My Losing Season (35 page)

No master of timing, I finally asked Mel if I could take Laurel Caruso out on a date after the game. Because of that critical lack of judgment, I still take the blame for everything that happened later.

Mel looked down at me like I was a stool sample. His face grimaced with his utter contempt. My question was met with disbelief.

“How can you even think about sex at a time like this, Conroy? Losing rips my guts out. It makes me want to curl up like a wounded animal and go somewhere to die. Losing makes you think about sex, Conroy? I don't reward losers like you. You aren't going anywhere.”

Then Mel turned and headed for the locker room in a rage. I trotted over to where Laurel Caruso was sitting and said, “Laurel, my coach just told me I couldn't go out with you tonight.”

“You want to sneak out later?” Laurel said, surprising me.

“With my luck, he'd catch me.”

“So what, Pat?” Laurel said. “You're twenty-one years old.”

“You know something, Laurel?” I said. “With Mel Thompson, I've never thought of myself like that. Not once.”

Pretty Laurel Caruso kissed me on my sweaty cheek and walked out of my life forever.

My depressed team boarded the bus in somber disarray. We looked like soldiers from a beaten nation being sent to a point of extermination. Not a word was spoken as we drove back to the motel. Mel Thompson's fury burned like an ember in the dark. When the bus stopped, the manager, Al Beiner, stood up and said, “Team meeting in the coach's room. Right now.”

Dan Mohr looked over at me and said, “We haven't had a team meeting all year, Conroy.”

We herded ourselves into Mel's room preparing ourselves for a long harangue about our lack of pride. Little Mel did a head count and went over to whisper something in Mel's ear. Mel looked up furiously as his eyes surveyed the room. “Conroy,” he said, causing me to jump. “Where is Tee Hooper?”

“I thought he was here,” I said.

“Well, take a look around, Conroy. It seems Mr. Hooper took a little joyride. I seem to have got me a team of quitters and losers and whiners and now joyriders. I got me any other joyriders on this team?”

Mel screamed at us for ten minutes. The specter of Tee Hooper loomed over the entire diatribe. Tee was a great guy and a solid citizen and I was more worried about his safety than his absence. In his commitment to athletics, Tee was in a league of his own.

“Get back to your goddamn rooms and if anyone hears from Hooper, tell him to report his ass to me on the double,” Mel said.

I was the roommate of Doug Bridges on this road trip, and Doug said to me, “Wherever Hooper is, I hope he's having a good time, because tomorrow he has to die.”

“Do you think he'll kick him off the team?” I asked.

“No,” Doug said. “If Mel does what he really wants to do, he'll bury Tee up to his neck in shit, pour honey over his head, and let the ants eat him.”

“Tee's a dead man,” I said.

I was reading
As I Lay Dying
because the first draft of my senior essay was due soon and I was behind in my reading, when there was a harsh knock on our door. Doug was in the bathroom so I went to the door in my underwear. I opened it and found my two coaches, Mel and Ed Thompson, standing before me.

Before I could say a word, Mel spoke in his most doomsday, prophetic voice. “We finally know what's wrong with this team, Conroy. We've finally patched it all together and come up with a reason why this season turned to such shit.”

“What'd you come up with, Coach?” I asked.

“Pussy,” Mel said.

“Pussy?”

“That's right, Conroy. You guys are more interested in pussy than you are in winning basketball games.”

“Coach, if you're right and the reason we are losing so many games is pussy, then I assure you, it's the
lack
of it that's causing these losses,” I said.

“Get out of our way, Conroy,” Mel said.

“What're you doing, Coach?”

“Searching your room for pussy,” Mel said.

“What? Coach, there's no girls in my room. You've got my word. I'm on the Honor Court and kick guys out of school for lying. You can take my word to the bank and I give my word of honor there's no girls in this room.”

“Get out of my fucking way,” Mel said, putting his hand on my chest and shoving me across the room. I was outraged.

“Stand against the wall,” Mel ordered. “Look under the bed, Ed.”

Little Mel got on his hands and knees and lifted up the spread under both Doug's bed and mine.

“No women here,” Little Mel reported.

“You know,” I said, “I hope you guys find some girls in this room. Yes sir. I'd like that better than anything in this world.”

“Shut up, Conroy,” Mel said, and I did. “Look in the closet, Ed.”

Ed Thompson approached the closet as though the Rockettes were going to spill out when he opened the door, their hundred legs a-kicking. He threw the door open suddenly and peered into the closet's shadow.

“Nothing here, either, Coach,” Little Mel reported.

Mel glowered at me then said, “Where's Bridges, Conroy?”

“He's in the bathroom, Coach.”

“What's he doing in there?” Mel asked.

“I think he's taking a shit, Coach.”

“Oh, sure, Conroy. Think we're going to fall for that one?” Mel asked. “Knock on the door, Ed.”

Little Mel knocked on the door.

“Yeah?” Doug Bridges said.

“Open the door, Bridges,” Mel demanded.

The door swung open and I found myself in a direct line, staring at a nude Doug Bridges sitting on the toilet seat. When he saw me, Bridges simply cracked up laughing. He had heard the entire scene and thought he would wait it out on the toilet. The two coaches peered in suspiciously.

“Check behind the shower curtain, Ed.”

Little Mel took the shower curtain and pulled it back quickly to reveal the presence of a bathtub. Bridges put his head down and began laughing hysterically. “Hey, Conroy. These guys think I'd be taking a shit with a girl in here!”

When the two coaches left our room, I was shaking with rage, but Bridges came out of the bathroom screaming with laughter. The sheer ludicrousness of that encounter had tickled Doug like nothing else. He fell across the bed and howled, holding his stomach with one hand.

“It isn't that damn funny, Bridges,” I said.

“It's hilarious, Conroy.”

“Tell me the funny part.”

“Conroy, he was searching your room and mine. You and I've never been spotted with a girl on our arms.”

I said, “Speak for yourself.” But I was surprised to hear Doug admit this about himself. Doug's extraordinary handsomeness was a given on the team, and his physique was legendary in the weight rooms. DeBrosse would say later, “If I'd been born with Bridges's body, I'd still be playing pro.”

At three in the morning, I received a phone call and heard the voice of a very distraught Tee Hooper on the other end.

“Pat, I hear Mel caught me.”

“He sure did.”

“What do you think my chances are?”

“I don't think they're good, Tee,” I said.

At breakfast the next morning, the team was on edge, so filled with a vague sense of dread and premonition of disaster. Tee wore his mood swings on his face. He was jumpy and exhausted and afraid that morning. The team ate in silence like teams always do when they stink up a court as we did the night before. The question that was whispered among us was, “Where was Hooper?” In whispers, the story made its way from table to table.

Tee, sensing that his sophomore year lay shattered around him, and that there was nothing he could do to redeem it, was at the point of despair. Since Mel had settled on me and DeBrosse as guards, Tee was often the third forward called upon and found himself coming into games after Kroboth and Bridges. He still found his demotion from starting guard a travesty of justice. Simply stated, Hooper thought he was a far better player and athlete than I was, and it was a crime and an outrage that I was starting in his place. His behavior became bizarre even to Tee.

After playing a small amount of time against Stetson, something snapped in Tee and while I was asking Mel if I could go out with Laurel Caruso, Tee had beelined his way toward the comely Stetson cheerleaders and begged two of them to take him to any kind of party they knew was going on that night.

“I just lost it, Pat,” Tee told me years later. “You know I was a solid citizen. That I would never do anything like that to hurt the team. I'd gotten bitter about what happened. I snapped when I went over to those cheerleaders. But they were nice girls and they took me to a nice party. It was wonderful. Just wonderful. That year was so hard. There was never anything to look forward to, Conroy.

“Coach Thompson didn't even look at me the next morning. I just waited for the ax to fall, but it didn't. I felt terrible about what happened, but I didn't know if he was going to kick me off the team or take away my scholarship or what. It was agonizing getting back to school. We had a five-hour layover in the Jacksonville airport. When the bus finally pulled up beside the Armory, Mel and Ed jumped off and Al Beiner made the announcement that Mel wanted to see me in his office right away. Conroy, you did something funny. You jumped up and pretended to play the violin at my funeral. It was funny, not mean. It broke the tension and the team laughed.”

Tee then walked into Mel's office as emotionally unbalanced and distraught as he would ever be at The Citadel. He passed the spot where the plaque honoring his induction into the Citadel Athletic Hall of Fame would hang one day. The best athlete in the history of The Citadel would enter Mel Thompson's office to learn both his punishment and his fate.

Though Mel was a wizard of absolute control, I bet Tee's opening volley must have surprised him greatly. Tee looked at Mel and said, “Coach, I'm so sorry about what I did. I'm so sorry about it and I'll do anything to make up for it. But why did you bench me, Coach? Why did you do it? I earned my way back to playing. Everyone knows that. Even Pat knows that. I'd go through the wall for you if you asked me to. You know that. But you bury me alive on the bench. Why, Coach? Please, just tell me why?”

The rawness of unharnessed human emotion was not the arena where Mel Thompson distinguished himself. I imagine Tee's outbreak unnerved him. It took a few moments for Mel to regain control of the situation. When he did, Mel said, “Someone who works in the athletic department told me you were saying some things in the barracks.”

“No one in the athletic department's even allowed in the barracks,” Tee said.

Mel looked at Tee and then to Ed Thompson and then back to Tee. “I was told that you tell the cadets that you fill out my lineup cards for me. That you decide who'll play and who'll not play on a given night.”

With the mystery of a loused-up season finally clear, Tee Hooper burst into tears. Through great, gut-wrenching sobs, he said, “Coach, I never, ever said or thought anything like that at all. Ever. I wouldn't say such a thing. It's not like me, Coach. I'm not that kind of a kid. My whole season screwed up for something stupid like that. Coach, why didn't you come to me and ask if that was true? I didn't play because of a rumor some jerk hears from the barracks? It's not fair, Coach. You should have told me. You should have told me man to man. Man to man.”

I first learned of a stranger's participation in Tee Hooper's ill-fated season thirty years later in Tee's elegant office headquarters in Greenville, South Carolina. None of the pain of that season had diminished for Tee as we talked about what had gone wrong for him. The memories still stung like paper cuts. But he told me something that surprised me. Because of his fiery tears of denial that he had spread the rumors attributed to him, Tee Hooper did not run a single lap or receive a single punishment for having skipped off to a party with two Stetson cheerleaders.

Thirty years later, I was sorry I hadn't gone to the party with him.

CHAPTER 27

LEFTY CALLS MY NAME

S
INCE BECOMING A NOVELIST,
I
HAVE FOUND MYSELF FASCINATED BY
the
many ways that writers construct theories about how the passage of time affects the tone, structure, and seriousness of their work. I once studied Proust and the theories of time and duration that he had absorbed during his infatuation with the works of Henri-Louis Bergson. Both men seemed to think that time, as it is generally thought about, did not exist or existed on a very different and theoretical plane. I could not help but notice, however, that, according to the biographies of each man, both of them happened to be dead.

In my own lifetime, nothing has been clearer or more unremitting than the inflexible and man-eating current of time. My life is chock-full of madeleines that send me reeling back on tides of pure consciousness to moments in my life lit up with consequence. But no matter how mystical my encounters with my past, I remain fully cognizant that my body is a timepiece that can kill me tomorrow or let me live a hundred years. It is this hard, inexorable passage of time that, I believe, is the one great surprise in every human life.

Because I was a basketball player, time itself has a solid substructure to it. I have felt it passing through me with terrifying insistence with each sunrise, every beat of my heart. In all my books, there is a beginning, a middle, and an ending. My experience with time is based on my cold eye when gazing at reality. At The Citadel, I answered to the gold-tongued voices of bugles that woke me up at reveille then put me to sleep at taps, with hard, busy hours in between. I also had developed an expertise with the measured times of games where a first half contained twenty minutes, a halftime break ten, and a second half another twenty. I would begin a game with a crisp, sweet-smelling uniform and end with a uniform that looked as though I'd thrown it into a lake. I could begin a game fresh and ready to roll and would end it exhausted to the bone, spent of every ounce of energy. I am time-steeped and time-cured and time-infused and time-beaten. I know how it works in life and in the pages of fiction. It moves, claw-footed and famished, toward the end of my days, as it always has. It moves the way it did before the Davidson game when I was shocked to realize that I was playing my final regular-season game in my Citadel career. Take the word “final,” roll it around on your tongue, gum it well, cut your tongue on its edges, taste its metallic finish, spit it to the ground in scorn and distaste. It will still mean the same thing. It shocked me on the day after, where I read it in the
News and Courier,
and it shocks me as I read it again and write about it thirty years later.

         

W
HEN
I
LED THE
B
ULLDOGS OUT OF
the locker room on
Davidson's home court, I was overwhelmed that I had come to the end of the season so unprepared for the finality of it all. Dan Mohr, Jim Halpin, and I were ending our lives as basketball players, and I could still remember the first day I met them in the middle of our fear-haunted Hell Week. Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?

The sellout crowd booed us heartily as we took to the court and I drank in their jeers as though they were an intoxicating extract. I loved the taunts of the enemy crowds, and I wanted to show this Davidson crowd some of my new tricks. I wanted to beat Davidson so badly I could taste it, vinegary and sharp in the back of my throat. They had ruled the Southern Conference and been ranked in the top-ten teams in the country since my freshman year. Beating them this night would be my going-away present to myself. This Davidson team was young and in the process of rebuilding. It still rankled me that Mel had benched me for the entire second half of the first Davidson game because of my perfect—and I repeat—my perfect behind-the-back pass to Kroboth. With the Corps behind us, we should have won that game.

As I dribbled past the Davidson coach, Lefty Driesell, I heard him call out to Mohr. “Hey, Danny, Mel benched you for four games? Has he lost his mind? You'd be my main man this year. My go-to guy.”

Dan was muttering to himself when we went to the rebounding line. “You hear that, weasel? I'd be a fucking first-string All-American here, and I'm a can of corn to fucking Muleface.”

“We've been through this before, Root,” I said. “Before every game with Davidson, Lefty tries to get under your skin. It works every time.”

“It'd get under your skin, too, Conroy, if you had pro potential like Hetzel and Synder—the way I do. Hell, if I'd come to play for Lefty, there'd be scouts from the Celtics in the stands tonight. Playing for Muleface's screwed up my whole life.”

“But you march so well. And you learned how to clean a rifle and execute a snappy about-face.”

Back in the layup line, Lefty made another pass at Danny, Lefty's long, good-humored face shining brightly as he said, “Come on, Danny. You didn't even play at VMI. The whole league was talking about it. Up here, you could write your own ticket, Danny. That's the damn truth.”

“You hear that, Conroy?” Dan said to me on the other side of the court. “I could write my own ticket at Davidson. I don't get jackshit at El Cid.”

“What about friendship, Root?” I asked. “That must count for something.”

“Fuck you, leprechaun,” Dan said, without a trace of malice.

I rebounded the ball and hit Brian Kennedy with a bounce pass that he caught on the run and put through the hoop. While waiting for my next layup, Lefty surprised me by saying something to me. “Hey, Pat. Why did Mel bury you alive the last couple of years? Mel even told me you couldn't score for shit. I'd've played you up here, boy. Guarantee that.”

I put the next layup in and as I rose to shoot that basketball off the board I rose up as the happiest boy in North Carolina because the great Lefty Driesell had proven to me that he actually knew my name. Long ago, in the Southern Conference, I had conditioned myself to the trauma of anonymity that mediocre athletes have to endure during every waking moment. In my first two years in the league, I don't think Lefty could have fingered me in a police lineup, but now he was teasing me the way he had always done to Mohr, and I basked in the glory of it.

When the managers began to feed us passes for jump shots, I took a ball and dribbled it to the half-court line to study the Davidson team. They looked massive, but I would beat them. I felt different than I had ever felt, and I could not place a name on what it was. But it lit my blood. I took it all in, the crowd, the noise, the smells of the arena, the nervousness of the referees—this was the last time that I would stand at center court at Davidson College, savoring my days as a basketball player.

Dave Moser saw me staring at his team, motioned to Wayne Huckel, and they moved out to stare me down. They were bold and wonderful sophomore guards and would ripen into great ones. Both were brilliant students who gave honor to the phrase “scholar-athlete.” Moser pointed to me and then back to himself, letting me know he would be guarding me tonight. I bowed, accepting his challenge. In the first game, Huckel had guarded me, but I was quicker than Wayne and this was a change in strategy for Lefty. I said to myself, “Hey, Moser, I hope you like going to the hoop, pal.”

I returned to my teammates, overflowing with a strange exhilaration. I could not suppress the confidence I felt, or deny it, or hide from it, or lose it, or dig a hole for it to burrow in. I simply had it in aces and spades and I gloried in it and strutted around the court and stuck it down Davidson's throat. If my teammates did not share it, tough shit—because I had earned it the hard way despite the savage eye of Mel Thompson. I had fought my way back from despair and self-loathing, from a coach who screamed “Don't shoot!” every time I touched the ball. Tonight, The Citadel had a point guard who believed he could hang the moon with the stars of Betelgeuse thrown in as a bonus. There wasn't a boy in the country who could stop me from getting to the paint. I could not wait for the game to start.

But Davidson used their crowd, and their early run at us was devastating. Moser had turned into a fine point guard and he and Wayne Huckel were taking rebounds and fast-breaking us right from the start of the game. Wayne Huckel gave DeBrosse and me fits. It was not just his height, six three; he was built so solidly he could chase Spaniards down crowded streets of Pamplona. He was the strongest guard I faced that season, and he posted me up near the basket all night. They were running away from us in the first few minutes. Rodney Knowles scored the first seven points as the Wildcats jumped to a 21–7 lead in the first five minutes. It stretched out to a fourteen-point lead until, with twelve minutes left to play, Mohr and DeBrosse began hitting from the outside. In the next three minutes, the Citadel pulled to within two, and finally when I drove the center lane, flashed past Mohr, and put up a reverse layup against a lunging Knowles, we tied it.

On this night, DeBrosse and I were again seamlessly matched and fine at what we did. Moser paid me the high honor of guarding me tightly. Huckel was overplaying DeBrosse and I caught DeBrosse's eye, knowing exactly what he wanted me to do. I dribbled toward John and we executed a pick-and-roll that peeled Huckel right off DeBrosse and left John open for a jumper which he sank. All night, DeBrosse charged by me and left Huckel planted into me. Other times we faked it and I drove between Huckel and Moser and Knowles towered over me and I flipped it to Mohr for an uncontested layup. But DeBrosse and I had merged our talents, and he could do all the things I could not do as a player, and I could do all those things that John would not even consider doing. He was a cautious player and I was a bold one. John had a beautiful jump shot and mine was a bad rumor, at most. He did not like to drive to the basket and I lived to do it. John loved shooting, not passing; a good pass made me as happy as I could feel on a basketball court. We drove the Davidson guards nuts that night, and I can still see Moser's tough, Indiana face trying to figure out how to keep me out of the middle or stop me from delivering the ball on the fast break.

But Knowles and Youngdale went to work on the boards again, and Knowles had twenty-three points in the first half alone. Davidson had built their lead back to fourteen when we went in for the half. “We can beat these guys. We can beat these guys,” I kept exhorting my teammates, but was met with those resolute Citadel stares that could drive Mel into such a fury. I drank a Coke, chewing on the ice, convinced we could win the game.

Only four of the Bulldogs had shown up to play that night. Zinsky and Bridges carried a vagueness and lostness in their eyes that I couldn't wave away. But Kroboth performed heroically while rebounding against the sequoia-like Youngdale and Knowles.

The guard play was quick and fierce and in the trenches. Huckel knocked both me and DeBrosse to the ground during the second half. He hit like a nose guard and loved the sheer physicality of the game. The pick-and-roll worked for me and Johnny; I opened up my boy DeBrosse and his jump shot was picture-perfect all night long. I loved it when DeBrosse got hot and made me look like an All-American handing it off to him. We began to get back into the game, point by point, and with nine minutes to play, Mohr hit a jump shot to bring us within five at 78–73.

Mohr turned around to go back upcourt when he saw Lefty Driesell come off his bench trying to get the attention of one of his players to call time-out. But Mel was on his feet screaming at me to call time-out, and I did so. As Danny ran beside Lefty, the Davidson coach shrugged his shoulders at him and said, “Goddamn, Danny. What the hell did you need a time-out for? You guys have got all the momentum. It's us that's flat.”

“Got me, Coach,” Danny answered.

After the time-out, my team went stale again, and Davidson began to play more conservatively, picking their shots with great discretion. Once more, we played for a long three minutes without scoring a point as Davidson began to light it up again with an insurmountable lead. We played sloppy, desperate basketball toward the end of the game, and John DeBrosse fouled out of a game for the only time in his college career, and Davidson won the game, pulling away by 97–85.

The
News and Courier
said the next morning: “The Bulldogs had three men with twenty or more points. Conroy had 24, Mohr 22, and DeBrosse 20. Conroy and Mohr were playing their last regular season game for the Bulldogs.”

Our bad year had ended badly but I went over to shake hands with Dave Moser and Wayne Huckel. I told Wayne that he and Dave were the best guards I'd ever seen come into the conference, and I wished them luck in the tournament.

On the bus ride back to the hotel, Rat handed out stat sheets to all the players. The coaches had not gotten on the buses yet and a general malaise had settled over the team. Suddenly there was screaming in front of me as Dan Mohr read that he had taken down only a single rebound during the course of the game. He was furious with Joe Eubanks, the statistician. “Fucking Rat. You can't count worth a shit. I can remember at least six rebounds I pulled down and you say I only have one. Goddamn, you got Conroy and DeBrosse with five rebounds each and they're the two littlest shits in the league.”

“Watch it, Root,” DeBrosse said. “Conroy and I were skying tonight. We had to hit the boards hard, because you were only bringing down one board all night.”

“Pipe down, Root,” Cauthen said, enjoying the chance to get on Mohr.

“Eat me, Zipper,” Dan shot back. “It's fucking Rat's fault. The midget duck-butt can't count. I bet I got at least ten rebounds.”

“I don't think you even got one,” Cauthen said.