My Losing Season (11 page)

Before the parade started, Mike West joined our group with an easygoing charisma that made leadership an instinct with him. I liked him from the moment I met him and had already fallen in love with his game in the four Citadel home games I'd witnessed in the past year. The whole campus seemed both drawn to and mesmerized by him.

At that same parade as the companies marched out from all four barracks to the beat of the drummers, Mike West suddenly sprinted through the crowd to embrace a young man I knew I'd seen before. Mike brought the man back with him and introduced Bill and me. “This is Dickie Jones, one of the best athletes to attend The Citadel. He was captain of the basketball team my sophomore year.”

“I hear you've been named captain next year, Mike,” Dickie said. “Congratulations. Maybe one of you'll be captain your senior year at The Citadel.”

“Mr. Jones, I saw you play George Washington up in D.C. You were terrific, sir,” I said.

“You saw me play up there?” Dickie said. “I'd do anything to be playing college ball. You boys enjoy every bit of it. You won't believe how fast it all goes.”

Bill and I drifted back to watch the parade as Mike continued to talk to Dickie. I wanted to ask Dickie Jones what he had majored in at The Citadel, and I walked up behind the two men and waited for them to finish their conversation before I interrupted them. I heard Mike telling Dickie, “Thompson's hot to trot to sign Taflinger. Conroy's just along for the ride.”

I took a few steps backward then rejoined Taflinger and watched the rest of the parade, hurt beyond all telling. But the parade gave me time to compose myself and gather my thoughts as the companies passed in review in perfect order. I finally admitted to myself that my chances of going to college the following year were growing dimmer by the hour. It was the middle of May and I hadn't applied or been accepted for a calendar year that was to begin again in three months. I tried to imagine myself as an ex–basketball player and couldn't conjure the image, just as I could not reconcile myself to missing out on college. My accidental overhearing of Mike West's insider information helped me prepare for the inevitable scene when Coach Thompson informed me that he couldn't offer me an athletic scholarship. I tried to think of alternatives, but there were none. I had come to the end of the line and had come up short and had thirty-six hours to prepare myself for Coach Thompson's farewell address to my basketball career. I think I would've gone to pieces in his office if I hadn't gotten Mike's bulletin as an early-warning system. My optimism could often be a form of neediness that did not always serve me well. For no reason whatever, I had assumed that Coach Thompson was going to offer me a scholarship and had already planned an acceptance speech in which I told him that I was honored to be selected and would make him proud of his decision and would never let The Citadel down under any circumstances—those unspoken words dried up.

On Sunday morning, the Taflinger family and I waited outside of Mel Thompson's office together. They had taken me to breakfast, invited me to visit them in Lima, Ohio, and told me I could stay with them for the whole summer if I so desired. They were a large-hearted midwestern family written in bold capital letters, and they smiled broadly when Coach Thompson called them in for a “little powwow.” Alone, I sat in the hallway on a bench in the otherwise deserted building. I was trying to find the proper words to tell my father that I had failed to land a scholarship from The Citadel. It would make for a difficult ride back to Beaufort, but I hunted for the right way to say that I had let my family down in the most humiliating way.

I heard a roar go up from the Taflinger family and knew that Bill must have signed his grant-in-aid. Soon, the whole Taflinger family boiled out of Coach Thompson's office, Bill wearing a broad grin. Mr. Taflinger said, “Bill just inked his name. A full four-year ride. Isn't that great news, Pat?”

“The best,” I said. “Congratulations, Bill.”

Bill surprised me by taking me by the shoulders and saying, “I want you on my team, Pat. Let's make The Citadel great.”

“I'd love to play on the same team as you.”

“Let's load up, kids,” Mr. Taflinger said. “We've got a long ride back to Ohio.”

“But it'll be a happy ride,” Mrs. Taflinger said. “Go see Coach Thompson, Pat. He's in there waiting for you.”

“You'll take the scholarship if he offers you one,” Bill asked, “won't you?”

“I've got a couple of other offers I'm looking at, Bill,” I said, the lie embarrassing me the moment it passed my lips.

“Sign here,” Bill said. “That's an order, smackhead.”

His family and I both laughed as I went into Mel Thompson's orderly office.

“Good morning, Coach,” I said as he motioned for me to sit down on a chair in front of his desk.

“Good morning, Pat,” he said. “Did Mike West show you a good time?”

“A great time, Coach. What a great guy he is.”

“I agree. Did Bill tell you he just signed on for a scholarship?”

“Yes, sir, he did.”

“That was our last one, Pat. I don't have any more scholarships to give. We've had our best recruiting class ever and we got boys to sign up we didn't think we had a prayer of getting,” Coach Thompson said. “We got us some real blue-chippers.”

“That's great, Coach,” I said.

“But it leaves you with the short end of the stick, Pat,” he said. “We wanted you since we first saw you. If I had you, I wouldn't worry about a full-court press for the rest of my life. But I just ran out of scholarships. If you come to The Citadel as a walk-on, we'll take care of you. We'd like to have you.”

“I'd love to come here, Coach,” I said. “I'll have to talk it over with my parents.”

“In my opinion, Pat, the boys we signed have skills that make them much better basketball players than you are at this point.” Coach Thompson said it with tenderness and kindness. “But you could find a place on this team. We liked your heart.”

“Thank you, Coach,” I said. “I'll let you know what my folks decide.”

I stood up and shook his hand, then walked out of the gym and saw my father waiting in our car. I was hoping for some time to compose myself before facing him, but he was there waiting for me. Entering the car, I tried to make conversation. “Isn't this campus pretty, Dad? You should've seen the parade on Friday. These guys march as well as Marines do, I swear they do. I was introduced to General Mark Clark by the captain of next year's basketball team
and . . .”

“Cut the yappin',” my father said. “Did you get the scholarship or not?”

“Coach Thompson wants me to come out for the team as a walk-on next year. He said he liked my heart, Dad.”

“Hey, jocko, I didn't ask for the directions to China and back. Did you get a scholarship or not? Negative or affirmative?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I didn't get a scholarship.”

The slap caught me with my mouth wide open and staring out the front window, another humiliation in a lifetime in which my father brought nothing but an accumulation of both public and private embarrassment. My full-blown hatred of him bloomed as my mouth filled up with blood. We did not exchange a single word or glance on the seventy-mile run back to Beaufort.

When we entered the house, my mother was waiting to hear the good news, but read the signs when I tore past her and retreated into my bedroom, but not before hearing Dad tell her, “Your sweet boy dropped the ball again, Peg. He didn't get zip. Nada. You need to look for a home ec scholarship for the kid. No one wants him to play ball for them in this loser state. No one.”

Two weeks later on June 4, 1963, I graduated from Beaufort High School, a school that had taken me in and cherished me and loved me at the end of a shameful boyhood. The town of Beaufort was the first place I'd ever come to that had the authentic feel of a homeplace to me. Leaving Beaufort was a killing, irrevocable act to me, yet my father's car was packed for the move to Omaha when I walked across the stage that night. At the ceremony, I received the senior class Sportsmanship Award that my father immediately dubbed “The Pussy Award,” and claimed he would have shoved it back into Bill Dufford's face if he'd tried to give the medal to him. I received my diploma and had not yet applied to a single college. My brilliant class had more scholarships than any graduating class in the history of Beaufort High, ranging from Princeton to Stanford.

When the ceremony ended I took off my graduation gown and burst into tears as I said goodbye to Gene Norris and Bill Dufford and Millen Ellis and Grace Foster Dennis and Dutchin Hardin and Marty Moseley and all the other wonderful teachers who'd made me happy in their classrooms. My father had commanded that I skip all the graduation parties, that it was more important that we hit the road and make good time on the trip to his family's home in Chicago. My brothers Mike and Jim and my sisters, Carol and Kathy, waited for me in the car with my father. Mom and the two babies were flying to Chicago the next day.

“Say goodbye to this loser burg, kids,” my father said. “We ain't never coming back to this place.”

Wanna bet? I said to myself as my father pulled away in darkness.

“You're the navigator, pal,” he said to me. “Any mistakes, you face a court-martial.”

“There won't be any mistakes, sir,” I said, opening the map. Twenty-four hours later, pausing for pit stops and gas, my father pulled our station wagon to the front of his brother Willie's house in Chicago, where we stayed for a week. Then we went to Uncle Jim's remote cabin on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River across from Clinton, Iowa, where Uncle Jim was the Catholic chaplain of Mercy Hospital. My mother and her seven children spent two of the most miserable and isolated months of our lives in that ill-equipped cabin as Dad went on to Offutt Air Force Base to begin his new job. I fumed all summer about my future and could not get my mother to talk to me about college because she had no news to report on that front. “Your father's working on college,” was all she'd say.

In July, I took a long train ride to Columbia, South Carolina, to participate in the North-South All-Star game. The game was good for me and taught me lessons in humility that the realm of sport can always teach its athletes. I discovered I was not the best basketball player in South Carolina as I had thought, I was the fifteenth or sixteenth best. I played on the same team as Don Whitehead and John Bloom and Hyman Rubin, all superb players. I played against the gifted Jim Sutherland and Mike Muth and Bob Cauthen for the North team. It was during that game that I noticed the apartheid nature of athletics in South Carolina sports and wondered aloud where the black All-Star game was being played.

I was out of shape and disillusioned and played the game without distinction except for three driving layups I made in the second half. But after the game, a well-built, handsome man wearing a Citadel polo shirt came up and introduced himself as Hank Witt, an assistant football coach at The Citadel.

“Pat, great game, son. You're just what the doctor ordered. Mel Thompson apologized for not being here. But he wanted me to welcome you to The Citadel.”

“What do you mean, Coach?” I asked.

“Your father enrolled you at The Citadel yesterday, Pat,” he said. “You're going to be a Bulldog. You're part of the Citadel family now, son.”

I was going to college. Thanks to my academic scholarships, I was going to be a “college” basketball player, and I thought I was headed for the big-time.

CHAPTER 7

PLEBE YEAR

I
ENTERED
T
HE
C
ITADEL AS A WALK-ON, A PLAYER WHO MAKES THE
team
without the benefit of scholarship. My first year, Mel hadn't offered me a scholarship because, as he told my father, “I signed two guards a lot better than Pat,” and he was telling the truth. “Walk-on”—this still remains the proudest word I can apply to myself. Walk-on—there are resolve and backbone in that noun.

My parents never considered the possibility of accompanying me to my first day at The Citadel. Instead, they found the cheapest mode of transportation to get me from Omaha to Charleston during plebe week in August. My mother, a bargain shopper of heroic proportions, found a southern version of the slow boat to China and, weeping hard, put me on a train in Omaha that made its ponderous way through the American Midwest, stopping everywhere to take on freight and passengers. For two and a half days I slept sitting up, eating a box of saltines and the banana sandwiches my mother had packed for the trip.

That journey through the heartland was my first great adventure. Aloneness itself seemed like a prize possession to the oldest of seven children, and I drew in the rolling beauty of the American landscape as it sped past the train window. I spoon-fed myself with lush, fabulous images of my country spinning by me in ever-changing light and shadow. On my own for the first time in my life, the exhilaration I felt lent an air of bright enchantment to the passenger compartment. I was on my way to play college basketball, and I didn't think that life could get any better.

But it did. Somewhere in Ohio a young black woman came into my car and sat in a seat across from me. Like me, she was going to college in the South, so we began to talk with an ease I didn't often achieve with other young women. Her personality enchanted me, her outspokenness charmed me and caught me by surprise as we talked about politics and books and the state of the world. Whenever the train stopped she and I would go out to the platform and listen on her radio to reports of the March on Washington that was taking place at the same moment we were moving toward Cincinnati. I had long grown accustomed to being silent around girls, but I marveled as this uncommonly pretty girl dragged things out of me that I did not even know were there. Right away, she told me since she'd never met a southern white boy, there were a lot of questions she had for me. She shared the fried chicken her grandmother had made and I tried to foist one of my mother's banana sandwiches off on her. Together, we listened to the great Martin Luther King speech and fell silent afterwards. I told her I'd met Dr. King at Penn Center in Beaufort, South Carolina, when my English teacher took me to a community sing at Penn Center on St. Helena Island. My brother Jim would later say that we were lucky to be raised in the South by two people who didn't have a racist bone in their bodies. That day, I tried to tell this loveliest of women the same thing, but youth had engineered barriers that cut me off from thoughts that surged around me in that inland sea where hormones raged. My words kept tripping over her loveliness.

We stayed together on a six-hour layover in Cincinnati; I've always loved the city of Cincinnati because she was at my side as we wandered through the rough-and-tumble district around the central city train station. On the same night that we heard Martin Luther King talk about the sons and daughters of slaves holding hands with the sons and daughters of slave owners, this kind and brilliant and gorgeous woman took my hand in the darkness. I fell asleep wondering how you tell a girl like this you were in love with her.

When I woke the next morning, she had departed my life forever. In the middle of the night, when we crossed some invisible borderline of the harsh and ruthless South where I was raised, the conductor had led her away. The train had entered that zone where the racial codes were honored to the letter of the law. She was moved by the loutish white conductor to the string of “colored” cars at the rear of the train. He confronted me with the old nastiness and told me he knew what I was after. I tried to find her, but my way was blocked by another conductor who had all the panache of a moonlighting Klansman. He informed me that I'd be arrested at the next town and put off the train if I “set one foot in the colored section.” My shyness had prevented me from asking her name. Maddened, I patrolled the platforms whenever we reached a city in Virginia or the Carolinas, walking obsessively past the cars carrying hundreds of black passengers, praying to spot her pretty face looking out the window, trying to find me.

Now, as I remember her, she must've been shaken by her first encounter with that evil and embittering South that I'd first tasted in my mother's milk. I hope my South did not harm her after that. With her vitality, ebullience, and a delight in her own prettiness, she could pollinate a room with an infectious sense of joy. She'd accomplished something no girl had done to that point; she had made me feel handsome, prized, fascinating. I lost her to Jim Crow, the bastard who had made my childhood South part inferno, part embarrassment, and all shame. She was the third girl who had ever held my hand.

         

S
IXTY HOURS AFTER
I
LEFT MY FAMILY
in Omaha, I stepped off the train in Charleston and found myself in the merciless embrace of The Citadel's plebe system. When I first walked on campus, the plebe system held no fear because Mel Thompson had promised that athletes were protected from its cruelties and excesses. But the train was late and I arrived in Charleston five hours after Coach Thompson had asked us to meet him at the field house the day before the other cadets reported. On campus, I became disoriented when the guard at Lesesne Gate, the entrance to The Citadel, began screaming at me. After making a phone call, he ordered me over to Second Battalion where a group of his friends were waiting for me.

Since I was the only freshman in the barracks, ten or twenty sophomores got to practice their black arts on me. More and more cadets heard the noise and soon joined the pleasantries. It was the first time the pack would go after me, but it would not be the last. The screaming became louder as it began to grow dark. I did pushups until I dropped, ran the stairs until I dropped, held out a rifle until I almost dropped it (a crime beyond forgiveness in the world of a plebe). Then, suddenly, I was thrown out of the battalion and told to run for my life. I ran the mile to Highway 17 where I hitchhiked the seventy miles to Beaufort. A Marine corporal dropped me at The Shack, the place where teenagers gathered in the town I had left three months earlier, as innocent an American boy who has ever breathed southern air.

Someone greeted me as I walked along the line of cars with trays on their window and the smell of hamburgers and french fries in the air. I approached the car of my chemistry teacher, Walt Gnann, and two of my favorite English teachers, Gene Norris and Millen Ellis. Gene was the most important and necessary teacher of my life and one of the best friends I've ever had.

“What are you doing here, scalawag?” Gene said. “You're supposed to be at The Citadel.”

“I didn't like it.”

“Didn't like what?” Gene said. “It hasn't even started yet.”

“If it hasn't started, I hate to see what it's like when it does.”

“I wouldn't go there on a bet,” Millen said.

“I ain't talking to this boy,” Gene said, getting out of the car. “I don't care if you quit, boy, but at least give the place a chance.”

Walt Gnann motioned for me to get into his car. “Come on over to my place, Pat. We'll see how you feel about it in the morning.”

I spent the night in my chemistry teacher's house. I was a terrible chemistry student but that night, Walt and Millen folded kindness over me like a shawl. The next morning, Gene had arranged a ride back to The Citadel with Ray Williams, a Beaufort boy who was a senior and a cadet officer. Ray dropped me off in front of Second Battalion where I walked through the gates to begin the seminal year of my young manhood.

         

I
SUFFERED GRIEVOUSLY UNDER THE SPELL
and sway of the plebe system. It left me terrified, brutalized, altered, and introduced me to a coward that lay deep inside of me. I was afraid the moment the plebe system began until it ended. I displayed no courage because I found none to offer. To me, it was mind-numbing, savage, unrelenting, and base. It broke me a thousand times and then a thousand more, then expertly glued me back together and sent me out to be broken again. After my eighteen-year trial by father, the last thing I needed was a long exposure to the most vaunted plebe system in the country. They called the first week “Hell Week,” and Dante Alighieri could not have coined a more accurate nomenclature.

Because I had failed to connect with the freshman basketball team the night before the plebes reported, the athletic department assigned a senior named Bud Aston, a member of the Fourth Battalion Staff, to deliver me to my team. It was Mr. Aston who taught me to salute, the proper way to do a right, left, and about-face, and how to march in step. He marched me across the parade ground to Mark Clark Hall and straight into the barbershop where Mr. Rampey sheared my scalp like a Highland sheep. I didn't recognize the boy who stared back with his raw, gleaming skull.

As he took me to be measured for uniforms and to collect the paraphernalia for the next four years as a Citadel cadet, Bud Aston gave me advice I'd need to survive. After I'd been screamed at by two sophomores who measured me for shirts, Mr. Aston whispered, “Remember this, Mr. Conroy. I was exactly where you are three years ago. It's terrifying. It's supposed to be. Most of you won't be able to stand it. But the best of you will. Don't take it seriously. Laugh at it. Those two sophomores who just racked you? They were knobs last year, just like you. Do what they say. Be enthusiastic about it. The year'll pass quickly.”

During the two days he spent with me, Mr. Aston passed on hundreds of tips for surviving the acid probation of the plebe system. Because I had missed the hour-long instruction in rifle manual, Mr. Aston taught me to handle my M-1 with dispatch and expertise. When I failed to snap the rifle into my left hand properly at his command, “Left shoulder arms,” he corrected me with great economy.

The barracks was a vessel of pure noise, the constant screaming of the upperclassmen unnerving, but Mr. Aston constantly reassured me. “Don't let the noise bother you. That's all it is, noise. Hell Night's tonight. That's when you'll find out what you're made of. They'll teach you how to brace in the corner alcove room of R Company. Big R is the most military of all the companies in the Corps. They take this shit seriously. Go along with them. Anyone who fights the system gets run out. Remember that, Mr. Conroy. I'll check on you tonight. Good luck.”

Hell Night still burns through the scaffolding of both my fate and my history like a pillar of flame. Even my eighteen fearful years spent quaking beneath my father's frightful gaze did little to prepare me for this lunatic attack on the souls of boys. It was a night that my own soul felt like an acre of Omaha Beach on D-day. I was still recovering from the trauma of it a year later. Those were the last years of General Mark Clark's tenure at The Citadel, and he'd vowed that the school would have the toughest plebe system in the world. I personally attest that he succeeded admirably.

When I wrote the section called “The Taming” in
The Lords of Discipline
I said everything I wanted to say about The Citadel's plebe system. It surprised me when older graduates of the school read my account and thought I'd made it up to harm my college. Over a period of time, the system had evolved into the extreme form of mob violence my classmates and I experienced. Because so many American soldiers had broken under torture and duress during the Korean War, The Citadel's system was to be so horrific that Citadel men could be counted on, no matter how inhumane the conditions or cunning the abuse. Citadel men were expected to provide an unshakable bulwark against the rise of Communism in the Western Hemisphere. I have yet to meet the Communist who has treated me as abominably as the cadre of R Company did my plebe year.

My roommate and I had barely spoken to each other when we finally shook hands on the day of Hell Night. His name was Bob Patterson, and he was from Longmeadow, Massachusetts. I knew immediately that Bob, nice looking and soft-spoken, would survive this test by fire. “This place sucks, doesn't it?” were the first words he spoke to me. I couldn't have agreed more.

“Let's show the fucks. Let's you and me make it,” Bob said, and I could see he meant it. By accident The Citadel had hooked me up with the right guy.

It was nightfall when they stood me in the first squad of the first platoon of R Company in the utter silence of a blacked-out barracks. The cadre had withdrawn into the shadows of the stairwell and had left us alone, bracing for the first time, our chins racked in uncomfortably against our throats. Dressed in bathrobes, field caps, and flip-flops, the plebes prepared themselves for the onslaught.

A harmonica played a haunting, aching version of “Home, Sweet Home” as the guards made an elaborate ceremony of slamming and locking the metal gates with keys as long as a man's hands. I'd grown so accustomed to their screaming and profanity that the silence felt malignant in the tropical, tide-scented air. Mosquitoes siphoned blood out of the back of my knees, my ears, my forearms. The speechless fear of boys scented the air like the charged ions after a thunderstorm. For me, standing in the darkness waiting for Hell Night to break over me felt like a fitting exclamation to a childhood I'd hated from the time of first consciousness. Two hundred forty plebes awaited their fate and destiny with me in Fourth Battalion. Eighty-three of them would survive until graduation.