My Losing Season Read online

  Listening to him talk made it clear to me that his true love was coaching because his voice changed timbre when he told me about teams he had coached to championship seasons. The same charged-up intensity I used to observe in John’s face during the fury of games I now saw behind the wheel of his van as he described the high and low points of his career. Then he looked at me and said, “I was a lot better than you, Conroy.” It was a statement of fact in the world of athletics, not braggadocio. “You couldn’t shoot.”

  The truth of this remark stung me, hurtful as a handful of wasps. “Other people noted that. I made very few All-American teams those years.”

  “But you got after it,” John said. “You went all out.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ve always told my players and coaches that something used to happen between us every practice, Conroy. Do you remember?”

  Something stirred, then struck a huge chord of memory, and I got that slight shiver that happens when I catch a glimpse of a part of my past that has slipped out of sight.

  “When the guards would split up from the forwards and centers and we would go to the opposite court to do drills,” John said.

  “I remember. I loved that.”

  “It always happened when you and I went one-on-one together. You guarding me. Me guarding you. There was nothing like it.”

  “You liked it because you were so much better than me.”

  “No,” he said. “We went after each other like no two other players on the team. Not a word was spoken. No trash talking. Just pure respect. The whole atmosphere in that gym changed. I brought out the best in you. You brought out the best in me. Man, it was something.”

  “You beat me a lot more than I beat you,” I said, “if memory serves me correctly.”

  “Damn right I did,” he said, laughing in the darkness as we drove down a charmless avenue that could have cut through any city in America. “But you gave it all you had, fought all the way. I think about that team we played on. That shitty season. If we’d just had a banger. Some tough guy on the boards. As it was, we had only one hard-nosed son-of-a-bitch on the team and we needed about three or four more really tough guys.”

  “Who was the hard-nosed guy?” I asked.

  John DeBrosse looked at me strangely, then said, “It was you, Conroy. Who the hell else could it have been?”

  I spent several pleasurable moments, basking in the sunshine of those sweet words and sitting in silence, the first minute in my life I was aware that John DeBrosse thought I was hard-nosed. He could not have made me happier if he had told me I wrote like Vladimir Nabokov.

  “Thanks, Johnny. I didn’t know I was hard-nosed.”

  “You always came to play, were always around the ball. If it hit the floor you’d be flying across the floor after it.”

  “Were you hard-nosed?” I asked.

  “I was good,” he laughed. “I didn’t have to be.”

  We went over the roster of the entire team that had endured that sullen and unsuccessful season so long ago, sharing any information or rumors we had heard about our teammates. “Conroy, do you remember that last game of your career? Against the University of Richmond. The Southern Conference Tournament?”

  The question surprised me. “I’ll never forget it.”

  “Remember how it ended?”

  “I sure do. But I’d never have brought it up.”

  At a stoplight, he turned to face me. His good, earnest American face filled with emotion rare for a man like John DeBrosse, and he said, “I think that game partially ruined my life.”

  “C’mon, Johnny. It was just a game. We lost in overtime. Richmond knew we were in the game.”

  “It was a lot more than that, Conroy. I lost that game for us. I blew the layup that would’ve sent us into the next round against West Virginia.”

  “You missed a shot,” I said. “We all missed shots.”

  “Not as important as that one,” he said.

  “It didn’t come at a great time,” I agreed. “But it was almost thirty years ago, Johnny. No one even remembers it now.”

  “I remember it,” he said fiercely. “I didn’t miss layups, Conroy. I never missed a layup in my life.”

  Again we came to a stoplight and John turned to me again. He reached over and grabbed my wrist and squeezed it.

  “Pat,” he said, the first time all evening he had called me by my first name, “I want you to know something. It’s important to me that you believe it. That game. That last shot. I didn’t miss that shot on purpose. I swear to you, I’d never do anything like that.”

  “It never occurred to me or anyone else, Johnny. You weren’t even capable of thinking such a thing.”

  “One person did,” John said. “And one person said it.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Our coach. Mel Thompson thought it.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Mel Thompson. Now there’s a story.”

  “Mel came up and stood behind me. Then he said—I swear he said it—‘Hey, DeBrosse, I know you didn’t miss that shot on purpose. I know you wouldn’t do something like that, would you?’ ”

  “You’d never miss a shot on purpose,” I said. “No one could think that of you.”

  “That’s not true,” John said. “My own coach did.”

  AFTER MY ENCOUNTER ON THE ROAD with John DeBrosse, I spent the rest of the Beach Music tour with that senior year insinuating its unwelcome presence into my roiled, middle-aged life. It began to pulse with new, sudden urgency. By writing The Lords of Discipline, I thought I had picked the bones of that year clean and left them lying, immaculate and sterile, on the road behind me. I was mistaken.

  So it was in the fall of 1995, my heartsick and downcast team began to rematerialize slowly from the wreckage of time. There seemed to be a gathering force creating some collaborative centrifugal pull on all of us. I could feel our failure and disfigurement summoning us when Dave Bornhorst and Greg Connor showed up with their families at the Chapter Two Bookstore in Charleston; then Jim Halpin and Bill Zinsky materialized in Philadelphia. We seemed like lost cards from a tarot deck, yet each time one of my teammates appeared, my joy in our reunion sprang out in a rapturous burst of light. Their presence and the attendance of their families moved me. It did not feel like sentimentality to me, though I have an infinite capacity for the maudlin and false note. No, it was like something else entirely, like a form of enlightenment or the beginning of a journey.

  At the end of that tour, on October 26, 1995, I stood in the divorce court of the City of San Francisco as I ended my thirteen-year-old marriage to Lenore Fleischer in a ceremony that felt like part self-evisceration and part auto-da-fé. I had walked into a travesty of a marriage and had done it with my eyes wide open and with the frantic warnings of all my family and best friends begging me to run for my life from the woman I loved. Even my father had warned me that Lenore was a gold digger, saying that I was an easy southern mark who did not understand one thing about the slippery, counterfeiting strategies of a big-city woman on the make.

  I thought that the beautiful, flippant Lenore was misunderstood. I had met the dark woman at last, the woman who let me in on the secret that the ferocity of tyrants could hide in the sweet flow of mother’s milk, that the words “I love you” could contain all the bloodthirsty despair of the abattoir, all the hopelessness of the most isolated, frozen gulag, all the lurid sadness of death row. Love came to me with all its soft words poisoned, its sweetness contaminated. As a boy, I was beaten up by my father, and my mother, whom I adored, could not protect me from his fists. The way I loved became bruised and disfigured—which is my fault and not Lenore’s, and I do not blame her for this. In her darkness, in all her convoluted, flawed humanity and the immensity of her pain, Lenore had my name written all over her. She was the agent of my great passion and my even greater ruin.

  If Lenore had been a country, I would have married North Korea, this is how murderous, cut off, and isolated the marriage h
ad begun to seem to me. We lived our lives together in such a mind-numbing overload of event and melodrama that by the early nineties I found myself used up and desperate. I ran screaming out of that marriage, feeling like my hair was on fire.

  My books all become Rosetta stones, giving me clues to how my life is going. I began Beach Music with a line that seemed to come out of nowhere, a startling cautionary image of despair: a beautiful, dark-haired woman is leaping to her death from a bridge in Charleston, South Carolina. This image frightened me because I was writing with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and that bridge had begun to summon me with its wordless enchantment, its promise of release that had attracted the legion of disconsolate souls who had made their last walk there. Sometimes it looked like a great poem to me, a sonnet of almost idolatrous devotion to architecture, a flow of wire and steel as beautiful as the Marin headlands or San Francisco itself. But when the bridge began to call to me, not as a work of art, but as an agent of deliverance and immolation, I knew it was time to retreat to my getaway home in South Carolina.

  By the time I made the move in 1992, I had deciphered the meaning of the book’s first sentence: the woman leaping from the bridge was my wife, Lenore, and my interior self was signaling that my marriage was much more than just on the rocks. The black leap of that anonymous woman was the smoke signal from the interior that my marriage was over.

  Such was my state of mind when I returned home from San Francisco licking my wounds, exhausted by the life I had chosen to lead. The writing of Beach Music had felt like a blood-letting and I limped home to my writing desk, unable to sit still there for a single moment. My heart slowed down in the disordered ruins that had become my life. The divorce enclosed me in a shell of edgy despondency. I wanted January along the marshes to cure me, but my basketball team and The Citadel began intruding on my life again.

  There had been an earlier prophetic incursion of Citadel basketball when I was foundering in the writing of Beach Music. Living alone on Fripp Island, I was in the middle of a most terrible breakdown where I could not shake the obsessional urge to end my life. I found myself shopping for pistols in pawn shops, studying the veins of wrists and throat, and learning how to get to the roof of the DeSoto Hilton in Savannah. Guilt and despair overwhelmed me and I could see no honorable way out of the mess I had made of my life. Finally I imagined a perfect suicide in which I rowed my johnboat out into the Atlantic at the precise moment of a spring tide’s turning, tied an anchor around my waist before I cut my wrists and carotid artery, then slipped into the water and out of the hours I could no longer bear. I had decided on this course when another Citadel point guard came roaring out of time to save my life.

  On October 2, 1993, I read that Dickie Jones, a flashy point guard for the “Blitz Kids,” the best team in Citadel history, had put a bullet in his brain while seated on a park bench in Mount Pleasant, a suburb of Charleston. A daily communicant in the Roman Catholic Church and the mayor of Mount Pleasant, the gregarious and joyous Dickie Jones, a man who seemed to have everything going for him and no acquaintance with darkness or calamity, killed himself and changed the history of his family forever.

  Dickie Jones had helped recruit me when I made my official visit to The Citadel. His personality was upbeat and big city, just like his game, and I laughed at everything he said. He was influential in my decision to attend The Citadel because he ran a team with such nerve and showiness. After Dickie’s funeral, when I called his home to try to comfort his widow and his children, I talked to a friend of the family whose name I cannot recall.

  “Did you ever see him play ball?” I said. “My God, he could play the game.”

  “I heard he was good,” the man said.

  “He helped recruit me to The Citadel,” I said, and then, to my complete surprise, I burst into tears and could not control my sobbing.

  “Dickie affected a lot of people,” the man said, “the same way he’s affecting you now.”

  “No. I didn’t know Dickie very well,” I said, strangling on the tears. “It’s something else.”

  I had entered into another of the great drifts that my life seems to take at least once a decade. My depressions have taken on a quality of serene artistry. I find myself exploring caverns of my psyche where the stalactites are arsenic-tipped, the bats rabid, and blind pale creatures live in the lightless pools dreaming of fireflies and lanterns shivering with despair. I have a history of cracking up at least once during the writing of each of my last five books. It has not provided the greatest incentive to head for the writing table each morning, but it’s the reality I’ve lived with. I came out of my free-fall when I heard shrieking in Dickie’s devastated home. It was Dickie’s children, far too stricken to speak to me. I know the dark things that all suicides know, but as terrifying as these things were, none had prepared me for the image of my children and my family approaching my open coffin with bitterness and love tearing through them in alternating currents. My imagination has always kept me alive and it did so as I mourned for Dickie Jones’s family. Out of nowhere, he had given me a sign that I was still needed in the game. The weeping and screaming of Dickie’s devastated children saved my life. Dickie Jones died without ever knowing the great impact he had on me.

  I had remembered the boldness of Dickie Jones’s game. He played the game like it should be played, but until his death I had never thought of the deeper stirrings that move beneath the facades of those people we select to be our heroes—I had never once considered the sadness of point guards.

  THIS IS THE STORY OF a mediocre basketball team that is remembered by few, a team that spent a year perfecting the art of falling to pieces. I thought I would be a senior on one of the greatest basketball teams in Citadel history. I could not have been more wrong.

  Sports books are always about winning because winning is far more pleasurable and exhilarating to read about than losing. Winning is wonderful in every aspect, but the darker music of loss resonates on deeper, richer planes. I think about all the games of that faraway year that played such a part in shaping me, and it is the losses that stand out because they still make their approach with all their capacities to wound intact. Winning makes you think you’ll always get the girl, land the job, deposit the million-dollar check, win the promotion, and you grow accustomed to a life of answered prayers. Winning shapes the soul of bad movies and novels and lives. It is the subject of thousands of insufferably bad books and is often a sworn enemy of art.

  Loss is a fiercer, more uncompromising teacher, coldhearted but clear-eyed in its understanding that life is more dilemma than game, and more trial than free pass. My acquaintance with loss has sustained me during the stormy passages of my life when the pink slips came through the door, when the checks bounced at the bank, when I told my small children I was leaving their mother, when the despair caught up with me, when the dreams of suicide began feeling like love songs of release. It sustained me when my mother lay dying of leukemia, when my sister heard the ruthless voices inside her, and when my brother Tom sailed out into the starry night in Columbia, South Carolina, sailed from a fourteen-story building and plunged screaming to his death, binding all of his family into his nightmare forever. Though I learned some things from the games we won that year, I learned much, much more from loss.

  PART 1

  THE POINT GUARD

  TAKES TO THE COURT

  CHAPTER 1

  BEFORE FIRST PRACTICE

  IT WAS ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 15, 1966, THAT THE FINAL season officially began. For a month and a half, my teammates and I had gathered in the field house to lift weights, do isometric exercises, and scrimmage with each other. Right off, I could tell our sophomores were special and were going to make our team faster, scrappier, and better than the year before. In the heat of September, there was a swiftness and feistiness to the flow of these pickup games that was missing in last year’s club. My optimism about the coming season lifted perceptibly as I observed my team beat up on each other in
the vagrancy of our uncoached and unmonitored scrimmages.

  I could feel the adrenaline rush of excitement begin as I donned my cadet uniform in the dark, and it stayed with me as I marched to mess with R Company. I could barely concentrate on the professors’ voices in my classes in Coward Hall as I faced the reality of the new season and stared at the clock with impatience. It was my fourth year at The Citadel and the fourth time October 15 had marked the beginning of basketball practice. Mel Thompson was famous for working his team hard on the first day and traditionally ran us so much that the first practice was topped off by one of us vomiting on the hardwood floor.

  I made my way to the locker room early that afternoon because I wanted some time to myself to shoot around and think about what I wanted to accomplish this season. Four of my teammates were already dressed when I entered the dressing room door. The room carried the acrid fragrance of the past three seasons for me, an elixir of pure maleness with the stale smell of sweat predominant yet blended with the sharp, stinging unguents we spread on sore knees and shoulders, Right Guard deodorant spray, vats of foot powder to ward off athlete’s foot, and deodorant cakes in the urinals. It was the powerful eau de cologne of the locker room. I realized that my life as a college athlete was coming to its inevitable end, but I did not know that you had to leave the fabulous odors of youth behind when you hurried out into open fields to begin life as an adult.