My Losing Season (31 page)

I prayed my way to the Harper house on Sunset Bluff and found the key they hid under a loose brick in case I came in unexpectedly. King Tut and Sarah Ellen Harper, parents of my best friend in high school in Beaufort, loved me fiercely as a son in the years I needed it most. When I awoke the next morning, I could smell coffee and bacon cooking in the kitchen downstairs. I went down to the kitchen and shouted, “Good morning, Maw. Good morning, Paw,” my nicknames for each of them.

Sarah Ellen ran to me squealing and hugged me hard. “It's not every day we get to have a college basketball star stay in our house.”

Paw Harper looked up from his morning paper. “You showed William and Mary a thing or two last night.”

I glowed from their love of me and their great, striking generosity to my boyhood. That May they presented me with a graduation present Sarah Ellen had bought at the bookshop on Bay Street. It was a Roget's thesaurus, and it sits by my left elbow as I write these words. Here is the inscription written in Sarah Ellen's distinct script: “For Patrick, Our budding young author, with best wishes for great success, and much love. Maw, Paw, and Bruce Harper.”

Each morning, before I work, I read those sweet words. They give me courage.

         

L
ESS THAN A MONTH LATER
William and Mary would
dismantle my team when we met them at their diminutive and claustrophobic home court in Blow Gym. It was the worst place to play basketball in America and I felt like someone had put me in a straitjacket every time I went there. Because my father had once played at Blow Gym for the Marines at Quantico, he and the family were coming down for the game. Against a fierce zone I put in two of the longest jump shots I had ever taken as a college guard to open the game. Then I saw my family enter the gymnasium late just after that second shot went in. Something bruised my spirit when I realized I had taken those shots because I wanted my family to see the kind of player I had become and they had missed the display's initial fanfare. The headline in the
News and Courier
said, “William and Mary Bombs Cadets 91–57.” I have never played on a team anywhere that got beaten worse than we did. I hate writing a single thing about it or remembering that chickenhearted game at all. It made me sick to my stomach to watch my father's snide face as my team got taken apart. Kroboth had fourteen, I had eleven, and no one else even came close to scoring in double figures.

Again, my father called me out of a cringing, silent locker room. Again he put his hand on my chest and pushed me back against the wall. No handshake or “How you doing, son, it's great to see you,” from the Colonel.

My father looked at me with pure, undistilled hatred which I do not understand to this day. “I just wanted to tell you that you were shit. You were pure shit.”

“I agree with you a hundred percent, sir.” Despite agreeing with him, I did not know I was angry until I heard my voice.

“Your team is shit,” my father said.

“They sure were tonight, sir.”

“Your coach is shit,” Dad said.

“He didn't get much help tonight from his players, sir,” I said. “Can I go say hey to Mom and the kids, sir?”

“Negative. We got to get back to D.C.,” he said, then turned his back and walked away from me.

Then the voice, the one I had been hearing at times during the year, the writer's voice, the one born during this season, this year—it spoke aloud for the first time and for the first time I knew it was my voice and mine to keep and to use and to wield in any way I so chose.

It said—I said, “Hey, Dad?”

My father turned and looked back at me.

“When I get home for Easter, let's go to the gym at Quantico.”

“Why?”

“I want to play one-on-one with you.”

“Why? Think you could take me?”

“No, Dad. You don't understand. I'm not only going to take you, I'm not going to let you score. Every time you put the ball on the floor I'm going to take it away from you, every single time.”

My father stared at me and I stared back. I think I was born into the world again and given back to myself at that very moment.

Easter came and went that glorious year and never once did my father mention the gym at Quantico.

CHAPTER 23

VMI

B
EFORE THE ROAD TRIP TO PLAY
VMI
IN
L
EXINGTON,
V
IRGINIA,
R
AT
came up to me in the mess hall at the noon meal and whispered, “Mel wants to see you at 1500 hours in his office, Pat.”

This was never good news. I avoided even accidental encounters with my coach with the instincts of a cat burglar. Not once in my four-year basketball career had I walked through the front door of the Armory which led me directly past Mel's office. In my sophomore and junior years, I received not a single summons for an audience with my coach, but in the midst of this season, Mel would periodically require my thoughts on the gradual dissolution of what we both thought had the makings of a good basketball team. I feared setting off his hair-trigger temper, and I also dreaded making some unforeseen mistake of judgment that would bring him out of his chair, screaming in anger.

“Hey, Mrs. Johnson,” I said to his pretty secretary, “I hear Attila the Hun wants to see me.”

“Hush,” she said, putting her finger to her lips. “He'll hear you.”

I opened his door and came upon the familiar scene of Mel discussing basketball with Ed “Little Mel” Thompson. Motioning me to sit down on the couch, Mel finished his story, and I could not help but notice how much Ed hero-worshiped the head coach. Again I could study what a good guy Mel could be if you were lucky enough not to play on his team.

Finally, he turned his attention to me, his unnamed captain. He fixed me with his Ahab-like gaze for a moment before surprising me by asking, “You think you're a pretty smart guy, don't you, Conroy?”

I did not answer at first, but thought he was still boiling over the fact that more than half his team had been on the dean's list and that a couple of us had made Gold Stars.

“About average, Coach,” I answered.

Mel looked over at Ed and snickered. “He thinks he's fooling us. We're your coaches. We know a lot more about this team than you'd expect. As a ballplayer one of your faults is that you think too much out on the court. An athlete reacts. They don't think. All instinct. Get it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“He said he gets it, Ed,” Mel said to his assistant. “Do you think he gets it?”

“I'm not sure he gets it,” Ed said sadly.

“Do you remember the short story you wrote about me in
The Shako,
Conroy? Remember how mad I was? I called you into this office and ripped you a new asshole. Right?”

“Coach, I told you then and I tell you now. That wasn't you. I made that guy up.”

In the previous issue of
The Shako,
I had published my third short story written during my time as a cadet. The previous summer I had come under the touchstone influence of a young novelist named John Updike when my mother handed me a copy of
Rabbit, Run.
Until I read about Rabbit Angstrom, I did not know that basketball could make a guest appearance into the palace of fiction. Nor did I know that my sport could also take a shy bow among the backlit colonnades of poetry until I tracked down Mr. Updike's wonderful poem “Ex Basketball Player.”

Under Updike's powerful sway, I wrote the best poem and the best story of my Citadel career. The poem was called “Ted Lucas,” and I can detect in that splintery stack of words a hint of the melody that would later come. In the short story “The Legend,” I actually see the starting point of my life as a fiction writer. A great high school basketball player, Jimmy Amansky, plays his last high school basketball game and performs heroically in the championship game, then finds, to his horror, the long and ruthless stretch of time laid out before him when he has done not a thing to prepare himself for a job or a career. Both my short story and poem are unartful homages to the hold that Mr. Updike's poem “Ex Basketball Player” had on my imagination. But it had unhinged Mel when he read the short story and he screamed at me for several minutes for holding him up to such ridicule on campus. My writing career has proven to be riddled with such encounters with people wounded by the malice of my portraiture. I had conjured up Mel Thompson when I sat down to imagine the story of young Jimmy Amansky. Mel seemed to have lost part of himself when he lost the game of basketball as a player. I could tell that he thought coaching was a second-string way of staying close to the game.

“Slim Coach Jim. A three-hundred-pounder. Laughed at by his players. Your way of letting me know I'd put on a few pounds,” Mel said.

“Coach, listen to me. That coach wasn't you. I based him on a guy who coached me in youth league.”

“Bullshit, Conroy. You think you're the only smart guy who puts his pants on in this Armory? That was me. You just don't have the guts to admit it.”

“Coach, I didn't think of you once when I wrote about the coach in that story,” I said.

“That's crap, but it's okay. I want to make a point with you. Have I held that story against you?”

“There was no reason for you to,” I said.

“Follow me on this one. Just a little way, Pat.”

“Okay. No, sir, you've not held it against me.”

“Do you know why?” he said.

“No, sir.”

“Do you know who William James is?” Mel asked.

“He's the brother of Henry James,” I said.

“Who the fuck's Henry James?” Mel asked angrily.

“He's a writer, Coach.”

“Who gives a shit?”

“Yes, sir. I know who William James is,” I said.

“See?” Mel looked over at Ed. “I told you he was a smart guy. You find a player's interest, Ed, and you work those angles. William James is the father of pragmatism.” Mel stared at me again. “I'm a pragmatist, Conroy. Do you understand? I have recently become a pragmatist by reading William James.” He said this in the same tone of voice he would've used while informing me that he had become a Presbyterian or a chiropractor. “Do you know what a pragmatist is?”

“I think so, Coach. Isn't it a guy that figures out the easiest, most basic way to solve problems, something like that.”

“Bingo.” Mel nodded happily. “You get to know your kids, Ed. Get to know what makes them tick. Then you do your own problem solving.”

I felt like a lab rat but then Mel turned to me and said, “Even though you fucked me with that short story, Conroy, I chose to ignore it. If I let that bother me, it would only hurt the team. But I'm a pragmatist, Pat. I'm reading a book on pragmatism right now. What do you think of that?”

“That's nice, Coach,” I said.

“Go get dressed for practice,” he said. “And, Conroy? You ever write about me again, I'll kick your ass.”

Odd encounters with Mel were the stuff of legend in the locker room. Our beleaguered and tormented center, Dan Mohr, carried with him a memory of his most harrowing collision with Mel in his dreaded office. Mel's incessant belittling of Root remains an agonizing memory for all his teammates, occurring with such frequency that it is simply part of the team memory of that year. It is most especially remembered by the aggrieved Dan Mohr himself whose memory about this year proved both encyclopedic and precise.

Dan believes he received a summons to report to Mel's office on the exact same afternoon as I learned that Mel Thompson had embraced the philosophy of pragmatism, and he has some convincing proof of this. With some frequency, Mel would require an explanation from our returning leading scorer about the disintegration of our season. When Dan entered the room, Mel immediately went after him with the curious Ed Thompson getting a much harsher lesson in the shaping of a college basketball player than he had with me earlier.

“Mohr, I want you to explain to me why we can't seem to get any senior leadership out of you and Conroy,” Mel said, catching Danny off guard and ill-prepared so that Danny made his first mistake.

“I think the leadership on any team has to come from the guards. At least that's how it's been on every team I've ever played on.”

“That's where you're wrong, Mohr. What a dumbo thought! Leadership always comes from the big men on a team. At NC State, I provided the leadership on the floor and the locker room. You earn the respect on the court. You fight for every rebound, you dive for every loose ball. People look up to you because you lay it on the line every single play. Big men rule this game. Understand that, Mohr? Tell me if you consider yourself a leader.”

Then Root made a real tactical error when he said, “Well, Coach, when you didn't name Conroy or me captains this year, it was a slap in the face in front of our teammates. It's hard to be a leader when your own coach doesn't believe in you.”

I think my childhood prepared me to deal with the complexities of Mel Thompson's mood swings a bit more adequately than Dan's achingly sweet set of parents up in Carolina Beach. As Root recalled the moment in his den years later, he said, “Mel went apeshit, Conroy. Out of his mind apeshit. I'd seen him mad before, but nothing like this. He came around his desk and bent his face down where I was sitting on that cheap couch of his, his face an inch from mine. You know how he loved to intimidate people. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, then he started hissing at me. He said, ‘Mohr, none of your teammates have an ounce of respect for you. None of your coaches do. The cadets don't respect you. The fans don't. Doesn't that bother you, Mohr? You know why it doesn't bother you, Mohr? You're soft all over. You don't have the guts your team is looking for. You don't got the fighting spirit where you leave it all out there on the court—your blood—your guts—your heart. No, Mohr. You're a pussy and a weakling on the boards. You let smaller guys eat your jock every day at practice. They eat your lunch. They steal your candy because they know you're gutless, Mohr. You ain't got it where it counts. In the gut. In the heart. They know you'll back off when the going gets rough.' ”

Dan told me this in his Greensboro home, mimicking Mel's voice. When he paused I said, “Yep, that's the Dan Mohr I knew.”

“Kiss my ass, Conroy,” Dan laughed. “It gets worse. Mel pulls me off the couch and backs me into a corner near his desk. Then Muleface sticks out his chin at me with Little Mel looking on, and he says, ‘Punch me in the face, Mohr. Hit my goddamn jaw, Mohr. I want to see if you're a man or the pussy I believe you are. I'm giving you the chance to break my jaw. A free sucker punch to see if you've got any fight in you at all. To see if there's anything left to your manhood, your balls, your pride. You got anything left, Mohr? I'm challenging your fucking manhood right here in my office and you're not taking a swing. Do something, Mohr. Do anything. Show me you got something, anything, between your legs.' ”

“Why didn't you punch his lights out, Root?” I asked, incredulous at the story.

“I thought about it, Conroy. But all I could see were headlines: Dan Mohr Kills His Coach in Office Brawl. Dan Mohr Arrested for Murder in First Battalion. Dan Mohr Named Captain of Prison Basketball Team. Mohr Named to Convict All-Stars. Prosecutor Asks for Mohr's Death. They kept going through my head, Conroy. I also thought if I hit him I'd lose my scholarship for sure. Finally I said, ‘I'm not going to hit you, Coach.' Of course, that drove him nuts and he cussed me out for another minute. Same stuff. Pussy. No leadership. Didn't have the guts of a hamster. Mel-odrama. Pure Mel-odrama. The whole year was a nightmare.”

         

O
F ALL THE SCHOOLS IN THE
Southern Conference,
a conference in which I take a fierce and partisan pride, there was no team I would rather play against than the Keydets of Virginia Military Institute. The campus itself formed an austere grotto of spartan military life in the pretty town of Lexington, Virginia. It was a sadist who placed the handsome, many-columned Washington and Lee, low-crawling with pampered frat boys, adjacent to VMI itself. I found the architecture at VMI to be so melancholic and bleak that it made The Citadel's Moor-inspired buildings appear positively sunny in comparison. While I was walking with a VMI senior one Sunday morning in my sophomore year, a still-drunken SAE frat man from Washington and Lee waved a pair of girls' panties at us from a second-story window as we passed below in our uniforms.

“This is torture,” I said to the senior.

“It makes us stronger,” the senior stoically replied.

In fact VMI always struck me as a far weirder, eerier military college than The Citadel ever could be. I attributed this to its cutoff sense of displacement and isolation. The jocks of VMI had to endure the great scorn of their corps the same as we did. Jocks are second-class citizens in every military college in this country 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. Their Rat Line met our Fourth Class system head-on, and we paid homage to each other by raising the level of our games to the highest pitch. The VMI team we had come to play on February 4, 1967, was a team with some shortcomings and insufficiencies, but VMI's fighting spirit could even the playing field.

On the flight to Richmond, my sulky, looming fate received an invisible shiver when Jessica Lynn Jones was born in a military hospital in Kingsville, Texas, to J. W. Jones and his wife, Barbara, neither of whom had the slightest knowledge that our lives had inextricably intertwined with Jessica's birth. Since I was dating no one at the time, it would have surprised me to learn that my first adopted child was nursing at her mother's breast in Texas while I was airborne over Virginia. My flight was uneventful, but Captain J. W. Jones III would take a more meaningful one the following year when he was shot down while providing close air support for a group of beleaguered Marines in the Republic of Vietnam. The year after that, I would marry his widow and adopt the two children he left behind in his short, courageous life. Fate hides in veils and approaches from behind with cards marked and chess pieces disfigured. You never know when a door you left unlocked will usher in a lost exterminator, a deposed queen, or the love of your life. As I write these words my thirty-four-year-old daughter, Jessica, is swimming on the beach of my island home with my seven-year-old granddaughter, Elise, all of us bound when my fate, a work in torturous process, received an imperceptible notch, a marking of inevitability and mystery that makes me believe in both magic and the hand of God.