My Losing Season

Conroy spent a single year at Gonzaga High School, a Jesuit school in Washington DC. Conroy describes intellectual Jesuit schools as “the Rottweilers of a Catholic boy’s education,” and a “warrior caste of the intellect, famous for the rigor of both their training and teaching” (59). Whereas Conroy grew physically and blossomed as a basketball player at Sacred Heart Academy in North Carolina, he grew intellectually by leaps at Gonzaga and fell in love with classic literature the same way that he had with basketball. He credits one particular English teacher, Joseph Monte, for igniting his love of literature, writing that “[Monte] came into my life as a rose window onto the world of literature” (60). 

Conroy tried out for, and made, the junior varsity team at Gonzaga, but his coach was reluctant to incorporate him heavily into the team’s plans because he knew that Conroy was a military brat and could “disappear overnight” because of his father’s career. As Conroy explains, his coach’s doubts became prophetic because the family would be moving to South Carolina for his next year of high school.

In closing Chapter 5, Conroy recounts an ugly incident that occurred at an awards banquet for Gonzaga athletes that brings to light just how bad the physical abuse was that he suffered from his father. His father beat him in public at the banquet so severely that the fathers of other students came to his defense and physically attacked his father. His father then beat Conroy so badly after the banquet that his mother would not allow him to return to school for a few days. 

Conroy begins Chapter 6 with an anecdote about another violent incident detailing his father’s rage. The family had just relocated to Beaufort, South Carolina, a place that Conroy would adopt as his hometown, when his father struck him in the head with a tea glass at the dinner table. On his way to the hospital, Conroy’s mother coached him on the lie that he was to tell about his injury. Her reasoning, as Conroy explains it, was that his father’s career would be over, and the entire family would be without an income or home: “he may not be perfect, but he’s all we got” (74). In his first days at Beaufort High, a public school rather than a Catholic one, Conroy had to wear a bandage covering the gash above his eyebrow.

Conroy made the basketball team at Beaufort High and immediately started to notice a change in his ability during his first game, noting that “[he] had come into [his] own without [his] knowledge” (76). It was also in this first game that he heard what would become a common insult that opponents tried to hurl at him, telling him, “you play just like a n*****” (76). His improvement in basketball led to Conroy averaging 18 points per game during what he calls his “dream-born junior year” (77). Basketball also made him popular among his classmates, and he was elected president of his senior class the following year. Despite his father’s constant criticism and verbal and physical abuse, Conroy was even better his senior season, averaging 22 points per game and leading the team to a 13-3 record.

In this senior season, Conroy met Mel Thompson for the first time, as The Citadel was recruiting him. He also received interest from the University of South Carolina, then a member of the powerful Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). It sounded to him like a scholarship offer from USC was imminent, but it never came. Even The Citadel, which had recruited him heavily, wanted Conroy only as a walk-on, non-scholarship player. His dream of being a college basketball player could only come true at The Citadel, and thanks to the academic scholarships he received, that was going to happen. A stunning aspect of Conroy’s recruiting process is that despite being recognized as one of the state’s top players, he had no full scholarship offers and only The Citadel invited him to walk-on. He divulges midway through Chapter 3 that his mother admitted years later that he had in fact received letters of interest from other schools, but his parents threw them all away because they were from Protestant colleges. 

In Chapter 7, Conroy covers his first year as a cadet and walk-on basketball player at The Citadel. Common at all military academies, first year cadets are known as plebes and suffer a brutal form of organized hazing from older cadets. At The Citadel, one week and one specific night, known respectively as “Hell Week” and “Hell Night,” are set aside to be even more physically and mentally torturous than all the others throughout the year. Conroy begins the chapter with an anecdote concerning his long train ride from Omaha, Nebraska, where the family had just relocated after his high school graduation, to Charleston, South Carolina. On the train, Conroy sat with a Black girl who was also on her way to a college in the South. The two became friendly and romantic and listened to a live broadcast of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous speech at the 1963 March on Washington on the radio. When the train entered the South, a conductor forced the girl to move to the “colored” section. Conroy writes of this incident, “I lost her to Jim Crow, the bastard who made my childhood South part inferno, part embarrassment, and all shame” (97).

Upon arriving on campus, Conroy was immediately greeted with hazing so severe that he left and hitchhiked 70 miles to his adopted hometown of Beaufort, but one of his former teachers convinced him to return the next day. Conroy explains the plebe system as “mind-numbing, savage, unrelenting, and base” (98), adding that he was in fear throughout the whole year. According to the author, the plebe system had evolved into the “extreme form of mob violence” (100) that it was in 1963 because so many American soldiers had broken under torture during the Korean War more than a decade earlier. Still, Conroy writes of the horrors of the plebe system, admitting that the only reason he did not leave is because he “feared [his] father far more than the wrath of the cadre,” (102) he also writes glowingly about the brotherhood that forms with other cadets going through it.

That dichotomy of hating the plebe system but loving the brotherhood it shapes is present in an anecdote Conroy uses to close the chapter. As an aspiring writer, Conroy had some of his freshman poetry published in The Citadel newspaper during the year. While his first poem went unnoticed by classmates, the second one brought him the sort of fame that no plebe wants. In an attempt at humor, his poem was openly disrespectful toward upperclassmen, and some of the more sadistic of the cadre were determined to retaliate by hazing him so severely that he would leave the academy. When their retaliation came, it officially broke him, and he openly sobbed while being tormented. Four seniors who were Conroy’s barracks neighbors and had grown to like him came to his rescue and pulled him away. Although he came close to quitting, Conroy made it through his plebe year and was offered a full basketball scholarship for his remaining tenure at The Citadel. 

Conroy begins Chapter 8 as his sophomore year at The Citadel is coming to a close. For both summers following his sophomore and junior years, he worked as a basketball counselor at Camp Wahoo, a skills camp for kids at the University of Virginia. Working at the camp was thrilling for him because it allowed him to indulge in his passion for basketball and improve drastically as a player. It was also thrilling for him because he was doing so with some of the most famous coaches and players in the country at that time. His first summer at Camp Wahoo was also unique because he had just learned to drive earlier in the year, and his parents bought him a cheap car to get him there. The car allowed him “to savor the thrilling taste that freedom of the road grants to Americans as our birthright” (125).

During his two summers at Camp Wahoo, Conroy worked with coaches such as Bones McKinney and Weenie Miller and played pickup games with collegiate stars like Lenny Chappell, John Wetzel, and Johnny Moates. His encounters with two specific great players stood out more than any others, though. Los Angeles Lakers Hall of Fame player Jerry West was there in first year, and former Duke University All American Art Heyman was there in his second. West, in particular, had a profound impact on Conroy because of the way he “carried himself with a kingly, benign dignity and treated the boys around him with gentleness and good humor” (128). Heyman’s impact on Conroy was purely in the way that he played the game. According to Conroy, Heyman, a New York City native, was the first trash-talker he had ever met. Heyman’s game was flashy and brash, but his intuition and court awareness left Conroy in awe. 

In Chapter 9, Conroy describes his senior year at The Citadel as “the year [he] woke up to the dream of [his] own life” (137). It was a transformational year in his life both because he would finally realize his dream of becoming a starting college basketball point guard and because he would turn himself into the Southern writer that his mother wanted him to be. He was writing short stories for The Shako, the campus literary magazine, and was learning how to think and see the world as a writer. During the year, he grew close to Colonel John Doyle, one of his English professors and his academic advisor. Conroy regularly met with Doyle and his wife for tea and to be inspired and coached about his writing career.

Chapter 9 also delves deeply into a biographical description of Coach Thompson and provides a better understanding of how he interacts with his players. In the early 1950s, Thompson had been a star player for legendary coach Everett Case at North Carolina State University, but Conroy still knew little about him. Similarly, Thompson knew little about his players and did not seem to care much about their lives away from the court. Conroy writes that “[Thompson] had no interest in getting to know the individual members of his team, and required of us only that we fear, respect, and obey him” (138). Continuing his biographical account of his coach and the role he plays in his memoir, Conroy writes that “Mel Thompson is the insoluble enigma and the Rosetta stone of this book” (139). 

In the final three chapters of Part 2 of My Losing Season, Conroy returns to the linear timeline of his 1966-67 basketball season. Chapter 10 provides a recap of the team’s second game of the season against Clemson University. Whereas the first game was against Auburn, a school from the powerful SEC, the second game is against Clemson, a school from the ACC, which has long been considered to be the strongest basketball conference in the nation. Conroy had been named the team’s captain for their opening game and had started but was demoted to the second string for the Clemson game. Coach Thompson named John DeBrosse, a junior, as the team’s captain. Writing about Thompson’s decision, Conroy argues that “to appoint a junior the captain of a team when two seniors were sitting in the same room is as huge and personal an affront as a coach could deliver, especially in the strictly hierarchal world of The Citadel” (149). Although the game was close early, the Bulldogs lost 102-85 and with 14 minutes remaining, Conroy finally got in the game and ended with 10 points. 

The Team’s next game, recapped in Chapter 11, was against Wofford, one of the smaller schools scheduled early in the season to counterbalance heavyweights Auburn and Clemson. The captain for this game would be center Dan Mohr, arguably the team’s best player and the one who seemed to be ridden the hardest and most often by Thompson. Conroy writes critically of Thompson’s “eccentric game of musical chairs with the team’s captaincy” because of the confusion it added to a season that had already started poorly, also adding that he remembered thinking “this does not feel like a team” (159). Before the game, Conroy had overheard Thompson telling his assistant coach that he did not think Conroy would get into another game all year because he needed to develop his younger players, so the fact that he was glued to the bench throughout the victory against Wofford did not come as a surprise to Conroy. He writes of this development humbly, however, acknowledging that “[his] position had been taken from [him], fair and square, by a superior athlete” (159).

Thinking that he would spend his senior season as a backup, Conroy resolved to take his position as leader of the second unit, or Green Weenies, as they called themselves. In doing so, Conroy notes that the second unit got to mimic their next opponent during practice against the starters. In a very clear criticism of Thompson, Conroy writes, “it was a pleasure to run offenses that were inventive and full of the possibilities that came from misdirection and surprise.” He also adds that the defenses they ran were “put together by brilliant, inventive coaches on the cutting edge of their sport” (161).

In closing Chapter 11, Conroy also recaps the team’s following game against George Washington University, their conference opener. While Conroy was daydreaming on the bench during the close game, making up writer’s stories in his mind about fans he saw in the stands, Thompson called him into the game because George Washington had deployed a full court press scheme to create turnovers. Because of the outstanding ball-handling and dribbling ability that he had worked tirelessly on, Conroy was needed, and he delivered flawlessly, helping break their opponent’s press over and over again and secure a win. 

In the final chapter of Part 2, Conroy discusses the team’s fifth game of the season against Old Dominion. This game stands out perhaps more than any other during the season for a few reasons: Conroy was again named captain, which unknown to him at the time would continue for the rest of the season; both starting guards for Old Dominion were Black, and this would be the official racial integration of basketball at The Citadel’s armory; and because of a childish prank and laughter during the team’s halftime meeting, Conroy came very close to being kicked off the team. Prior to the game, Thompson spoke about Old Dominion, a small college from Norfolk, Virginia, with contempt because it was a lower level school from a lower level conference. Thompson also told his team that Black players do not like a rough and physical style of play.

According to Conroy, only a few minutes into the game “we white boys looked as though our Converse All Stars had been glued to the floor” (170). It became clear to Conroy that no one on the team or the coaches had ever played against Black players before and were guarding them too closely.

The team went into halftime behind and stunned. Before Thompson arrived in the locker room, one of the players ignited uncontrollable laughing because of his dead-on impersonation of Thompson, who would be coming any second. When Thompson arrived and went through every movement exactly as the player had forecasted, Conroy burst out laughing. Thompson was infuriated and ordered Conroy out of the locker room. He walked to his barracks during the second half thinking of how he was going to tell his parents he had been kicked off the team. The next day, he met with Thompson and apologized profusely. When Thompson accepted the apology, Conroy walked away with a sudden affection and loyalty for his coach. He writes of the incident “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” (176-77).