My Losing Season (15 page)

In February, I was quick-timing my way out of the barracks when I spotted the R Company tactical officer conducting an unannounced room inspection on the third division of N Company. I halted on the gallery, did an abrupt about-face, and hurried to my seniors' room in the alcove. Sleeping soundly in his bunk was Jim Plunkett. Since I was studiously aware that he was eight demerits short of being expelled from school I shook him awake. Or tried to.

“Mr. Plunkett, Captain Rose is in the barracks! He's inspecting the barracks, and it's five demerits if he catches you in bed. Get out, sir. He's on his way here.”

Mr. Plunkett pushed me away and said, “I'm a senior private, dumbhead. He'll find thirty of us in the rack this morning.”

“Yes, sir. But you've got too many demerits, sir. I've got to get you up and dressed,” I said, pulling a disoriented Plunkett to his feet. He took a halfhearted swing at me, but I ducked it and left the room as he was putting his pants on.

“I'm going to rack your ass tonight, dumbhead,” he shouted at me.

“Just being a good slave, sir,” I said, hitting the gallery and racing to class, where I was burned for being late by my chemistry teacher, Colonel Durkee.

Jim Plunkett carried himself with a slouching, devil-may-care style that I found both charismatic and dangerous. He was the only cadet I ever met who could angle his hat in a way that said “fuck you” to the world. Though he was contemptuous of cadets who bucked for rank, all the top-ranked cadets in the Corps seemed smitten by him. He was a natural-born leader who was up to no good, and he knew all the places where trouble hung its hat. My roommate thought that Plunkett was a terrible influence on me, and he was right. There was not a knob in the company who feared the approach of Jim Plunkett or any of my other senior privates, and that was the kind of cadet I wanted to ripen into if I remained a part of the Corps.

During exam time, Plunkett had gotten in the habit of taking amphetamines or “black beauties” to help him stay up all night to study for his exams in electrical engineering. At the end of February, he began a five-day binge that caused him to be seriously disoriented. I'd helped get him out of bed on the first day of this regimen, but Plunkett kept taking them to get through a stretch of exams early in his final semester. He'd study all night, then sleep through most of the day. His waking moments were zombielike and disorderly.

Bob and I were studying when we heard our seniors yell out, “Room Ten-hup,” next door. The officer in charge, Captain D. C. Hilbert, was conducting a surprise room inspection, and he caught my seniors completely off guard. Keyser, LaBianco, and Hough were all standing at strict attention by their desks when Captain Hilbert approached the sleeping Plunkett's rack. On the fifth day, Jim had been sleeping most of the day. Keyser tried to wake Plunkett up, but Plunkett hit him. Captain Hilbert was not amused. Plunkett smiled deeply in his sleep, turned over, and resumed his drug-induced nap. When Hilbert made his report, he didn't burn Plunkett for sleeping during evening study period, but burned him for “assaulting another cadet.” When that punishment came out, Jim Plunkett went to General Mark Clark's office to receive his expulsion papers, even though Dave Keyser pleaded with the commandant that he didn't consider himself assaulted, and he was the alleged victim.

“You're a cadet,” Keyser was told. “You aren't capable of deciding whether you were assaulted or not.”

When Patterson and I returned to our room after lunch, there was a commotion in the alcove room next door. The battalion commander, Bob Fletcher, walked out of the room as we came in, followed by the R Company commander, Chuck Klotzberger. They both looked grim and troubled. As senior officers, they seemed bronzed to perfection, metallic in their untouchableness. It was impossible to imagine that our own classmates would one day wear the same stripes and chevrons as these peerless leaders of the Corps.

“Get in here, dumbheads,” Keyser said at the door. “There's trouble in paradise.”

When Bob and I entered the room the atmosphere was tense and funereal. Mr. Plunkett sat on his bed with his head in his hands and it looked like he'd been weeping. LaBianco and Hough looked shell-shocked and Keyser puzzled. None of them could think of a word to say to the grieving Plunkett.

“Sir, what happened, sir?” Patterson asked.

“They threw Plunkett out of school for excess demerits,” LaBianco said, running his fingers through his red hair.

Plunkett looked up at us in despair. “Four kings and two slaves. We made a good team, didn't we, guys?”

“Sir yes sir,” Bob and I said, both shaken. Plunkett had centered our world for us, translated The Citadel's madness and let us in on its passwords and secret handshakes.

Plunkett rose and walked over to me and stuck out his hand, saying, “I'm not going to be here for the recognition ceremony, dumbheads. So I'm doing it right now. Pat, my name is Jim Plunkett. I'd like to welcome you to the Corps of Cadets.”

We shook hands, and I said, “Thanks for everything, Jim.”

Outside Lieutenant Colonel Nugent Courvoisie, whom the cadets had nicknamed “The Boo,” was waiting for him on the quadrangle, and Jim Plunkett walked out the gate and all of our lives. I had lost my first antihero to something as small-time as demerits.

         

D
URING GRADUATION WEEK,
the editors at the
News and Courier
chose an article I'd written for the school newspaper,
The Brigadier,
as the best-written feature article of the year and presented me with a check for fifty dollars, the most money I'd ever held in my hand at one time. I was going to use that money to hitchhike to colleges around South Carolina to arrange a tryout with their basketball programs. I'd targeted small schools like Newberry and Erskine, Presbyterian and Wofford because the academic scholarships that paid for my first year were not renewable, and my parents had not told me if they'd pay for my sophomore year or not. Then I received a summons to appear in Mel Thompson's office the day before graduation.

When I entered his office Mel was talking with my freshman coach, Paul Brandenberg, a man I had come to adore. Coach Thompson was brusque and no-nonsense as he said, “Pat, you did everything we asked of you this year. We were pleased with your progress and we want to offer you a basketball scholarship.”

“We offered you a full ride, Pat,” Coach Brandenberg said. “But your father made a change himself.”

“He crossed out the clause where you'd receive laundry money,” Coach Thompson explained. “We thought it odd, but the folks in the athletic office were delighted.”

“Your dad thought the extra money would just get you in trouble, Pat,” Brandenberg said.

“Trouble?” I said. “In this place?”

After I signed my grant-in-aid and left the field house, Paul Brandenberg caught up with me from behind. “Pat, we didn't think you were going to make it through the plebe system. We really didn't.”

“I didn't do well, Coach,” I said.

“No one has ever been affected by the plebe system like you were. No one,” he said. “We haven't heard you talk since Christmas. Not a word. You didn't have a bad attitude or anything. You just seemed so sad.”

“Do you coaches know what goes on in the barracks?” I asked.

Coach Brandenberg took a drag on his cigarette before answering. “Mel and I make it our business not to know.”

“Let me give you a hint, Coach,” I said. “I just played on the best freshman team in Citadel history. Over half of that team has already left. That's what goes on in the barracks.”

I walked away with my scholarship in my hands, but my teammates would call me a walk-on for the rest of my life. I walked back toward the only college education I was going to get.

CHAPTER 8

CAMP WAHOO

I
WAS AT THE END OF MY SOPHOMORE YEAR WHEN THE LETTER ARRIVED
from Bill McCann, the coach at the University of Virginia, telling me that I had a job as a basketball counselor at Camp Wahoo. He welcomed me to the staff. My father had come out of the Depression scarred by the deprivation his family had suffered and vowed that his children would not be forced to work as hard as he did during those troubled years. My youth was spent on the playing fields of the South and I rarely had a dime to my name. I do not remember how much Camp Wahoo paid, but I felt like a rich man for the first time in my life when I drove off the mountain after the last session had ended.

This was the summer I dedicated to improving my game and becoming the kind of player other teams feared. During the previous year, I began to understand how far behind I was compared to both my teammates and my opponents. My coaching in high school had been shaky and haphazard at best. I didn't have a single clue about anything I did on the court. I'd learned everything by imitating players better than me. Coach Brandenberg surprised me by stopping a freshman practice and telling the team that I had the best reverse dribble he'd ever seen, even in the pros. I didn't have the foggiest notion what he was talking about.

When he demonstrated what he wanted me to show the team I said, “So that's what you call it.”

For all practical purposes I was illiterate about the fundamentals of my game and had drifted through high school oblivious to the most basic concepts of the sport. Never a natural athlete, I was getting along on mettle and a kind of implacable staunchness. I was a “feisty little shit,” according to Coach Brandenberg, who had placed the call to Bill McCann to get me the job at Camp Wahoo.

In the spring, my father surprised me by buying me my first car. My mother had told him of my deep unhappiness at The Citadel, so my father answered my discontent with a 1959 gray Chevrolet that he bought for seven hundred dollars at Harpers Motors in Beaufort. The sum seemed princely then.

“He's rewarding you for getting a scholarship last year,” my mother said.

“I don't know how to drive, Mom. He never let me get my driver's license.”

My mother said, “He didn't want you to turn into a hood or a juvenile delinquent.”

“We live in the South, not Chicago. I've never seen a hood,” I said. “I've never met a juvenile delinquent.”

“Whatever,” she said. “But your father's theory worked. You've turned out to be a very nice young man.”

“It's not because I couldn't drive.”

“That's
your
theory,” my mother said, maddeningly.

         

T
HE CAR WAS UNGAINLY, HOMELY,
unprepossessing, and I've never loved another car so much in my life. In the first month, I drove it as though moving a truck full of dynamite through a minefield and with the earnest incompetence that only neophyte drivers know. Slowly, I began to savor the thrilling taste that freedom of the road grants to Americans as our birthright. There is nothing like the automobile to make you fall in love with the laden profligate majesty of the American landscape. My father had denied me deliverance from the hard eye of patriarchy that a license confers; I fell in love with driving the moment I sat behind the steering wheel of my commonplace car that my mother christened “The Muskrat.”

So the Muskrat and I roamed the back roads from Orlando, Florida, to the foothills of Virginia. Even then, lost in the secret future of my life, I'd seized upon the romantic conceit fed to me by Thomas Wolfe that an author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before. I drove down strange roads for the sheer pleasure of going the wrong way. Stopping the car, I'd slip into rushing mountain rivers in the Blue Ridge Mountains because they were so beautiful and I was so free. For four days I wandered the South free as a red-tailed hawk, daydreaming about the novels I'd write when I finally had something to say. On the Blue Ridge Parkway, I hiked to a waterfall and discovered a shelf of rock behind the falls where I sat and stared at the hills through rainbows of falling water. Since I'd never seen the world through a waterfall before, I promised myself to honor this moment, its sacredness, its surprising and unconditional completeness. I'd have to live deeply in moments like this, surrender myself absolutely to the duties imagination requires from a writer to make a reader cry out in rapture at the beauty of a lived-in world. Lost in the joy of my first road trip, I suddenly realized I was driving around the mountains of North Carolina on the very day I was due to report to work.

Looking at a map, I saw no good way or straight path to take me into the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virginia. The route I chose could not have been slower, even if I had burrowed a tunnel, molelike, from the Blue Ridge to the midlands of Virginia. Because I was raised under the aegis of the Marine Corps and spent my college years at a military college, I prided myself on punctuality and disliked people who made a habit of being late. They are time thieves who consider their time more important than yours.

Driving along a gravel road in a high hill country without benefit of road signs or human habitation, I began to panic. Though I didn't know it, I was coming into Miller School from the back way. As a new driver I felt a gathering sense of dread as I pushed up a gravel road that seemed embarrassed to be there. The sun was setting to my left when I started down the other side of the mountain and saw lights off to the right coming from a large red-brick building a quarter of a mile away. My spirits soared as I turned down a long winding driveway leading up to a series of handsome buildings. When I pulled up to the front steps of what appeared to be an administration building, I saw a large group of women and children gathered on the stairs.

They looked up as I pulled up and leaned my head out of the window. “Excuse me, please. Do any of y'all know if this is Miller School?”

They looked as though I had asked the question in Chinese. One of the women said, “No. This isn't Miller School. What gave you that idea?”

“This has got to be Miller School,” I insisted, checking my map with a flashlight. “Have y'all ever heard of Miller School?”

“No. Miller School. Never heard tell of it.”

“Did you say Miller School, son?” an attractive woman asked me. “Never heard of no place like that. You sure that's the name?”

“Camp Wahoo,” I said. “I've been hired to be a counselor at Camp Wahoo, which is run by some great basketball coaches. Bill McCann. Bones McKinney, Weenie Miller, or Gene Corrigan. Do you know Camp Wahoo? Have you heard of any of those coaches?”

“Nope. Never heard of Camp Wahoo. Never heard of any of those gentlemen,” another woman said. “Any of you kids ever heard of Wahoo?”

“No, ma'am,” the children answered in what was now total darkness.

Despairing, I laid my head against the steering wheel and said, “Oh my God, I'm a dead man. Late for my first job and I'll never find this place tonight.”

In the gathering darkness, the wives and children of Bill McCann, Bones McKinney, Weenie Miller, and Gene Corrigan erupted into laughter on the front steps of Miller School, Virginia.

My first job had begun.

         

A
S
I
THINK BACK TO THE GREAT LUCK
that brought me to Camp Wahoo, gratitude washes over me in a sweet aura of memory. I know of no one connected with Wahoo who does not grow sappy and nostalgic when describing the experience. For two straight summers, I luxuriated in my passion for basketball, lived in the center of the game through the sunburned clinics where I assisted famous coaches and players teaching the fundamentals to young boys as eager as beagle puppies. As much as the enraptured boys who flocked around the coaches and players like moons orbiting Saturn, I listened to men like the incomparable Jerry West explain the rudiments of ball handling and shooting and defense. My face lit up with the same transformational pleasure as any boy in that camp when Jerry West shook my hand. When I fouled him in a counselors game, I went to bed that night with a voice ringing in my head, “I fouled Jerry West. I fouled Jerry West. I fouled Jerry West.” He carried himself with a kingly, benign dignity and treated the boys around him with gentleness and good humor. Jerry West is the reason I would like to take a baseball bat to the swollen heads of the ex-major-league ballplayers who charge kids money for their signatures at baseball-card shows, refusing even to acknowledge the child who approaches them in the tenderest posture of hero worship. Every boy who approached Jerry West was met with a gentlemanly kindness, a genuine engagement, and unfeigned courtesy. Even meeting my literary heroes—Gore Vidal, James Dickey, William Styron, Eudora Welty, Reynolds Price, Joyce Carol Oates, and others—pales in comparison to that day at Camp Wahoo when I met Jerry West, one of the ten greatest basketball players of all time, and fouled him during a counselors game. If you are one of those who think that great athletes shouldn't have to be role models for the young boys and girls, I offer you this: I have tried to treat everyone I meet as Jerry West treated those bedazzled boys who approached him as he walked the grounds of Miller School. He taught me much about basketball, but he taught me much more about class and the responsibilities of fame.

The campers arrived on Sunday with their parents, and twenty fifteen-year-old boys were assigned to my dormitory room that first summer at Wahoo. I took to the role of counselor, my experience as the oldest brother of seven children providing an ease in the camp environment enjoyed by few others. I was easy in the company of young boys, especially the sassy, rebellious ones sent by parents who needed a vacation away from their mouthy sons. Camp Wahoo's genius lay in the fact that it kept even the crossest, most bellyaching kid exhausted and out of breath. Wahoo taught you everything about basketball, all in a breakneck-paced week that was relentless in its intensity.

An odd, unsettling event took place on my very first workday when I was walking with other counselors and campers toward the ball-handling station at court number five. I was moving past the main steps of the administration building when a voice called out: “Conroy!”

I turned around and was shocked to see Mel Thompson, my coach at The Citadel, smoking a cigarette on the steps. He seemed as surprised to see me.

“What the hell you doing here, Conroy?” he asked.

“I needed to work on my game, Coach.”

“That's the truth. Who told you about Camp Wahoo?”

“Coach Brandenberg got me the job.”

He eyed me obliquely. “He did, huh?” Coach Thompson always looked at you from odd angles, as though there was a tree or a bush blocking his view. “Why didn't you tell me about it?”

“I didn't know you'd ever heard of Camp Wahoo, Coach.”

“Okay.” He finished his cigarette. “Get out of here, Conroy.”

In the two summers I worked at Camp Wahoo, that was the last time Mel Thompson spoke to me, even to say hello. Our every encounter was an entanglement, a thorny unraveling of fate, and one that always left a bad taste in my mouth. His failure to acknowledge me left me feeling sullied and insulted, especially when he seemed to relate so well with the other counselors, the boys from rival colleges. Often when Coach McCann blew the whistle that signaled the end of each Wahoo hour, I'd see Mel grin with pleasure as the campers changed stations, the playful, easy banter of sportsmen caught up in moments of leisure. At other times, I would see Coach Thompson's car packed with other coaches and counselors driving into town for a hamburger and a movie. I witnessed his laughter but always from a distance, and when he smiled, his face was transformed, making it softer, almost handsome. Those two summers in Virginia, I studied my coach in secret as he passed me by without a sign of recognition. To his eyes I was invisible, made of glass or air, and yet I had long held the suspicion that Mel Thompson liked me. It was only because I was his player, his property, that I was anathema to him, untouchable.

         

I
N SPORTS THERE ARE NO NATURAL ATHLETIC
gifts
that cannot be improved and shaped by the power of discipline. The coaches at Wahoo had dedicated their lives to the teaching of the game of basketball; their instruction was clear and distinct, their zeal bracing and sustaining. Much of what I learned about teaching I owe to those generous men. Coach Bones McKinney used me as an example during a rebounding clinic and had me block the great center Lenny Chappell off the boards. Lenny was the best big man ever to come out of Wake Forest until the arrival of Tim Duncan.

“Even a little pip-squeak like Conroy can take a rebound from a giant like Lenny. It takes guts and heart. You got the guts, Conroy?”

“Yes, sir,” I screamed, my butt level with Lenny Chappell's knees. I tried to back Lenny out farther into the lane, but he felt like a parked Chevy truck.

Bones threw two rebounds off the backboard and I got the first two, drawing the cheers of the campers.

On Bones's next shot, Lenny Chappell put his huge hand on my shoulder and vaulted up toward the rim and dunked the ball through the basket while driving me to the floor.

“Guts, Conroy, you got,” Lenny Chappell said, bowing to the applause of the campers. “But no damn heart.” I basked in the glow of his jesting voice for the rest of the day because an NBA player had said my name out loud for the first time in my life.

In the morning with the sun rising up from the Virginia tidelands, I couldn't wait to take to the court. My days at Camp Wahoo passed in a dreamy blur of pivots, stutter steps, crossover dribbles, and outlet passes. The language of my chosen sport flowed out of me in psalms of pure melody and praise. Though overwhelmed by my lack of knowledge and being outclassed by the other counselors, I was taking something into the pores of my skin that seemed like the very essence of sport. That first summer, when I competed against players the caliber of Hot Rod Hundley, Rod Thorn, Lenny Chappell, Jerry West, John Wetzel, and Art Heyman, my game improved. I was a baitfish struggling upstream with the silvery, leaping wild salmon, but I was swimming in the same river and happy as a sunbeam to be there.