My Losing Season (34 page)

CHAPTER 25

EAST CAROLINA

T
HROUGHOUT MY SENIOR YEAR,
I
HAD TO HIDE FROM MY BASKETBALL
coach the number of activities I participated in outside of the Armory. Mel considered basketball as our paramount consideration and had no interest in our becoming well-rounded in the process. Mel knew I was poetry editor of
The Shako
because he teased me about it, saying, “I guarantee you you're the first and last jock ever to hold that position, Conroy.” But I went to great lengths to hide the fact that I was an active member of the Fine Arts Committee, the Round Table, the English Club, the honorary cadet member of the Charleston Ballet Board, and had delivered a long paper on Thomas Wolfe to the Calliopean Literary Society, one of the nation's oldest societies. I had delivered this talk on a Thursday night before the William and Mary game; it was important to me that I was a member of the oldest club on the Citadel campus and part of a cadet tradition that stretched back to 1845. The Calliopean Literary Society was older than my game of basketball, and I knew that, too.

By then, I had a strong sense of myself as a cadet and as a member of the Citadel family. Since I refused to participate in the plebe system in any way except by being pleasant and helpful to knobs (at VMI I would be known as a Rat Daddy, but The Citadel had no equivalent term), I had to find other outlets to be a valuable, contributing citizen of my realm. Given the antipathy to jocks at The Citadel, I tried to prove my worth in areas where athletic ability gave me no advantage or currency. I wanted to make a mark on the only college I would ever have, and I wanted that mark to represent the highest standards of achievement. Because I grew up with the United States Marine Corps, I was fed the word “excellence” constantly.

But it was my work in the Honor Court during my senior year that would have brought Mel Thompson to the point of apoplexy and beyond. Mel would not have understood that work, or liked it, or approved of it, and I think it likely that he might have gone to General Harris to get me relieved of my duties, at least during the season. Nothing in my cadet career had shocked or perplexed me as much as the cadets of Fourth Battalion electing me to the position of battalion honor representative. The Honor Court was both the most feared and the most respected organization on campus, but the fear may have been preeminent. I tried to figure out what signals I was giving off to indicate to anyone that I was honorable. In those days I lacked all powers of insight or self-knowledge and saw myself as a kind of cipher, a hollowed-out shape of a boy waiting for personality to be poured into the empty shell of the man I might become. Inside, I thought something was developing in the depths of me the way diamonds formed under pressure in the earth's crust, but I could not give it a name. When I was tagged with the word “honor” by my peers, I spent many hours considering the question of whether I had any or not.

I tried to imagine myself sitting in judgment of one of my classmates and whether I could actually vote to kick him out of school when graduation was only months away. If I could not pass judgment on a classmate's guilt, then I thought I was not worthy to serve on the Honor Court and should resign from it immediately. I studied the honor code which said: “A Cadet shall not lie, steal, or cheat or tolerate anyone who does.” It was a stern code, but I thought then and I think now, it is a good one. Since I took my oath as a cadet, I had tried to live by this code and thought, for the most part, I had lived up to its standards. In the barracks, we cadets were forbidden to lock our doors, and I had never lost a stick of gum or an M&M peanut nor had I taken one from another cadet. The honor code seemed like a logical extension of the Ten Commandments as a foundation to my ethical life, so I decided to accept the choice of my battalion and join the court. If the members of my battalion paid me the high compliment of considering me to be a man of honor, I would strive to prove them right. My service on the Citadel's Honor Court changed my life forever.

When I told my roommates Mike Devito and Bo-Pig Marks that if they ever appeared before the Honor Court and the evidence proved them to be guilty I would have no choice but to vote against them, there was some tension in the room until Mike said, “We already know that, asshole. That's why we voted for you.”

In the first meeting of the newly selected Honor Court in the spring of my junior year, Steve Grubb's name was put up for the chairman's job, and he was elected by acclamation. This pleased me greatly because Steve and I were friends and I think he was the sharpest, most heads-up cadet in my class. When the court selected me to the position of vice chairman, I stopped breathing and could hear the blood drumming in my ears. I blushed with the incongruity of it all. Because of my election, I was required to attend every session that met in 1966–67 unless one was scheduled when the basketball team was on the road. The Honor Court was a busy place to be that year, and I took my work on that court with great seriousness. I had nights of agony and nights of abiding joy when I cast an innocent vote for a man I thought unjustly accused. There were three nights that I remember with agony, all three of them taking place during the basketball season. All ended well after midnight, and one found me walking across the parade ground at five in the morning with tears streaming down my face.

One of the cases involved a classmate who had been accused of lying after he swore he was in the hospital when witnesses put him squarely in the city of Charleston. Though he had talked a Citadel employee into saying she remembered admitting him to the hospital and produced documentation that proved it, it was clear to me that the woman was lying to protect him. I voted guilty and so did eight other seniors on the court. But one member of the court believed the woman and cast an innocent vote. Since the vote had to be unanimous, my classmate survived his ghastly ordeal. In complete darkness, I crossed the parade ground deeply shaken because I had spent the entire trial staring at my classmate's Citadel ring knowing full well that I might be required to ask for that ring before I put in the phone call to his parents. I still have nightmares about asking one of my classmates to remove his ring and hand it over to me.

But the trial that began on the night before the East Carolina game was so knotty and convoluted and troublesome that the court did not come to a decision until 0500 hours the next morning. It was the first time in Citadel history that a rising member of the Honor Court was accused of an honor violation and found guilty by the sitting court. The humiliation of the young man who stood accused was agonizing to watch and to hear his voice break when he delivered the terrible news to his mother was a killing moment. It was always unbearable to me and experience made me no better at it. But on February 9, 1967, as I rang the bell to wake the sleeping guard in Fourth Battalion, I wondered how in the living hell I was going to play in a game against East Carolina in fifteen hours. The answer was that I was a Citadel cadet and a Citadel athlete and it was my duty to rise at reveille in one hour and fifteen minutes and start at point guard when the whistle blew that night. That's what I did.

My team was still bristling about the lacerating postgame screaming that Mel had launched against us after we had lost to East Carolina at their home court. But on this night our coach seemed subdued and resigned as he marked off the offenses and defenses he thought East Carolina would throw at us. He wore the expression of a coach who had lost faith in his team and was only going through the motions. There was no hint in that beaten-down, nonplussed locker room that gave off a sign that my team was going to play its most complete and accomplished game.

It marked the first game of the season that our spectacular sophomore, Bill Zinsky, played the way I thought he was going to every night of the year. It was the first time Zeke let the Citadel cadets in on the secret of what a blue-chipper his teammates thought he was. An aficionado of the game sitting in the Corps always carried a sign that simply said “Z,” pure homage to Zinsky.

From the opening whistle, The Citadel ran its fast break with such efficiency and speed that the floor looked like a cross between a raceway and a stampede. Kroboth and Zinsky controlled the boards all night, and the paint was a dangerous place to go for all players. A total of fifty-five fouls were committed by both teams. But Kroboth would haul in a rebound, pass it to DeBrosse on the wing, who would feed it to me coming to the center of the court. I would take it flying toward our basket, my teammates thundering to fill the lanes around me. My teammates were calling to me as they moved into position and I moved toward our goal looking left, I threw a bounce pass to Zinsky on the right who took it on full fly and laid it in. On the next time down the court, I looked right and threw it to the right when the East Carolina guard guessed that I was going to go to my left and guessed wrong.

All night we ran it and we ran it hard and everything we did worked and worked well. Doug's jump shots were perfect and natural like rainbows or mountain streams and he hit them from long range. When East Carolina tried everything to slow Bridges, Zinsky took over on the other side of the court. As always, DeBrosse was putting together another solid performance and would finish the night with eighteen points.

The sportswriter John Hendrix covered the game for the
News and Courier,
reporting that “the win was the fifth against four defeats in Southern Conference play. It was only the third time in history and marked the first time since 1965 against Erskine that the cadets had gone over 100 points in a game.

“Despite liberal substitutions late in the game after leading by as much as 18 points, the Citadel hit 59.2 percent of the shots from the field, by far the best team effort of the season.

“With Bill Zinsky and Doug Bridges turning in their best performances of the season, the cadets got the lead for the first time at 4–3 with fifty-four seconds gone and never gave it up.

“Zinsky scored 23 points and Bridges 20. Zinsky shared rebounding honors with Al Kroboth who carried three fouls with more than eight minutes in the first half and saw little service in the second half after quickly drawing his fourth foul.

“John DeBrosse who hit the bucket with 19:06 left in the first half that gave The Citadel the lead for keeps, followed with 18 points. Pat Conroy, who at times displayed dribbling and ball-handling tactics that could match Marcus Hanes of old Globetrotter fame, chipped in 15, including the pair of free throws that carried the total to 101.”

I could justify the writing of this entire book for the excuse to reprint that last sentence of the more than generous John Hendrix. I carry the memory of that game against East Carolina because it came to represent the randomness and unpredictability of the appearance of perfection in human life. I could not throw a pass that night without it seeming brilliant and improvisational. Bridges could not fire up a shot without it looking predestined to swish through the net with the sound of a sudden inheld breath. All night I would see Kroboth's hands above the rim or DeBrosse maneuvering to choose his spot on the floor for one of his explosive jump shots. Connor brought havoc from the bench and the Green Weenies got to finish the game. I got to watch Hooper slash and burn and rev up the crowd while Cauthen, Kennedy, and Bornhorst came in to rule the boards during the final three minutes of the game.

It was a fine East Carolina team we had manhandled and belittled, but they caught us on one of the only nights of that year where we played like the team I dreamed we could be. That night my team took the court with a swagger and a strut and a gleam in the eye that I had rarely seen before.

Only Dan Mohr did not receive the sudden visitation of bounce and swiftness that infected the rest of us. When Rat handed out the mimeographed stat sheets to all the lockers, I saw Root take his and crumple it with his fist and toss it casually into his locker. I'd not thought it possible that any team in America could hold Dan Mohr to a single point. But once again, Mel Thompson proved to be the best defensive man East Carolina could not put on the floor that glorious night.

That twenty-four-hour period when I was acting as chairman of the Honor Court with a trial that ended at five in the morning, then walked out as captain of the Citadel basketball team that night and helped my team to victory—I mark that day as the finest I spent as a citizen of the South Carolina Corps of Cadets.

CHAPTER 26

ORLANDO

A
T LUNCH IN THE MESS HALL, THE DAY BEFORE WE WERE TO TRAVEL TO
Orlando to play the Stetson Hatters, Rat approached my table and said, “Mel wants to see you in his office after lunch. He says it's an emergency.”

“What kind of emergency?” I asked.

“I don't know, but he looked worried,” Rat said. “Not mad. Just worried.”

When I walked into his office ten minutes later, it had a different feel to it, and I didn't sense the usual dread of every encounter with Mel. “Hey, Coach,” I said as I entered his domain. “Joe said you wanted to see me.”

At first I did not see the tall figure of Bob Carver, the six-five center of the freshman basketball team, sitting on the couch to my right. Bob was a superb athlete, and by far the best of the big men Mel had recruited in this year's class. I thought he had a great chance to be a starter the following year, but it was a shaken, ashen-faced boy who sat before me.

“Hey, Bob, how you doing?” I asked.

“Not so good,” he answered.

Mel said, “Pat, don't you have some kind of pull with the Honor Court?”

“I'm on the Honor Court, Coach,” I admitted. “I don't know if I have any pull with it or not.”

“You've got to help us out of a jam. Someone's accused Carver of an honor violation,” Mel said.

“What's the honor violation?” I asked the freshman. He wore that look of pure terror I had come to know so well that year.

“I wrote a report, an ERW, saying that I didn't miss any chemistry classes,” Bob said, and I saw his hands trembling.

“Did you miss any chemistry classes?” I asked.

“Not one. I swear to God, Pat. I've been to every class,” Bob said.

“Then you've got nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing. In fact, I'll be happy to defend you when you go up before the Honor Court.”

“I knew you'd come through for us, Conroy,” Mel said.

“Who reported you for the honor violation?” I asked.

“Colonel Durkee. My chemistry teacher,” Bob said.

“He taught me chemistry, too,” I said. “I know him. Let me go talk to him right now. But, Bob, this is very important. The Honor Court is strict and it's hard and it's cold. But we swear to live up to it. It's an agreement we make with each other as Citadel men. I can't go to Colonel Durkee if you're lying to me.”

“I promise, Pat. I didn't miss one chemistry class. Except when we were on the road trips playing games.”

“Those are excused absences,” I said. “Nothing to worry about. Stay here, Bob. I'll do this quickly, Coach.”

“The team's counting on you, Conroy,” Mel said.

         

I
FOUND
C
OLONEL
D
URKEE SITTING IN
the same room where I had taken his class three years earlier. He was a no-nonsense kind of man, but not humorless, and he wore his hair in a nineteenth-century manner, parted almost, but not quite, down the middle.

“Mr. Conroy, what a pleasant surprise,” Colonel Durkee said as I walked into his classroom. “Have you been in Bond Hall since you got out of the sciences?”

“I sometimes cut through here when it's raining, sir.”

“You struggled mightily with chemistry, but you came out with a gentleman's C,” he said, reviewing a book annotated with his fastidious inscriptions.

“I've come here on behalf of Bob Carver. You've accused him of an honor violation.”

“Yes, I have. It's a great pity, but I had no other choice,” Colonel Durkee said.

“Bob just told me that he attended every class,” I said.

“He said that, did he?” Colonel Durkee adjusted his eyeglasses. “I haven't had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Carver. I've never laid eyes on him.”

“Sir, that's impossible. I just talked to Bob. He's in Coach Thompson's office waiting for me. You must've made a mistake, Colonel.”

“Let me show you something, Mr. Conroy,” Colonel Durkee said, and he brought a roll book out from his desk. He opened it up and showed me how he counted the roll; it was the same as when I was in his class.

“Remember you were arranged alphabetically in my class, Mr. Conroy?”

“Yes, sir. I sat in that seat. Four rows above the bottom.”

“Very good. Mr. Carver sat in the seat behind you—or would have if he ever came to class. I call the roll alphabetically and I look up and see the cadet whose voice calls out ‘present.' That way I get to associate a name and a face. It's how I get to know the cadets I'm teaching. Whenever a cadet is absent, I circle his name with a black marker. Then I send in a report on the absent cadet. Let's look at Cadet Carver's record. Here's the first day of class.” There was a black circle around Carver's name and at the second class and the third and the fourth.

“I'm very sorry to have wasted your time, Colonel Durkee,” I said.

“It was a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Conroy,” he said. “I'm sorry the topic was so disagreeable.”

When I walked back into Coach Thompson's office, Bob Carver immediately covered his face with his hands. He could no longer hide his great shame or the mess he had made of his young life.

“Will you need help packing, Bob?” I asked. “I'll be glad to help you.”

“What in the hell are you talking about, Conroy?” Mel said, yelling at me, trying to regain some control over the situation that had slipped out of his hands forever. “You're supposed to be on our side.”

“Tell him, Bob,” I said.

“There's nothing to tell,” said Mel. “It's an open-and-shut case. The professor fucked up and the kid's getting a bum rap. You were supposed to clean up the mess, Conroy, not make it worse.”

“Tell him, Bob,” I said again.

“I lied, Coach. I didn't go to any of those classes,” Bob said, his voice breaking. “Not a single one.”

“So he walks tours. Give him a punishment order. Conroy, this is my stud for next year. He's going to be one of the great ones,” Mel said, his voice now pleading with me.

“Not anymore, Coach. He gave his word when he wrote his ERW. His word isn't much good. You can resign and you won't have to face the Honor Court. Believe me, Bob, you don't want to face the Honor Court with the evidence I just saw. There'll be nothing on your record, Bob. You can learn from this. You can start over.”

Mel looked hammered and hangdog as he fell back into his seat.

“Sorry I lied to you, Pat,” Bob said, and he shook my hand as he left the room. Mel Thompson and I never saw Bob Carver again.

Then Mel turned on me in fury. “Conroy, I just want you to know you let me down, let the school down, and let your goddamn team down.”

I turned to face my coach, and I stood at attention.

“What do you have to say for yourself? What do you have to say in your defense?”

“I just upheld the highest standards of The Citadel, Coach. I'm required to do it every day. They don't give us days off.”

“Don't give me that pious bullshit,” Mel sneered. “You goddamn cadets are no different than the guys I played with at NC State. I barely went to class, Conroy. They took care of their athletes at NC State. They knew how to be big-time. I'll be frank. I didn't know a ballplayer who didn't cheat to get by. So what? I could cheat at cards as well as anybody. It was all a joke. We were at school to play basketball and the rest was icing on the cake. The only time I remember being in a classroom was when I ducked in to look at a clock to see if I was late for practice. Hell, the school even paid us to play ball. I took a pay cut to go to NC State. You think there's that big a difference between us, Conroy? You going to tell me you've never cheated since you've been here?”

“I've never cheated since I've been here, Coach,” I said.

“You're as full of shit as a Christmas turkey. You're just like me, Conroy, and you know it. There's not an ounce of difference between us. Or do you think there is?”

“Yes, sir. I do. You're a graduate of North Carolina State and I'm going to be a graduate of The Citadel. From what you just told me, there's a huge difference between us, sir.”

“Get the fuck out of my office, Conroy, and never come back.”

I left Mel Thompson's office, and I never went back.

         

I
WROTE TO PRETTY
L
AUREL
C
ARUSO
of Winter Park, Florida, and asked if she would be my date after The Citadel played Stetson in Orlando on February 21, 1967. It still bothered me that I had not played a basketball game during this entire season and then gone out on a date afterward. Always, clusters of pretty girls would crowd around the entryways to locker rooms of our opponents on road trips. One of the reasons I played basketball was to attract pretty girls to my shy part of the world. It had not worked very well for me at The Citadel nor had it produced great dividends for my teammates. Except for Bill Zinsky, Dave Bornhorst, and Jim Halpin who were already pinned to the women they would marry, no one on the basketball team had a girlfriend of any kind. So, thinking far ahead, I wrote Laurel that I would love to take her out after the Stetson game. Laurel had been and remains the only girlfriend that my sister Carol ever arranged for me to date. We had courted the previous summer and had liked each other very much, I think, but her parents owned the Blue Bird Orange Juice Company, and her mother let me know by her coldness and reserve that I did not rank high on the list of young men she wanted sparking around her daughter. Laurel was lovely and breathtaking and only now, over thirty years later, do I realize that she was a dead ringer for Annie Kate Gervais, the girl who had put my heart on the floor two years before. There was something so disturbing about Annie Kate's rejection of me that I thought no woman would ever love me, that all would see the marks or disfigurements of spirit that caused Annie Kate to take her leave. Laurel answered by return mail that she would love to go out after the Stetson game and couldn't wait to see me play basketball.

Then I had to summon up the courage to ask Mel if he would allow me to have a date after the game. I would rather have asked Mel if I could moon the entire Corps of Cadets when they passed in review the following Friday. He could be courtly and charming when our mothers came to visit, but the subject of sex made him shifty and uneasy. Not once in my cadet career did Mel ask me if I had a girlfriend or if I was interested in meeting one.

Now I believe that Mel was the enemy of all passion and all sense of engagement where one of his players might drift into realms Mel couldn't control, and I include the carnal arena in this appraisal. His fury at my showboating at guard, my behind-the-back passes and dribbling between my legs—these actions would bring him leaping from the bench because the passion I revealed was antithetical to his desire to tamp down, repress, undermine, and usurp anything original in our games. His rule over us was high-handed, despotic, and totalitarian in nature. He sucked the life out of us and turned a good team into a bad one. By the time our plane landed in Orlando, Mel had lost Bill Zinsky, Tee Hooper, and Doug Bridges and ruined the season of Dan Mohr. Greg Connor's season had ended with a pretty girl in Jacksonville. The Green Weenies were buried alive on the bench, their names appearing in no box scores, their heroic play against the starting five unsung and unrecognized. By the end of the long season, we were fully under Mel's control and his iron thumb. I knew this because I fretted about asking him if I could take Laurel Caruso out after the Stetson game.

I thought about asking Mel on the flight to Orlando, but I chickened out. I almost approached him in the baggage claim area, but thought better of it. When I got to the motel room, I lifted the receiver of the phone several times and once even dialed his room before slamming down the phone. On the bus ride to the gym, I walked from the back of the bus, then sat down with Bob Cauthen who sat directly behind Mel and Ed Thompson. Walking behind Mel, I tried to summon the courage to ask him as we drifted through the gym on the way to the locker room. Then I dressed in my uniform and got ready to play Stetson. I would pray for a victory and then ask Mel, in his moment of triumph, if I could take Laurel out after the game.

When I led the Bulldogs out for warmups, I spotted Laurel immediately and winked at her after I made the first layup. She blew me a kiss that I prayed Mel did not see. On the other side of the court, I panicked when I saw my Aunt Helen Harper talking with Mel Thompson. I sprinted toward her and my befuddled coach and took her by the elbow, leading her back to her seat with my Uncle Russ and my four cousins, the Harper boys.

“Hey, Pat,” my sweet Aunt Helen said in her musical southern accent. “I just invited your coach and your whole team over to the house after the game for a Bible reading.”

“He worships Satan, Aunt Helen,” I said. “So do all my teammates.”

“That's just terrible! Then they need a Bible reading real bad,” she said.

“They sure do,” I said, shaking hands with Uncle Russ and hugging my cousin John. “I may bring Laurel Caruso by after the game. Remember her?”

“A sweet girl,” Aunt Helen said. “We'll have a Bible reading.”

I ran by Mel and apologized to him. He looked at me, then said, “How many more of your fruitcake relatives do I have to deal with, Conroy?”

“That's the last one, Coach,” I said, returning to the layup line, loving Aunt Helen even more than I did before.

Naturally, the game was a disaster, and I spent it trying to get my teammates to snap out of the Citadel stare. We didn't score for the first four minutes and my team looked as though we were playing in a rainstorm. This was a good Stetson team, but we should have handled them easily. Even the reliable John DeBrosse played without style and ended the game with only six points. We made only ten of twenty-one free throws while Stetson was making twenty-six of thirty-seven. Mohr led our team with nineteen points and I got eighteen. My team stank up the court, and we were cringing when we staggered off the court after the final buzzer.