But I was a college basketball player, too. From day to day, I was caught up with the rhythms of my game. Basketball provided the nearest approach I’ve ever made to the realms of ecstasy. The sport consumed the best part of my dreaming self, and I found myself in reverie after reverie moving swiftly in the flow and anarchy of games. My whole philosophy of life was caught up with what I believed were the responsibilities of a point guard—the importance of outhustling your opponent, watching for the unexpected, moving teammates to their proper spots on the floor, barking orders and calling the plays, exhorting and inspiring your team, and never quitting until the buzzer has sounded.
ON THE LAST DAY OF PLEBE WEEK, I received a note from an orderly of the guard to report to Coach Mel Thompson’s office at 1500 hours. Being summoned to Coach Thompson’s office was never good news, but I was a senior now, part of the senior leadership, and concluded that I would be spending much of my time in Mel’s office discussing team attitude and personnel. I could not have been more wrong.
Before my last season as an athlete began, I sat outside his office conjuring a portrait of my fascinating, scowling, and unforthcoming coach, Mel Thompson. At the outset, I knew so little about him I found it bewildering. For three years, six months of the year, I saw him for three hours every day. He did not know either of my parents’ names after those three years nor anything about my personal life. He 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. The terror we felt for him was real. His powers of ridicule were considerable, and his bitterly cutting dismissals of his players could feel like acid thrown in your face.
Something smoldered inside Mel Thompson. He was the type of man you would cut open and expect to see lava flow instead of blood. There was nothing soft about my coach. I studied him up close and came to know him only as mask and stone wall, as sphinx and empty vessel and hidden passageway. I watched for clues that would elucidate his character, but the graffiti that cut into the granite wall of him were written in a language not even he could speak. Mel Thompson is the insoluble enigma and the Rosetta stone of this book.
What I did know about Mel Thompson was that as a six-foot-three-inch player for North Carolina State, he was one of the best rebounders of the early fifties. For three years, he started for the Wolfpack in the best basketball conference in the country, coached by the legendary Everett Case who along with Adolph Rupp introduced big-time college basketball to the South. Everett Case referred to his player Mel Thompson as the “most competitive player I ever coached.” Case was famous for treating his players like dogs, yet a distinguished fraternity of coaches came out of his program, including Vic Bubas at Duke; Norman Sloan at The Citadel, Florida, and North Carolina State; and Les Robinson, Eddie Biedenbach, and a long list of others. Old man Case may have been hard-nosed and ornery, but something about his toughness made his team want to play for him. He made his teams feared in the ACC, and his boys went after you with everything they had. Everett Case exemplified a certain philosophy of coaching whereby a team of young players could be molded into greatness by the use of fear and intimidation. Case dismissed out of hand the softer ways of the lesser breed of coaches. Mel Thompson adored Coach Case and brought that philosophy to his job at The Citadel.
Mel was the assistant coach under Norman Sloan at The Citadel when Sloan directed the “Blitz Kids,” the best bunch of Citadel basketball players in the college’s history. When Sloan departed for Florida in 1960, Mel took over the head coaching position, a year after he had taken over as The Citadel’s freshman basketball coach. Mel led those same Blitz Kids to a 17–8 season, a remarkable achievement for a first-year head coach. But that was followed by an 8–15 season and a disastrous 1962–63 year in which his team went 3–20. Coach Thompson righted himself in the next two years and fielded two winning teams in a row. The 1964 team finished 11–10 and the team I played backup guard on as a sophomore went 13–11. It is a rarity that a modern Citadel basketball squad put a winning team on the floor for two consecutive years. Since 1940, only Norman Sloan ever won for three consecutive years, and Les Robinson cobbled together consecutive winning seasons in 1979 and 1980. Winning basketball games in a military college is as perilous a way to earn a living as exists in American coaching.
Mel Thompson appeared at the door and barked out my name. “Conroy, get in here.” No “how was your summer” or pleasant handshakes or idle chatter to break the ice after a long separation. “You know why I called you down here, Pat?” he said. He had not called me “Pat” since he tried to recruit me in high school.
“No, sir, I don’t.” I was actually shaken by his friendliness.
“I’m thinking about making you captain of the team,” he said. “What do you think about that?”
It was a lifelong dream of mine to captain our team, but that is not what I said to Coach Thompson. “What about Danny Mohr? Or Jim Halpin? It might hurt their feelings.”
“Feelings, Conroy? I don’t give a shit about feelings. I care about winning. I’ve always been a winner, and losing kills something inside me. Danny Mohr’s not a leader. Halpin’s got a gimp knee. I was depending on you for leadership. But the hell with it. You’ve always wanted to coach this goddamn team. Get the fuck out of my office.”
I got up to leave, until he held out his hand to stop me. “Except for your ball handling and passing, you’re barely college material. You’re just mediocre, and that’s the truth of the matter.”
“The truth of the matter” burned through me like fire as I walked back through the shadow of the field house. As a boy, words had stung and lacerated me far too much, and I’d tried to learn to defuse their power when launched as weapons. “You’re just mediocre” would echo in my head every minute of the season that had not even begun. My mediocrity stung me, which is why I’d worked so hard in the summer for my last year as a basketball player.
On Hell Night, I drifted from R Company over to Tango Company where three freshmen basketball players were having the worst night of their lives. In the chaos of the plebe system’s first great disruption, I went to introduce myself to the three most highly prized recruits of the class of 1970. I watched as three cadremen worked over Jerry Hirsch and was standing in front of him when he rose after completing twenty-five pushups.
“Good evening, Mr. Hirsch,” I said.
“Good evening, sir,” he screamed.
“How you liking college?”
“Sir, I love it, sir,” he screamed.
“I’m a basketball player, Mr. Hirsch. A senior. My name’s Pat Conroy, and I’m going to get you through this year. I was standing in this same spot three years ago. Think of it as a game. A joke. Some of the guys screaming at you tonight will be the best friends you’ll ever have. Bend your knees. That’s it. You’re doing good. If I can help you, let me know. But you’re going to make it. I hear you’ve got a great jump shot.”
Young Mr. Hirsch surprised me by saying, “Sir, one of the best, sir.” I knew that Jerry Hirsch was going to make it just fine. I had the same encounter with Willie Taylor and a mountain of a boy named Bob Carver, who looked both bewildered and terrified. “Mr. Conroy, sir, permission to make a statement, sir.”
“Please feel free,” I said.
“Sir, Coach Thompson said I wouldn’t have to go through any of this, sir. He promised to keep me out of it, sir.”
I looked around at the cadre moving through the knobs in the stormy loosening of havoc in their ranks. “Mel doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job, Mr. Carver.”
“Sir, he promised me,” Carver said with greater urgency.
“He lied, Mr. Carver. But he’s consistent. He lied to every one of us, to every basketball player on this campus. But you’ll get through it and I’ll buy you a beer in June.”
On Friday at the end of plebe week, I went for afternoon tea at Colonel John Doyle’s house on campus overlooking the Ashley River. Once a month Colonel Doyle and his wif
e, Clarice, invited me to their quarters for an afternoon tea as formal as an English garden. It was as a plebe, in the Doyles’ living room, when I first discovered that not all tea came in bags and that it could be served without ice.
I was about to knock on the Doyles’ door when a booming voice rang out, “Halt, bubba!”
The Boo’s voice, always startling, had the same effect on me that a lion’s roar had on a herd of wildebeest. I froze and awaited his approach as the smell of his Thompson cigar announced his arrival. I could feel the heat of the cigar as it drew close to my ear, and the Boo shrouded my head in a plume of smoke.
“Stop that, Nugent,” I heard Mrs. Courvoisie say to her husband. “Leave Mr. Conroy alone.”
“Bolshevik,” the colonel said, “I thought I sent you out of here to mess up Clemson. You are not Citadel material, don’t you understand that yet?”
Because of my role in placing a coded but obscene poem in The Shako the previous spring, the Boo had recommended that President Hugh P. Harris kick me out of the Corps of Cadets.
“If General Mark Clark were still president, you’d have been long gone, bubba. Harris is new, still feeling his way around. He thinks of you cadets as human beings. He doesn’t know you for the lowlife bums and scoundrels I know. You better not fart through cotton this year, bubba, or I’ll crucify you without nails. Got that?”
“Nugent, we’re late,” Mrs. Courvoisie said.
“One mistake, bubba,” the Boo said. “Just one and you’re history. You ever walked tours?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Well, if I don’t get you here,” he said, “look for me in hell. I’ll be waiting for your Bolshevik ass.”
“Great to see you, Colonel,” I said as he walked back to his car. “My summer was great, sir. Thanks for asking.”
The Boo was laughing as he got into his car and I knocked on Colonel Doyle’s door.
Colonel Doyle met me at his back door and warmly shook my hand and thanked me for the letters I’d written him during the summer. He was dressed in an ascot and a smoking jacket; I’d never seen a man dressed like him except in period movies. Clarice Doyle was wearing a dress, stockings, high heels, and pearls. I never saw this cultured couple let down their hair when I visited them. Entering their house always felt like stepping back a hundred years or more.
“Do you think Mr. Conroy will take to Darjeeling, John?” Clarice asked.
Colonel Doyle answered, “I think we can assume Mr. Conroy is the adventurous type.”
I cherished my time with John and Clarice Doyle at The Citadel, yet always felt clubfooted and inappropriate when I was sitting with them, the three of us talking like characters out of an unpublishable British short story written by a librarian with a stutter and a drinking problem. The conversation always seemed surreal and disconnected from all reality.
“John, have you lined Mr. Conroy up with some delicious courses for the new semester?” Clarice asked her husband. It made me happy to see how much she loved him.
Colonel Doyle beamed at her. “I think I may have come up with some tasty morsels, dear. Perhaps, even one or two bonbons.”
“Bonbons,” I said, having no idea what anyone was talking about, but wanting to be part of their close-knit yet inexplicit alliance. Always, I felt like the Doyles were telling jokes but letting me guess the punch lines.
“You will be in my modern novel class,” Colonel Doyle said.
“Now there’s a bonbon,” Clarice said.
“You seemed enamored with Colonel Bowman last year, so I put you in his abnormal psychology class. I trust you will study the subject, Mr. Conroy, and try your best not to become abnormal yourself. We’ll have none of that.”
“Oh, John,” Clarice said, holding her stomach as she laughed.
“But wait—I have solved the problem of your senior essay, Mr. Conroy.”
“Wonderful,” I said. The senior essay was the crowning glory of four years at The Citadel, but I’d been particularly uninspired in choosing a subject. I’d turned the job over to Colonel Doyle who would both oversee and grade the project as my academic advisor.
“I’d like you to compare the novels of William Faulkner of Oxford, Mississippi, with the novels of Sinclair Lewis of Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Both from small-town America, both recipients of the Nobel Prize for literature.”
“Nobel. That’s very big,” Clarice said.
Colonel Doyle nodded. “You will find that Mr. Lewis is not quite up to snuff when it comes to the Lion of Rowan Oak.”
“A year spent among Nobelists, Mr. Conroy,” said Clarice. “A judicious way to spend one’s senior year.”
“I suggest you start with Light in August,” Colonel Doyle said to me. After tea, he led me upstairs to his small, book-lined office where he’d written his books and essays. John Doyle was an expert on Robert Frost and a signed copy of his book The Poetry of Robert Frost sits on my desk today. I sat facing him as he opened a folder that contained the poems I’d written over the summer. In a clear, accented voice, he read each poem aloud to me, reading them with complete openness as though they all were not hopelessly amateurish and flawed. To John Doyle writing was a religious act, the teaching of it a work of holy orders. His voice lent beauty and gravitas to poems that lacked both. I couldn’t breathe as I listened to my own words read back to me with uncommon gentleness. Each time I came to this room to have Colonel Doyle take my writing with a seriousness it didn’t deserve, I’d fill up with gratitude for him again and again. Though we were nothing alike, we shared a passion for the English language that bound us like brothers from the first time we met until the last time we spoke on the phone, the week before he died.
“Now this is the hard part for all writers, Mr. Conroy, but it is necessary. You must learn to think of yourself as a writer.”
“I’m not good enough yet, Colonel Doyle,” I said.
“No, you’re not. But you’re getting better. You’re doing the hard work. But you must tell yourself that you’re a writer. A work in progress, but a writer. Can you tell me that?”
“Not yet, Colonel. I can’t make a sentence sound like I want it to. It won’t say what I want it to say.”
“That will come. Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer when he was twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn’t know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it’s necessary, Mr. Conroy. This is your last season as a basketball player, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I stink at that, too.”
“You say that about yourself as a writer. You say that about yourself as a basketball player. Mr. Conroy, may I give you some advice? You are far too young to know this, but your life is precious and your time is short. You are blind to yourself, Mr. Conroy. You’re too hard on yourself. For reasons I don’t understand, you are deeply unhappy, and it pains me. Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself. Someone has taught you to hate yourself. I hope I haven’t crossed some line, Mr. Conroy. I value our friendship very much.”
“You should’ve been a coach, Colonel,” I said. “That’s the greatest pep talk I ever heard.”
When I left Colonel Doyle’s quarters, I drifted past the obstacle course, walked the length of the practice baseball field lush with freshly mown grass, and walked along the marsh until I came to the Citadel marina. This was the spot I’d discovered my freshman year where I could come to think and to separate myself from the life of the Corps. I climbed a ladder of the Citadel yacht, the Southwind, and sat on a deck chair and looked out toward the Ashley River. The tide was coming in, and the sun was lowering in the west. I thought about Colonel Doyle and my good fortune that he found me in my first despairing days at The
Citadel and offered his hand in friendship. From the day I met him, Colonel Doyle carried an unshakable faith that I’d one day write novels for a living, which seemed as unlikely to me as my ripening into a good point guard. I linked my destiny as a writer to that of myself as a basketball player because both seemed to represent realms of achievement that would always be denied me.
I sent out a silent prayer above the Ashley River. I asked God to let good things happen to me this last basketball season, a season I could look back on without shame. It seemed like a modest, ungreedy prayer. I asked that I complete a short story I was working on, and that I be granted a sign that I was supposed to write novels for a living.
Standing in the bow of the Southwind, I looked back toward The Citadel, a college that was now part of my history and my fate. I promised myself something of great importance to me. “I’ll remember everything,” I said. “I won’t forget a single thing.”
BASKETBALL PRACTICE WOULD BEGIN on October 15, 1966.
CHAPTER 10
CLEMSON
WHEN I THINK OF THE WORD “SNAKEPIT,” THE IMAGE OF THE claustrophobic, hostility-steeped field house where Clemson University played their basketball games springs to mind. For a visiting team, a game at Clemson was as hallucinatory and disquieting an encounter as a basketball player could experience. It was close to miraculous for even the great teams of the ACC like North Carolina to come into the harrowing environment of the Clemson gym and return home with a victory.
In my sophomore year, I played on a very good Citadel team that beat the University of West Virginia in Morgantown, breaking the longest home winning streak in American college basketball. It was as good as the game of basketball could get. The Corps of Cadets listened to the game in Charleston on radio and in celebration threw every garbage can in the barracks off the four divisions and onto the cement quadrangle. The team would go 8–2, defeating a wonderful Virginia Tech team, before the particular malaise set in that seems to undermine the long seasons of almost all the basketball programs at military colleges. That 1964–65 team finished 13–11, the only winning varsity team I would play for at The Citadel.