My Losing Season (30 page)

In the roar of the crowd I heard a faint cry of “Pat Conroy's my nephew” coming from my indefatigable Uncle Joe, but Aunt Evelyn put the clamps on him once again, to my great relief. Mel was animated in the huddle. The game had excited him, and he screamed at us as though he liked us again. We led three times in overtime, but each time Jacksonville came back with a bucket to even the game. With less than a minute left, Kroboth committed an offensive foul. Jacksonville ran out the clock, then called time with four seconds remaining.

I knew what that play was going to be and so did everyone else who was present in the Jacksonville Coliseum. Fronting Wayne Kruer, I tried to prevent him from receiving the inbound pass from Alan Treece. Treece had to lob it over me and Kruer received the pass deep in his backcourt. Forcing him to his left, he took an off-balance jump shot, and it careened off the rim and went high on the backboard. In the drama of the last shot, one of my teammates forgot about the elusive Mr. Treece who was waiting under the boards by himself, and he tipped the ball in as the final buzzer sounded.

Treece's shot felt like a knife in the abdomen. I fell to my knees, exhausted and beaten and disillusioned in every cell of my body. I had been positive we were going to beat Jacksonville. The Dolphins' team and cheerleaders were mobbing Treece as Barney and Zipper helped me to my feet. Wayne Kruer sought me out to shake my hand, a gesture of sportsmanship I truly appreciated. As I walked toward the locker room, weaving through the jubilant crowd of Dolphin fans, Karen found me and planted a French kiss on me at center court. To say this act took me by surprise is understating my complete astonishment at finding this young woman's tongue in my mouth. My first thought was that Aunt Evelyn and my cousins had witnessed this and would report it in all of its salacious detail to my mother.

Karen then said, “You lied to me, Pat. You are a basketball star.”

“I'm not, Karen,” I said.

“You looked like one to me,” she said. “Can you go out?”

“I'll have to talk to my coach.”

“A girlfriend lent me her apartment at Jacksonville Beach,” she said.

When I reached the locker room, my team had begun the rituals of undressing. Some of the Green Weenies, notoriously fast dressers after a game, were in the showers already, but Connor was standing beside my locker.

“Conroy, when're you gonna ask Mel if we can go out on a date?”

“Let's give him some time, Greg,” I said, looking over at Mel and Little Mel as they spoke in disconsolate whispers to each other on a bench across the locker room. Mel looked more gaunt and haggard than he usually did. It was clear the game had taken its toll on him. I decided to shower and put on my uniform before I approached Mel about Connor's and my sex lives. Then disaster struck. My eyes were suddenly engulfed in an aura of cheap light, and I looked up in horror to see my Uncle Joe filming me and my naked and half-naked teammates in living color. Uncle Joe was well known in my family for filming the entire waking lives of his children. I cannot ever remember him when he was not sticking a camera into my face.

“I told you that you shouldn't mess with my Jacksonville Dolphins. The ol' Dolphins sure came through for the city by the St. Johns River tonight. Hey, Coach,” Uncle Joe said, turning the light from my astonished head to my coach's enraged one. “Hey, if you're going to cry about it, Coach, you're in the wrong profession, pal. Crybabies don't make good coaches, I can tell you that. . . .”

I went for the plug in the wall that Uncle Joe had found before he began his impromptu postgame shoot. I saw a look pass on Mel's face, and I thought he was rising up to kill my uncle, so I grabbed my uncle and my cousin Joey and ran them both out of the locker room. Outside, I kissed my aunt and hugged my cousins while trying to move them deeper and deeper into the coliseum. Before I went back to the shower room, my Uncle Joe said, “I saw your father play ball for the Navy Olympic team, Pat. He was never as good as you, and that's a promise.”

It was not true, but it's what my Uncle Joe said that night so long ago in Jacksonville. I am still grateful for his saying it. I went back to the locker room and heard the elephants again, and that alien sound so deep in the bowels of the coliseum did not augur well for the love life of Greg Connor.

After dressing I approached Mel who was smoking a cigarette outside the locker room. I was direct, and simply said, “Coach, a couple of the guys have dates tonight and wanted me to ask you if they could go out.”

“Good,” Mel said. “You asked me. Now go tell them no way in hell.”

“One of them's Greg Connor, Coach,” I said. “He hasn't had a date since he got to The Citadel.”

“Conroy, you deaf?” Mel said, his voice rising. “How can you even think about women after losing a close game like this? You guys need rest.”

“I think Greg's close to cracking, Coach,” I said. “The Citadel's getting to him.”

“You think I'm going to make any exceptions to the rules, Conroy?” Mel asked. “A rule's a rule for a reason.”

I walked across the gym to where Karen was waiting with the other cadets and their dates. Apologizing to Karen, I told her that there was a party over at a Citadel cadet's parents' house, and that it would be easy for her to find a date for the night. A year later, I heard that Karen had met another cadet that night and that he had gotten her pregnant and abandoned her.

When I went outside in the cold, I found Greg Connor pleading his case with Mel Thompson. Coach was shaking his head and Greg was looking more and more desperate. His voice sounded whiny and reed-thin as he fought for his right to spend some time with his pretty date. It was not until the team pulled into our unspeakable motel that I learned that Greg had actually brokered a deal with Mel. Our coach allowed Greg to sit with his date, out by the drained swimming pool on broken-down pool furniture, for one hour and one hour only.

Greg and I still remember this girl's beauty. Greg remembered her kindliness for even agreeing to the ridiculous stipulations of that undermined date. I looked out my window and saw Greg talking with great animation as this pretty young woman listened to him on a cold January night after he had just played the best basketball game of his life. At fifteen-minute intervals, Coach Ed “Little Mel” Thompson would come out to check on the two lovebirds, making sure they weren't having too much fun. The hour passed swiftly, and the pretty young woman walked out of Greg's life forever.

CHAPTER 22

WILLIAM AND MARY

I
N SECRET,
I
USED TO STUDY
M
EL
T
HOMPSON TO SEE IF
I
COULD FIGURE
out what made him so deeply feared and grudgingly respected by his team. From the beginning, I noted how easily Mel got along with other men, especially the sportswriters and sports information directors he met as we traveled around the league. He laughed easily and was garrulous without being coarse; his laughter rang through hallways after games when he had gathered reporters, coaches, and friends into his hotel room. Sometimes, I would eavesdrop beside a half-open door while Mel told side-splittingly funny tales of his brilliant career with the Wolfpack of North Carolina State. Relaxed among other males, Mel was a masterful host who seemed to have a real affinity for friendship. In those far-flung hotel rooms, made pungent by cigar smoke and good liquor, Mel Thompson was a different man when he was not with us.

We had a hard two-hour practice on Friday after the Jacksonville loss when William and Mary was coming into town the next day. “Hey, Mel. Give us a break. We've got to get up at reveille and march to breakfast with the Corps. How about a shoot-around on Friday?” I said to Root as we dressed for practice.

That Friday, Mel took off his whistle and took to the court among the Green Weenies. The Weenies were unbeatable by themselves, but they transformed themselves into a splendid basketball team when Mel Thompson of the Wolfpack took his formidable place at center. When I played for the Green Weenies and Coach played for my team, I looked like an All-American guard by getting him the ball every single time we came down the court.

“Catch, Coach,” I would say and put a pass into his waiting hands. He played the game like a bird of prey flying over a henhouse and he went for rebounds like it was a blood sport. When he played against the Blue Team that day, we did our best to raise our competitive fires against him. Whenever the ball went to Mel, five of us dropped off on him and DeBrosse and I hectored him like wrens tormenting a crow whenever he put the ball on the floor. Our big men fought him heroically for every rebound. Once when he went to the floor, all five of us jumped into the pileup beneath the basket. Although we played much harder when our coach scrimmaged against us, I still do not see the wisdom of having such a practice the night after we lost in Jacksonville, two hundred miles to the south.

         

T
HE
W
ILLIAM AND
M
ARY
I
NDIANS
looked descended from
a race of giants when our small lineup stood beside them with Al Kroboth jumping at center, Hooper, Bridges, and Mohr, three of the leading scorers in Citadel basketball history, with their butts planted on the bench. DeBrosse and I were accustomed to being the smallest men on the floor so it was only noteworthy when one of us was actually taller than the guy we were guarding. As usual, DeBrosse pointed to the taller guard for me to chase around and he took the smaller one for himself.

I would remember this night long and well because the pattern of the season would finally emerge for me, and my long apprenticeship as a point guard would be over at last. From the William and Mary game to my final game of the season, I had figured it out at last and, by God, I knew what I was doing and woe to the man who got in my way while I was doing it. For the first time in my career, I walked out to the basketball court brimming with confidence and a euphoria about the game. I had never dared utter these words to myself in my life, my enclosed and cutoff and malignantly apprehensive life had never once allowed me to take pleasure in whatever skills I brought to the sport of basketball. But as I stood waiting for the ref to toss the ball, the writer's voice screamed at me, “Hey, pal. Anybody noticed that you can play this fucking game? Have you noticed?”

The ball went into the air, the gifted Ron Panneton controlled the tip, and William and Mary jumped out to a 5–1 lead. Tee Hooper replaced Bill Zinsky early in the first half and our team suddenly caught fire because when Kroboth got me the ball on the wing and I took it to the other end of the court, I had DeBrosse on the left wing and the deerlike Hooper filling it on my right. It was the first time the three of us had been on the court together, and we soon discovered that we were the fastest backcourt in the Southern Conference. I played that game like there was a wind at my back. I played it reckless and proud and I drove their guards nuts trying to keep me out of the lane. They couldn't, they simply couldn't, and a great joy came upon me as I kept going by them, the flashy, cocksure, in-your-face point guard I had long dreamed of being.

Our big guys seemed lethargic on this night, but they fought hard under the boards and got the ball into my hands every time they pulled down a rebound. I would take off on the fly with the shouts of my teammates filling the air around me, and the roar of the Corps of Cadets lifting beneath me like a wall of pure noise. Lord, I could feel myself that night, every cell of my body ablaze, I could feel myself borne aloft with the high-geared, game-hardened energy of my bright and powerful youth. I felt charged up and well built and unstoppable. Were the boys from William and Mary better basketball players than I was? Yes, all of them, I could have said before the start of this intensely engaged game.

But now, on this night of January 29, 1967, I wanted and demanded for those William and Mary sons-of-bitches to prove it to me. If they were better, they'd stop me. If they stopped me, I'd get the ball to one of my teammates. But not many people stopped me, and no one stopped DeBrosse or Hooper either.

That night Tee Hooper played like he was delivering fire to mankind and his eyes revealed a kind of possession, almost an unleashed lunacy. It is a condition that is known in basketball circles as “being hot,” point guards being the court physicians who are supposed to diagnose this febrile yet volatile condition. In our amazing sport, wild in his lean beauty, Tee slashed through the William and Mary team and hit seven straight shots. His hands were hot, and I stoked his fire by feeding him the ball.

At one point Mel left his seat as I was bringing the ball across half-court and I heard him scream at me out of pure habit, “Don't shoot, Conroy.” I dribbled one more time then launched the longest jump shot of my humble-pie career as a jump shooter for The Citadel. Mel howled with frustration as the shot left my hand, but I had transformed myself into a confident young man that night, had infused my spirit with the balms that unquestioning, unhesitating assurance can bring to the heart of a player. The echo of his shouted “Don't shoot, Conroy” rang through the Armory as that shot popped through the basket thirty feet away with a sound like the net clearing its throat. The home crowd roared and the Corps rocked to their feet. Mel Thompson never told me not to shoot again. David Walker, Jack Downing, and Jim Rama were chasing me all over the court, but they were behind me much of that first half as I drove the lane again and again and led my team on fast breaks that fanned out in perfect order like they do on diagrams drawn on blackboards by famous coaches.

It was a night that John DeBrosse and I played like we had been born in the same crib together. I set picks the whole game that peeled his defender from John like a dog coming to the end of his rope. Slipping Johnny the ball, I gave him room for the one dribble I knew he had to have before he took his sweet and architecturally perfect jump shot. Unknown to either of us, John DeBrosse and I, lost in the wordless alchemy of our game's fearless chivalry, its coiled undaunted valiance, its resolute beauty, found that we trusted each other. From this game on, DeBrosse could not make a move without me knowing exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it. We had achieved congruence and we became gallant and courtly as our knowledge of each other deepened with every game. We made each other fearless, and teams began to have trouble with us, starting with William and Mary on this wondrous night that rises out of my past like a starship of hallelujahs and white light. The Bulldogs led by five at the half, and Tee and I had lit it up with fourteen points each. There had been wizardry to our guard play.

In the second half Dan Mohr finally got in the game, hit the first shot of the second half, and gave us some needed size on the inside. DeBrosse cooled off in the second half until the Bulldogs required a hero.

Back and forth we played hard against each other, and there was no question that this William and Mary team was wonderful. The teams were tied eight times, and the lead changed hands on seven occasions in the sprinting, fast-moving delight of that game. Then DeBrosse lit it up with six quick points and put in two calm free throws after he stole the ball and was hammered as he tried to lay the ball in our basket. Then the clock, which had been our enemy all year, became our friend as William and Mary tried to catch up to us in the desperate last minutes of play. DeBrosse had scored twenty-three, I had put up twenty-two, and Hooper eighteen. Forty-five points from his backcourt would put a smile on any coach's face. My Citadel team had beaten a better team than we were, and we did it going away.

I felt like a Roman candle when that buzzer went off and we had won the game, pulling away 85–77. I went into a state of exhilaration that felt like ecstasy. Before I knew what I was doing or why, I ran up into the stands where the Boo was helping his wife, Elizabeth, walk down to the floor.

“Colonel Courvoisie,” I said, “could I please have an overnight leave, sir?”

The colonel looked at me then said, “Sure. You were a star tonight. You earned it, bubba.”

I had rarely been called a star in my entire college basketball career, and I rewarded Colonel Nugent Courvoisie for making that statement by writing my first book about him and dedicating it to his wife.

After showering and putting on my dress grays, I walked out of Lesesne Gate and straight down to Rutledge Avenue where I turned south and walked toward the heart of the historic center on the coldest night of the year. I had no idea where I was walking or where I would spend the night. All I knew was that I could not bear the thought of returning to the barracks while feeling this elation, this sense of daring and swashbuckling bravado. I skipped and danced along the sidewalks. I sang Citadel fight songs out loud and must have appeared drunk to passersby and strangers. And it felt like intoxication—as though my heart had lit up with secret fires and my soul had fed on manna and sacred honey. I sparkled like a jewel on the ring finger of Charleston as I danced through its streets. I walked beneath the indrawn canopies of water oaks and mimosas in a city where I had not one person to visit or a home to walk into or a place to lay my head. But I could not let go of this bone-rattling optimism that had come over me since that buzzer sounded. I wanted to luxuriate in the waters of pure and free-floating human joy.

In the hushed streets near the College of Charleston I said in a whisper, “I'm going to write about you, Charleston. Listen to me. I'm going to write about you and you're going to like what I say. You are so beautiful. You're so beautiful. Thank you, Charleston. Thank you so much for being so beautiful.”

I found myself at the ticket counter asking the clerk when the next bus to Beaufort was. He told me it left in a couple of minutes. I bought a ticket and discovered it was near midnight. In a reverie, I rode that bus through darkness toward the town of Beaufort, the town that found me when I was fifteen years old and graciously let itself become my home. I wanted to tell my hometown that I was a college basketball star, at last.

At two in the morning, I walked down Boundary Street to Carteret. It was close to freezing as I watched the moon fingerpaint the Beaufort River with a long ribbon of silver. I was freezing and could not have cared less. I made the sign of the cross when passing by St. Peter's Catholic Church and picked up the pace as I crossed Bay Street and skipped on to the Lady's Island Bridge. I passed no cars and encountered no pedestrians. I was singing a Citadel fight song as loudly as I could when a voice rang out above me.

“Are you drunk, son?” the bridge tender demanded.

I laughed and said, “No, sir. I'm happy. I scored twenty-two points against William and Mary tonight. I was terrific. I was just terrific.”

I had never said anything like that in my entire life, and the words surprised me. Then I said something to the poor man that embarrassed me then and embarrasses me now. I said, “Sir, I'm going to put you into a book one day.”

He looked at me as though I had lost my mind. “You better get on home, boy.”

“I'm going to put you in a book,” I repeated. In 1995, I made good on that pledge when I placed a bridge tender in a scene in
Beach Music
.

I was walking toward the house of W. B. “King Tut” and Sarah Ellen Harper on Sunset Bluff. I did not want the evening to end just yet. I needed time to memorize what happiness felt like because I had experienced so little of it. Looking up into the night sky, I saw the Milky Way. I instantly thought of God and how I was afraid I was losing my faith in Him and the immensity of the fear and cowardice I felt when I thought of facing the world without Him. I was receiving the Eucharist every day of my life and fighting this war with faithlessness with every cell of my body, but I could feel the withdrawal taking place without my consent.

On the causeway to Lady's Island I prayed out loud, “O Lord. Please hear me. I thank you for this year. I thank you from my heart. I needed to be a decent basketball player in college, Lord. I don't know why. But I needed it. We both know I'm no good, but we sure are fooling some people. Aren't we, Lord? I'm sorry about Tee Hooper and I'm sorry about the Green Weenies. They're great guys and they deserve more playing time, Lord. Thank you for tonight. Thank you for giving me the William and Mary game, Lord. Thank you for the river and the stars and every house in Beaufort. . . .”