My Losing Season (9 page)

Toward the end of the game, I took a pass on the wing from Randy Randel at center, and brought it to the middle of the court where the two Ridgeland guards lined up to stop me. When I reached the top of the key I went behind my back when the first guy tried to steal it, then flew by the second guy and scored on a reverse layup on the left side of the basket. It brought the crowd to its feet. It brought my mother, brothers, and sisters to their feet, but not my father. My mother blew me a kiss and I blew one back at her, but disguised it as though I were wiping perspiration from my face.

Then I heard it for the first time from one of the Ridgeland guards, and it would become a common theme among my opponents for the next two years. “Hey, number thirteen. You play just like a nigger. You know that?”

“Sure do,” I answered, swollen with pride.

I scored twenty-eight points in my first game as the point guard of Beaufort High School, more points than I had ever scored in a basketball game. I was so accustomed to walking down a school corridor with no one knowing my name that I received a shock the next morning when the entire school seemed to be calling out my name. Scores of kids called, “Good game,” as I passed them in the hallways, yet I didn't know a one of them. That day, Bruce Harper, a basketball teammate and the vice president of the Student Council, asked me to spend the night with him that weekend; I had not seen the inside of a Gonzaga boy's home. That season I would go on to score twenty-five points against St. Andrews and Garrett high schools out of Charleston, and thirty-one against Conway after a defeat the previous night against a Myrtle Beach team that would go on to win the state championship. My game had finally caught up with what my imagination told me it should be, and I averaged eighteen points a game that dream-born junior year. Basketball had put my name on the lips of every student at Beaufort High School, and the following May, my classmates elected me the president of the senior class. My mother broke down and wept when I told her. My father judged my class with more severity when he said, “Talk about a lack of leadership, pal. That class of yours must be pathetic.”

         

I
N THE SUMMER BETWEEN
my junior and senior years, Bill Dufford, my principal, gave me a key to the Beaufort High School gymnasium and a job as a groundskeeper for the summer. Because of some incurable wound my father suffered during the Depression, the Colonel instituted an ironclad rule that none of his seven children could take a paying job. Mr. Dufford was delighted that I'd move tons of dirt from one end of campus to another while refusing to take a single dime. I thought the physical work would be good for me as an athlete, and I spent the summer in the blazing heat, resodding and planting grass on every bald patch that disfigured the vast greensward of my pretty campus. Mr. Dufford also let me practice basketball in the gym the last three hours of the day before he made me close up at six. But I practiced hard, pushing myself to absolute limits. Every day, I set up long lines of folding chairs that stretched from one end of the gym to the other, and I dribbled right-handed, left-handed, weaving between them at full speed, sprinting as hard as I could go. My ambitions exceeded my talent but I didn't know that then, so I drove myself to the point of collapse. I worked on going to my left all summer, and during one of those hours I'd only dribble with my left hand and only throw up left-handed hook shots off the drive. I invented dribbling and passing drills for myself, playing imaginary games from start to finish in my head. Those games, populated by a whole nation of made-up players, were my first attempts at composing short stories, and all games ended the same way, with me in a heroic, winner-take-all, last-second shot on a drive down the lane with my invisible enemies closing the lane down around me.

In the first days of my senior year, I caught the mumps and never fully recovered from the five weeks of classes I missed. When I got back to Algebra II and trigonometry, my natural weaknesses in math overwhelmed me, and the figures on the blackboard looked like Sanskrit and chicken scratch to me, lost in a funhouse of ghastly numbers. Though I developed a crush on my French teacher, Nancy Rogers, I never attained the sangfroid it required to stand up in class and order a meal in French with the comely Miss Rogers. I struggled in economics and physics, a course my father insisted I take after he made me drop a typing course.

When basketball season dawned, the students and teachers of Beaufort High School looked at me through different eyes. The school expected a lot of my team and it expected the world of me. Unlike the previous year, when I came on in the tailwinds of my father's orders, I'd take no one by surprise either in my school or in my league. On the first day of practice, Coach Jerry Swing named Robert Padgett and me as the team's co-captains and told us all that he knew this was the best basketball team in Beaufort High School history. Swing trimmed the team down to twelve men who could all play ball. If my team had a single weakness, it was a noticeable lack of height. In the team photograph taken by Ned Brown that year, it looks as though we are all the same height—though we ranged from five ten to six one. We were quick and game and an easy team for a coach or a school to like. A buzz of high expectancy hung over the breezeway as I held my breath for the opening night. Half the school wished me luck as they passed me in the hallways. Julie Zachowski, the senior class vice president, gave me a garter she had sewed to wear beneath my sock for luck. So much was riding on the success of this basketball season that the worst case of the butterflies in my career had almost bent me double in physics class that morning. Butterflies are what fear masquerades as in the cocoon of an athlete's stomach.

As I lay down in my top bunk, resting for the game, my father came into the room to talk about the coming season. He kept his voice low so my mother wouldn't hear him.

“Hey, jocko. Want to hear my prediction about you and your team?” Dad said.

“Yes, sir.”

“One game below five hundred,” he said. “I don't think you'll win half your games. You've got no height. No big guys to get you the ball under the boards. This league's going to be gunning for you this year, son. I don't think you do well under the spotlight. You scored over eighteen a game last year. The other teams make adjustments and I say you score less than ten a game this year.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“I bet not a single college scout comes to watch you play,” he said. “I think my baby boy's going to wilt under all the pressure.”

“I hope not.”

“You're a loser, son. Your mother can't see it, but I'm a Chicago boy and I know a pussy when I see one.”

My father's laughter rang down the hallway as he walked toward the kitchen.

         

A
GAINST
S
T.
P
AUL IN THE OPENING GAME
, before what seemed like the largest opening-night crowd in history, I faced my first double-team and realized that the St. Paul coach was gambling that if he could stop me, his team could defeat the Tidal Wave. But the two guards assigned to me had never double-teamed anyone for a whole game, and they found it harder to do than it looked on a blackboard. I kept busting through a seam up the middle and heading for the basket. During the game I kept hearing a voice through the noise of the crowd shouting, “Get Conroy, put Pat Conroy on the deck,” and recognized it as the voice of my father. A Marine brat by the name of Billy Swetnam had entered Beaufort High School and joined me in the back court. He could play the game and had a nice short-range jump shot that made teams regret double-teaming me. Our big men controlled the boards, Chris Edwards and Robert Padgett with finesse, and Benny Michael with the brute strength he brought intact from his fullback position on the football team. We defeated St. Paul 49–34. I scored a workmanlike nineteen points and knew that I was in for a far different season from the honeymoon of my junior year when I was one of the league leaders in scoring. But my team and I sustained each other and fought for each other and we were 3–0 going into our annual road trip to play Myrtle Beach and Conway.

In Conway, the gym was packed with a rowdy, enthusiastic crowd as we loped out of the locker room for warmups. Their coach, Tom Eady, walked over and shook my hand as I moved to the back of the layup line.

“Go easy on us, Pat,” he said. “You killed us last year.” Last year I had scored thirty-one points against Conway, by far the best game I'd ever played.

Coach Eady, an elegant and handsome man who had a gift for the right gesture, had come to find me in the locker room to congratulate me. He was an excellent coach and that night proved it by stopping me cold. Coach Eady introduced me and my teammates to a defense called the box and one.

An aggressive guard named Harold Branton was the one, and his only job that night was to bird-dog me all over the court. If I got around him, his four teammates were to move out as one in a disciplined zone to stop me until Harold recovered and got back into position. Conway encouraged my teammates to shoot often as Branton followed me around the court with the persistence of halitosis. I could not shake the kid and our offense had no way to get him off me. We never solved the problem of the box and one that night and lost to the Conway Tigers 52–39. I stunk up the floor, disgraced my school, only scoring eleven points by intercepting errant passes and taking the ball downcourt for layups.

We lost three of the next four games; the league teams had figured out a foolproof way to contain me on offense. I grew accustomed to seeing two men inch out to intercept me when I brought the ball upcourt. My team grew worried and diffident around me. I could see in their eyes that I was failing to hold up my part of the unspoken covenant, lifting this team to victory. I scored seventeen in a two-point loss to Garrett, fifteen in a 49–41 victory over Berkeley, and fourteen in a 51–42 loss to St. Paul. My play was flat and undistinguished, and much worse, it was cowardly.

My father recognized the cowardice, not me. In the disappearance of my game, I had submitted to a strange lassitude that fell somewhere between surrender and vagueness. I was lost somewhere in the fogs of myself and didn't know how to recover. When my father picked me up to take me home to Laurel Bay, he asked how the St. Paul game went.

“We lost, Dad,” I said.

“How many did you score?”

“Fourteen.”

He backhanded me into the passenger-side window. His slap had caught me relaxed, and my nose started bleeding profusely. If the blood had not flowed, the beating would have continued. Because I was an expert in translating the fury of my father's eyes, I knew that the first backhand was a warmup for a long night spent warding off his blows. I unzipped my bag and pressed my nose into my uniform shirt. I could always tell my mother that I'd been elbowed under the boards by St. Paul's center.

“You don't get it, do you, mama's boy? This is a kick-ass world that doesn't have time to wait around for pussies like you to wake up and read the fucking headlines. You're not as good a ballplayer as you were last year, pal. Understand that? These teams have your number. They're eating your jock. Because you've got a pussy between your legs instead of a dick, it's working on you. I'd've gone through this league like shit through a goose. Their teeth'd be lying all over the floor like Chiclets. I'd shuck teeth from their heads and make them believe it was corn. You listening to me, pal? Ah, you're not crying, are you? Sweet little Pat. Mama's little baby loves shortenin', shortenin', mama's little baby loves shortenin' bread. Itty-bitty baby feel bad? Daddy's so sorry. You haven't received one letter from one college about playing ball next year. Not one. No one's scouted you because word's getting out that you're a quitter and a loser. You won't be going to college next year, son.”

There was nothing my father could not teach me about the architecture of despair. I knew all its shapes and its blueprints, the shadows of all its columns and archways. My father could send me reeling down its hallways and screaming into its bat-spliced attics with a curl of his thin-lipped mouth. He brought madness home every time he entered the many houses of my overlong childhood. His cruelty baffled me, shamed me, and I promised myself I would never be anything like him.

I came back the next game against Walterboro with nineteen points, and our team won 69–41. My father was in the stands and I waved to him for the first time all season, enraging him. Against Georgetown I scored twenty-two of my team's forty-four points as we won by eight points. Against Berkeley I scored twenty-one of forty-nine points, and I had found my way back to myself and my game again. In the middle of the Berkeley game with my friend Bruce Harper shooting two free throws, I walked over to where my father and family were seated among the hometown crowd and waved. I waited for the look of rage to cross my father's face—and it was quick in coming. “Hey, showboat,” he yelled at me, “let's get serious about the game.”

In my secret self, the one my father didn't know about, I said in silence, “Fuck you, Dad.” I smiled and waved again, but this time only to my father. At the end of the third quarter we were tied up with Berkeley 30–30. In the fourth quarter I scored twelve points and we won the game going away. On the drive home, my father critiqued every aspect of my game, slashing the air with his index finger to emphasize his points as he listed my shortcomings, his voice a soundtrack in the garden I was tending in the high-country of self that was lush and fatherless.

         

I
T WAS THAT SEASON, IN 1963
, when I first met Mel Thompson, who came to Beaufort High School to do a scouting report on me in a game against Chicora High School. When Coach Thompson took his seat in the top row of the visitors' section I had no way of knowing that my fate, inexorable and cat-footed, had come riding into town. The Citadel's coach sat in silence and judged me as a player he might recruit for his team. Later, he told me he had been looking for a ball handler. I could have told him, if that was the order of the day, he had come to the right place.