My Losing Season (10 page)

I was in the middle of the best week of basketball I would ever play, if the number of points scored is the measurement of achievement. On the previous Tuesday night in a small-town gymnasium, heated by a woodstove, I scored forty-three points against Ridgeland High in a game we won in the final minute. Every shot I made seemed to float magically through the basket. I felt possessed, enraptured, flush with gladness, and I did not think there was a boy in the whole world who could stop me.

While we were riding home that night, my father, still in his Marine uniform, bawled me out for thirty miles for playing lousy defense. I am certain my father was right because I'd not even begun to understand defense. I was accustomed to my father's screaming after games but it couldn't dull my pleasure at having scored forty-three points in a closely fought contest whose outcome was in doubt almost to the final whistle.

It was the box score of the Ridgeland game that brought Mel Thompson into my life. What Coach Thompson would see during our next game against Chicora was not a true reflection of my ability. He watched a far better basketball player than I was on a daily basis, for again I found myself on fire against this team that was favored to beat us. I roared around that gym, magnetized, bewitched, and again, all but unstoppable. I ran the court as though my blood had turned to quicksilver. This night would prove the only time in my career that two such games occurred back-to-back, during the same week. I lay awake that week in sheer amazement at what my own body had done.

The largest crowd in the history of Beaufort High School showed up for the Chicora game and the pep band put everyone into a state of near frenzy as my team burst out of the locker room high on Coach Jerry Swing's emotional pregame speech. In this one glorious night, I lifted right out of myself and turned into the kind of basketball player who could change the way a town felt about itself. The score was close all game, and Chicora was coached brilliantly by Ray Graves, once a star forward at The Citadel.

Every Chicora boy who played that night fouled me in my reckless drives through the lane. I was in the middle of a senior year when I would average twenty-two points a game, leading my team to a 13–3 record. When that final buzzer sounded, I always felt like Cinderella as the clock tolled the midnight hour and I'd find myself transformed back into the painfully shy boy I was, not a star who'd just scored thirty-six points that helped beat a superior team. In the locker room, I sat beside my open locker as my teammates pounded my back, not wanting to get dressed because I wanted to hang on to the sweetness of this one night. I had scored seventy-nine points in two games, something I never thought would happen.

Coach Swing brought the tall, dark-eyed man into the locker room to meet me. I watched as Mel Thompson made his way through a locker room full of ecstatic boys. My fate approached me with a great, loping walk.

“Pat, you remember that Citadel game I took you to last year?” asked Coach Swing. “Well, this is The Citadel's head coach, Mel Thompson.”

“Hello, sir,” I said. “I saw your team play George Washington in D.C. two years ago. I loved how Dickie Jones played.”

“You reminded me of Dickie Jones,” Mel Thompson said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“I told him all about you, Pat,” Coach Swing said. “They don't make them any better, Coach.”

“You'll be hearing from me, Pat,” Coach Thompson said. “Good game.” He smiled as he left me.

I played under Mel Thompson for the next four years, and he never again said “good game” to me. Nor did he smile at me again. Ever.

         

I
N
M
ARCH,
C
OACH
M
EL
T
HOMPSON
of The Citadel
wrote me a letter inviting me to visit the college the first weekend in May. He did not mention the word “scholarship” but my parents thought that such an invitation implied a promise of financial aid. When I returned home from baseball practice each day, I'd ask my mother if there was any mail for me from a college, but there never was. Years later, my mother would admit that there had been letters of interest from Furman, Presbyterian, Wofford, and Erskine, but she and my father had thrown them in the trash because they were Protestant colleges.

In April I was called out of Millen Ellis's English class by a messenger from the principal's office. I walked into Mr. Dufford's office, and he introduced me to a tall friendly man by the name of Dwayne Morrison. His name was vaguely familiar, then Bill Dufford said, “Coach Morrison is Chuck Noe's assistant up at the University of South Carolina, Pat. He wants to talk to you about playing for Carolina.”

Stunned by this unexpected news, I stared at Coach Morrison with my jaw loosened and my mouth agape as I hunted for the proper words.

“How'd you like to play for Carolina, Pat?” Coach Morrison asked me.

“More than anything in the world, Coach.”

“We hear you got the attitude, the heart, the will—everything but the jump shot, kid.”

“Pat'll work,” Mr. Dufford said quickly. “He spent the whole summer in the gym. He's got the best work ethic of any kid we've had here.”

“That's what we like to hear.”

Coach Morrison took me by the elbow and led me into the office next to Mr. Dufford's. His personality and enthusiasm dazzled me; he was the kind of coach I'd dreamed of having since I was a kid. He made me feel like I was the best basketball player he had ever talked to, and he made me believe in every single aspect of Chuck Noe's program. He talked about “redshirting” me for a year, putting me on a weight-training program, sending me to summer basketball programs for extra seasoning, and teaching me all the tricks of the trade that a point guard would need to know in the highly competitive Atlantic Coast Conference at the time South Carolina still held membership in it. He asked me if I would accept a scholarship from Carolina if one was offered, and I said yes sir. Coach Morrison asked me if I would give my heart and soul to make Coach Noll's program take its place as one of America's best, and I said yes sir. He inflated my ego to the breaking point, seeming to know everything about my skills and deficiencies as a ballplayer. When he talked about his university, he made it sound like some grand easement into paradise. When he asked me if I thought I could play against the Tar Heels of Chapel Hill and the Wolfpack of NC State, I told him I'd dreamed of playing those teams since I was a child. What I learned in that half hour was that Coach Morrison was a wizard in the art of recruiting. He could've talked me into walking across burning embers or a live minefield. When he left me that day he said, “We're going to try to make this work, Pat. I can see you in a Gamecock uniform. We've got a couple of other kids we're going to look at. But I can practically guarantee you, you're the kind of guy we're looking for. A good point guard's worth his weight in gold these days. He's the quarterback, the brains of the team, the guy who gets it done. It's you we want, Pat. You. Got it, buddy?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

In my great naïveté, or innocence, or stupidity, I thought that the scholarship to South Carolina was a sure thing, and I made the mistake of telling my mother that USC was giving me a free ride when I got home from school that afternoon. To be perfectly accurate, I think most probably I confided to my mother that Coach Morrison had offered me a full scholarship but not to tell anyone until it was official. My mother danced around the kitchen when she heard the news, and in her ebullience, I felt the first shivers and pangs of confusion about the reality of the scholarship. I warned her not to tell Dad a thing until I received confirmation from Coach Morrison, but she told him the moment he arrived home from the base. My father walked up to me and put out his hand to shake mine.

“A scholarship to the University of South Carolina,” Dad said. “That's the best college basketball conference in the country, son. I was wrong about everything I said about you and your game.”

“Ask him how the crow tastes, son,” my mother laughed.

“It's not official yet, Dad,” I said.

“The guy offered you a scholarship, didn't he?” my father asked.

“He practically did, Dad. He sounded like he really wanted me, that the team really needed a guy like me.”

“Well, sounds like a done deal to me,” my father said as he walked to the phone, where I heard him telling several of his brothers they'd better start making reservations for the ACC tournament next year if they wanted to see his son help defeat the North Carolina Tar Heels.

In less than a month, I was the laughingstock of my father and his family. I never heard from Dwayne Morrison or received a single letter from the South Carolina athletic office. My father ended up calling Coach Morrison who regretfully told him that they had completed their recruiting for the next season, but he felt sure I would land a scholarship with a good program. “That's a great kid you've got there, Colonel. He'll go places.”

But my father's report to me had a sterner edge as he said, “Bottom line, pal. You're not only a loser, you're a liar. The coach said he never offered you a scholarship.”

My father possessed a small genius for scab-flicking, for zeroing in on that tenderest spot of the psyche where healing was most difficult, exposing the rawness of the wound again and again. His cold blue eyes would twinkle with malice for long weeks after my imaginary scholarship to Carolina was exposed as fraudulent. He'd say, “The lawn looks like it needs mowing, ACC.” Or, “How 'bout opening me a beer, ACC,” or, “When's your next baseball game, ACC?” “Looks like ACC could use a haircut.”

To survive the long march of my father, I taught myself to be stoical and unreadable. I disguised my face even from myself. In April I quit asking about the mail and hadn't a clue about where I was going to be the following year. Then Dad got orders to Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, and my despair was bottomless. Only when Dad received these orders did I realize the depth of my attachment to Beaufort. The next day, I opened a letter informing me that I'd been selected as one of the players to represent the South in the annual North-South All-Star game in Columbia that July. I ran around the house screaming with joy, a renewal of hope that I'd have one more chance to impress the college scouts who had missed me on the first go-round.

“Write them back today,” my mother said. “Tell them you can't play.”

“What do you mean, I can't play? I wouldn't miss it for the world.”

“We'll be in Nebraska then,” she said.

“I'll be in Columbia, South Carolina, then,” I said. “It might be my last chance to win a scholarship. Mom, I'll walk from Nebraska to South Carolina if I have to.”

Dressed in my shorts and T-shirt and basketball shoes, I ran out of the house and jogged toward the Broad River and the path into the forest that began when base housing made its last encroachment. The sun had oiled the calm river with a last forfeiture of gold as it slid behind the banked clouds in the west. I passed the tabby ruins of an abandoned fort and came to a small beachhead hidden by the bonneted roots of fallen water oaks where I retreated when I wanted to think. Five porpoises hunted schools of baitfish, causing a silvery panic along the sandflats. The sun caught the velvety green backs of the porpoises in sudden trapezoids of fire. I danced for myself and gave myself up to a rapture of what seemed like pure joy. I began screaming at the porpoises and the sun and the river, something I had wanted to give voice to since I got the letter, something I was dying for my mother to say to me, but she had not understood what the true measure of the letter was, or what it could have meant to me. But, by God, I knew what the letter meant as soon as I read it, and I shouted at the top of my voice words I needed to hear said, screaming aloud: “I'm All-State! I'm an All-State basketball player from South Carolina. Did you hear me? I'm All-State and no one can take that away from me. I'm an All-State selection. I'm All-State!”

When my father got home that night, I positioned myself in the living room as he read the day's mail with maddening slowness. He read four or five letters before he got to the one naming me to the All-State team. I watched him as he read it over twice, and Mom came out of the kitchen to measure his reaction.

“What do you think about our boy, Don?” my mother asked. “Not bad, huh?”

My father folded the letter up carefully and replaced it in its envelope, then said as he put the mail on the coffee table in front of him, “Mister ACC.”

         

M
Y MOTHER TOOK GREAT STOCK IN
the significance of my official visit to The Citadel in the middle of May. For a week, she put me through a short course on the courtesies and mannerisms I should display when being escorted through the campus. Since I was almost oily with politeness anyway, I suffered no lack of confidence that I would revert to the etiquette of a Cro-Magnon simply because I was out of my mother's sight and control. But she had become desperate that there be some kind of satisfactory resolution to the dilemma surrounding my college education. I think my whole family, myself included, had suffered some incalculable wound when no college had stepped forth clamoring for my services on their basketball team. Somehow I had let my family down.

When my mother dropped me off in front of the Armory at two o'clock the following Friday afternoon, she told me, “I think The Citadel's your only chance for college, Pat. I really do.”

I stepped out of the car and into a fierce recruiting war in which I played no part. A splendid guard from Lima, Ohio, named Bill Taflinger had come to The Citadel accompanied by his working-class family, and I soon learned that a number of midwestern schools were interested in signing Bill to a grant-in-aid. Coach Mel Thompson met both Bill and me in his office and told us what he had planned for us over the weekend. Our guide around campus was to be the captain of next year's team, Mike West. Mel was charming and solicitous. He handled Mr. and Mrs. Taflinger's questions about the rigors of the military lifestyle at The Citadel with alacrity. “We keep our boys away from the military as much as we can, Mr. Taflinger. They're over there and we're over here. Two different worlds with two different purposes and never the twain shall meet. It gets a little dicey during plebe week, but that's like fraternity rush, then it's over. Bill'll do just fine here. I've seen him play and this is one tough kid. These military guys won't make a dent on him. C'mon, let's go see a parade.”