My Losing Season (44 page)

I looked at my father's face and saw the look of the trickster, the playful wisecracking imp with the touch of pure malice in his mean Irish eyes. “They say you're not as good as Updike or Roth or Styron or even that broad from Mississippi—what's her name? Dora Delta.”

“Eudora Welty,” I said. “They're all better writers than I am, Dad.”

He looked at me with hard eyes. “Never admit that again. That's an order, pal. You're my son and you get it in your goddamn noggin that you're the best writer that ever lived. You got it, pal? There's no such thing as second best. I raised you to be the best, so you bear down and kick Updike and Roth's asses. You got me, jocko?”

He had risen to a full-pitched fury and was his old self again. It was one of his bravura performances. Red-faced and enraged, he had raised up on his right arm and was pointing at me with his left forefinger.

“Hey, Dad,” I said. “Name me one book John Updike ever wrote.”

My father roared with laughter, laughed until he hurt. He motioned for me to hand him the tape recorder, fumbled with it inexpertly, and said, “Time to get going, pal. Hollywood's waiting for this stuff. They don't make guys like me anymore. Guess they broke the mold.”

“It's your modesty that's so unusual, Dad.”

“Let me tell you about Chicago. Now there's a city to grow up in,” my father said.

After the publication of
The Great Santini,
a book my mother and father and most of my family saw as a ruthless and unforgivable act of treachery and betrayal, my father grieved at my betrayal of his life as a family man and Marine Corps officer. Then he remade himself and walked into his new life that I had willed and made possible for him. He returned to his children in the disguise of The Great Santini, the fictional one, not the real one. He became the Santini who gave his son Ben a flight jacket on his eighteenth birthday, the one who sent his daughter Mary Anne flowers at her first prom, who left his duty as officer of the guard when his son got in trouble. I believe my father used my novel as a blueprint to reinvent himself and make a liar out of me.

My father may be the only person in the history of the world who changed himself because he despised a character in literature who struck chords of horror in himself that he could not face. He had the best second act in the history of fathering. He was the worst father I have ever heard of, and I will go to my own grave believing that. But this most immovable of men found it within himself to change. I could not believe how much I had come to love my father when he died on May 11, 1998, and his children buried him in the National Cemetery in Beaufort, not far from our mother's grave.

He died a richly beloved man, even an adored one. His children were prostrate and bereft at his funeral and remain so to this day. When his funeral procession wound through the old town of Beaufort, the police stopped traffic in every street leading to the National Cemetery. Gene Norris said at the gravesite, “They've never done that in Beaufort. Of course, today they're burying The Great Santini.”

EPILOGUE

I
N WRITING THIS BOOK,
I
HAVE FORCED MYSELF TO CONSIDER THE
perilous
and shifting nature of memory itself. There was a time in my life when I could replay these games in my head and remember, with astonishing precision, each move I made in a game and most of the ones my teammates made. For years, I held on to the capacity to relive the games of this dispiriting year in all their livid and living detail, rolling out in my consciousness like a game tape. As I aged, those details have faded almost completely and the games still float within the constellations that make up memory, but with a ghostly pallor and the stick-figure movements of disembodied teammates lost in the streams of time. I should have written this book when I was twenty-five, but I needed John DeBrosse to startle me back to the awareness that this season of badly played basketball had been seminal and easily one of the most consequential of my life. John's sense of timing was perfect because I had begun to turn away from the boy I was—the one who wrote those wounded books where I cried out against the injustice and violence of my youth. I was beginning to turn a cold eye toward the misery I had brought into the lives of my own wives and children. It had never occurred to me that I would carry my childhood in a backpack to spread its coarse havoc and discord far into my adult life. In Ohio, John caught me at the exact moment I was becoming aware of the terrible brevity of life, its eggshell fragility, its unutterable sanctity. He caught me at the precise moment I was considering my own diminishment. And because of Dickie Jones's death and my own breakdown, DeBrosse caught me mortal and afraid in Dayton.

Yet, as I intercepted my long-neglected teammates in the middle of living out their lives, it troubled me that I did not know what to call the book I had begun to write in my head. It was not a memoir, I hoped, as I wrote in a nation awash and aflutter with memoirs. I could not remember enough about this last season to call it anything. As I began to write, it felt shockingly akin to fiction, yet I was trying to tell the truth about how that time felt in the dead center of living it. Throughout the ordeal of writing this book, I have worried that my teammates would read it with total disbelief and that the book would represent some betrayal of our time together, just one more hurt to add to a season that still causes much suffering for several of them. Their wives have been understandably concerned about how I would portray their husbands, their families, and themselves.

         

T
HIS BOOK HAS BEEN AN
act of recovery. When DeBrosse found me in Dayton, it was the first indication I had that the 1966–67 basketball season could cause perpetual hurt to any other person besides myself. I wore the memories of that season like stigmata or a crown of thorns. I had watched my optimism bloom at Camp Wahoo then turn to despair at the tournament game in Charlotte. I had been chief witness, then major participant, in the collapse of my team. When I turned in my uniform for the last time, I told myself I would never think of that pockmarked, quicksilver year. At the end, the team felt like a wing of a lunatic asylum, malfunctioning at every level, unable to right ourselves or save ourselves or even know that we were in need of deliverance.

Some of my teammates thought all of us needed to be on Prozac and others thought that we suffered a collective nervous breakdown because we were not strong enough in spirit to endure the gale-force winds of Mel Thompson's personality. Here is how badly fortune grimaced at my poor team: when I interviewed my teammates and had them rate all of us by our talent as players, I ranked eleventh on a team of twelve players, yet I walked the world as the team's most valuable player. That is how skewed and heartsick that year was for us. In every home I entered as I reconstituted my team, I found instead of memory scar tissue and nerve damage. Great teams look back at their college days through banners of streaming light. Bad teams glance over their shoulders with great reluctance at streets that will always be paved with their own hangdog shame. There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous. But there is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss. The great secret of athletics is that you can learn more from losing than winning. No coach can afford to preach such a doctrine, but our losing season served as both model and template of how a life can go wrong and fall apart in even the most inconceivable places.

Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time. The American military learned more by its defeat in South Vietnam than it did in all the victories ever fought under the Stars and Stripes. Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word “loser” and add it to your résumé and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. The word “loser” follows you, bird-dogs you, sniffs you out of whatever fields you hide in because you have to face things clearly and you cannot turn away from what is true. My team won eight games and lost seventeen . . . losers by any measure.

Then we went out and led our lives, and our losing season inspired every one of us to strive for complete and successful lives. All twelve of us graduated from college and many of us with honors. Bill Zinsky would leave The Citadel after his sophomore year and return to his hometown to finish his college years at Glassboro State University in New Jersey. He has had a distinguished career in city and county management, and he married his high school sweetheart, Peggy, who is a school principal. Many of us thought Bill was the best of us on the court, the complete package, but he never played basketball again after he left The Citadel. He deeply regrets not receiving his Citadel ring, and he was moved to find out how often his teammates spoke about him and in what high regard we held his talent.

In Houston I found Bob Cauthen, who had turned himself into a legendary insurance salesman and had become president of a big insurance company. Tee Hooper and a partner had founded MOM, an acronym for Modern Office Machines, and turned it into a multimillion-dollar chain which they sold for an enormous profit in the late nineties. Bob and Tee are the millionaires on the team, turning their enormous competitiveness on the court to their advantage in corporate America. Both men were handsomer than they were in college and both looked like they could suit up today and take to the courts at the sound of a whistle. Of all the players, Bob loved Mel Thompson the most. I believe that there was something congruent with their fighting spirits and the fierce nature of both men. Tee will never forgive Mel for starting me in his place. Tee feels strongly that a great injustice was done to him, and, as I have stated many times, I could not agree with him more. I have never taken to the court with a more competitive athlete than Tee Hooper. Bad knees have taken Tee from the tennis courts so he has taken up the game of golf at the age of fifty. My Citadel friends in Greenville are astonished at how good a golfer Tee has become. I expected him to be terrific and would expect the same thing if he took up archery, hurling, lacrosse, or badminton.

Dave Bornhorst was a full colonel in the Judge Advocate General's Corps in the Army, and Jim Halpin was the national account and export manager of the Irish multinational corporation Jefferson Smurfit. Dan Mohr is the CEO and owner of four real estate schools in North Carolina that bear his name while DeBrosse is an assistant principal at Studebaker Middle School in Huber Heights, Ohio, a job he took after a successful stint of teaching and coaching basketball both on the college and high school levels. In Dallas I visited Brian Kennedy in his office where he was vice president for American Greeting Cards, and he told me, “You know Hallmark cards, Conroy? We're the other guys.” Doug Bridges is one of the most successful real estate agents in Columbia, South Carolina, and Greg Connor is a beloved radiologist in the college town of Hartsville, South Carolina.

But it's Al Kroboth that represents the soul of this lost team that I gathered out of time and the great distances that had come between us. In his heroic walk, we saw the stuff our team was made of—that we might have been hurt, humiliated, exhausted, and defeated, but we never would quit on our school or our coach or each other. The exemplary courage that Big Al exhibited on his forced march through the jungles of South Vietnam was the same valor he took to the boards every game at The Citadel. Al's heart was my team's heart. Yes, our team lost, but an American hero was shoulder to shoulder with us as we stood at attention for the national anthem during a year our country was at war and our alumni were dying in Asia.

All of my teammates agreed that they took the lessons they learned during that long fatiguing season and applied them to their jobs. They had learned the value of praise because they had suffered from the lack of it by their coach. Yet they could see the strength of what Mel had accomplished also—because he lacked all capacity for praise, they had learned to live without it. Because they had endured their test by Mel Thompson, no bad manager or hostile employer could shake the confidence of my teammates so that they could not do their jobs under great adversity. My teammates thought they could walk to hell and back, and they praised Mel because under him, they had proven it. When speaking of our coach, our voices are lit with mythmaking and awe. His name still inspires dread and foreboding in us. His boot is still on our throats and there is honor in how we bent to his will and danced to the tune of his whistle. He was the dark father of our college years, but worthy and manly and volcanic. My team is Mel Thompson shaped and Mel Thompson broken. He has driven us all to turn our lives around and to be worthy of him, at last. The flame that was Mel Thompson burned in us all and will brightly burn in our inner fires for the rest of our lives.

So I wandered in search of my team and I found them all. I rejoiced in their success and their contentment. They all lived in large, two-storied houses, with green sloping lawns and acres of land. The wives of my teammates welcomed me into their houses and lives, and these beautiful and accomplished women did much to enrich the days and nights when I stole their husbands for hours at a time, made them return to a year that was painful to all of them. Often, the women and children would ease into a room to hear the man of the house tell about games they had never heard a word about, practices that would end in fistfights, or running endless laps around an empty gym. Those wives became friends, and some of them as close as sisters to me as I asked them questions about their husbands' memories.

The children of my basketball team are all bright and dazzling and tall. They brim with confidence and radiate joy easily. The children were numb with father-love and these guys, for the most part, had made excellent fathers and husbands. My own two divorces and my incautious, squirrelly home life blighted the portrait of my whole team. Our nation's health is sustained by families like my teammates made. From New Jersey to Texas, my teammates and their families showered me with hospitality. I walked into their homes after a desertion of thirty years, and they opened their arms and announced that I was a member of the family. They told the stories that they could tell and slowly we foraged for memories in both the thickets and the clearings of that year, then moved them out toward the light. Hour by hour, we tried to put that year back together and to describe how it felt to be part of that unlucky team.

I left The Citadel as a point guard and walked straight into my life as a writer. I thought I was the luckiest man on earth. I carried The Citadel inside me, and I knew it was not just a college I had gone to, and I have never pretended it was. It's a civilization and a way of knowledge, a paradox, a bright circus of life, a mirror and a bindery of souls, a hive of sweat and hard work, a preparation for the journey, a trailblazer and a road map, a purgatory, an awakening, and an insider's guide to the dilemma of being alive and ready for anything that the world might throw your way.

My experience as a point guard at The Citadel still remains miraculous to me. I began the season with my coach putting his arm around me and confiding to a television audience that he thought I could score a point or two to help his team. But I found myself in the locker room at Loyola of New Orleans, found the self who sprang alive in that game, and I turned myself into the best point guard I was capable of being. That I averaged twelve points a game, and scored over twenty points in four college games that season, dazzles my imagination even now and reinforces the fact that belief in oneself—authentic, inviolable, and unshakable belief, not the undercutting kind—is necessary to all human achievement. Once I began believing in myself and not listening to the people who did not believe in me, I turned myself into a point guard who you needed to watch. I could bring it upcourt, I could stick it in your face, I could take care of the ball, I could get it to my big men, I could work the break, and pal, whoever you are, wherever you are, I hope you like going to the hoop. At the end of the season, I came at the whole world like a point guard. Point guard. It's the most beautiful phrase in sports to me, and for a year, for a glorious year, I walked through the world as one with a team that was dying at the same time I was finding myself.

I came to the writing life as a point guard, and it became the metaphor of my transition. The novelist needs a strong ego, a sense of arrogance, complete knowledge of tempo, and control of the court. As a novelist, you tell people where to go and bark at them when they are out of position. It's up to you to fill the seats by your style and flashiness and complete mastery of tempo. You thumb your nose at critics and academics and keep your eye on the flow of the game. You stand in the center of things and you create the world around you. You must retain your poise and confidence, and you dare them to box you in or trap you in the corners. The point guard knows that the world is fraught with pitfalls and dangers, and so does the novelist.