My Losing Season (39 page)

“The Senior Class Sportsmanship Award, Dad,” I said, bracing for what I knew was coming.

“The Senior Class Pussy Award. You won that in high school, too. If there's ever a pussy award for a ballplayer, it always goes to my favorite little girl.”

“I've got to go,” I said. “Big day tomorrow. I'll see y'all at graduation. Say hi to the kids.”

I took my two trophies, one in each arm, and walked out to the quadrangle and slowly made my way across the textured, moonlit landscape of my cadet life and toward the history of the one to come. Then, I heard the cheering begin along the galleries of Romeo Company. Word had come to R Company that I had won the two trophies, and my company poured out of their rooms to greet me. The applause grew louder as I climbed the stairs to my room on fourth division. I walked through the joyous noise of my shouted name, of boys who liked me because I was one of them and had brought honor to our company.

Entering my room, I saw my roommate Mike Devito studying for his English history exam. He was surprised when he noted the size of the trophies I bore in my arms. Wordless, Mike rose and approached, my handsome and powerful roommate, my protector, my wingman, my paisan.

Mike picked me up by the waist and hoisted me into the air. Mike, who had known of my great self-doubt as a basketball player, who had awakened when he heard me crying in the lower bunk after I didn't get in the Wofford game, and who comforted me with soft words from a rough yet tender boy who made the word “roommate” a holy one. Mike walked from the door to the window with both me and my trophies high above him. Then he turned and walked me back to the door. He and I didn't say a word, and I let him do it twice more because I understood the necessities of ritual. I was so moved that I couldn't have spoken if I'd wanted to when I realized that my roommate was honoring me for my struggles and disappointments. He was giving me a one-man parade at the end of my losing season.

         

T
WO WEEKS AFTER MY GRADUATION
from The Citadel, Mel Thompson was fired as head basketball coach. Louis Chestnut wrote: “The fact that a change was taking place had been known positively by the
Evening Post
for some months but, in deference to the school's recruiting program, and Thompson's own negotiations for other employment, confirmation was withheld.”

Chestnut quoted Mel as saying: “I have talked to a number of people, but I have not determined in my own mind if I'll remain in coaching or take a job in private business. When you make a change, you want to make the right one. Anytime you change, you must consider what is best for your family. I do not think anything is open in basketball right now that I would be interested in.”

I sat down to write a letter to the
Charleston News and Courier
telling that newspaper exactly what I thought of The Citadel firing Mel Thompson. Though I did not know it then, it began a long and honorable letter-writing exchange between me and that newspaper. Whenever I wrote a letter, I found out that I had a small talent for bombast and petty fulmination. In this letter, I tried to tell Charleston and The Citadel about the overarching difficulty of putting together a winning basketball team at a military college that prided itself in having the world's toughest plebe system. I told of watching six-foot-ten centers walking out of Lesesne Gate, and five-foot-ten guards like me with small hands and no outside shot deciding to stick around for four years. I raged about playing on the best freshman basketball team in history and losing half that team to the plebe system. I told the story of how we'd lost Donnie Biggs to Florida State. How could a coach win under such circumstances, and why didn't anyone in this city understand the impossibility of Mel's situation?

Then I segued into a long disquisition on the traditional hatred of athletes that every military college embraces as one of the secret gospels of the long gray lines. I spoke of scoring twenty-two points against the Furman freshmen and finding a group of cadremen waiting for me back in the barracks to put me through my own personal sweat party so I wouldn't feel that I was superior to my classmates. It happened to DeBrosse and Bridges and Mohr and Zinsky and Kroboth and Hooper—it had happened to every jock I knew at The Citadel. If the Corps hated its jocks, how were the athletes and coaches supposed to win in such an alienated environment?

I wrote far into the night. I postured, I railed, I tongue-lashed and blistered General Harris for firing my coach. That Harris had dared fire the only college coach I'd ever have did not sit well with me. There was something about Mel's dark, unapproachable solitude that touched me as I launched even more deeply into my passionate and out-of-control defense of him. I finished my letter at three in the morning, addressed it to Thomas Waring, the editor of the
News and Courier,
and mailed it the next morning before I left for work. It was my first letter to any editor.

A week later Mr. Waring answered my letter with one of his own. I wish I had saved his letter, but I was so humiliated by its demure arguments that I buried it on the bottom of the garbage can. It said something like this:

Dear Mr. Conroy,

I would have liked very much to publish your letter to the editor. But I'm afraid we're loath to publish thirteen handwritten pages, written on legal sheets, on our editorial pages. You understand, I pray, that we have certain space limitations. I found your letter interesting. Have you ever thought about writing with economy and restraint? Have you ever thought about the power of concision? The elegance of simplicity? Would you consider resubmitting your letter? Could you say in three paragraphs what you said in thirteen pages? Could you drop the anger, the self-righteousness, and that irritating didacticism? I would appreciate your attention on this matter.

Yours very truly,
                  Thomas Waring

That letter marked my final act as a Citadel basketball player. Mel Thompson simply walked out of our lives forever. As a coach, Mel was lord and master of his environment at the Armory. There was not a player on my team who was not afraid of or intimidated by him. His will to win boiled over in his black-eyed fury to push us to our physical limits at practice. Mel wanted with all his heart for us to be warriors on the court the way he was at NC State, and it frustrated him that we sprang from a softer, less driven tribe. My team, that began the season with such wide-eyed wonder and optimism, became Mel Thompson's Achilles' heel, his pass at Thermopylae, his OK Corral. When the shouting was done, Mel left town with his family none of us knew and returned to Richmond, Indiana. Like a storm center, he drifted out of the sea lanes of Charleston and moved all the eerie power of his darkness toward the plains of the Midwest. My misguided, hopeless awe of him had nowhere to go, and my team broke up like an archipelago of volcanic islands formed out of heat and chaos. Not one of my teammates said goodbye to me when I graduated. My team was an accurate and flawless reflection of our coach's theory of coaching: we lacked all unity, camaraderie, and fellowship. Mel was suspicious and paranoid, and he discovered that these rueful gifts were easily transferable to his team's unstable psyche. His paranoia proved reality-based, and his firing loosed him from the moorings of his game. Mel Thompson never coached another basketball team. Mel never got to know us at all, and it seemed against his most basic philosophy to try. Abruptly, he left as a stranger to us, and even worse, left his players as strangers to each other.

The team itself melted into the history of those days without a trace. So alienated was my team that I was not invited to a single one of my teammates' weddings nor were any of them invited to mine. We turned our backs on each other and for the most part, played no part in each other's lives. We did what all bad teams do. We pretended our losing season had never happened, or that losing was good for anything but a cause for the deepest shame. There were no covenants between us, no treaties to be broken, and no promises to honor. Our team was composed of twelve islands, bound by an uneasy alliance, and mindful of the dysfunction of our commonwealth and the vanity of even thinking we could take to the court as a unit forged by unbreakable bonds. We vanished into time, and tried to forget all we could about each other.

PART 4

THE POINT GUARD'S
WAY OF
KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER 30

NEW GAME

L
URKING AS BOTH TOUCHSTONE AND THE DEFINING MYTH BEHIND
this
book has stood the evasive, mysterious, and wordless figure of Mel Thompson. As I was taking notes and coaxing out memories from my teammates, I resigned myself to Mel never emerging long enough for me to interview him about a season that he had every reason to forget. In the first year, when Doug Bridges called to tell me he had located Mel on the Internet, I thought it was only a matter of time before I would fly to Indianapolis to strip-mine Mel's memories of that long-ago year. Finding Mel was not difficult, but getting him to answer my inquiries proved almost impossible. He would not even return my phone calls.

In my own mind, Mel assumed the shapes of great, impersonal forces of nature like the Gulf Stream or the Gobi Desert or some remote, snow-dusted Alp—all dominate in their landscapes, yet are impersonal and impossible to know. I moved against Mel's storm front each time I wrote a page of this book and neared the critical point of deciding whether I should just fly to Indianapolis and knock on his front door. I lacked the journalist's instinct and comfort with bad manners, and thought I might catch a break if I remained patient. Mel's sense of privacy protected him like the shell of a tortoise. For his players, his silence became both our obsession and our wound.

Though I wrote Mel as well as leaving messages on his answering machine, I never received a reply. Then one day in deepest winter he answered the phone himself.

“Coach Thompson?” I said.

“If you're calling me ‘Coach,' we haven't seen each other for a long time,” he replied.

“This is Pat Conroy, Coach. I'll be in Indianapolis in a couple of weeks and would like to take you to dinner.”

“Okay,” said Mel.

The first dinner went without incident, but Mel was withholding and off-putting, giving away very little of himself in conversation. I learned that after being fired, Mel and his family had returned to his hometown of Richmond, Indiana, where he had owned and operated a pizza parlor and a steak house for many years before a horrendous underground explosion destroyed a large portion of the downtown area, killing dozens of people. Though his buildings suffered damage, they were not destroyed, but the fear of other explosions turned downtown Richmond into a no-man's-land, and his clientele vanished overnight. In Indianapolis, Mel took a job as manager of a cement factory, but had recently retired after the death of his second wife.

As we sat in the rooftop restaurant, The Eagle's Nest, I noticed again Mel's thirty-eight-inch-long arms and his huge hands with fingers tapered like a pianist's. When I was in college I used to envy those arms and huge hands. Mel still looked every inch the basketball player. The waitress led us to a window table and as I sat down, I felt slightly seasick and then I realized we were in one of those dreadful restaurants that revolves 360 degrees while you pick at your arugula salad. In my travels, I have discovered there is an inverse ratio in the quality of the food to the number of full circumnavigations of a city's four quadrants that I was forced to endure in a single evening. As my coach and I moved counterclockwise above the city of Indianapolis, I told him about my encounter with John DeBrosse in Dayton in 1995. I told him how I had thought about him and that team often since I walked out of the Armory for the last time. I had interviewed every guy on the team extensively, and I thanked him for letting me interview him.

Mel said, “I'm afraid I'm not going to be much help. I talked to Ed Thompson about this, and neither of us can remember much about that year. It was a real up-and-down year, and I wasn't at all surprised when General Harris fired me. I was Mark Clark's guy. The general and I liked each other. Understood each other. We were both fighters deep down and respected that about each other. Harris was more of a bureaucratic type guy who liked to dot the
i
's and cross his
t
's. We never clicked much. The chemistry wasn't there.”

“Do you think General Harris knew how hard it was to win in a military college, Coach?” I asked.

“We had to recruit a certain kind of kid, one who didn't make a face when we mentioned The Citadel was a military college. It wasn't for everyone. You know that. But if I could get a boy there, I thought I could keep him. Didn't always work. I remember one kid who showed up at eight in the morning outside the Armory. When I gave him the old pep talk about why it was important to stay at The Citadel, he looked me right in the eye and said, ‘If you were in my shoes, Coach Thompson, would you stay here and take the shit that goes on in the barracks?' I didn't have an answer for him. That guy was a real player, too.”

“The ones that left were always players,” I said. “Did you know what the plebe system did to your athletes?”

Mel looked at me for a moment, then said, “I didn't care what happened in the barracks. I couldn't control that. I worried about what happened in practices. I got guys ready for games. But I will admit that when I was trying to recruit against other coaches, they had one word they used that became my biggest enemy.”

“What word?”

He laughed and said, “Clink.”

“Clink?” I said, puzzled.

“Yeah, clink. That's the sound of the gates locking at The Citadel every night. That's the ‘clink' that takes away your freedom for the next four years. I have to admit it was a pretty good strategy to keep a boy out of The Citadel, but we went for the type of kid that word wouldn't bother,” he said as we completed our first circling of the Indianapolis skyline.

The next morning Mel picked me up at nine o'clock sharp and drove me to his condominium. His neighborhood was modest, and inside, the house was clean and comfortable and well-lit, but it seemed strangely unlived-in and underpopulated. His recently deceased wife, Julia, had arranged her basket collection on the upper shelves in the kitchen. There was also a platoon of empty wine bottles arranged as orderly as cadets.

“What are the wine bottles, Coach?”

“Great evenings to remember. Me and Julia,” Mel said. “Man, we had some times together. No one could've gotten me to go to all the places she did. Hell, she got me to go to Mexico. Can you imagine me in Mexico?”

“Sounds like she was something.”

“Julia,” he said. “Julia was the best. The best.”

I thought I would learn little things about my coach on my visit, but I learned few. My great surprise was Mel Thompson's haunted tenderness whenever Julia's name came up. My coach had been deeply in love with his second wife, and there was a fierceness and urgency in the way he missed her.

“What about your first wife, Coach?” I asked.

“Didn't work out. Problems.”

“The kids?”

“Great. I got the best kids. They really take care of me now. The girls look out for me; the boys worry about me. Did you know my son Mike played basketball at Valparaiso?”

“Barney told me that. Was he any good?”

“Yeah, he was good. But he just didn't have the mean streak athletics requires. He wasn't the killer his old man was, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean, Coach.”

“I wanted him to go to East Carolina, but he made the choice. I never believed in pushing my kids into doing things I loved. Reliving the past through your kids is a mistake. But Mike, he was too nice. The kid was just too damn nice. All my kids are.”

Mel softened when the subject of his children arose, and though I could not tell what kind of father he had been, I knew he loved his children with all the ardor that his fierce heart could muster. I saw pictures of them, and they were attractive and fresh-faced. I realized I had come into Mel's place thinking he fathered like he'd coached. I expected to find terminal malfunction loose in the household he had brought up.

But whenever I turned to the year I was writing about, Mel's ability to remember the slightest detail deserted him. If I mentioned a game, it had slipped from both consciousness and memory. If I mentioned his players, Mel would provide me with the most banal descriptions of them. When I tried to dig deeply, Mel would answer me with vagueness or disinterest until my questions began to sound rude even to me. Mel never got angry, he simply seemed not to have lived through the same year I had. Where I wore scars, contusions, and bruises, it seemed not to have laid a single finger on him. My years at The Citadel were nothing compared to his years with the Wolfpack. So I let him drift back to his playing days, his glory days in the ACC when he was king of all he saw and bright with all the passions that still enlivened him and all the poisons that still defined him.

That night, John DeBrosse drove over from Dayton to join us for dinner in the movable restaurant on top of the Hyatt Regency. Again, Mel seemed in good spirits and happy to be with us as we told some of the stories the team had conjured up when piecing our last year together. Time and again, Mel would turn the conversation back to State or Everett Case or himself.

During one long, animated conversation, Mel told us how Case used to urge his guards to get the ball to the big men underneath the basket, the guys like him who could score. When the guards failed to make the passes, Case would reward them with lifetime seats on the bench. “I wanted the ball all the time. I loved shooting more than anything in the world. What was the point of basketball if you couldn't shoot it at the hole? I'd call for the damn ball every time down the court and the damn guards better get it to me if they knew what was good for them. You know what I've always hated? You know what I've always really hated?”

Mel was in a reverie as he remembered. “No, Coach,” DeBrosse said, “what do you really hate?”

Mel looked at me and John and spat out the words. “Guards. I've always hated guards.”

Stunned, his two guards from the '67 team stared at him as he resumed eating his steak.

When I said goodbye to Mel, I thanked him for meeting with me, and said, “Coach, I need to tell you something. I loved having you as my coach. I was proud to suit up and take the floor for you. And I wanted to thank you for all the time you spent with me as a boy. You never missed a practice.”

“Not me,” Mel said. “Not one in my whole career.”

“On the team I'm writing about,” I said, “nine of us loved you. Three didn't. That's not a bad percentage.”

“None of my boys ever quit on me,” Mel said. “Every one of them gave me everything they had and everything I asked.”

“I'll tell them that,” I said.

“Gotta go,” Mel said.

“You want to meet me and Johnny for breakfast tomorrow?” I asked.

“No,” Mel Thompson said, and walked back out of my life.

         

O
N THE FLIGHT BACK,
I flipped through my notes and thought about Mel. He remained untouchable at his core. He had dominated me in every conversation and then I realized something more astonishing. Mel had not asked me a single question about any of my teammates or myself. He never asked me if I had married or had children or if my parents were alive or where I lived or what I had done with my life. Before I interviewed him, I thought he would like a rundown of his team and how the lives of his players had played out. Mel lacked all curiosity about us, and only once during my time with him did I receive any indication that he knew what I did for a living.

“I hear you write books,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“I've never read one of them.”

“That's not a requirement, Coach,” I said.

“Don't plan to read any of them,” he said. There were no books in his apartment.

I did not say it, but I thought it: I bet you'll read one of them, pal.

I believe Mel asked me nothing because he is still lost in the strangeness of being Mel Thompson. I think that is a full-time job, a bizarre trip to the fun house and a lostness into self that produces confusion and dilemma. I do not believe that Mel Thompson ever thought about his ex-players once in his Indiana life. His mind drifted toward the years of victories and championships when he spent every waking moment with winners shaped and tormented by Everett Case. I spent my senior year exiled among losers shaped and tormented by Mel Thompson. Alone, among my coaches and teammates, the year was painful in the extreme. It also was the finest year of my life. Not once since then have I felt so fully alive, so vital and necessary.

         

F
OR FOUR YEARS
I
DRIFTED BACK INTO
the homes and lives of my lost team, met their wives and grown children, ate dinner with their friends and neighbors, and questioned them about the memories they carried from that year. They helped me resurrect games from uncharted depths that were all but unrecallable to me. When DeBrosse mentioned the sounds of elephants somewhere in the deep bowels of the Jacksonville Coliseum, a whole herd of circus elephants gathered in my head, rescued from oblivion at last, bellowing out into the north Florida night. Bornhorst told of the escape routes from an old hotel in the middle of Richmond, and Connor spoke of the provocative beauty of an East Carolina cheerleader who would be fifty-five years old today. But for Greg and me, that pretty girl will be twenty-one and glowing with radiant youth until the day we die. Some of the guys remembered the restaurants that served the best steaks, and others the hotels with the most comfortable beds; others the unstable, effervescent details of the games themselves. I discovered that no one forgets a star player, but it is very difficult to remember a role player or a set-up man or a sixth man off the bench. Though I thought I was invisible to my teammates, they were watching with uncommon vigilance, remembering things I said that I have not the slightest recollection of saying. In my own mind, I was a slouching, ill-tempered boy trapped in a phlegmatic, baffled personality; my teammates tell me that I was bright and good-natured, trying to spread good cheer among them.