good for me.

In the days before the Richmond game the following Saturday night, I again practiced with the Green Weenies and Tee practiced with the Blue Team. But since the return of the voice on that bus ride home, I was on the mend and ready to do battle again. With the University of Richmond coming to Charleston, the guards knew that the great Johnny Moates was coming to town. He was the guard at Camp Wahoo the previous summer who reacted with fury when I was the only camp counselor to take defense in the summer games seriously. At twenty-five points a game, Moates was one of the leading scorers in the nation.

As a Green Weenie again, I very comfortably helped the Weenies dismantle the poor Blue Team once more. Now I took a greater interest in how Mel would turn his scorn on one individual player, pick a victim out of the crowd and humiliate him before teammates. Mel had singled me out over Christmas because I had played three solid games in a row for my Citadel team, and Mel had noticed me for the first time in his life. As a Green Weenie, I was invisible. But as a starter, something in Mel's subconscious (a place I am sure my coach never traveled to or even booked a ticket to) stirred into life and the athlete that still lived within him became competitive with the young athletes on his team. Dan Mohr had made an inexcusable error of judgment—he had dared score twenty-five points against Georgia Southern and played a magnificent game. Because of that, Mel brought up the heavy guns to rain artillery fire at him during practice. Basketball players do not always notice these things, but novelists do. Mel would stop practice, then go after Mohr as though he hated him personally. “Mohr, you just don't give a damn. You don't care about getting the job done. You stand there in the middle like your feet were rooted to the floor. If you don't want to rebound, Mohr, I'll get someone in there who does.”

“Can't you see I'm giving it everything I got, Coach?” Dan said, but it came out pleading and whining, which infuriated Mel even further. “You want me to feel sorry for you, Mohr? Is that what you want? If that's what you want, you've come to the wrong place and the wrong guy. I want you to move your ass out of one spot and get to the boards. Kroboth's eating your jock. Every damn time. You're nothing but a can of corn.”

Mel's harsh words cut through Dan every practice, and all of his teammates carry with us the image of Dan's great hurt eyes staring down at his coach with disbelief and humiliation. But as the season wore on, the look in Root's eyes began to turn a darker shade of hatred.

On that Saturday night, I dressed for the first time since playing Loyola with the feeling that I had a small chance of starting. I had decided to put the Jacksonville and Georgia Southern games out of my mind and concentrate on playing well the next time I got a chance. As a senior I tried to say something to every player on the team before the game, upbeat words of praise or encouragement. I teased the sophomores and already felt a brotherly solidarity with the juniors. It would never be a happy locker room because locker rooms reflect more the personalities of the coaches than the players.

When Mel entered the locker room with his ritualistic walk before the Richmond game, he surprised the team again by adding my name to the starting lineup. It was a shock to me and a blow to Tee Hooper, who had worked his tail off in practice to get ready for Moates. Tee looked sucker-punched and when I caught his eye, I shrugged my shoulders then lifted my palms up, letting him know that I knew an injustice had been done.

After warmups, I joined the refs at midcourt as captain. Always feeling like an impostor, I stood with the two refs waiting for the Richmond captain Johnny Moates to get out of his warmup pants. As we waited, I said to the two men who had spent the last four years reffing in my games, “Gentlemen, I heard Johnny Moates calling both of you rotten bastards in the visiting team locker room.”

They grinned, then one of them asked, “Pat, what did you do about it?”

“Beat the living shit out of the rotten son-of-a-bitch,” I said, deadpan.

Johnny never knew why the two men were laughing when he and I shook hands. It was an honor to be on the same court as Johnny Moates that year. But what began as an honor Mr. Moates turned into a challenge.

Yet it was a night when my fate turned bright as a basketball player of marginal skills and limited prospects. Poor Tee's fate as a sophomore would turn to dust on the same night, and his boyish, handsome face would quiver with anguish and incomprehension for the rest of this trying season. I would become the unwilling agent of the destruction of Tee's year. I would be the starting point guard for the rest of the season for reasons both unclear and unfair.

As we broke from the huddle around Mel and took to the court with the roar of the cadets greeting us, DeBrosse said to me, “You've got Moates. I'll take McCann. If Ukrop comes in, I'll take him.”

“Thanks tons, DeBrosse,” I said. “I get the All-American. You get the midgets.”

         

I
N GATHERING THE FRAGMENTS
and raw materials to
pull this strange-feeling book together, I was fascinated to learn about the gauzy indistinctness of memory itself. I have lost so much from that long-ago season, but I wish I could forget that I played that year against Johnny Moates. I wish I could forget I ever heard of Johnny Moates. That night he taught me invaluable lessons in the humility that games grant to the lesser order of athletes when they test their skills against those of higher order. Moates had a game of high-arching sublimity. He was unstoppable that night, although I battled him every time he brought the ball downcourt and fought him with every ounce of strength I possessed. He taught me that I had not learned how to play defense that previous summer at Camp Wahoo when I held him scoreless during one of those free-for-all counselors games. No, that summer I had learned the importance of playing defense, of putting as much heart into stopping your own man from scoring as on being an offensive threat yourself. From Wahoo, I had gone to Duke and listened to Vic Bubas and Chuck Daly and Tom Carmody talk of the great courage it took to play tough defense all the time. At a basketball camp at Dartmouth College, I heard a young Rollie Massimino teach the intricacies of full-court pressing zones, a slim-as-a-blade high school coach mesmerizing a gymful of young boys by using me as an example to teach the kids. “Get in your defensive stance, Conroy,” and I did. “Get your ass touching the ground, Conroy. Get low, son. Like a dog with worms.” Later I would watch his career progress with pleasure and enjoyed telling my game-loving friends that I knew him long before he ripened into Dick Vitale. All the coaches preached about the virtues of defense that summer and I thought I had taken those lessons to heart. I had not reckoned on the salient fact that the whole Richmond team would work to get Johnny Moates open.