My Losing Season (6 page)

On the first day of school I walked into the comely entranceway of Sacred Heart Academy, a junior college for women with a boarding high school for girls. Several years before, the Sisters of Mercy had begun taking day students, including thirty boys from the local communities. Sacred Heart did not have enough boys to field a football or baseball team and barely enough to make up a basketball team to compete in the Catholic League of North Carolina. I followed a flow of students and found myself in the student lounge when the song “Poison Ivy” boomed out from the record player and smooth, good-looking Bud Wofford walked up to pretty Louise Howard and asked her to dance. The school was so intimate that I knew almost everyone by the end of the first week, and they knew me. I'd never seen such pretty girls, and walking down the hall of Sacred Heart was the happiest thing a ninth-grade boy could do. It was the year I would reach puberty and the last year I'd entertain my Catholic-boy fantasies of becoming a priest. The Catholic Church could fill up its seminaries if it forbade God from making women look as fabulous as they do. Even the nuns were pretty at Sacred Heart as well as being the kindest women wearing habits and rosary beads who ever taught me.

I tried out for the varsity basketball team in October and surprised even my father when Coach Ted Crunkleton chose me as his tenth player. In this school of thirty boys, the sisters of Sacred Heart had found seven neighborhood kids who could really play the game. No one was great, but all played with determination and all hustled every moment on the court. I was five feet three inches tall when I arrived at Sacred Heart and I would be five ten when the season ended in February. It was the year I grew into the body I would carry into adulthood, and my game improved at a faster rate than it ever had because I was playing against juniors and seniors every day. My teammates never teased or hazed me because of my size or age; rather, they took me in and cherished me and helped me get better in my chosen game.

The point guard was the matchlessly named Johnny Brasch who was cocksure and arrogant the way the good ones are supposed to be. He took care of the ball and directed traffic and got the ball to the guy with the hot hand. The other guard was Bud Wofford, the boy I had watched dancing on the first day of school, whose game had a touch of elegance and who possessed the best jump shot on the team. No one on the team was over six feet two inches tall; Sam Carr, Ted Frazier, and Buddy Martin made up the front line. Nicky Vlaservich was the sixth man and he and Buddy served as the team co-captains.

Though Coach Crunkleton knew very little about the game of basketball, he knew a lot about bringing a team together. He let us in on the fact that he found it a pleasure to coach us, and thought we might surprise some teams that year. In the first game of the season against Cherryville High School in their gym, we beat them so soundly that even I got into the game with a couple of minutes to play. Wofford passed me the ball at the top of the key and I threw up the first jump shot of my high school career. It swished through the net and Wofford cuffed me on the back of the head in celebration as we ran down the court.

Though the Sacred Heart Ramblers started out fast that year, we entered a phase of ennui and uninspired play in the winter months. We were 13–8 entering the Knights of Columbus Tournament in Charlotte that would bring some of the best Catholic schools in the South together, including the habitual powers Bishop England of Charleston and Benedictine of Richmond.

Coach Crunkleton prepared us for this tournament in the oddest, most unconventional way imaginable. At some time toward the end of the season, he became convinced that our team was not in shape, so he spent the week before the tournament running us up and down the country roads around Belmont. We never touched a basketball once and looked more like a cross-country team as Ted Crunkleton would call out of the window of his car, “Meet me at Belmont Abbey.” Then he would scratch out of his parking spot and drive to the college to wait for us. When the team ran up to his car at the Abbey, our coach would yell out, “Meet me in Mount Holly.”

“Mount Holly!” the team would scream, and our coach would scratch off toward the small town three miles to the west. We bitched and cussed and grumbled for the next three miles. By the fifth day, Crunkleton had us doing ten miles of roadwork every afternoon and none of us touched a basketball during that crucial week leading up to the tournament. Only God's name was taken in vain more often than Crunkleton's as we jogged along country roads without a sign of life except the encroachment of impenetrable forest that crowded them.

“This isn't basketball,” Bud Wofford said. “It's track and field.”

“God, I could use a cigarette,” Johnny Brasch said, causing the whole team to laugh.

Sam Carr said, “Let's go up to Charlotte Catholic and challenge them to a footrace.”

Vlaservich and Martin led us down the back roads, upbeat and enthusiastic, and taught me how the captains of teams should act when the bellyaching got too loud. Always, Coach Crunkleton would drive to a spot several miles ahead and park his car on the shoulder of the roadway. When we would reach his parked car he'd be smoking a cigarette and would allow us to rest for five minutes. Then he'd say, “You know where that old stone quarry is? Run past that quarry and I'll meet you at the Old Gastonia Road.”

With great symphonic moaning, the ten of us would start the four-mile run as Crunkleton's car disappeared in the distance. I heard every joke Johnny Brasch carried in his vast repertoire that week and I listened to tales of the greatness of Bishop England and their six-foot-eight center, Tommy Lavelle, and the classiness of the undefeatable Cavaliers of Benedictine of Richmond who had won the Knights of Columbus tournament for two straight years. To my freshman ears the names “Bishop England” and “Benedictine of Richmond” sounded much like the words “Troy” and “Sparta” would sound to an Athenian child in ancient Greece. The Sacred Heart Ramblers ran in good order the four miles past the stone quarry and toward Ted Crunkleton's car that sat on a slight rise beside a farmhouse on the Old Gastonia Road. Though none of us knew it on that final run on Friday, we were about to surprise our school, our coach, our league, and ourselves.

In a dangerous ride through snow, we arrived at Charlotte Catholic just in time to get dressed for our game with Asheville Catholic. Though we had beaten Asheville Catholic twice during the regular season, both games had been closely contested, and their point guard, Jerry Vincent, was one of the best players in the league. I received a shock to my system when Coach announced that I would start the game in place of Buddy Martin, who had hurt his hand over the weekend and was in a cast. It embarrassed me to be starting when both of our co-captains, whom I hero-worshiped, were sitting on the bench watching me. Yet it was Martin and Vlaservich who slapped my fanny hardest when we gathered for the final pep talk by the bench.

“We've got a great team here,” Coach Crunkleton said. “I've known that all year long. Let's prove it to ourselves and everyone else.”

When we walked out on the court and I shook hands with Jerry Vincent, it surprised me that I was taller than he was. When Johnny Brasch came over to encourage me, I saw that I was an inch taller than Johnny. Our center, Sam Carr, controlled the tap and Ted Frazier made a jump shot for our first basket. Vincent answered with a jump shot from the top of the key. Despite their two losses to us, Asheville Catholic had come to play. Jerry Vincent played a smart swift game and his teammates lifted up with him to play their finest basketball of the season. I drifted through the first quarter, surprised to be there, feeling inadequate to fill the shoes of our co-captain Bud Martin. Then Carr took down a rebound, hit Wofford on the wing, who threw me a half-court pass after I slipped behind my man and took off downcourt. Bud's pass was perfect and I took it over my shoulder, dribbled once, and laid the ball in. Running back downcourt, I passed our bench and both Martin and Vlaservich popped me on the fanny as I ran past them.

In the second, third, and fourth quarters of the game against Asheville Catholic, something happened that had never occurred to me before in sport. I lost all sense of myself in the great tidal movements of the game itself, in the thrusts and retreats, the surges and falling back of teams rapturously engaged in a sublime submission to their game. I began taking long shots on the wing, half jump shots–half set shots, and I arched them high in the air and they came down without much backspin. The shots were without artfulness or beauty or much hope behind them. So high did I arch them, that they hung in the air for a long segment of time, then fell like fruit from the sky. They swished through the basket with the sound of torn fabric. I hit three in a row toward the end of the second quarter. In the fourth quarter I hit another three and my game had shifted into a high plane where it had never gone before.

It took two overtimes to defeat the gallant team from Asheville Catholic. Frazier and Carr, our two big rebounders, pulled the game out for us in final overtimes. Ted Frazier and I had both scored fourteen points and were high scorers. I looked up in time to see my father entering the gym with a busload of Rambler boosters he had driven to the game. My father had gotten lost in the snow and had found himself pulling his bus up to the campus of Queens College instead of Charlotte Catholic High School. He did not see me score a single point but my joy was so great I wanted to freeze-frame that moment of time and suspend myself in the honeycomb amber of that sublime moment.

The next afternoon, before a packed house, the Sacred Heart Ramblers took on the Cougars of Charlotte Catholic, the big-city team that had beaten us twice during the regular season, and we beat them by four points. After showering and dressing, my team sat together and watched the other semifinal game where the two most powerful Catholic schools in our part of the Southeast were about to take to the floor against each other. Bishop England of Charleston lined up against Benedictine of Richmond, which had a powerhouse athletic program that chose its athletes from five hundred Virginia boys. But it was only minutes into the game when we knew that Benedictine of Richmond was going to overrun Bishop England with its superior depth and firepower and speed. Bishop England went down by a score of 64–41, and I knew we did not belong on the same floor with mighty Benedictine of Richmond.

The next morning, the hallways of Sacred Heart shimmered with an excitement that was almost chemical in nature. Even the college nuns and coeds had caught fire with the improbable story of the thirty-boy high school competing against the largest Catholic school in the South, a high school power that looked all but unstoppable.

As I dressed for the game, I could feel the sudden paralysis come over me that terror brings to an inexperienced athlete's body. I'd experienced butterflies before, but nothing like this. I felt like vomiting all during the warmup period. The Benedictine Cadets looked every inch like the Boston Celtics warming up. They appeared to be three inches taller than us and carried themselves with an arrogant grace that let you know that playing us was a kind of insider's joke to them. They laughed and cut up on the sidelines. We were as serious as a quadratic equation, but I was the only one on our team who seemed afraid.

My first prayer to God that day was to thank Him for healing Buddy Martin's right hand. My knees were shaking on the bench as I watched Sam Carr jump center against their big man. It took about five minutes of a game played with extraordinary intensity for Benedictine to know they were in a game and at least another minute to realize they were in the fight of their lives. One minute Wofford would have the hot hand and the next Carr would distinguish himself, or the pure hustle of Martin would carry the day or the heart of Sam Carr or the tenacity of Nicky Vlaservich. Together, they blended so effortlessly that if a team stopped one player cold they lit a fire beneath another on another part of the court. But on this night, Benedictine had more than it could handle from the chain-smoking, tough-talking little point guard, Johnny Brasch.

Though not a great jump shooter, Brasch lit it up with long-range jumpers all night long to the ecstatic cheering of the entire community of Sacred Heart who filled the gym to capacity. Every nun from the convent had come over with my father in the school bus and their cheering section looked like a lost colony of emperor penguins.

When we went ahead by eleven points, Benedictine went into a blanketing full-court zone press. I knew we were in trouble the moment they moved their players all over the court. Their guards Meyer and Berry started stealing the ball frequently from our guards. They began cutting into our lead and I saw Coach Crunkleton giving me the eye. But with a minute and a half left, Bud Wofford fouled out of the game and I heard the coach call my name. After I reported to the scorer's table, I ran out to the court and took my position up against Jimmy Meyer.

By then, Johnny Brasch had taken over the game. He had assumed for himself all dribbling and scoring duties and let everyone else on the team know that he could do it, that he could pull us through and win the game for us. He came up to me, put his arm around me, and said, “Take the ball out of bounds, Pat. Get it to me. Then head up the court. If I get in trouble, come back to help me. Got it?”

I did what Johnny Brasch asked me to do. I got him the ball because I did not want it and lacked the courage to take the ball upcourt. My fear disgusted me but it consumed me. Brasch fought the whole Benedictine team and held them off all by himself. He broke the full-court press, with the help of no one. Once Meyer and Berry surrounded me when I received a pass and took it away from me with dispiriting ease and scored an open layup. I took it out of bounds and fed it into Brasch, who took the ball downcourt with everyone on the Benedictine team trying to stop him. He was heroic and magnificent and I fell to my knees and kissed the floor when the final buzzer sounded and we had prevailed 53–52 in the greatest upset in high school basketball in North Carolina that season. We carried Johnny Brasch off the floor, delirious with joy.