My Losing Season (21 page)

The sheer absurdity of my situation overwhelmed and sickened me. I kept having imaginary conversations with my mother, who had not gone to college. My graduation day was as important for her as it was for me, and I imagined telling her what had happened, trying to make her understand what had taken place in the locker room.

On that long walk to the barracks, I knew in my bones Peg Conroy would never get it.

         

T
HE NEXT DAY IN THE TRAINING AREA WHERE
the jocks gathered to be fed, Rat came up to me and said, “Coach Thompson wants to see you at 1500 hours, Pat.”

“Been nice to know you, Conroy,” Mohr said, from the opposite side of the table.

“You're history,” Cauthen said.

“Hey, Bridges,” I said to Doug. “How do I explain to Mel why I was laughing my ass off last night? I'm having trouble with this.”

“Your ass is grass, and Mel's the lawn mower, bubba,” DeBrosse said.

“It doesn't look good, Conroy,” Bridges admitted. “I've never been more afraid as I was last night. I thought Mel was going to kill you. Did you see the look on his face? He wanted you dead. Dead, Conroy.”

“I couldn't see the look on his face because I was laughing so hard,” I said. “Bridges, I've sat by you at mess for a couple of years now, and practiced with you every day. Don't let this hurt your feelings, but you've not demonstrated the greatest wit or personality. When did your ass turn into fucking Jack Benny?”

“The guillotine, Conroy,” Bob Cauthen said, drawing a bony finger along his throat.

“You gonna tell Mel what happened?” DeBrosse asked me.

“I can't do that. It sounds too nuts. Do you know that what happened to us last night never happened to another team?”

“Bouncy,” DeBrosse said to Bridges, “you got nineteen last night. Hell of a game.”

“Doug finally got to play among his own people,” Cauthen said.

“Fuck you, Zipper,” Bridges said, shooting a bird.

“Fuck
you,
Bouncy,” Cauthen said right back.

And my team's happy journey across time continued on course.

At exactly 1500 hours I was in Mel Thompson's office, sitting on his couch, enduring his intimidating scowl. The air in the room felt tamped down. I had erred egregiously and I knew it. Whatever punishment, no matter how severe, I had earned it fair and square.

“Well?” Coach Thompson said.

“I can't explain what happened, Coach. It was so painful to be losing like that. So I tried to think of some joke I'd heard in the barracks, one that really tickled me.”

“What's the joke, Conroy?” Mel asked.

This question caught me off guard. I am one of those men doomed to walk the world crippled by a dazzling inability to remember jokes. Jokers are not my favorite companions as I make my weary, tear-stained way through this world.

“You surprised me last night,” Ed Thompson said from his desk in the corner. “You're one of our solid citizens.”

“If we can't depend on you, Conroy,” Mel said, “what're we supposed to do?”

“Let you down. Let the team down. Let my school down. I can't tell you how bad I feel about it.”

“What's the joke, Conroy?” Mel asked. “The one you heard in the barracks?”

“I have two Italian roommates, sir. Bo Pig and Mike Swine.”

“What's that got to do with the price of corn?”

“Sir, they're very sensitive about being Italian. So I collect jokes to tease them.”

“This is going nowhere fast, Conroy,” Mel said.

“I told them this joke the other night. There was a pig farm that was the stinkiest, smelliest place on earth. An Englishman decided to find out which race could stomach garbage and filth more than any other. So he sent an Englishman, an Irishman, and an Italian to live with the pigs.”

“This better be good, Conroy,” Mel muttered.

“You'll be on the floor, Coach,” I said.

“After the first day, the Englishman came running out puking his guts out, saying he couldn't stay another minute. At the end of the second day, the Irishman came running out vomiting and smelling like shit. And, on the third day, the pigs came running out,” I said.

Mel Thompson looked at me in soundless disbelief, but Ed Thompson chuckled from his chair in the corner of the room. Mel turned and glared at his young assistant, but I think Ed's chuckle saved me.

“That's the worst joke I've ever heard,” Mel told me.

“It really isn't that good,” I agreed.

“We're gonna forget about last night, Conroy. You've been a model citizen for this team since you got here. That was out of character. Don't let it happen again.”

“Coach, that's a promise I give you my word on.”

“Okay, get the hell out of here. Get ready for practice.”

“I can't thank you enough, Coach.”

Mel dismissed me with an angry gesture, and I left his office moving fast. But the writer who was secretly blooming inside me had noticed something in that office. I could smell my own fear as I entered Mel's office, and I know he smelled it, too. But for a single instant, I felt something new register on the screen where all the data and fragments of my four-year encounter with Mel Thompson were stored. The writer, not the basketball player, took note of it, a fast blip of insight and consciousness. Mel Thompson had not kicked me off the Citadel basketball team. Not because I didn't deserve it, but because he loved the boy I was and the player he had helped shape. He could not help it. The writer was busy sending news from the depths that day. As I walked slowly to the locker room I was shaken to the core by my urgent and material affection for my coach; no, I was overwhelmed by the profoundness of my own strange loyalty for Mel Thompson. In my life thus far there was nothing odd about this; love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most, and I feared few men as I feared Mel Thompson.

In the locker room, I packed for the trip to New Orleans, the road trip that would change my life and destiny as an athlete forever.

PART 3

THE POINT GUARD
FINDS HIS VOICE

CHAPTER 13

NEW ORLEANS

O
N THE FLIGHT TO
N
EW
O
RLEANS,
I
READ
A
S
TREETCAR
N
AMED
Desire
.
I was kindling in the hands of Tennessee Williams. Because I was going to the mythical and flamboyant city for the first time, I wanted to read the play before I began prowling the back streets of the French Quarter searching for the chance encounters and rich images that would one day add salt and ambience to my future. All year long, I escaped into books the way a cat burglar would take to the woods at the first sign of trouble. My teammates thought my reading habits both odd and off-putting, another way of not inhabiting the world around me.

“Isn't the guy that wrote that book a faggot?” Bob Cauthen asked me with more curiosity than meanness.

“I don't know,” I answered.

DeBrosse said, “Conroy, I love these road trips because I
don't
have to read.”

Barney Bornhorst, sitting behind me, said in a low voice that only the players could hear, “New Orleans, boys. Naked women. Strip shows. Liquor flowing in the street. Barney's kind of town.”

Our laughter was boyish and forbidden. Then I returned to the country of literature where Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski were locked in a powerful dance of bizarre and tragic attraction. They seemed so much more alive and animated and dangerous than my poor teammates and I. The dialogue crackled across the page, laced with sweet malice in every scene. I finished the play almost at touchdown in the city of New Orleans.

As we waited for our luggage, I thought it sad that life had set me down among such dullards and laggards, and the poor colorless bastards on my basketball team. I needed to be hanging around people like Colonel Sartoris and Lady Brett Ashley and Amanda Wingfield instead of Bridges, Bornhorst, and Cauthen. It never occurred to me a single time in the year I am writing about that I was in the dead center of living out my own life, accruing the experiences and gathering the raw materials to form the only life I was ever going to have. As I saw it then, my life had not yet started. I had not escaped my parents' death grip on my imagination.

I had arrived in New Orleans to search for the literary haunts of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. I ended up leaving the city thinking I had encountered one of the best basketball teams I had ever played against in my life. We had not studied Loyola on film so none of us knew that we were facing one of the hottest teams in the nation. Loyola had already beaten Texas Christian and LSU when we came to town.

In the wake of my shock at again being named team captain, especially after my disgraceful behavior in the locker room during the Old Dominion game, everything about the Loyola game seemed surreal and otherworldly. The floor of the field house was raised, the first I had ever played on where you had to run up a flight of stairs to enter the game.

Mohr and Zinsky started out strong, The Citadel was leading 17–12 with 12:59 to play in the first half when the sky fell in for the Blue Team. For the next ten minutes, we could not seem to make a shot or pull down a rebound or stop the Wolfpack from scoring at will. First we looked hapless, then we looked hopeless, then we looked like we had no business even being on a court. Our starting team seemed drugged and lifeless. For the second game in a row, Hooper and DeBrosse were battling two much taller guards, both of whom turned all-world against our smaller guards. In fact, Ronnie Britsch and Charley Powell dominated this game more than even Pritchett and Speakes had for Old Dominion. Tee Hooper guarded Powell, a smooth, sweet-shooting black kid who was averaging twenty-two points per game. He was quick coming off the ball and got his shot off in a hurry. Again, poor Tee from Greenville, South Carolina, was getting far too many lessons on integration far too quickly for a southern white boy. DeBrosse had his hands full with Ronnie Britsch who was a flashy, cunning white guard.

I had never seen a Citadel basketball team get overwhelmed so quickly and so thoroughly. The game turned into a rout and then a comedy routine. Then it began to have the makings of a tragedy. When Mel called time-out and the Green Weenies swarmed around the first team, shouting encouragement to them, patting their rear ends, trying to jump-start them into life, they could barely respond. Even Mel's screaming took on a desperate cast that had rarely been there before. Our first team had simply vanished out of themselves. They were not only being beaten; they were getting killed in every phase of the game.

The atmosphere in the locker room at halftime felt like midnight at Gethsemane. I had never seen my teammates closer to despair. Tee held his face in his hands, humiliated beyond measure. The rocklike DeBrosse seemed lost and tentative. In agony, Mohr stared at the concrete floor, a towel draped over his head, hiding from his coach, his team, and perhaps most of all, himself.

But the one we were losing fastest was the one I thought untouchable to the raw malice of Mel Thompson, the sophomore Bill Zinsky. “Zeke?” I said to him. “You okay, son?”

Zeke nodded his head sadly, barely lifting his eyes to acknowledge me. Something seemed broken in a player I had thought would make first-team All-Conference in our league. If self-combustion was possible, Mel Thompson would have entered the locker room as a pillar of flame. There was a choler and rancor to his fury that night that none of us had seen before. His tantrum seemed more nervous breakdown than halftime talk. He seethed and screamed and snarled at us until he was left staring and sputtering and raging at a roomful of boys. “Does anybody in this room have any pride left? Do you have no guts, no balls, no manhood, no nothing? How can I appeal to gutless wonders? What the fuck am I to do? We got plays, don't we? Can we just run the goddamn things? Can somebody guard somebody out there? Is that too much to ask? Jesus Christ. Just guard somebody. Anybody. Jesus Christ. That's the most embarrassing play out of a team I've ever seen. They're kicking your asses to hell and back, and you don't seem to even fucking care,” he screamed, throwing a folding chair across the room and into a bank of lockers. “Son-of-a-bitch! Son-of-a-bitch! Son-of-a-fucking-bitch, this beats anything I've ever seen. Mohr, can you get off the fucking line? Zinsky, can you show any sign of life? Bridges, quit giving me that Citadel stare. Wipe it off your fucking face. Bridges— All of you. Get it off your faces. I won't stand for it. We'll start over, by God. Jesus Christ! What am I supposed to do with these goddamned guys, Ed? No guts, no balls, no points, no rebounds, and what do we have? Not zip. Not shit. Goddamn it!” He hurled another chair. “I might even play the Green Weenies. What quitters—what fucking losers.”

Mel threw a towel that landed between me and Dave Bornhorst, then stormed out into the night like a Tennessee Williams character—Mel Thompson starring as Stanley Kowalski, misanthropic, brutish in his exit, in his manner, in his essence. Taking his own cue, Ed Thompson drifted out in Mel's wake, leaving us to marinate in the acids of our coach's wrath.

In the circle of hell where we now sat in agony, I watched my broken teammates trying to gather inward strength that could combat the awesome forces of Mel's negativity. Our coach could yell and rage and throw chairs and yell obscenities and make us run laps until we dropped and suicide drills until we vomited—but in the well of this existential moment among boys suffering from the ferocity of Mel's pitiless charge, I heard a voice scream out inside me, an actual voice—embryonic and unsure—cry out from within me in alarm: “Mel can destroy us and loathe us and demean everything about us, but he cannot and never will coach us. He cannot make us into a team. He cannot teach us to be the thing we need to be.”

With this strange and disloyal insight in a gym in New Orleans, I think I was born to myself in the world. That night in New Orleans a voice was born inside me, and I had never heard it before in my entire life.

I looked upon my devastated teammates in the heartless, pitiless wreckage of their season which had barely begun, and they were too bereft for bitterness and too outcast for hope. My teammates had found themselves reduced to a state that was birthplace and hermitage and briar patch to me—a despair with no windows or exits, a futility that made hope vain and the future unthinkable.

This moment felt like home to me, and I knew why. My father never touched me unless he was hitting me or pounding my head against Sheetrock. If he was not beating me, I could enjoy the many pleasures of watching him beating my mother or my smaller brothers and sisters. I was trapped in a child's body, a boy's body, and could not protect my mother from the brute she had married.

In the bell-jar shyness of the young man I was, I began to speak to my team in the voice I had just found. It was the first time I had ever spoken to the group by myself and certainly the first time I had ever tried to exhort them with words or lift their spirits or even fire them up.

My voice was halting and amateurish as I began and I did not even stop when I heard Bob Cauthen say, as he had done the year before when Wig Baumann had called a team meeting, “That shit don't work, Conroy. That's high school shit.”

I continued and I remember the talk because it was the first and last one I ever gave as a Citadel athlete. What I said is lost forever, but here is what I think I said: “When we were little boys, we played basketball because it was the most fun a boy can have. Then we noticed something. We were better at it than other boys. We loved it like no other boys. We played it until our mothers came out to shout that our dinners were getting cold. Guys, we need to make this game fun again. We play it because it brings us joy.”

As we took to the court for the second half, I made a secret vow to myself that I would never listen to a single thing that Mel Thompson said to me again. I would obey him and honor him and follow him, but I would not let him touch the core of me again. He was my coach, but I was my master. Whenever I got in the game for the rest of the year, I would play it as I was born to play it, I would play it with reckless abandon. If Mel Thompson did not like it, he could choose not to play me. I felt a loosening, an opening up. I had done many things in my life but this marked the first time I had felt myself change. I was not the same young man when I returned to that court at the college of Loyola in the city of New Orleans.

Despite Mel's locker room hysteria, nothing that he did or said could reverse the pathetic play of my team in the second half. Watching the agony on my coach's face as he screamed at Mohr, Bridges, and Zinsky to do something, anything, was almost unbearable. When he called time-out, I saw the look of utter vacancy on the faces of all five starters as they endured another withering attack. The louder he screamed the worse our team played. Only Al Kroboth, substituting for the big men, played with any style or panache. Everything Big Al got he got from pure hustle on this night. The other players went through the motions as the Loyola Wolfpack poured it on the Bulldogs. At one point we were behind thirty-four points.

Now it was garbage time and Mel gave the word to Ed Thompson to put in the Green Weenies. The Weenies leapt up and sprinted out onto the court and relieved the beaten and exhausted starters as a Loyola player was shooting a pair of free throws. It was the first time the Green Weenies had played as a unit in a game this season. Going around to each one of my second-string teammates, I slapped them hard on the fanny and said with urgency and passion, “Get me the goddamn basketball, then catch my ass. Let's kick the living shit out of their Green Weenies.”

And we did, by God, we did. I was electric that night, and I could feel the currents of myself humming in my bloodstream for the first time since my sophomore year, before Mel had tied my game to his own self-image. The flashy guard sputtered into life. I dribbled behind my back and through my legs the first time I touched the ball and headed downcourt as fast as I could go. Mel hated my flashiness, but that was too bad; something had snapped in me. Kroboth, Kennedy, Cauthen, and Connor were all over the boards, bringing down rebound after rebound after rebound, then turning to find me on the wing. I was there every time, and they got me the ball swiftly the way they did every day at practice. Know this, world: my Green Weenies could rebound like a secret race of giants.

For ten minutes, we ran and ran. I would catch the ball on either wing, then put the ball on the floor, streak to the center line then fly the length of the court. I felt like an uncollared cheetah fleeing the raja's court. I burned with the combustible joy I took from leading a fast break, the lanes beside me and behind me filling up with unhappy, unpraised boys like myself, humiliated by our lack of talent, and invisible to our coach.

“Don't shoot, Conroy,” I heard Mel scream, and I shot it from that very spot far out of my range. I threw behind the back passes to Kroboth and Bornhorst, drove the lane whenever I felt like it, took seven free throws and made all seven.

The Green Weenies went wild, encouraging each other, urging each other on, forcing each other to do even more. “Get me the goddamn ball, Weenies,” I would scream and the Green Weenies got almost every one that came off the glass. We began whittling away at a twenty-seven-point deficit. “I want the ball, Weenies,” and it came to me often and I took it to the hoop every time I could in the last ten minutes of that humiliating and wonderful game.

The Green Weenies were not humiliated; we were transcendent and unstoppable and grand. We played like we knew how to play basketball, and we played like young men who admired and trusted each other. We played like a team who beat the living daylights out of the first team every day and never received a single word of recognition or praise from our coach. We played our hearts out and worked our asses off because this was the only way we could tell each other how much we loved being Green Weenies. It was the only place you could go to on Mel Thompson's team and have any pride in your game at all. Wildly, we played that night because of our wordless, ineffable, and unstealable love of each other.