My Losing Season (18 page)

“Oh, John,” Clarice said, holding her stomach as she laughed.

“But wait—I have solved the problem of your senior essay, Mr. Conroy.”

“Wonderful,” I said. The senior essay was the crowning glory of four years at The Citadel, but I'd been particularly uninspired in choosing a subject. I'd turned the job over to Colonel Doyle who would both oversee and grade the project as my academic advisor.

“I'd like you to compare the novels of William Faulkner of Oxford, Mississippi, with the novels of Sinclair Lewis of Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Both from small-town America, both recipients of the Nobel Prize for literature.”

“Nobel. That's very big,” Clarice said.

Colonel Doyle nodded. “You will find that Mr. Lewis is not quite up to snuff when it comes to the Lion of Rowan Oak.”

“A year spent among Nobelists, Mr. Conroy,” said Clarice. “A judicious way to spend one's senior year.”

“I suggest you start with
Light in August,
” Colonel Doyle said to me. After tea, he led me upstairs to his small, book-lined office where he'd written his books and essays. John Doyle was an expert on Robert Frost and a signed copy of his book
The Poetry of Robert Frost
sits on my desk today. I sat facing him as he opened a folder that contained the poems I'd written over the summer. In a clear, accented voice, he read each poem aloud to me, reading them with complete openness as though they all were not hopelessly amateurish and flawed. To John Doyle writing was a religious act, the teaching of it a work of holy orders. His voice lent beauty and gravitas to poems that lacked both. I couldn't breathe as I listened to my own words read back to me with uncommon gentleness. Each time I came to this room to have Colonel Doyle take my writing with a seriousness it didn't deserve, I'd fill up with gratitude for him again and again. Though we were nothing alike, we shared a passion for the English language that bound us like brothers from the first time we met until the last time we spoke on the phone, the week before he died.

“Now this is the hard part for all writers, Mr. Conroy, but it is necessary. You must learn to think of yourself as a writer.”

“I'm not good enough yet, Colonel Doyle,” I said.

“No, you're not. But you're getting better. You're doing the hard work. But you must tell yourself that you're a writer. A work in progress, but a writer. Can you tell me that?”

“Not yet, Colonel. I can't make a sentence sound like I want it to. It won't say what I want it to say.”

“That will come. Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer when he was twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary, Mr. Conroy. This is your last season as a basketball player, isn't it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I stink at that, too.”

“You say that about yourself as a writer. You say that about yourself as a basketball player. Mr. Conroy, may I give you some advice? You are far too young to know this, but your life is precious and your time is short. You are blind to yourself, Mr. Conroy. You're too hard on yourself. For reasons I don't understand, you are deeply unhappy, and it pains me. Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself. Someone has taught you to hate yourself. I hope I haven't crossed some line, Mr. Conroy. I value our friendship very much.”

“You should've been a coach, Colonel,” I said. “That's the greatest pep talk I ever heard.”

When I left Colonel Doyle's quarters, I drifted past the obstacle course, walked the length of the practice baseball field lush with freshly mown grass, and walked along the marsh until I came to the Citadel marina. This was the spot I'd discovered my freshman year where I could come to think and to separate myself from the life of the Corps. I climbed a ladder of the Citadel yacht, the
Southwind,
and sat on a deck chair and looked out toward the Ashley River. The tide was coming in, and the sun was lowering in the west. I thought about Colonel Doyle and my good fortune that he found me in my first despairing days at The Citadel and offered his hand in friendship. From the day I met him, Colonel Doyle carried an unshakable faith that I'd one day write novels for a living, which seemed as unlikely to me as my ripening into a good point guard. I linked my destiny as a writer to that of myself as a basketball player because both seemed to represent realms of achievement that would always be denied me.

I sent out a silent prayer above the Ashley River. I asked God to let good things happen to me this last basketball season, a season I could look back on without shame. It seemed like a modest, ungreedy prayer. I asked that I complete a short story I was working on, and that I be granted a sign that I was supposed to write novels for a living.

Standing in the bow of the
Southwind,
I looked back toward The Citadel, a college that was now part of my history and my fate. I promised myself something of great importance to me. “I'll remember everything,” I said. “I won't forget a single thing.”

         

B
ASKETBALL PRACTICE WOULD BEGIN
on October
15, 1966.

CHAPTER 10

CLEMSON

W
HEN
I
THINK OF THE WORD
“
SNAKEPIT,
”
THE IMAGE OF THE
claustrophobic, hostility-steeped field house where Clemson University played their basketball games springs to mind. For a visiting team, a game at Clemson was as hallucinatory and disquieting an encounter as a basketball player could experience. It was close to miraculous for even the great teams of the ACC like North Carolina to come into the harrowing environment of the Clemson gym and return home with a victory.

In my sophomore year, I played on a very good Citadel team that beat the University of West Virginia in Morgantown, breaking the longest home winning streak in American college basketball. It was as good as the game of basketball could get. The Corps of Cadets listened to the game in Charleston on radio and in celebration threw every garbage can in the barracks off the four divisions and onto the cement quadrangle. The team would go 8–2, defeating a wonderful Virginia Tech team, before the particular malaise set in that seems to undermine the long seasons of almost all the basketball programs at military colleges. That 1964–65 team finished 13–11, the only winning varsity team I would play for at The Citadel.

As a sophomore, my spirit was puppylike and unbridled because, as Dick Martini liked to say, “Mel hasn't had a chance to break your spirit yet. It won't take long.”

In the fall of my sophomore year, it was Dick, our Italian center and captain from Passaic, New Jersey, sitting beside me on the bus taking us to our game, who first told me of the pitfalls and dangers of playing at the Clemson Tigers' gym.

“I got something to say to you, weasel,” Martini said in a conspiratorial whisper. “You just listen to Uncle Dick and don't say a word until I'm finished or I'll crush your little guard ass like a roach. Now, you're a rookie and have never played at Clemson in your putrid life. This ain't like no other normal game, rookie. Clemson's only got these big, mean, stupid redneck boys like yourself, only these boys are farm boys with no teeth. They grew up fucking sheep and who knows what else. These boys are so backward they major in agriculture and shit like that. Agriculture! Plow 101. Milk a Fucking Cow 202. Turn On a Tractor 303. Clemson guys are the meanest, dumbest, fightingest sons-of-bitches in the whole world.”

“It'll be that much more fun to beat them,” I said.

Dick put a large hand over my mouth. “Don't talk like that, midget. That's exactly the kind of talk I don't want to hear coming out of your stupid southern mouth.”

“Dick, we beat West Virginia in Morgantown,” I protested. “We can beat Clemson up there.”

“Midget, midget,” Dick said sadly. “You don't understand. If we beat their team, the Clemson boys will storm the court and tear us apart with their bare hands. They'll kill us. We just got to hope they don't fuck us before they kill us. But when you get in the game, don't do nothing stupid like trying to win. Got me, smackhead?”

Looking into Dick Martini's eyes, I saw to my astonishment that he was terrified. The largest, most powerful Italian man I had ever met had a grave, unappeasable terror of my mother's southern people.

“Agriculture,” he kept saying. “They go to college to major in farming,” said the tenth leading rebounder in Citadel history who once pulled twenty-two rebounds from the boards in a game against Richmond. “That'd be like me going to college to major in pepperoni.”

I never knew what to make of Dick Martini's metaphor about farming and pepperoni, but later that night, I knew everything I ever wanted to know about the heartburn and melancholy of playing basketball in Clemson's satanic gym. When our uniformed team walked in carrying our bags, we passed in review of four thousand rabid Clemson loyalists. The freshman game was under way and we had to make our way single file to the locker room. The crowd was so close to the out-of-bounds line that the football team had to move their feet to let us pass. Of course, they refused and a couple of them actually tried to trip us. So, my whole team walked on the open court as the crowd began a thunderous, mocking chant: “Hup, four, hup, four, hup, two, three, four.” Captain Martini led us into the field house, staring straight ahead, as though he was following an invisible prison warden to his own execution.

Clemson murdered us that night of my sophomore year, 90–75, but the game was not nearly that close. I got in the game late in the second half and tried to lead the effort to catch up. When Wig Baumann told me to take the ball out of bounds, I received my first lessons in the manual of courtesies and virtues of Clemson's fans. I had to jump among the raucous fans who churned along the sideline. Two of them pinched my butt hard and two more put cigarettes out on the back of my legs. I went flying toward a referee and shouted that someone had burned and pinched me, but I could not even hear my own voice above the crowd. The referee simply shrugged his shoulders, and I could see he carried some of the same terror of the Clemson crowd as Martini did. Five cigarette burns branded my legs before that game was over, and Clemson fans had depilated a third of the hair from the back of my legs.

In the final minute, I was racing after a ball going out of bounds when I dove for it near Clemson's basket and slid along the floor and into the football team. Clemson guys dove out of the way and my wet jersey slalomed me along the slippery floor. I disappeared through a hole beneath the bleachers and the Clemson football team made me fight through their legs to get back onto the court. The crowd at Clemson was not just hostile; they were lunatic in their advocacy of the Tigers.

On December 3, 1966, my team walked into the Clemson visiting team locker room, a testament to the disdain the Tigers felt for their opponents. The sheer dinginess of the room was nearly heroic. The whole building had the feel of a place designed by a testy little man who had flunked all his engineering courses and hated basketball players with a passion. But we could hear the stands filling up above us.

Our trainer, Coach Billy Bostick, was taping ankles when Doug Bridges opened his bag and discovered he had forgotten to pack his uniform shirt. Forgetting one's shoes or uniform was a high crime in Mel's list of commandments.

“Mel's gonna kill me, Barney,” Doug said to Dave Bornhorst.

“Yeah, but it won't take long,” Barney said.

“Bridges forgot his jersey,” Bob Cauthen said to the whole room. “What an idiot.”

Bridges said, “Watch your mouth, Cauthen.”

“Take Conroy's,” Danny Mohr said, on the taping table. “He sure as hell won't need it.”

Cauthen said, “Bridges would forget his dick if it wasn't attached.”

When he received the bad news, Al Beiner, our head manager, went looking for Mel, then returned, saying, “Coach wants to see you. Right now.”

Mel glowered as Doug approached, which did nothing to assuage the younger man's terror. The relationship between the two of them was surly and vinegary in the best of times.

“Bridges,” Mel said scowling, “you never, ever forget the tools of the trade. Got it? You'll owe me some laps for this one.”

“Sorry, Coach,” Doug said, lowering his eyes.

Coach Ed “Little Mel” Thompson entered the locker room with a most unpleasant task. “Dave,” he said to Bornhorst, “Coach says you have to give up your shirt to Doug.”

“Sure, Coach,” Dave said with such brio and generosity that he turned a painful moment into a lesson in the subtle, but difficult, art of teamwork. In his clumsiness and self-deprecation, Dave's deficiencies as an athlete faded into nothingness when placed beside the essence of his character.

The two Coach Thompsons entered the dark locker room. “DeBrosse, you'll be the captain tonight.”

Mel's announcement cuts me deeply even thirty years later, and still wounds Dan Mohr. I felt like Mel had slapped me in the face in front of my teammates. I am sure it made John DeBrosse as uncomfortable as it made me and Danny. To appoint a junior the captain of a team when two seniors were sitting in the same room is as huge and personal an affront as a coach could deliver, especially in the strictly hierarchal world of The Citadel. Though I thought it was a serious mistake not to name Danny and me co-captains for the Auburn game, I had wrongly assumed the captaincy was my booby prize for riding the bench.

It was the second straight game that Mel Thompson had gone out of his way to insult Danny Mohr, his highest returning scorer from our previous year. I do not remember a single word of Coach Thompson's pregame pep talk on that long-ago Saturday night, but I remember my darkly burning face and my eyes on the floor as Mel went over the defensive assignments and the scouting reports on the Clemson players. Because this was my final season and I'd played these boys before, I did not need to listen to any in-depth assessment of the Clemson team. Beating them was a snap. All you had to do was stop Randy Mahaffey and Jim Sutherland. Stop those two magnificent athletes and the rest was mop-up time for the Green Weenies. Theories of how to do so flowed easily from Mel's lips; executing them, however, was a far more complicated matter.

So far, I have spoken with awe and nostalgia about my terrific freshman team. Our only loss that season came at the hands of the Clemson freshmen where we found that we could not handle the powerful six-foot-six Mahaffey under the boards, or the formidable six-foot-five Sutherland at shooting guard on the outside. They were aggressive, banked with all the necessary competitive fires, and were uncannily graceful.

Jim Sutherland served as president of the student body at Clemson, made straight A's in his premed courses, and had averaged over fifteen points a game in the ACC his junior year. I hoped I would get the chance to play tonight because I wanted to tell my children I had once guarded Jim Sutherland.

“Conroy,” Dan Mohr said as we waited our turn to do layups, “can you believe he named DeBrosse to be captain? What the hell's he doing?”

“He's the boss, Root,” I said.

“It ain't right,” Dan said. “It just ain't right.” Then, looking down at the Clemson team, “Goddamn, Mahaffey's a big son-of-a-bitch.”

In Randy Mahaffey, the third Mahaffey brother to attend Clemson on a basketball scholarship, all the grace and speed of impalas and lions combined nicely with the strength of water buffalo. He was long-limbed and long-strided and was a natural meat-eater under the boards. When I was a sophomore I tried to block him off the baskets for a rebound and he sent me reeling out of bounds with the barest movement of his hip.

As we gathered together by our bench and placed our hands in a circle before the first tip, Mel issued our final instructions. The Tiger Pep Band, sitting directly behind the visiting team's bench, repeatedly and maddeningly kept playing “Tiger Rag,” Clemson's famous, repetitive fight song.

The referee approached the crouched centers, formal as candelabras in their stillness, and lofted the ball upwards as Mohr and Mahaffey sprang toward the lights. The game began in ugliness and unsettledness. From my seat on the bench, I watched Clemson forward Randy Ayers foul Mohr hard when he went to put the ball on the floor. Danny made the free throw and we led 1–0. Then Randy Mahaffey slashed and dazzled for the next ten minutes with radiant backup play by Jim Sutherland.

The Clemson offense was fluid and smooth and worked efficiently to get the right man open—often Mahaffey, who would post Mohr up then back him into the paint with elegance and precision. Mohr was overmatched physically; Mahaffey was fast, explosive, and intimidatingly strong. His sheer physical presence overtook the game almost as soon as it began. It helped both Mahaffey and Clemson that in Mel Thompson's defensive scheme, we were not allowed to help our teammates out unless a complete breakdown occurred.

The pace of the game was brutal from the start, and the mood quickly turned malevolent as the big guys roughhoused on the boards. As peasantry from The Citadel, we were not supposed to mix it up with the lordly squires of the ACC. Mahaffey's face bristled with resentment if Danny even attempted to block his movement to the board. ACC refs could be as fair as those rabid Nazi judges who screamed obscenities at the men accused in the attempted assassination of Hitler. Early in the game, it became readily apparent that all close calls would go to Clemson.

If Mohr was having trouble with Mahaffey, sophomore Tee Hooper was in the process of learning profound lessons from a seasoned Jim Sutherland. As always, Sutherland was far quicker than it seemed he should have been. Not quite as quick as Tee, Jim used his edge of sixty games of varsity experience to great advantage. Jim would pump fake on a jump shot, then lean into the leaping Tee, and Tee was in foul trouble early.

Five minutes into the game, a moment of exceptional beauty took place when Danny Mohr brought down a fought-for rebound with Mahaffey on his back, then he pivoted and found DeBrosse in place on the wing. He threw to DeBrosse, who hit Tee with a dead-on pass as Tee assumed the point, and the fast break developed with textbook perfection.

Zinsky and Bridges filled the outside lanes, then broke for the basket at the exact same time. Tee hit Zinsky with a superb pass on the left side of the basket and Bill laid it in, even though he was fouled. Zinsky hit the free throw and the ideal execution of the play gave my team a sudden infusion of energy.

But the rebounding grew more militant and hostile. So brutal was the play under the basket that it made me happy to be a guard on the bench. Whenever any contact or collision occurred under the boards, the referee almost always called the foul on one of the Citadel big men, drawing a huge roar of approval from the crowd. If you do not think that contempt of home crowds does not file down the rough edges of a referee's psyche, then you know little of the game of basketball.