My Losing Season (5 page)

“Swing it,” Coach Thompson yelled.

Doug threw it to DeBrosse at the top of the key who swung the ball to Zinsky on the left side of the lane, then John took his man into the far left corner. Mohr picked for Bridges on the other side of the court as I moved to the top of the key, Buisson covering me like a silk glove. I had to fake a backdoor move toward the basket to open up the passing lane between me and Zinsky when I saw Mohr break toward me as I shuffled him a pass. Danny dribbled Ronnie Quick deep into the lane, then spun and shot his lovely jumper down low. Mohr actually was taller than the Auburn center, but when Danny extended his long willowy arms, he played like he was six nine or better. For a big man, Danny had the softest, supplest hands, and his shots passed through the cords as if they were trying to nest there.

Auburn played a fast-paced game but Bobby Buisson controlled the tempo and action of everything the War Eagles did. His bursts toward the basket were rabbit-swift and I started to give him some room. In the first five minutes, Bobby had proven that he could drive the lane better than I could, an accolade I did not hand out often, and always grudgingly. So I played off of him, giving him some daylight to maneuver, and hoping he would take the opportunity for jump shots. He radiated with all the dangers of the penetrator, the kind that loves to kill defenses by attacking the dead center of their engines.

“Get in his face, Conroy!” Coach Thompson yelled over the noise of the crowd, but I had all I could handle with this kid. I was a Southern Conference guard trying to hold my own with a Southeastern Conference guard, and the difference was glaringly apparent. Bobby took in the whole floor in a glance, and he got the ball to the player who was open with crisp, split-second passes that landed in his teammates' hands soft as biscuits, and at that exact moment they were ready to shoot.

Bill Zinsky scored his first college goal on a short jumper he took after grabbing a long rebound. Thirty seconds later Bridges hit a long jump shot, pulling up while trailing on a fast break, his body already glistening with sweat from the frantic pace.

“Slow it down,” Mel Thompson commanded. As he shouted this, Bobby Buisson swarmed all over me, his arms snake-striking all around me, trying to flick the ball away, but Bobby was operating too close, and I passed him in a flash. We raced for the basket, he closing the gap slowly with every step we took, as Auburn's center, Quick, slipped off of Danny Mohr to intercept my drive. I do not remember if Bobby fouled me or Quick or if it was Tom Perry, but whoever fouled me did it hard and made sure I did not score on the play.

I stood on the free throw line, made a sign of the cross because it irritated the Protestant boys I played against, and threw up my underhanded free throw and scored my first point of the season. When I made the next free throw, the buzzer sounded and Tee Hooper came in to replace me at guard. My role as The Citadel's starting point guard had lasted five full minutes, and we were tied 10–10 with Auburn University. The Green Weenies all stood and cheered as I took my place at the end of the bench, trying to hide my shame over having been pulled from the game so early. “I told you not to shoot, Conroy,” Coach Thompson said.

I simply did not think I could endure one more season of riding the bench and watching a game that I loved more than anything in the world pass me by. My mediocrity at the game of basketball festered in me, tumored my normally buoyant spirit, tortured me into a kind of resigned submission as I considered the humiliation of spending my last season as a reserve guard. But I was not the kind of boy who would allow himself to fret or mope—that had not been my training. My teammates required my loyalty and enthusiastic championing of their play. And for the night of December 2, 1966, I was their captain, their leader on and off the floor, and I knew the power and necessity of being a team player.

So I fought the colossal disappointment of being replaced by a far more talented sophomore and got on with the business of cheering the Blue Team to victory. As Green Weenies, we never got to play much because in Mel Thompson's theories of coaching, you put your best athletes on the floor and let them win your basketball games with their superior skills. My coach did not believe in resting his best players because he never once asked to rest in his career as a center for North Carolina State. Fatigue was a form of moral cowardice to Mel, and all of his players understood that.

When Tee took my place, Bobby Buisson started to guard John DeBrosse, and the taller of the Auburn guards, Alex Howell, took on the rangy Hooper. Only when I returned to the bench did I realize how small Auburn's forwards were.

“Hell, we're bigger than those guys,” I said.

“You ain't bigger than anybody, duck butt,” Bob Cauthen said.

With six minutes left in the half, Danny Mohr, who was in the middle of playing a terrific game, hit three straight turnaround jump shots to pull The Citadel within three points. Taking a pass from Bridges, Tee left his man in the dust and flew through the entire Auburn team to make a beautiful, twisting layup against the glass. His layup narrowed Auburn's lead to one. Then Auburn got serious, and Bobby Buisson spent the rest of the night teaching me the great secrets of playing point guard. Watching him was like seeing Manolete demonstrate the proper use of the muleta to a Spanish boy maddened by the desire to face the great bulls in his own “suit of lights.” In Bobby Buisson, I had found what I had been looking for my whole life.

In the realms of college basketball, the entire concept of the point guard was a new and developing one. I had heard the phrase used in my first summer at Camp Wahoo, but the necessity of having a guard who directed the offense and distributed the ball to the big men and the shooting guard (also a new concept) was gradually spreading around the theorists and innovators who created new wrinkles in offensive patterns and strategies. I could see that the five men on my team now on the court were, by far, the five best athletes The Citadel could field on any given night. Mohr, at center; Bridges and Zinsky at forward; DeBrosse and Hooper at guard—any one of these men was fully capable of scoring twenty points in any given game. Though it would take me four or five games to realize this, my team had one great, transparent flaw in its makeup: it lacked a point guard, a Bobby Buisson. Though John DeBrosse looked like a point guard, he was deficient when it came to possessing the proper temperament of the position. John was a shooter, pure and simple.

All five players on the court for my team were either scorers or shooters. There was not a passer among them. Bobby Buisson would begin to cut our hearts out in the second half. His utter joy in getting the ball to his hustling teammates was a besotted, almost maniacal thing. He was guarding DeBrosse so closely that Johnny was having difficulty establishing his game. Buisson was quicker, faster, and stronger than either me or DeBrosse—Auburn led by seven at the half, 50–43.

In the second half, with me and the rest of the Green Weenies in agonized witness, my Citadel team fell apart. The unraveling began with the opening tip-off. Our defense, never strong, simply collapsed under the full fury of the Auburn fast break. Auburn seemed to score on every possession. My team looked exhausted, spent, and beaten down by forces they did not seem to understand. After ten minutes, Auburn led 81–59. What had been a close and fiercely fought game turned quickly into a rout. It got so bad that Coach Thompson put me back in. Playing a desperate catch-up game, I drove the lane and scored my first 2-pointer of the season. Immediately Tee Hooper came back into the game.

“I told you not to shoot, Conroy,” Mel Thompson shouted as I headed for the bench.

“Sorry, Coach,” I said, noting that I had made the shot in question.

“That's your problem, Conroy,” he said. “You're always sorry.”

My team did not congeal as a team for the rest of the evening. Each time one of us made a move with the ball, it seemed individual, selfish, and unrelated to the other four players on the court, while Auburn was assassin-like in its delicious execution of its offense. They were a much better basketball team and much better coached, playing with brio, freshness, and unquenchable zeal.

I studied Buisson, dissecting his game and trying to steal as much as I could from him and graft his talents onto my own. First, I saw how much Buisson wanted to be there for his teammates, the joyfulness he took in delivering a pass to an open player and the gratitude they felt toward him for his childlike magnanimity. I basked in the bracing aura of his indomitable confidence. He flashed like a buccaneer across both ends of the court, brash, swashbuckling, all the elixirs of being fully alive and in control sparking off him as his team finished the joy of taking my team to the cleaners. The final score was an unbelievable 105–83.

But ah! There were bright spots for the Bulldogs. As the
News and Courier
sports editor Evan Bussey would write the next morning, “Danny Mohr, The Citadel pivot man, again proved to be old Mr. Dependable in the scoring column. The 6-6 senior scored 20 points and at one stretch in the first half was about the only one holding the Citadel Bulldogs in the game. Sophomore Bill Zinsky got 16 points in his first varsity game and proved to be the best the Cadets had on the boards. He had nine rebounds.

“Doug Bridges had 15 points, DeBrosse 8, and Tee Hooper in a most impressive debut had 11.”

I followed the rest of Bobby Buisson's career closely. He proved to be as good as I thought. His nickname was “Bweets,” and Adolph Rupp was quoted as saying that Buisson was “one of the finest defensive players we've ever seen.”

I agree.

Bobby Buisson. Wherever you are. I was an eyewitness to your mastery, the tender wizardry you brought to my home gym. I dedicated the rest of my year to remaking myself in your image. It was an honor to take the court against you. I was no match for you and for that I apologize. But I took some things from your game that would hold me in good stead.

After showering, I walked in darkness behind the barracks on Plebe Walk, trying to control my shame. A second-stringer and a senior, I said, torturing myself. My season was already slipping away, and it had just started. In agony I made my way across the length of the campus alone, doomed to be a spectator while my life as an athlete went flashing past me on the fly.

Shame, I felt, the purest shame.

PART 2

THE MAKING OF
A POINT GUARD

CHAPTER 4

FIRST SHOT

L
ET ME TAKE YOU TO THE SPOT.

In the city of Orlando, Florida, near the foul line of an outdoor court, Billy Sullivan took a pass from Gregory Rubichaud then threw it to me. “Let the new kid shoot it,” he said.

I took my first shot ever at that basket in Orlando in my tenth year on earth and felt the course of my whole life change. I felt a bolt of pure wonder and joy—I had found a place I could take my terrified childhood to hide. Though I missed that first shot, I moved in fast to retrieve it and laid it in off the backboard.

“Nice shot, kid,” Gregory said.

“Where you from?” Billy asked.

“Nowhere,” I answered. Both boys laughed and I'd made my first friends in Orlando. They also had changed my world and place in it forever. From that first day, a basketball court provided me with a sense of home in whatever town I entered. I became a fixture on that St. James playground after school and would wait patiently until the older boys would invite me into a game or until they gave up and went home. Basketball, like a good book, gave me a place to be alone without the lacerating wounds of loneliness as an accompaniment.

I mark the year in Orlando as the happiest of my childhood. It is no accident that my father was away, spending that year on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. It was a year spent fishing in a city dimpled with abundant lakes, or smelling the spiced air of my Uncle Russ's ferneries, climbing the trees of his pond-fed orchards to peel grapefruits, big as my head, with a pocketknife. Aunt Helen and Uncle Russ had a houseful of boys so an open door visitation of cousins spilled in and out of our house and theirs. We lived in a rodent-infested place on Livingston Street (with a baseball bat, I killed two rats perched on my brother Jim's crib), barely a mile from my cousins' house on North Hyer Street. It was the year I fell in love with the girl next door, Barbara Ellis, caught my first bass, became a patrol boy, and finished third in the county fifth-grade spelling bee by reversing the position of the inner
s
and
t
in the word “taste.” That word still taunts me whenever I hear it. Each day, in season, I would go out and harvest an avocado lying under a tree, bringing the best one back to my mother as she sat on the front porch reading the
Orlando Sentinel
. With my pocketknife I would carve glistening, pale green crescents of the fruit and hand them to her. Mom would salt and pepper each slice, anoint them with the juice of lemons grown in the same yard, and moan with pleasure when she popped each morsel in her mouth. My mother was thirty-one that year, a knockout, and often men would wolf-whistle at her. Mom would wink at me as though she and I were conspirators who knew things the uninitiated could never know.

In November I made the fifth-grade basketball team, and in our first game the sixth grade stomped us and teased us so mercilessly that one of my teammates wept. A week later in a rematch on the same outdoor court, we lost by eight, clearly outclassed by the older boys. But in our third and final game, something happened to my little band of fifth graders that contained all the elements and seeds which go into the creation of magic in sport. There was a strange coming together when Gregory Rubichaud, the largest of the fifth graders, took me by the shoulders, stared into my eyes, and said, “We can beat these guys, Pat. You, me, and Billy Sullivan. We can beat 'em.” I felt something change deep inside me.

In a hard-fought game, the fifth grade of St. James School beat the haughty sixth graders by one point. I scored the layup that won the game and felt the glorious rush of teammates trying to hug me all at once, the first taste of the ecstasy of victory, of prevailing over a better opponent.

After the game, I sprinted the mile to Livingston Street, the length of that tree-lined street, to that house, to the arms of that pretty woman who loved avocados. Bursting through the back door, I ran straight up to her, breathless and heaving, and said, “Mom! Mom! We beat the sixth grade. We really did. No one thought we could, Mom, no one! I was the high scorer. The high scorer. You've got to write Dad.”

Before she could respond, I burst into tears of joy and threw myself into her arms.

My parents wrote to each other every day. That night when my younger brothers and sisters had been put to bed, I oversaw the writing of Mom's letter to Dad. I made sure that she emphasized the underdog role of my small-boned fifth-grade team and yes, the sixth-grade boys had been like a race of mean-spirited, taunting giants to me. With great care, I told Mom where I had scored each one of my points including the first foul shot I ever made. “Nine points, Mom. No one on either team scored that many. I was the high scorer.”

“You've told me that a hundred times, Pat,” my mother said. “That's the first thing I wrote to your father.”

“Won't Dad love it, Mom? He'll just love it.”

If my father loved it, he never acknowledged it in any of his many letters to my mother. He never mentioned that game until I drove him to the spot on the playground of St. James School, in 1997, and told him how we defeated the sixth-grade team. Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry, and like him, I grew up court-savvy and predatory and ready to rumble in any game that came my way. Though I tried to incorporate my father's big-city, Chicago-coarsened game into my own, I grew up in a South where basketball was still in a stage of infancy. I would hear his voice raised in mockery and vituperation with every step I took. Dad was happy to step into the role of “the sixth grader” no matter where I went or how far I took the game I had once watched him play so uncommonly well. His greatness as a ballplayer was thrown in my face each time I achieved some new milestone as a player.

When my father returned from his tour of duty overseas he had a new assignment and my mother had to extract me from Orlando like a tooth. The year had been a fatherless idyll and I begged Mom to let me stay in the city with Aunt Helen and Uncle Russ and my beloved four cousins, the Harper boys. On his first day back, my father slapped my brother Mike in the face for the first time. Mike was four years old and did not realize that Dad was establishing his authority over a house that had gone soft in his absence. After he wept, Mike approached my father and said to him, “I want you to go back to the seas. I don't like you.” In two sentences my brother had summoned up the courage to say out loud what I had always suppressed, and I waited for Dad to kill my brother or beat him into unconsciousness. My father surprised me by laughing as Mike shook with a four-year-old's helpless fury. I knew Mike's look and I shared his anger. My father looked like the strongest man in the world to me. When I asked Dad to come with me to the playground at St. James to shoot around before dinner, he appraised me, saying, “You come to me when you can give me a game. Then I'll kick the shit out of you.”

My father had played on the Parker High School team that won the city championship in Chicago in 1938. He is still considered, by some, to be the best basketball player to attend St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa, and his name hangs in its Athletic Hall of Fame. His college friend Ray Ambrose told me often that “when your father came to this part of the Midwest, everyone shot with two hands. When he left, everyone shot with one hand. Your old man brought the one-handed shot to Iowa.” In a practice game against DePaul Dad outscored a young sophomore by the name of George Mikan, the first great big man in the game. George Mikan was named the best basketball player in the first fifty years of the twentieth century. The incomparable Michael Jordan took the honors over the next fifty years. My father had outscored the best basketball player of his time. “I caught Mikan young, before he became George Mikan,” was all my father would say about it.

With my father's great gifts, he could've taught me everything about basketball I'd need to know, beginning that education in the schoolyard of St. James. Instead, he taught me nothing, and I went to The Citadel not knowing what a pivot was or how to block out on a rebound or how to set a pick to free a teammate for a shot or how to play defense. A beautiful shooter, a fierce rebounder, and a legendary defender, my father chose not to pass these ineffable skills on to any of his five sons. We grew up overshadowed by his legend and that legend did not lift a finger to help us toward any patch of light our own small achievements might have granted us. The Conroy boys learned their game in the streets. The Conroy girls grew up unnoticed and unpraised. Their brothers envied them.

My father pulled the '55 Chevy station wagon out of the driveway at 945 North Hyer Street as Uncle Russ and Aunt Helen stood with the four Harper boys waving a tearful goodbye to their five cousins and their favorite aunt and uncle. It was the first trip to a new assignment that we started in broad daylight. Normally, we left at midnight when the roads would be empty and we could “make good time,” according to my father. He drove straight through to Arlington, Virginia, where he began a new job at the Pentagon as his family built a new life on Culpepper Street in Arlington. The Culpepper Street years were stormy ones between my parents—the only calm years they ever had was when Dad was called overseas. My mother and I had grown exceptionally close in the year he'd been gone, and now when Dad beat me it seemed like a punishment meted out for being liked too much by his wife.

But the basketball was wonderful in Virginia, with outdoor courts everywhere. Culpepper dead-ended onto the grounds of Wakefield High School, and in the first summer I shot around with a bunch of high school kids, one of whom was the son of a coach. The Wakefield gym was the first time I had ever played the game on a wooden floor or dribbled a regulation leather basketball. When the gym was closed I'd settle for an outdoor court by Claremont Elementary School. By myself, I would shoot all day, happy as a boy could be.

For three straight years, I attended Blessed Sacrament School in Alexandria and played in the church leagues from sixth through eighth grade. I did well in those leagues and was the star in my last year. Neither of my parents attended one of my games. My mother was overwhelmed with small children; my brother Tim was born in the hospital in Bethesda in December of 1957; and I was grateful my father was too overworked by his job at the Pentagon to be at my games.

It was during my Arlington years that I discovered the vast difference between the way black kids played the game of basketball and the way white kids did. The black kids would drift onto the courts near Blessed Sacrament and I would walk over to “Green Valley,” the black neighborhood near Claremont where I'd be the only white kid in sight. From the beginning, I took to everything about basketball as it was played in the ghettos. It was high-speed, rough-around-the-edges, tough-talking, hand-checking, kick-ass basketball, the way the game was supposed to be played. It was hard for me to get into a game in Green Valley because I was white and because I was little. But sometimes I'd luck out and they'd need my body to complete a team. I'd get the ball to the best shooters on my team and do it quickly and often. Very early on, I learned that all shooters—black or white—value guys like me who get them the ball. I mimicked the showmanship and style of the fifty or so black kids I played against for the next three years. I loved their heart and their aggression and the fierceness of their bantering and back talk. They called me “white boy,” “cracker boy,” and “white fuck,” as in: “Shit, we'll take the little white fuck.”

The guy that called me “white fuck” was a grown man, unemployed and sad-faced, who played with the boys and young men of Green Valley because he had nothing to do and because he had a glorious jump shot, high and hanging and architecturally perfect. I fed him the ball every chance I got. When a new kid came to the court, he elbowed me, an eighth grader, in the back of the head and I went somersaulting out of bounds, sliding across concrete. The new kid walked toward me with his fists clenched and I prepared myself as well as I could for the beating. Then someone grabbed him from behind, a muscled arm around the kid's neck. “The rule, new boy. Don't fuck with the white fuck. That boy gets me the ball.”

         

A
FTER MY GRADUATION FROM
Blessed Sacrament, the gypsy caravan that disguised itself as my family started up in earnest as though to punish us for our three years on Culpepper, the longest amount of time I'd ever spent on a single street (even though we had lived in two separate houses). After years of going to night school, my father had applied for the Operation Bootstrap program which sent officers whose college studies had been interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War back to school to earn their diplomas. From far-flung sources, my father collected all the credits he'd earned at St. Ambrose and beyond and found a college that would allow him to graduate after taking a single year off from the Marine Corps.

Leaving again at night as was his habit, my father took us to the road once more, driving us down country roads through Virginia until he pulled into the driveway of the smallest house the Conroy family would ever live in, on Kees Road in Belmont, North Carolina. My father would spend the year as an undergraduate senior at Belmont Abbey College. I had only known my father in his mythological, unconquerable ideal of the Marine Corps fighter pilot so I had a difficult time making the adjustment to him as a college student who had trouble making C's. Among my brothers and sisters, we now conduct polls to discover which were Dad's worst and most violent years as a father. Belmont always ranks high on the list. It was the year my restless father had too much time on his hands.

My sister Carol became expert at excavating my father's graded essays which he went to great length to bury under his huge stack of intimidating college textbooks. Once she found an early essay from his American literature class and announced to the family: “Hey, everybody! Dad got a C– on his English paper. What a dope.” I got to Carol before Dad did and sent her hightailing it to her room.