My Losing Season (19 page)

It was a shooter's night for John DeBrosse, and his form was immaculate every time he went up and his hand flicked the ball toward the basket and his wrist bent and held there until the ball split the net. He looked lit up from the inside. I watched all this from the bench, with two trombone slides whizzing past my ears, playing the ugliest fight song in the country. That is one of the most important of the point guard's duties: knowing which of your teammates carries the hot hand in the game of the moment. Being hot as a shooter is an exalted state that has a brief and fragile life span and the point guard must be able to mark his teammates when struck by this unpredictable and transient condition. For shooters like DeBrosse and Mohr, it is what they live for. But we point guards learn to discern it in the eyes of our teammates and get them the ball when the fever reaches full pitch.

Mel's halftime talk was blistering. He complained about our many turnovers, when we had thrown the ball away or had it stolen from us. Mel's speech, although contemptuous and sneering, never approached the volcanic heights which he was fully capable of scaling. To some of us, he even seemed content that we were only ten points behind them at the half. The big guys' uniforms were soaked with sweat. I had not even broken a sweat during the warmups. An undamp uniform is only one of the humiliations of sitting on the bench. A dry basketball player is a loser and a benchwarmer and that is how I viewed myself when we trotted out to begin the second half.

Tee had his hands full trying to stop Sutherland, who was always strangely wonderful even on his worst night. “Try to make him go to his left, Tee,” I advised. “He's good going to his left, but not great.”

Tee nodded but I was not sure he heard me above the roar of that unruly crowd—that, and the accursed trombones that awaited the poor Green Weenies on the bench.

“Let's beat up the fucking band,” Cauthen suggested as we sat down to watch the tip-off.

Both teams spent the next half snarling at each other and grappling fiercely under the baskets. Among the Citadel players, John DeBrosse was in the middle of the best college game he would ever play. He performed with an aristocratic elegance on this night, delighting me with the perfect fluidity of his shot. So hot was DeBrosse that he later told me he expected to see smoke coming off his fingers. He made thirteen jump shots over the much taller Clemson guard, and he carried himself on the court like a man possessed.

Barney leaned over and yelled over the sickening din of the trombones, “Beaver shot. Eleven o'clock. Another one. Two o'clock.”

Bornhorst handled the shame of sitting on the bench by becoming an aficionado of spotting the panties of coeds with casually parted legs. The piety of my young Catholic and southern manhood was so extreme at the time that I never once looked into the stands for that secret and harmless thrill that gave us Green Weenies our only pleasure as we sat and watched our lives pass by without us.

With fourteen minutes left to play, Tee fouled out. As I entered the game to replace Tee, I saw a look of unadulterated suffering cross his face. The game had wounded this high-strung competitor.

“You get Sutherland,” DeBrosse said to me as Sutherland shot his foul shot.

“Thanks a ton,” I said. “I want Ayoob.”

“Not a chance. Get me the ball, smackhead. I'm hotter than shit.”

“Think the kid didn't notice?”

The game got nastier for both teams and I thought both Zinsky and Bridges were going to start swinging at the men guarding them. John and I posed a slight matchup problem for Clemson. Though Jim was seven inches taller than I was, and Ayoob five inches taller than John, we were both much quicker than they were. I started setting picks on Ayoob that DeBrosse would use to perfection, coming off me like we were part of the same body. I would flip him the ball and John would dribble once, then leave his feet, the mechanics of his flawless jump shot textbook, and the ball would arch high over Sutherland's outstretched hand, then split the net with the sound of razored cotton.

When Sutherland saw I was guarding him, he looked at me like I was an hors d'oeuvre. He called for the ball as he was supposed to when he found himself guarded by a midget, which is what I felt like as he began to back me toward the basket. I tried to use my quickness to flick the ball from him, but he was Jim Sutherland, and I was me, imprisoned in a body that had little business on a college basketball court. He faked right, then spun in a tight, sweet move to his left and went up for a jump shot. Far below him, I grabbed his shooting arm, deciding that he would earn his points on the free throw line, which he promptly did.

“We're losing by a million. Where's our big man?” I asked DeBrosse.

“Over there,” DeBrosse answered, pointing to Mohr on the bench.

Mel had taken Danny out with more than thirteen minutes to go and never put him back in the game. This was unfathomable to me. I started seeing various members of the Green Weenies reporting in at the scorers' table as DeBrosse and I went into high gear and began fast-breaking every time we got the ball, playing sloppy, catch-up basketball.

But the fast break was my native land, the country where I felt most at home in my chosen, lovely game. Fleet of foot, I loved pushing a basketball up the court as much as I have loved anything in this life. That night Zinsky and Kroboth were like racehorses on the wings, and I could always depend on them filling the lanes. I hit them whenever they were open.

The Green Weenie Brian Kennedy got in for his first minute of playing time in his varsity career, joined by Greg Connor. Looking for his first college rebound, Brian was matched against the peerless Randy Mahaffey. Brian flung himself at the ball, but Randy got to it first and ripped it out of Brian's grasp. Randy caught Brian's jaw with an unconcealed elbow and one of the referees called a foul on Brian. Then Brian surprised the entire gym, and especially Mel Thompson, by throwing a punch that, had it landed, would have taken Mahaffey's head off.

Two whistles blew and Brian was called for a technical foul ten seconds into his varsity career. Mel sent Bob Cauthen into the game to replace the fired-up Kennedy.

I went over to Brian and said, “Hey, Brian. Pick a fight with someone who ain't built like Samson.”

“You see what he did to me,” Brian snapped.

“Don't take it personal. He does it to everyone.”

With 6:12 left in the game, Coach Bobby Roberts took mercy on our Citadel souls and sent in his second team. The two second teams (“Hey, they got Weenies, too,” Cauthen said) ran up and down the court, the scrubs flinging up shots anytime we touched the ball. Mere sloppiness transformed itself into the shameful bedlam that emerges when discipline leaves the gym in the wake of a rout. Never have I seen more turnovers in a single game. “Hold that Tiger” never stopped playing and the crowd never stopped roaring. The only good thing about that awful game is that I could not hear Mel screaming at me not to shoot every time I touched the ball.

With a single minute left, Mel sent Dave Bornhorst into the game for Doug Bridges. Only when Barney removed his warmup jersey did the fans realize he had surrendered his shirt to Doug. Shirtless, Barney ran onto the floor before a disbelieving Clemson crowd. Doug, exhausted and spent by the night-long catfight under the boards, peeled off Barney's shirt and handed it to his teammate at midcourt. When Barney put on that sweat-soaked shirt in full view of four thousand people, the gymnasium rang out with a disgusted cry of “Oooooh.” With that one strategic coaching move, Mel managed to humiliate both Bornhorst and Bridges, but both men howled with laughter at the memory years later.

The
News and Piedmont
headline the next day was “Tigers Romp Past the Bulldogs 102–85,” while the
News and Courier
said more tersely that “Tigers Claw Bulldogs.” Clawed and beaten up, my team certainly felt, and it was becoming clear to everyone that our defense could not stop anyone. Mel told the
News and Courier
's reporter, Jimmy Powers, “To put it in simple language, Saturday's game with Clemson was sloppy. It was a bad ball game all the way around. We didn't play well and I don't think Bobby Roberts was satisfied with his team's performance, either. I know neither one of us was pleased with the calls made by the officials. It was just sloppy from start to finish. We aren't playing defense in any sense of the word. We are just making too many mistakes both on offense and defense, but the defensive ones appear to be showing up stronger. It is real odd that we outscored Clemson by one field goal and outrebounded them by sixteen, but they shot twenty-seven more free throws than we did.”

Coach Thompson uttered not a word describing the superlative play of John DeBrosse who had scored twenty-eight points, the best game yet of his distinguished career. Bill Zinsky followed with twelve, and Danny Mohr and Al Kroboth had eleven, and I had pitched in a messy, undistinguished ten points—only the third time in my varsity career I had scored in double figures. But not to have singled out DeBrosse at all seemed a mistake to me. When I read that article it was the first time I had ever made the connection that Mel lacked all gifts or talents required by the language of praise.

CHAPTER 11

GREEN WEENIES

B
EFORE THE
W
OFFORD GAME,
M
EL HAD
D
ANNY
M
OHR PAY HIM A VISIT
in his office at the Armory. Like the rest of us, Mohr dreaded these infrequent encounters and, as he told me years later, cannot remember emerging from a single one of them feeling good about himself or his game. According to Dan, Mel Thompson never looked at him for four years with anything but hatred and contempt in his eyes. He entered the office and said, “Hey, Coach, how're you doing?”

Mel looked up and stared darkly at his center. “I don't know who I'm going to make captain this year. You and Conroy don't show me jackshit for leadership. My seniors are letting the team down.”

“Seniors have always been the captains, Coach,” Dan said.

“I've never seen that rule carved in stone, Mohr. You seen it carved in stone? Show it to me.”

“Maybe the team could vote on it,” Dan suggested.

“You think this is a goddamn democracy, Mohr? This isn't a democracy by any stretch of the imagination. This is a fucking dictatorship and you know who's in charge. Right?”

“I guess you are, Coach,” Dan offered.

“You
guess
? You fucking
guess
I'm in charge? Is there any doubt in your mind, Mohr?”

“No, not any, Coach.”

“That's good, Mohr. If you ever doubt I'm in charge, let me know and I'll run your ass into the ground. I don't know if you have the guts to be captain. You don't show me a smidgen of leadership out there on the court. I even saw you smile at our players on the bench when Clemson was kicking the shit out of us. Smiling.”

“I was trying to give the guys some encouragement, Coach.”

“That's not your job,” Mel shouted.

“Coach, the guys get down. You don't know what we have to put up with in the barracks.”

“What happens in the barracks is irrelevant to what happens on the court. You guys are on scholarship. You owe full allegiance to this program. We own your body and most of your soul. Full commitment, Mohr. Do I have it from you, Mohr? Will you put yourself on the line for me?”

“Yes sir, Coach,” Danny said. “You can count on me, Coach.”

“Bullshit, Mohr,” Mel screamed. “Bullshit. You're nothing but a can of corn.”

Later that same day while returning some paperwork to Mel's pretty secretary, I caught Mel and his assistant, Ed Thompson, in the middle of a drifting, desultory conversation about the team and its prospects against Wofford. Then the subject shifted to Tee Hooper and how well their experiment of putting him at the number two guard position was working out. Then Mel put a bolt of lightning through my life by saying, “I don't know if Conroy will get into another game this year. We need to develop some of these young kids.”

I staggered out of the field house into the bright sunshine of that December day, feeling as if I had been hit by a car. I had trouble breathing and trouble walking, my head ablaze with Mel's despair-inducing words. Slowly, I walked in front of Murray Barracks and made my way back to the Fourth Battalion. From long experience, I knew that once Mel had made up his mind about a player there was no such thing as redemption or a second chance. Devastated, I returned to my room and tried to work on my senior essay comparing the works of William Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis. Neither
Light in August
nor
Arrowsmith
could touch the struck-down athlete in me who grieved for his lost season.

Before the game against the Wofford Terriers, Mel wrote the names of his starting lineup on the blackboard: Bridges, Zinsky, Mohr, DeBrosse, Hooper. As I read the names, I had to admit that those five were the best athletes on the team and gave The Citadel its best chance to win. I hated that it was so, but it was so. After going over the defensive assignments, Mel surprised his team again when he pointed to Danny and said, “Mohr, you're captain for tonight.” This caused some minor discomfort for DeBrosse, who had played the best game of his career while serving as team captain against Clemson. Mel had managed to pull off a hat trick. There were now three of us sitting in the locker room who could go through life claiming to be captain of the Citadel basketball team. It all felt slipshod and ill-considered to me. This eccentric game of musical chairs with the team's captaincy added a touch of bewilderment and misdirection to a season shakily begun. This does not feel like a team, I remember thinking.

The door flew open and we entered into the sudden light with the band going wild and Dan Mohr leading us out on the court dribbling the ball and making the captain's honorary first layup. Wofford was one of the smaller colleges put on The Citadel's schedule to serve as baitfish for us, a team that provided us a breather after our games with the leviathans, Auburn and Clemson. Unfortunately, Wofford refused to play dead for us. Before 1,582 fans, the Terriers came out scrapping and clawing from the opening tip-off until the final buzzer. It marked the real coming-out party of our sensational sophomores and it was their play that dominated the game. Still, we were fouling everybody in sight and did not seem to be able to move without putting a Wofford kid on the foul line. The big guys were beating each other up so badly in practice that they did not seem to know how to stop when game time began. Both Bridges and Mohr had three fouls in the first half and had to be replaced by Kroboth and Cauthen to save them for second-half action. Going into halftime, Wofford led us 44–43.

I never got into the Wofford game and neither did any of the other Green Weenies except Bob Cauthen. “I rotted on the bench” is the most accurate phrase I can think of. I always felt a putrefaction setting in as I watched the games go by without my participation. Since I had overheard Mel's plans not to play me for the rest of the year, I had to surrender my dreams of that season to the sure knowledge that my position had been taken from me, fair and square, by a far superior athlete. Even though I would not play this year, I still had to shoulder responsibilities to my teammates. I could be a great Green Weenie and get the starters ready for the hard games coming up on our schedule. And I could cheer, yes, cheer my ass off for the good of my team. The Green Weenies were always the best cheerleading squad in the gym wherever we played. We possessed a genius for firing up and supporting our starters and no one was noisier or more zealous about it than we were. I cheered Tee loudly, then silently offered a prayer that he would break both legs. Horrified, I would right myself and scream my support for DeBrosse, then quietly pray that his pancreas might fall out onto the floor. This despicable pattern of applause and indefensible prayer got me through the second half of the Wofford game. It was disgraceful then and it shames me today that I did it.

When the game ended, I had not even broken a sweat and my uniform was so dry and clean it embarrassed me. Our five starters all had broken into double figures. Bridges had a quiet ten and Mohr had a businesslike fifteen. His man Willie Pegram was the game high scorer for Wofford with twenty-seven, and Mel would torture Dan about those twenty-seven points for most of the next practice. Our guard play was superb with DeBrosse scoring eighteen and Hooper with seventeen points.

Louis Chestnut, the executive sports editor of the
News and Courier,
quoted Mel Thompson in the paper the next day: “The turning point in the game was our defense in the second half. We have had trouble with our defense and we had to be made believers. I think we were made aware of it in the second half tonight.”

I did not know what my coach meant by that when I first read those words thirty years ago, and they remain mystifying to me as I read them again today. I was in the middle of the lunatic process of trying to turn myself into a novelist in a college that turned out colonels, but I would spend a baffling, imbalanced year trying to figure out what Coach Thompson was trying to tell the world.

But one thing I knew for certain: I had heard him say I would not play, and I believed it with all my heart—a heart that after the Wofford game was a wreck.

So, I resumed my life as part of the audience of my last basketball season. Any joy in the game would have to come in practice, and I reclaimed my position as leader of the Green Weenies with as much panache as I could muster. Humiliated as I was by not playing in a game as a senior, I had long been drilled in the importance of subsuming my own ego for the good of my team. In fact, putting the team before self was the essence of being a good point guard. So I adjusted my ambitions for myself as an athlete and returned to my role as career second-stringer.

But still, day after day, practice after practice, the Green Weenies could whack and ambush and humiliate the Blue Team every time we took the court. There were reasons for this. First, we Green Weenies played the game with no pressure on us. In Mel Thompson's world, a second-stringer was a loser by definition and an afterthought at best. There was no way that any of us could excel at practice and work our way into the starting lineup. To Mel, we were invisible. I think I was the only one of the Green Weenies who knew how good our team was. We also got to run the offenses of our next opponent. From scouting reports, Ed “Little Mel” Thompson would take us to the far end of the court and instruct us on the intricacies of offenses that were beautifully conceived. It was a pleasure to run offenses that were inventive and full of the possibilities that came from misdirection and surprise. The defenses we ran were scrambling and complex, put together by brilliant, inventive coaches on the cutting edge of their sport.

At the same time, the Green Weenies knew, by heart, every single thing the Blue Team was going to do long before they did it. But the Blue Team never had a clue about what offense we were going to throw at them until we went into action. Mel's malefic glare was fixed on them like a jeweler's eye and no one seemed the slightest bit concerned over the Weenies' play. The first team was supposed to kick our butts every practice because they were, by far and in fact, the superior athletes. But sport is often strange and contradictory.

On the Green Weenies, I had my pick of Al Kroboth, Bob Cauthen, Greg Connor, Dave Bornhorst, Brian Kennedy, and the superb freshman center Bob Carver under the boards. Kroboth was the great surprise of the sophomore class and was getting more and more playing time because of his flawless attitude, his nose for the ball, and his unceasing hustle. He would ripen into one of the best rebounders in the history of Citadel basketball. Big Al could get me the ball anytime I called for it. Two flashy freshmen guards, Jerry Hirsch and Willie Taylor, gave us a formidable backcourt.

The much maligned Bob Cauthen was as much a presence beneath the boards as the soft-spoken Kroboth. Alone among my teammates of that year, I rated Cauthen as the best and most fierce rebounder on the team. I remembered with great clarity the Duquesne game in Pittsburgh the year before with Mohr and Bridges hurt when Mel, in desperation, inserted Cauthen into the lineup, and I watched Bob take on the entire Duquesne team. He scored nineteen points and pulled down sixteen rebounds in the greatest performance by a reserve I had seen in my career as a Citadel basketball player. He followed it up with an almost magical game against East Carolina when he scored twenty-one points and pulled down another slew of rebounds. Then Doug and Dan healed and Cauthen joined the rest of us Green Weenies on the bench, rarely to rise again. Though Bob's caustic wit and negativity irked my teammates, I always admired his courage under the basket. The Blue Team never understood the humiliation of warming the bench, but the Green Weenies taught them the humiliation of being soundly trounced.

“You're letting
these
guys kick your asses? The fucking Green Weenies? What in the hell are you going to do against George Washington or Davidson?”

Every day of that indecipherable, overlong year, the Green Weenies stomped the Blue Team and it still irritates them thirty years later.

When I saw Bill Zinsky at Doug Bridges's house in Columbia, South Carolina, recently, the memory was visibly painful to him. He said, “There was absolutely no pressure on the Green Weenies. We were a lot better than you guys and you knew it. We knew there was nothing any of us could do about that. It was Mel's great negativity that tore us down. He was a black hole. We played badly because he wanted us to play badly, wanted us to lose to a group of guys who couldn't hold our jocks. You guys were having a ball. You were having fun. We were having Mel. Do you understand that, Conroy? We were having Mel.”

The following Saturday night at the Armory, we took on the visiting George Washington Colonials. In the locker room before the game, after posting the starting lineup and designating the defensive assignments, Mel shocked us again by naming me captain. I felt Dan freeze up beside me.

When DeBrosse had served as captain against Clemson, he scored the highest number of points in his career. When Mohr had gone to shake hands at center court with the Wofford captains, he had come away at the end of that game with our first victory of the season. Rat flipped me the ball as I took my place of honor to lead my team out onto the court when Dan whispered to me, “What's going on, Conroy? You didn't even take your warmups off against Wofford. It doesn't make any damn sense to me.” Then the first strains of “Dixie” sounded as I ran out into the lights and noise of the crowd. I think the breaking of Dan Mohr began in earnest that night. It hurt him when the referee tapped me on the shoulder for the meeting of the captains at center court. When I shook hands with Joe Lalli, it shamed me to be there. He was fast, bold, and cocksure like a point guard was supposed to be, and a good two inches shorter than me or DeBrosse. He scooted around the court like a manic waterbug, making the bigger guards covering him look slow-footed and earthbound. His game smelled like the New York City school grounds to me. He hummed with pure energy as we listened to the refs explain the rules. I did not feel like the captain of my basketball team. I felt lost and haunted and ridiculous, an afterthought, a mistake. If I could not even get into the Wofford game, I certainly did not deserve to stand at center court facing the best point guard in our conference. Already, I avoided looking at either DeBrosse or Mohr when I returned to my teammates who were taking their first warmup shots.