My Losing Season (36 page)

“I'm sorry, Danny,” Joe Eubanks said. “I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.”

“Fucking Rat,” Mohr said, dismissing the manager with a gesture.

Later, at the hotel, I knocked on the managers' door. Joe Eubanks opened the door and I could see that he'd been crying.

“Where's Al?” I asked. “Is he with Coach Thompson?”

Rat nodded his head then walked over to the sink and began washing his face and hands. I walked up behind him and said, “Root didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Joe. This season's been hell on Danny. He thought he had a chance to be an All-American.”

“I thought he would be, too.”

“He took his frustration out on you.”

“He sure did. He embarrassed me, Pat, in front of the guys.”

“Don't worry about it—the guys love you. All of them. Even Root,” I said.

“Hey, Pat,” Joe said as I was leaving the room. “Thanks for not calling me Rat. I hate it.”

“Want me to get them to stop?” I said.

“No. They don't mean anything by it.”

“All of us think you're the best part of this team.”

“They do?” he asked.

“They sure do.”

“Why don't you call me Rat?” Joe asked.

“My three nicknames on this team have been ‘weasel,' ‘midget,' and ‘leprechaun.' Which one do you think I like?”

“None of them,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “Now, because Danny Mohr hurt your feelings, I'm going up to his room, cut off his pecker, and feed it to a coon dog. I'll make him pay for this. Good night, Joe.”

That was the last time I talked to Joe Eubanks before I received a phone call in Beaufort informing me that he'd been killed in Vietnam.

CHAPTER 28

THE TOURNAMENT

W
E COME, THEN, TO LAST GAMES.

We come, as we inevitably must, to the tournament game against Richmond which would flush John DeBrosse out of his Dayton suburb to connect his life again with mine, and in the process, give me back the team I had lost through neglect and memories too painful to recollect. We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game. The game that branded DeBrosse with his own earmark of stigma was upon us, the memory John would carry like a small-craft warning in his interior weather for the rest of his life.

But there was optimism and zeal loose in our locker room after the defeat by Davidson, the thought that we had given a great effort against the Wildcats and had actually frightened them on their home court. Before the tournament, our practices were lively and our enthusiasm catching. From four to seven, we practiced hard and put our faith in next Thursday. I was convinced we were part of a down cycle in the Southern Conference and that we had as good a chance of winning the tournament as anyone. The tournament could provide redemption for the whole lost year. If we could only win three games in a row, we could spend the rest of our lives calling ourselves champions.

Louis Chestnut said in the
News and Courier
that “the Bulldogs will be led into the game by seniors Danny Mohr and Pat Conroy, who will be tasting their final competition. Mohr is a top rebounder who sports a 13.3 scoring average and Conroy, who has not been a starter until this year, has shot for an 11.8 average. The top scorer all season has been junior John DeBrosse. The small (5´ 10´´) floor leader has a 14.4 average.” Mr. Chestnut agreed that our team was peaking at the right time and could do some unexpected damage in the tournament.

         

W
HEN
T
HE
C
ITADEL WAS WARMING UP
in
the Charlotte Coliseum, the place which represented the big time for any Southern Conference guy, I noted something in the layup line that had been peculiarly absent for most of the year—Doug Bridges snorting and clapping and dunking with authority, if not fury. The key with Bridges lay in the eyes. When Bridges hustled during warmups, it was a grand sign that he had come to the court ready and willing to play. When Bridges was lit up to play his best game, he could score thirty against any team in the country, and I mean any team. He was the best athlete on our squad. If you could have put my will or DeBrosse's or Hooper's into Bridges's head, his name would still be sung in clear anthems by basketball fans. He had as beautiful a body as I have ever seen, and could look like a combination of Michelangelo's
David
and Baryshnikov when he soared to bring down a rebound. For four days, I had dropped hints that we needed Bridges in the lineup to Little Mel when he was overseeing the one-on-one drills between the guards.

“We need Bridges, Coach,” I said. “He's got the firepower to match Moates.”

“The big fella thinks he's been erratic,” Ed Thompson said, in his quiet, serious way.

“But when he's on, Coach, there's no one like Bridges.”

“The big fella makes all the calls. You know that,” said Little Mel.

Bridges's eyes looked like the place where madness was born, and I almost screamed aloud when I saw Mel include his name in the starting lineup. I looked around the room and I heard the crowd outside. I felt my team coming together at last, the way teams are supposed to feel, the ones who you would go to the wall for, dive on the floor for, and shed your blood for. Our blood was up, and I was ready to play the game of my life. That morning I had read in the
Charlotte Observer
that “The Citadel's getting the best guard play in the Southern Conference.” Coach Gary McPherson of VMI had said that about DeBrosse and me.

When I shook hands with Richmond's captain, Johnny Moates, I was shaking hands with the tenth-leading scorer in the nation with a twenty-five-points-plus per-game average. This had been a dream season, for Moates wore the mantle of greatness with a cockiness that bordered on arrogance. He had the same look in his eye that I had spotted in Bridges's during warmups, and I took that to be a bad omen for myself. Moates had disliked me since the last counselors game at Camp Wahoo, and even more so after our epic battle in January.

As we walked out to start the game, DeBrosse told me to take Moates and he would guard Billy McCann, the son of Bill McCann, the Camp Wahoo coach who used to coach at the University of Virginia. I shook hands with all five of the Richmond players, feeling rested and peppery and charged up. Moates regarded me with the slight contempt one of the best ballplayers in the Southern Conference can afford to express when they are being guarded by one of the worst. Moates could do contemptuousness the way Olivier could deliver high tragedy. He was magnificent in his disdain for me, then spent the next forty minutes proving why I fully merited it. When I was busy diving into the wreckage of this lost season, I kept coming across the fact that I spent the entire season playing defense against a splendid platoon of shooting guards who were stronger, taller, and much better athletes than I was.

I met Moates as he crossed half-court every time he came downcourt, his other four teammates lining up to pick for him in endless combinations all afternoon long. “Pick left,” I'd hear Doug cry out behind me. “Pick right, Pat!” John screamed. “Double pick,” Danny cried out as Buster Batts came out to set a high post screen. Because I was Mel Thompson trained, I knew that my only job was to stop Johnny Moates by myself. Moates dribbled toward me, six feet one inches, lean and long and flowing, his game princely and dangerous. I went into my defensive crouch and slapped both hands on the shining floor and motioned for Moates to come and get it. Unfortunately for me, Johnny Moates accepted my invitation.

Richmond's coach, Louis Mills, based his game plan on his belief that I was neither athletic enough nor big enough to stop Moates. Like a wide receiver in football, Moates roamed the perimeter as his four teammates set a series of picks that started to look and feel like the Maginot Line to me. Sometimes Moates would dribble right where Tom Greene set a devastating pick on me, again driving one of his bladelike knees into my left thigh. Fighting over the top of that pick, I would lose one step on Moates and in that step, Moates would go into the air, his eccentric-looking shot held high behind his head. He would release it straight up, then it arched high in the air, so high that the crowd would hum with disbelief. Gravity would bring it down, and the hiss of nylon would echo through the gym.

In one agonizing three-minute stretch in the first half, Moates came at me four times in a row, took me over a series of ten well-placed picks, and hit four long-range jumpers and a free throw when I fouled him out of frustration on his last shot. My teammates shouted encouragement: “Get 'em, Pat. Fight him, Pat. Fight your ass off. We'll make these other guys work their asses off. Fight Moates.” In the customs and courtesies of my team, the only time they ever called me by my given name was in the dead center of games. Then and only then did I become Pat.

On our first offensive play, I moved the ball down the right-hand side and Doug Bridges called for the ball. Doug did something awkward and strange, something arrhythmic and ungraceful, suddenly shot the ball without his usual stroke and flair, but the ball clanged in for our first two points.

“Get me the ball,” Bridges said as he passed by me and I went out to meet Moates again. After Moates made the nine straight points against me, I changed my tactics. Now I realized he was planning to and fully capable of scoring sixty against me. In the first ten minutes of the game, he had shot almost every time down the court and had made a high percentage of them. I started taunting him: “Hey, Moates, don't you have some other guys on this team? Hey, Greene, don't you like to shoot, every now and then? I've seen ball hogs in my life, but this guy thinks he's the only guy out here.”

“Shut up, Conroy,” Moates said as he passed to Tom Greene for the first time all day.

“Wow, give him an assist,” I screamed. “Nice pass, Moates. You're not a virgin anymore.”

Though Moates seemed like the only player on the Richmond team in that first half, The Citadel had also brought their A game to the coliseum. In both halves I looked like I knew what I was doing whenever I got the ball to Doug Bridges or Dan Mohr. Bridges played in a special realm, as though he was not subject to laws of physics that bound the rest of us. Every time I threw it to Bridges—every time he called for it—I simply got out of his way. Several times I backed out to the far wing instead of cutting to the corner, simply to give Bridges more room to work against Tom Greene. When Doug was hot, his jump shot was a work of impossible art. He made shots that game, spinning, wheeling jump shots, as he faded backward toward the out-of-bounds lines, off-balance, uncontrolled. He would stroke them in, one after another, each more preposterous than the last, our antidote for their antichrist, Johnny Moates.

Under the boards Mohr was scrapping for rebounds against the taller Buster Batts. In fact, the rebounding was relentless and physical. Our big guys were beating their big guys, keeping us in the game as Moates emphasized the difference between a first-team All–Southern Conference guard and an also-ran like me. Taking me over three picks set to free him, he put up a jump shot that arched at a much steeper angle than a rainbow. When it scorched the net it felt like the sky was falling in on me. Moates was exposing me for the fraud that I knew I was.

Yet my coach was a man famous for the spotless integrity of his fighting spirit, and I heard him scream at me, “Fight him, Pat! Fight him for everything it's worth. Don't quit on me.”

Those words ignited like gasoline inside me, and I vowed to put Moates on the floor the next time down the court. Then I had a better idea. We had run the court since the opening whistle, fast-breaking every time we touched the ball, and keeping the lead for most of the first half. I first noticed exhaustion on Moates's face with nine minutes left in the first half, and I saw him gasping for breath as he guarded me. “Hey, Moates,” I yelled. “You know what I noticed at Camp Wahoo last summer? You can't play defense worth shit.”

“I can sure score, though, can't I, Conroy?” he said back.

“But Johnny, how you gonna keep me out of the paint?” And I blew by Moates and left him flat-footed at the top of the key. I was flying into the lane when six-foot-eight Buster Batts moved out to intercept me with his hands held high. Here is how a point guard thinks on the fly: if Batts is covering me, then Dan Mohr is free. I flicked a bounce pass to Mohr who laid it up under the basket all by his lonesome. Each time we came downcourt I drove past Moates, and if no one came out to contest me, I laid it up. If Tom Greene picked me up, I passed to Bridges at the wing. If McCann or Ukrop dropped off DeBrosse, John would drift to a spot and I would hit Kroboth or Zinsky or anyone else who was open.

To end the half, John retrieved a jump ball and hit Danny Mohr going upcourt before the foul line. Mohr dribbled once, then launched a shot from half-court that flew to the basket in a predestined arc and swished through the net at the buzzer. Richmond led us 47–45. They had shot for an amazing 65.5 percent accuracy from the field. On fire, Johnny Moates had lit me up for twenty-one points. I walked into that locker room feeling like the worst defensive player in America.

Sportswriter Louis Chestnut described the first half in the
News and Courier
the following morning: “The Citadel and Richmond played each other to a standoff in what may turn out to be the best basketball game of the Southern Conference Tournament which opened here Thursday. . . . Doug Bridges, having possibly his best game as a Bulldog, and little Pat Conroy, jumped The Citadel out to an early seven-point lead after seven minutes of play. Moates then went on a nine-point spree and the Spiders finally pulled even at 26–26. From that point the lead swayed back and forth until the Spiders took their two-point lead into the intermission.”

In the locker room, the Green Weenies surrounded me and told me I was making Moates earn every point he got. Adrenaline pumped through us like enzymes of pure energy. Mel was as animated as I had seen him all year. It felt like we were on the edge of something big. I prayed to God that He would let my team win this game and I prayed hard.

The Citadel came out into the second half scratching and burning and clawing for every loose ball and rebound, and at the twelve-minute mark, the score was 61–61. The crowd swooned for both teams that afternoon; they loved us with their applause and their joy at the valor on the floor.

Every time Moates guarded me, I drove the lane as hard as I could push it, flashing by him, dangerously loose in the paint. Richmond knocked me to the floor again and again. I ended up shooting fourteen free throws—a career high—and made eleven of them. Both Roberts and Larry Patterson fouled out taking me to the floor.

Bridges remained ethereal and untouchable throughout the second half. His shots grew longer and more preposterous, but he kept shooting and Mohr kept shooting. I screamed at Moates and dared him to shoot it, he screamed back, went off two picks, put up his odd jump shot, and hit it from what seemed like a quarter of a mile away.

Six times during the game, Greene's knee, which he used as part of his screen, hit my thigh squarely, the pain as bad as anything I'd experienced on the basketball court. It was smart, not dirty, basketball that Greene was playing, and it was having a damaging effect on my game. But I noticed that Moates was slowing down and fighting for breath at the same time I was running out of gas completely.

We went ahead—they went ahead—we responded—they answered. The game was tied at 84. We stormed back and went ahead. Greene scored. Mohr scored. Batts scored. The game went into overtime.