My Losing Season (20 page)

Our sophomores were magnificent, especially in the first half. The game unveiled the rapidly developing game of Al Kroboth, whose long arms always seemed to appear above the rim at exactly the right moment. In addition, Bill Zinsky's presence was a lordly one on the court, his beautifully chiseled body glistening with sweat as he guarded Ed Rainey of the Colonials with a catlike fierceness. From past experiences, I knew that Rainey was a good ballplayer, but Zinsky was all over him from the tip-off until the moment Rainey fouled out trying to guard Zinsky.

Sitting on the bench praying for the death of Tee Hooper, I immediately filled up with shame again and began cheering for him all the harder. I cheered as I retreated to the country place I keep behind my eyes, the place I return to in times of danger and despair, the hermitage and refuge I kept secret to all but myself. I employed it as summer house, lecture hall, resort, and private lair. In the madness of my terrible boyhood, it was the den I fell back on when my father beat me with his fists, when the plebe system tore me apart in the soft places, when the screaming of the coaches grew too loud or hit too close to home. I was the only one with the key to this inn of interior peace that I had built on the other side of retinas and corneas and the soft tissues of my face. It is a manse of solitude and shade and refuge. It is the place I go to every day to write the books which explain who I am to myself.

In my years on the bench at The Citadel, I practiced the art of writing during every game and had not the vaguest notion that I was doing so. One part of my mind remained on the game, like an idling motor, and I followed the routes and fortunes of my teammates and cheered when appropriate or moaned with displeasure when disaster struck. But the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me. My eyes would light on a human face in the crowd, and I would invent stories about that face and that body until these complete strangers would brim over in an amazing and vital life. Sometimes I would hone in on the assistant commandant for cadets, Lieutenant Colonel Nugent Courvoisie, and his wife, Elizabeth, and begin their courtship in Europe when they met during the war in the snowy, perilous days that led up to the Battle of the Bulge. I had the Boo's artillery battery tearing up a road of advancing German tanks as American troops fell back in terrible disarray all the way back to the Ardennes forest. Mrs. Courvoisie had been a nurse during the war and was grievously wounded in Belgium, and I had her present at fearful amputations, her hand wiping the foreheads of doomed young soldiers whose intestines were slithering out of wounds too horrible to imagine. I had the Boo take the young nurse to a lunch in Brussels on leave and he ordered a very fine wine (I didn't know the name of a single wine then) and then a fabulous Belgian meal of whatever rich and gracious Belgians ate. I knew only of waffles, and that lacked romance to me. Then my eyes would travel higher and another nurse, pretty Sylvia Cox, would come into rapturous view. I had a crush on Sylvia for the four years I was a cadet, which put me into solid competition with the other two thousand Citadel cadets who flirted with her whenever they visited the infirmary. Once, I called to ask her for a date, but hung up the receiver as soon as she answered the phone and I heard her lovely voice. But under the false light of field houses, I would plot out in my mind the long serious courtship of the unknowing Miss Cox, my canoeing her down the Edisto River, taking her to plays at the Dock Street Theater, and reading her long poems I had composed in praise of her loveliness. Of course we would live in Paris in a small garret with a view of the Seine and the Eiffel Tower where I would begin to write the books that would change the course of world literature and bring the literati of the Western world to my modest doorway. Sylvia would find them there on their knees. We would eat only in Left Bank cafés, and I would wear a beret to cover my thinning hair. The guard at the Louvre would know us so well he would wink and wave us in without a ticket.

DeBrosse hit a jump shot coming off the dribble near the foul line. The next time down the court John put another one in at almost the same spot. Thirty seconds later Kroboth broke through underneath with a twisting layup that their forward could not block. Walking down the rue Vaugirard, I would take Sylvia's hand and tell her the French words I loved the most: hyacinthe, époussetage, rosette, reconnaissances, peintre—I would try to think of other beautiful French words and wish I had studied harder in Colonel Smith's French class. In my retreat behind the eyes, I spoke a perfect colloquial French. Sylvia and I always had more money than we needed, and the flowers in the Luxembourg Gardens were always in full bloom as the cadets' hot hands cooled off in the beginning of the second half as the George Washington defense stepped up the pressure. DeBrosse was playing a terrific floor game and holding the slippery Joe Lalli at bay. Quicksilver fast, Lalli could make a defender look bad by driving by him hard, then pulling up for a quick jumper. I had found this out the hard way in a game the previous year.

A man rose out of a seat in a top row and I watched him make a signal of some kind to his wife. The wife looked beleaguered, worried, and at that moment I knew the man was the son of a one-eyed tobacco farmer near Mars Hill, North Carolina, and a woman who had only finished third grade and was famous in the mountain country for frying perch and handling snakes. The man sold flood insurance by day, but was a cross-dresser who secretly went to a nameless bar near the Merchant Seaman's Club that required your own key to gain entry. They had a bitter fight on the way to the game because the wife had confronted him sneaking into their house wearing her hose and brassiere and dress. He had gone to phone a client that a friend of his had a dog about to give birth to a litter of Boykin spaniels. The man in the flight jacket in the third row killed fourteen Cambodian villagers when one of his rockets strayed off course as he bombed targets along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and that blond woman ran a numbers racket out of the backseat of her surgeon husband's Jaguar, and the redheaded man with the mole above his lip . . .

“Conroy!” Coach Thompson shouted. My warmup was already off when I reported to my coach.

“Get in for Mohr. You bring it up the court. Nobody else. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, looking up at the clock, having no idea what the score was.

Bob Nugent, a six-foot-eight substitute, had entered the game when the center, Ed Rainey, had fouled out. Nugent scored two quick baskets to tie the score at 77 all, then the Colonials moved ahead on a free throw by Nugent.

When George Washington put on a full-court press, “Conroy” was the first word out of Mel Thompson's mouth, and it'd been that way since I arrived at The Citadel. I ran out on the court and got a cheer from the Corps because they liked to watch me dribble a basketball and I liked to dribble for them.

I took the inbound's pass from DeBrosse and waved for him to go downcourt. Then I faced the two George Washington guards moving toward me and one of them was the sneaky-quick Lalli. I picked on the other guard and, dribbling with my left hand, blew by the kid like his foot was nailed to the court.

“Don't shoot, Conroy,” Mel yelled as I passed him on the run and threw the ball to a wide-open DeBrosse who found it a resting place in the net. The pesky Nugent hit a jump shot from the corner and again the race was on. John shuffled me a pass after he took it out then cleared the court for me again. I dribbled to my right and Lalli made a mongoose-quick move to slap the ball away, but I could bring a ball upcourt and anticipated his move and went behind the back, leaving Lalli to the rear. I put a crossover dribble on the other guard and charged up the court pursued by a duet of Colonial guards. I charged toward the basket and saw Kroboth's man move out to challenge me, so I dished it to Mr. Kroboth who got to make the layup. Al was fouled by the weak-side forward in the process. Oh yes, and Mel Thompson shouted, “Conroy, don't shoot,” when I surged past him.

At the time I played the game, dribbling the basketball was an art form and few players could do it as it was supposed to be done. The fingertips controlled the basketball entirely and the ball was kept low on the floor and you had to be good or lucky to steal it from a point guard who knew what he was doing. I knew what I was doing but the fan of today cannot appreciate the art of dribbling I am talking about. The great players of the later era—Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, John Stockton, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley—palmed the basketball every time they handled it. The game has advanced or retreated in such a way that what these players call dribbling, our referees would have called turnovers.

Each time George Washington scored, I dribbled through their whole team for the rest of the night. Evan Bussey wrote the story for the
News and Courier
's morning edition the next day: “It took a pair of free throws by little Pat Conroy of Beaufort and a last-second goal to seal the Bulldogs' second victory of the season.”

We were 2–2 as we entered the shower room. Bridges came in last in his slow-loping gait and passed Dan Mohr as the center stood mutely in the shower. Unlike the other guys, there was no horsing around or small talk for Danny.

“Good game, Root,” Doug said with sincerity and kindness.

Every member of the team remembers his reply. Dan stuck up the largest middle finger on the team and said, “Fuck you, Bouncy.” Doug's nickname came because Cauthen thought Doug “bounced like a nigger” when he ran the court.

The whole team lapsed into shocked silence before we howled with helpless, senseless laughter. It became the signature moment of the entire lousy year.

CHAPTER 12

OLD DOMINION

M
Y TEAM WAS 2
–
2, AND WE WERE ABOUT TO PLAY A TEAM FEW OF US
had ever heard of before we read the schedule. Today, several of my teammates look upon this game as the central point when our team began to founder, but all agree that our game with the Old Dominion Monarchs, an unknown and uncelebrated team out of Norfolk, Virginia, set forces loose that would have melancholy consequences all year. Someone let us know that the Old Dominion coach, Sonny Allen, had practically begged Mel to get his little team from the Mason-Dixon Conference into our mighty Southern Conference. In the days leading up to the game Mel spoke of Old Dominion with withering contempt. Since he had starred on the high mountain passes of that Massif Central known as ACC basketball, he held not a smidgen of respect for coaches or players who labored for their schools in the unhonored, trash-fish leagues around the country. To Mel, my teammates and I were unspeakable losers because we played in the Southern Conference, but the very idea of lowering his standards to include such a new, unproven program on our schedule rankled him. To us, he made Old Dominion sound like we were playing a team composed of paraplegics and Lou Gehrig's disease sufferers.

This game marked a moment of history I was proud to be a part of because the two starting guards at Old Dominion were both black, and Bob Pritchett and Arthur Speakes would have the honor of integrating the Armory on the Citadel campus. Black kids were appearing more and more in the lineups of southern basketball, but none had made it to our home gymnasium until this night. And the appearance of Pritchett and Speakes brought me back to the days of Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Virginia. I took it to the hoop the way those flashy black guards from Spingarn and Eastern high schools did on the outdoor courts around the city. “Let the little white kid play” were the happiest words I could hear on a Saturday morning when the pickup games would begin.

For reasons that still remain unclear to me, Mel named me as captain for the Old Dominion game, the first time this season anyone on the team had been captain in two consecutive games thus far. Even more mystifying and inexplicable to me, I was named captain for every single game for the rest of the season, but never knowing for sure that Mel would appoint me for the next game or not. The sound of my name began to hurt Danny Mohr, and there was nothing either one of us could do about it except endure it with grace.

Our coach was an extraordinarily superstitious man. He would not let me wear my high school number of 13 because he considered that number to be anathema. His life was stylized and ritualized to the point of parody, and the schemes of his life were all obsessive. Once you caught on to the major currents of his patterns of behavior, Mel would never surprise you. By my senior year, I could read Mel as clearly as a windsock on some matters.

“Old Dominion,” Mel sneered as he began his pregame pep talk. “Old Dominion. We don't know much about this team, but how much do you need to know about Old Dominion of the Mason-Dixon Conference? Now here's what I want you to do. We've got these two black guards named Pritchett and Speakes. Now Tee and John, you don't play black kids like you do white kids. You play 'em tough. You get in their faces and rough them up. Black kids don't like to play rough-and-tumble kick-ass Citadel basketball. They like to play pretty and fancy-Dan like Conroy, but they sure don't like taking their licks. I don't know if black people have a place in this game or not [prophecy was not Mel Thompson's long suit] but I want these goddamn kids from Old Dominion—all of them, not just the black ones—to leave this field house tonight knowing they've been in a war. Now, get out there and show them what Southern Conference basketball is all about.”

We roared out onto the court to the sound of “Dixie,” and ten minutes later the first two black kids ever to play ball on the hardwood of the beautiful Armory shook hands with DeBrosse and Hooper. Let it be known that the two five-foot-eleven guards Bob Pritchett and Arthur Speakes were that night kingly with their gifts and magical with their skills. The guys, as they say, lit it up, and we white boys looked as though our Converse All Stars had been glued to the floor. In the first five minutes of play, Speakes and Pritchett flew past Hooper and DeBrosse, humiliating both players.

“Get in their faces, Hooper. Get up in there tight, DeBrosse,” Mel would scream, and both Hooper and DeBrosse would move in tight. The two black kids would cut through them like wind through a cornfield. Right in front of me, John moved in pressuring Speakes who drove by him so quickly that DeBrosse looked up in pure surprise and said in a startled, helpless way, “Fuck.”

It was at that moment that it struck me that John DeBrosse and Tee Hooper had never played against any black kids. I ran down the bench to Mel's side and knelt beside him. He looked down at me as though I were a typhoid carrier.

“What the hell are you doing here, Conroy?” Mel said. “Have you gone nuts?”

“Coach, Tee and John've never guarded black kids. They need to back off them. Those kids are fast as hell.”

“Get back to your seat on the bench. Did General Harris hire you as coach? Do I need to hand you my whistle? Ed, get rid of him.”

Ed “Little Mel” Thompson, his sweetness almost a salve to Mel's gruffness, said, “Pat, go on back to your seat now. We'll discuss it at halftime.”

“They're going to kill us, Coach,” I said, returning to the last folding chair away from my coaches. And then it dawned on me that neither Mel nor Ed Thompson had played against black competition, either. It was painful to watch Tee and John running after the swift and agile Pritchett and Speakes. All night long, the Old Dominion guards drove the lane with boldness and flash. Speakes had a beautiful outside shot from long range. The box score claims that I hit a single basket, but I have no memory of being in that game because of what happened during halftime.

When we entered our overheated locker room at halftime, Old Dominion was beating us badly. The managers distributed Cokes to all of us. We knew we had five minutes to relax and gather our thoughts until Mel would enter and scream at us for the last five minutes of the break before we had to report back to the court for the second-half tip-off.

Brian Kennedy, frisky all year from lack of playing time, lightened the heavy atmosphere by announcing, “You know, it seems to me that black people might, just might, have a place in this game.”

The team exploded in suppressed laughter—suppressed because laughter is the last thing Mel would have wanted to hear in our locker room. Then Dave Bornhorst compounded the damage by saying, “I'll tell you one damn thing, Old Dominion sure found out what Southern Conference basketball is all about.” The team fell apart for a second time, the first authentic laughter we had shared the whole year. Guys kept repeating the lines.

“You think black people might have a place in this game? No way, man,” said Connor.

“Old Dominion's gonna spread the word. Don't fuck with those boys in the Southern Conference,” said Cauthen.

“Stay away from the Southern Conference if you know what's good for you,” said Connor.

Most of the talk came from the bench-warming Green Weenies. Members of the first team laughed, but they were also exhausted and humiliated by the fast-paced ordeal of the first half. They knew they were due for a blistering verbal assault from our all but unhinged Coach Thompson. Rat came flying through the door to say, “Knock it off. Coach is coming and he looks pissed.”

It seemed early for our routine-loving coach to arrive, but it occurred to us that the coach needed extra time for a good ass-chewing. All of us put on our game faces, faces that could not submit to defeat by a bunch of bush leaguers from the Mason-Dixon Conference. Our coach entered in the same manner he had before every game and during every halftime of the fifty-some games I had played as a Citadel Bulldog.

I was surprised—no, that is not a strong enough word—I was stunned to see my teammate Doug Bridges walking through the door smoking a cigarette. He looked preoccupied, overserious, and he walked with a long-strided, loping gait that looked familiar. The others began falling down laughing all around me. Mohr and DeBrosse were on the floor. I still had not quite gotten it, then it hit me: Bridges was doing the most extraordinary imitation of Mel Thompson imaginable. Not once did he break character. What he was doing seemed dangerous and forbidden and fabulous to all of us.

Like the rest of my teammates, I recognized every step of Bridges's brilliant send-up of our inflammatory coach as an exact mimic. Bridges smoked his cigarette exactly as Mel did his, taking preoccupied puffs and exhaling in long, heavy sighs indicating that he, poor Mel Thompson, should be doomed to coach such an unmanageable posse of slackers and whiners. When he reached the shower room, Doug turned to the right and we heard Bridges-Thompson pissing in the urinal. Again we fell apart. The sound of Mel Thompson pissing as we awaited a bawling out is a memory every member of this team carries to this day. Doug urinated casually, broodingly. He passed into sight for a brief second as he walked to the sink and when we heard Doug washing his hands, Brian Kennedy sank to his knees in laughter. We heard the water run as Doug cleaned his hands and the pure genius of his performance was in the perfect timing of each gesture—Doug washing his hands for the exact same length of time as Mel. I was howling and helpless with laughter when Bridges emerged from the shower room wiping his hands with the towel, slowly, smoking his cigarette, ignoring us tumbling down around him. When Doug neared the blackboard, he wiped it clean with his towel, then in a final brilliant act of mimicry, he drew the last puff from his cigarette, threw the butt on the floor, and extinguished it with his large right foot, grinding it compulsively until completely extinguished.

In all the years I played sports, I have never seen a team in less condition to be bawled out for poor play than this one. We had guys with tears streaming down their faces as some of the other guys said, “We've got to get it together . . . We've got to stop this.”

Until this moment, no one on the basketball team knew that Doug Bridges possessed such a chameleon gift of mimicry. No one.

Then Rat appeared in the doorway. “Coach's coming. For real this time.”

Some of the guys tried coughing to stifle their laughter. Others threw their warmup jerseys over their heads, some wheezed, but the sudden suppression of enormous laughter into the shamed silence of a team being beaten by an inferior foe left the atmosphere brittle and perilous. Of course, Mel had no idea of Doug's drop-dead imitation of him, but when I looked up and saw my coach enter the locker room exactly as Doug Bridges had, I knew I was going to have a difficult time. I was strangling on my own laughter as strange noises that sounded like a possum being asphyxiated came from my throat. My mistake was to watch Mel do exactly what Doug had just done. Mel carried the towel draped and folded carefully over his left shoulder, and he smoked his cigarette with deep and brooding detachment. His slouching, forward-leaning amble had all been stolen perfectly by Bridges. When Mel made the turn and we heard him pissing in the urinal, the team broke one more time. The laughter was in every face, but subterranean and forbidden, and we had only seconds to right ourselves.

I was too near hysteria as Mel crossed over to the sink to wash his hands, but I was desperate to come up with a foolproof way to calm myself. Mel treated laughter like some capital crime. He was wiping his hands with the towel as he began his slow, deliberate promenade the length of the locker room, smoking his cigarette expertly as he moved in his oddly shuffling gait toward the blackboard. I made it through the cleaning of the board and I think I would have gotten through the whole thing cleanly except that I had not counted on the completeness of Doug Bridges's genius in his spooky parody of Coach's behavior. When Mel took the last puff of his cigarette and threw it on the floor, I was in control of myself. But when I saw Mel's huge, tasseled wingtip on his right foot solemnly crush that cigarette with exquisite thoroughness, I laughed as loudly and as completely and as idiotically and as hysterically as I ever have in my life.

Only me.

My outbreak was met by the stoical silence of my teammates. Coach Thompson looked at me as though I had told him that I had cooked and eaten the baby Jesus for breakfast that morning. But I kept laughing and the more I tried to hold it back, the more the high tide of hysteria poured out of me in guffaws and belly laughs and snorts. Snot oozed from my nose and tears rolled down my cheeks.

Then Mel exploded. “Conroy, you think it's funny? You think it's funny that fucking Old Dominion is kicking our asses to hell and back? Losing's funny to you? Losing eats my guts out and makes me want to puke. I'd rather die than be a loser, Conroy. Die! Get the fuck out of this locker room. Get out, now. I won't have you on my damn team.”

Laughing still, I staggered out of the locker room thinking I had just ruined my life.

When the team returned to the court, I went into the empty locker room, removed my uniform, and showered alone for the first time. The second half started and I could hear the sound of the basketball hitting the oak floor, one of the loveliest sounds to me. Devastated, I dressed and walked the long way back to the barracks by the baseball field and the obstacle course and behind the mess hall.

In memory, that walk looms colossal in importance. Now I knew the dismayed horror of being the agent in the destruction of my own life. I wondered if Mel would revoke my scholarship tomorrow. In the darkness I tried to form the words I would use to tell my mother that I had been kicked off my college basketball team. From bitter past knowledge, I knew my parents would not spend a dime on my college education. From even bitterer knowledge, I thought of my bullying, brow-beating father's reaction and thought that in his rage, The Great Santini might try to beat me to death. I imagined the fist fight I would have with the strongest Marine colonel I had ever met, and it surprised me that I was even thinking about fighting back. Then a sudden surge of pure fear shot through me as I realized the Vietnam War was raging in Southeast Asia and that I would be drafted the day I told the comptroller's office I could not pay the tuition for the final semester of my senior year. I could see the headline in
The Brigadier
on the day my death was announced in the mess hall: “Conroy killed by mortar fire because he laughed at Thompson.”