My Losing Season

Conroy covers the next game, versus The College of William and Mary, in Chapter 22. The game represents perhaps the happiest time of the entire season for Conroy because he had finally become a good basketball player and allowed himself to celebrate his transformation. The game also marked one of the only times during the season that entire team played to its full potential. Conroy was fantastic in the 85-77 victory, scoring 22 points and distributing the ball the way a point guard should. Following the game, Conroy sought out Courvoisie to ask for an overnight leave. With the granted leave, Conroy rode a bus 70 miles to Beaufort in order to celebrate his great game in solitude with the town “that found [him] when [he] was 15-years-old and graciously let itself become [his] home” (275).

In closing the chapter, Conroy flashes forward to reveal that the team traveled to Williamsburg, Virginia a few weeks later and played the same William and Mary team and lost 91-57, the most lopsided score he had ever been a part of. Conroy’s parents traveled to see him play for the second time of the season in this game, and for the second time his father called him out of the locker room to tell him that he “was pure shit” (277). Something happened with Conroy in that moment, and he challenged his father to play one-on-one with him when he comes home for Easter. Of the incident, Conroy writes, “I think I was born into the world again and given back to myself at that very moment” (278). 

In the first half of Chapter 23, Conroy remembers separate personal encounters that he and center Dan Mohr had with their tempestuous coach in the days leading to the road game against the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). Thompson called Conroy to his office concerning a short story that Conroy had just written for The Shako, The Citadel’s literary magazine. Thompson was certain that a character in the story, an overweight basketball coach, was based on him, but Conroy denied that it was. Thompson let him know that the only reason he ignored it was because he was a pragmatist and knew that punishing him would hurt the team. Mohr’s meeting with Thompson was not as pleasant. Thompson castigated Mohr as weak and cowardly and even asked him to punch him in the face, but Mohr chose to walk away, knowing that it was a trap.

Another of The Citadel’s biggest athletic rivals is VMI, as both are military academies in the Southern Conference. Conroy notes this similarity, pointing out that jocks are second-class citizens at every military college and “in a secret, wordless accordance we acknowledged our aggrieved station in the chain of command by playing our best games against each other for the honor of our schools” (284). The Bulldogs won the tight game, and Conroy shared high scorer honors with 17 points, but the story of the game was that Mohr had not played at all. The big center who entered the season as the team’s leading returning scorer and rebounder, and who had already received a letter of inquiry from the Denver Nuggets of the American Basketball Association, found himself so entrenched in Thompson’s doghouse that he did not leave the bench. Of the development, Conroy writes that Mohr “had finally met the center who could keep him from scoring. His name was Mel Thompson” (290). 

A couple of weeks after their first matchup, the Bulldogs and VMI played again, but this time at the Armory on The Citadel campus. Conroy calls the thriller that took four overtimes to decide “the game of all games on the night of all nights” (291). This would be the second time that Conroy has written about the game, following the chapter he dedicated to it in his 1980 novel The Lords of Discipline. Prior to recapping the game, Conroy drifts back to his world of fiction and explains that most of the characters in his novels were actually based on real people and real events in his life. In the locker room before the game, he carried on a fantasized conversation with Will McLean, the protagonist from his novel based on himself. The Bulldogs won 73-70 with Conroy, DeBrosse, and Mohr, who had not played at all in the previous meeting, all playing the entire game.

Following Conroy’s recollection of this fabulous game, he describes the affection that all the players had for Joe “Rat” Eubanks, the team’s diminutive equipment manager. Some of the players teased Eubanks, but Conroy points out that “it disturbs [them] greatly that he died without having a clue how much he meant to [them]” (300). Eubanks was shot down and killed as a combat helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War. The chapter closes as Conroy walks onto the floor of the now-empty gym and strikes up another fantastical conversation with Will McLean. McLean comments that Conroy does not write fiction after all because he was under the impression that the game from the novel he was a character in was made up. 

Conroy’s brief Chapter 25 covers the game versus East Carolina University, which The Citadel won 105-91 in what was likely the best game the team would play all season. A good portion of the chapter, however, concerns Conroy’s time serving on the Honor Court, the student-led organization that imposes disciplinary sanctions against students who violate the academy’s honor code. The Honor Court, which was only one of many non-athletic Citadel activities and organizations that Conroy participated in, is “both the most feared and most respected organization on campus” (305). On two previous occasions during the basketball season, Conroy cast a vote of guilty that expelled a cadet from the academy, but the trial that occurred the night and morning hours before the East Carolina game was most agonizing for him. It was the first time in Citadel history that a member of the Honor Court was accused of a violation and found guilty. Because the trial lasted until five in the morning, Conroy played the game that night after having slept only one hour. 

Chapter 26 opens with a disturbing anecdote dealing once again with Conroy’s involvement with the Honor Court. The day before the Bulldogs were to travel to Orlando to play Stetson University, Conroy got word that Thompson wanted to see him. In the coach’s office, Thompson was waiting with a talented player on the freshman team who had been accused of an honor violation for cutting classes. When it turned out that the accusation was true, Thompson asked Conroy to use his position on the Honor Court to “clean up the mess” (313). When Conroy refused, Thompson became enraged and lectured him on how big-time programs took care of, and even paid, their players.

The game turned out to be one of the team’s worst performances of the year, and the events that occurred afterward seemed fitting for the disastrous season that was nearing its end. With another anecdote to close the chapter, Conroy describes how Tee Hooper, the talented sophomore who had taken his starting position earlier in the year, snuck away from the hotel after the game. When he was discovered missing, Thompson went into a rage, even checking the players’ rooms for girls. Hooper had essentially snapped over his unexplained benching, and when he finally confronted Thompson to find out why he had been buried on the bench, the reason given was because of a rumor in the barracks that Hooper was making the coaching decisions. 

The Citadel’s final regular season game, versus Davidson, would also represent the final regular season game in Conroy’s basketball career. He begins Chapter 27 with an introspective discussion about the passage of time: “in my own lifetime, nothing has been clearer or more unremitting than the inflexible and man-eating current of time” (323). The Bulldogs played the powerful Davidson Wildcats closely, but they lost the game 97-85, with Conroy pouring in a team-high 24 points.

For Conroy, the game’s most interesting development was that Davidson head coach Lefty Driesell, who was widely regarded as one of the top coaches in the country, knew full well who he was and what kind of player he had become. During pregame warmups, Driesell singled out both Conroy and Mohr to tell them that he would have used them differently had they played for him. The fact that Driesell thought Mohr should have been an All-American was not a surprise to Conroy, but for him to also be singled out was shocking to him: “long ago, in the Southern Conference, I had conditioned myself to the trauma of anonymity that mediocre athletes have to endure during every waking moment” (325). 

Tournaments take place at the end of every college basketball season. Every major conference holds an end-of-season tournament, and the teams that qualify advance to play in a NCAA-sponsored tournament. The Southern Conference Tournament of 1967 was held in Charlotte, North Carolina, and it would represent the last time that Conroy took the floor as a basketball player. In the first round, the Bulldogs would face off against the Richmond Spiders for the third time in the season, which also meant that Conroy would be dealing with high-scoring Johnny Moates for the third time. The game was a thriller, and the Bulldogs fought hard against a superior opponent, but lost in overtime 100-98. Conroy’s words sum up his feelings, as he broke down in tears after the game: “I wept out of sheer heartbreak, unable to control myself. I was lost in the overwhelming grief I felt at losing my game, losing basketball as a way to make my way and define myself in a world that was hostile and implacable” (340). In the game’s recap in the Charleston News and Courier the following day, head coach Mel Thompson was quoted as saying “Pat Conroy gave another great performance. That kid gets more mileage out of his talent than any player I have ever coached” (340-341). 

Conroy begins Chapter 29 writing, “for the first time since I was nine years old, I awoke as an ex-basketball player” (342). The chapter covers Conroy’s eventful final few months as a Citadel cadet, which he refers to as “lyrical and elegiac” (345). For the first time since he had entered The Citadel four years earlier, Conroy was experiencing the school the way that a typical cadet does, and the free time that he now had to focus on academics suited him perfectly. He writes, “I learned about barracks life as it was lived by the average cadet and not the jock that I’d been for four years, and I thought it was all terrific” (345).

The culmination of Conroy’s life at The Citadel, the rigid military academy that had first tortured him and later gave him a secure home, came in the form of trophies and awards that he was honored with. At the annual South Carolina Press Association Conference, Conroy won the award for best short story, and the following week, he won the school’s Shako Award for creative writing in both the poetry and the short story categories. At The Citadel’s annual Athletic Awards Banquet, he was surprised when he heard his name called as the winner of the Sportsmanship Trophy, but was completely astonished when Thompson declared that he was the winner of the team’s Most Valuable Player Award. As he handed him the trophy, Thompson said to him “congratulations, Pat. You were a lot better than I ever thought you were. A lot better” (353).

In what Conroy describes as his “final act as a Citadel basketball player,” (357) he rushes to the defense of his head coach Mel Thompson, the same coach whom he has criticized heavily throughout the memoir. Two weeks after the Class of 1967 graduated, Thompson was fired as the head coach of The Citadel’s basketball team. In response to this, Conroy wrote an open letter to The Citadel and the city of Charleston to be published in the News and Courier. According to Conroy, he tried to explain “the overarching difficulty of putting together a winning basketball team at a military college that prided itself in having the world’s toughest plebe system” (355).