In the circle of hell where we now sat in agony, I watched my broken teammates trying to gather inward strength that could combat the awesome forces of Mel’s negativity. Our coach could yell and rage and throw chairs and yell obscenities and make us run laps until we dropped and suicide drills until we vomited—but in the well of this existential moment among boys suffering from the ferocity of Mel’s pitiless charge, I heard a voice scream out inside me, an actual voice—embryonic and unsure—cry out from within me in alarm: “Mel can destroy us and loathe us and demean everything about us, but he cannot and never will coach us. He cannot make us into a team. He cannot teach us to be the thing we need to be.”
With this strange and disloyal insight in a gym in New Orleans, I think I was born to myself in the world. That night in New Orleans a voice was born inside me, and I had never heard it before in my entire life.
I looked upon my devastated teammates in the heartless, pitiless wreckage of their season which had barely begun, and they were too bereft for bitterness and too outcast for hope. My teammates had found themselves reduced to a state that was birthplace and hermitage and briar patch to me—a despair with no windows or exits, a futility that made hope vain and the future unthinkable.
This moment felt like home to me, and I knew why. My father never touched me unless he was hitting me or pounding my head against Sheetrock. If he was not beating me, I could enjoy the many pleasures of watching him beating my mother or my smaller brothers and sisters. I was trapped in a child’s body, a boy’s body, and could not protect my mother from the brute she had married.
In the bell-jar shyness of the young man I was, I began to speak to my team in the voice I had just found. It was the first time I had ever spoken to the group by myself and certainly the first time I had ever tried to exhort them with words or lift their spirits or even fire them up.
My voice was halting and amateurish as I began and I did not even stop when I heard Bob Cauthen say, as he had done the year before when Wig Baumann had called a team meeting, “That shit don’t work, Conroy. That’s high school shit.”
I continued and I remember the talk because it was the first and last one I ever gave as a Citadel athlete. What I said is lost forever, but here is what I think I said: “When we were little boys, we played basketball because it was the most fun a boy can have. Then we noticed something. We were better at it than other boys. We loved it like no other boys. We played it until our mothers came out to shout that our dinners were getting cold. Guys, we need to make this game fun again. We play it because it brings us joy.”
As we took to the court for the second half, I made a secret vow to myself that I would never listen to a single thing that Mel Thompson said to me again. I would obey him and honor him and follow him, but I would not let him touch the core of me again. He was my coach, but I was my master. Whenever I got in the game for the rest of the year, I would play it as I was born to play it, I would play it with reckless abandon. If Mel Thompson did not like it, he could choose not to play me. I felt a loosening, an opening up. I had done many things in my life but this marked the first time I had felt myself change. I was not the same young man when I returned to that court at the college of Loyola in the city of New Orleans.
Despite Mel’s locker room hysteria, nothing that he did or said could reverse the pathetic play of my team in the second half. Watching the agony on my coach’s face as he screamed at Mohr, Bridges, and Zinsky to do something, anything, was almost unbearable. When he called time-out, I saw the look of utter vacancy on the faces of all five starters as they endured another withering attack. The louder he screamed the worse our team played. Only Al Kroboth, substituting for the big men, played with any style or panache. Everything Big Al got he got from pure hustle on this night. The other players went through the motions as the Loyola Wolfpack poured it on the Bulldogs. At one point we were behind thirty-four points.
Now it was garbage time and Mel gave the word to Ed Thompson to put in the Green Weenies. The Weenies leapt up and sprinted out onto the court and relieved the beaten and exhausted starters as a Loyola player was shooting a pair of free throws. It was the first time the Green Weenies had played as a unit in a game this season. Going around to each one of my second-string teammates, I slapped them hard on the fanny and said with urgency and passion, “Get me the goddamn basketball, then catch my ass. Let’s kick the living shit out of their Green Weenies.”
And we did, by God, we did. I was electric that night, and I could feel the currents of myself humming in my bloodstream for the first time since my sophomore year, before Mel had tied my game to his own self-image. The flashy guard sputtered into life. I dribbled behind my back and through my legs the first time I touched the ball and headed downcourt as fast as I could go. Mel hated my flashiness, but that was too bad; something had snapped in me. Kroboth, Kennedy, Cauthen, and Connor were all over the boards, bringing down rebound after rebound after rebound, then turning to find me on the wing. I was there every time, and they got me the ball swiftly the way they did every day at practice. Know this, world: my Green Weenies could rebound like a secret race of giants.
For ten minutes, we ran and ran. I would catch the ball on either wing, then put the ball on the floor, streak to the center line then fly the length of the court. I felt like an uncollared cheetah fleeing the raja’s court. I burned with the combustible joy I took from leading a fast break, the lanes beside me and behind me filling up with unhappy, unpraised boys like myself, humiliated by our lack of talent, and invisible to our coach.
“Don’t shoot, Conroy,” I heard Mel scream, and I shot it from that very spot far out of my range. I threw behind the back passes to Kroboth and Bornhorst, drove the lane whenever I felt like it, took seven free throws and made all seven.
The Green Weenies went wild, encouraging each other, urging each other on, forcing each other to do even more. “Get me the goddamn ball, Weenies,” I would scream and the Green Weenies got almost every one that came off the glass. We began whittling away at a twenty-seven-point deficit. “I want the ball, Weenies,” and it came to me often and I took it to the hoop every time I could in the last ten minutes of that humiliating and wonderful game.
The Green Weenies were not humiliated; we were transcendent and unstoppable and grand. We played like we knew how to play basketball, and we played like young men who admired and trusted each other. We played like a team who beat the living daylights out of the first team every day and never received a single word of recognition or praise from our coach. We played our hearts out and worked our asses off because this was the only way we could tell each other how much we loved being Green Weenies. It was the only place you could go to on Mel Thompson’s team and have any pride in your game at all. Wildly, we played that night because of our wordless, ineffable, and unstealable love of each other.
With two minutes left, Coach Ron Greene stuck two of his big men back in the game because his margin of victory had become a bit too narrow. But I was greedy now, a cocky, strutting pain-in-the-ass point guard. I wanted to bring those two magnificent guards back into the game to see if they could slow me down. We closed to within eight points. My team was fiery and intense. We lost by ten, 97–87.
The Green Weenies strutted off the court with our heads held high. I do not remember playing in the first half at all, although John Joby, in the Charleston paper’s account of the game, says, “Just before intermission Pat Conroy made two driving layups for The Citadel to reduce the margin to 51–33.” But the game does not come alive to me until the Green Weenies took the floor as warriors together, no first-stringers allowed. The Green Weenies scored fifty of our team’s eighty-seven points, and most of them we scored together. We had proven to ourselves that we were the only members of our team who could play like one.
As Joby said: “For The Citadel, Al Kroboth, a reserve who picked up the scoring slack in the second half, was the leading point scorer with 16 points, followed by another sub, Pat Conroy, who had
15. Loyola’s next foe will be nationally ranked Michigan State Tuesday night in the Field House. The Spartans are third in the UPI poll and eighth in the AP rating.” Loyola would defeat Michigan State, the third-ranked team in the nation.
In the shower room after the game, the humiliation of our first team kept down any sense of jubilation the Green Weenies might have felt. Then Mel Thompson, who never came into the shower room after a game, ever, shocked us by announcing, “The Green Weenies are going to start at the Tampa Invitational.”
Silence greeted this announcement. I was glad I was in the shower because I felt tears rush into my eyes. Mel Thompson had seen us at last.
AFTER THE TRAINER BILLY BOSTICK CONDUCTED the bed check, the whole team tumbled down the fire escape of the grand old hotel on Canal Street and headed for the bars and clubs of Bourbon Street. In my euphoria over the game and my surprise at the militancy and confidence of the voice that had risen out of me, I walked the backstreets of the Vieux Carré the way I thought a writer might. I tried to drink up every sight and image I passed. I stood before Antoine’s and Brennan’s and I breathed in the air that floated like clouds out of those restaurants, perfumed with garlic and the brine of oysters and the great brown pungency of sirloins. Someday, I promised myself, I would return to these restaurants and sit myself beneath the diamond-backed light of chandeliers and order all the meals I had read about in books but had never eaten. People would eat well and drink well in my books, I thought, and all my point guards would be flashy, by God, my point guards would be flashy as hell. Drifting alone in the city, I read every plaque on every house I passed. By accident, or perhaps by some unknown design, I found a house where Tennessee Williams had lived as a young playwright loose in the city and wondered if it was the house where Blanche and Stanley were born in his tortured and baroque imagination. Though I was looking for a house where the great Faulkner had lived, I could not find one, but I unknowingly passed the house where one of my mother’s favorite writers, Frances Parkinson Keyes, was living. There was no plaque on the door for Miss Keyes, but there would be nineteen years later when Houghton Mifflin rented that same house for my publication party for The Prince of Tides.
ON SUNDAY MORNING, THE FIVE CATHOLICS on the team rose early for mass at St. Louis Cathedral. Conroy, DeBrosse, Bornhorst, Connor, and Kennedy—you can hear the shuffle of immigrants’ feet from Ireland, Germany, and France in that muster of fresh American names. Our insistence on attending mass every Sunday baffled Mel, who often had to adjust our travel schedules to accommodate his Catholic boys. Generally, I think Mel approved of our fidelity to our beliefs and considered it one of the many forms that discipline could take. When I took Communion that morning, I thanked God for the game He had given me at Loyola. That year, my relationship with God was direct and personal and conversational in nature. I was losing Him and I wanted Him to help me. Though there was majesty in His silence, He had finally managed to send me a good game. I considered this a good sign.
All season long, I would look for signs of His imminence and concern in my daily affairs. I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came to me as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
Outside the church, Dave Bornhorst and I strolled beneath the feathery ironwork of balconies as gypsylike women tried to read our palms and sharp-featured men tried to lure us into card games and black children danced madly in tap shoes and put out their top hats for dimes. The whole city, by daylight, felt strange with injustice and fatigue. Barney and I both thought it was a mortal sin to have our fortunes told. Both of us were looking for Christmas presents for our mothers. Street artists and caricaturists were in full cry as we passed by them, raucous as crows.
Since we had little money, we stopped near an artist who did portraits for two bucks apiece. The others charged five or more. In the vanity of sons, we both thought that our mothers would love nothing more than pictures of their favorite boys. We studied the drawings of the strangers’ faces he presented as examples of his work of portraiture. He seemed talented if literal. In my Citadel uniform, I endured my first sitting, thinking in some small insubstantial way I was contributing to the support of the arts. In less than five minutes, the artist, whose face did not accompany him in time’s journey, handed me my portrait, then quickly began work on Dave’s.
I did not recognize the face he handed to me. It was not simply a bad drawing, but a grotesque one. I looked evil around the eyes and mouth, stone-faced and idiotic as a gargoyle. The artist had found all the strangeness he could find in a human face and all the pain. The face grimaced and looked as if it should be wearing a crown of thorns. Barney’s portrait was cartoonish and just as bad. New Orleans had hustled two more rubes from the mainland.
CHAPTER 14
TAMPA INVITATIONAL
TOURNAMENT
WHEN I SAW THAT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA WAS ONE of the four teams at the Tampa Invitational, it was a moment brimming with deep pleasure. If luck was with us, The Citadel and North Carolina would meet in a game. They would cheerfully mop the floor with us, but I could tell my children and grandchildren that I once took to the court to do battle with the lordly Tar Heels.
Several of my teammates remember me saying, “Don’t you feel sorry for Dean Smith, coach of the Tar Heels? Poor guy’s got insomnia, hasn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep in months, trying to devise a defense to stop Conroy.”
“You’re so full of shit, Conroy,” Mohr whispered across the aisle of the jet winging across the Gulf of Mexico to Tampa. “My God, it’s getting worse.”
“Root,” I said, still exuberant after the Loyola game, “when I take my place as point guard with the Celtics, I want you to know that I won’t forget the fart blossoms and losers who held my game back at The Citadel, the guys who failed to see my talent for what it really was.”
“Why don’t you and DeBrosse develop that damn talent by throwing me a pass every once in a while? You know, once or twice a season,” Mohr shot back, bringing DeBrosse into the fray behind us.
“You ever thought about moving your sorry ass to get open, Root? Try to establish a passing lane every once in a while,” John said.
“Passing lane? You wouldn’t know a passing lane from a jockstrap, DeBrosse. Anyone ever see DeBrosse throw a pass?”
“Yeah,” Cauthen said. “Once, with a girl.”
Our coaches sat in the front of the plane and the players crowded together in the back. Seats were not assigned in those faraway times, but we thoughtlessly arranged ourselves according to our classes. The class system at The Citadel cut deeply and invisibly across our system-tested psyches. We aligned our stars with the boys who had witnessed both our suffering and our resolve. During our freshman year, Mohr and I had compared cigarette burns that two of the cadremen had left on his chin and my arms.
“Zits, Coach,” Dan had explained to our beloved freshman coach, Paul Brandenberg.
“Floor burns, Coach,” I said. “Got ’em diving for the ball.”
That is why I always sat near Dan Mohr; it is why the class system at The Citadel remains the unbreakable, the unseverable bond. In the back of the plane, the five sophomores, wary and still unacclimatized, studied the customs and procedures of the juniors and the seniors. They were still early in their varsity careers and just six months away from the last indignities of their own plebe year.
“Hey, guys,” I said, whispering as I walked toward their area in the back of the plane. “How do you like playing big-time college basketball?”
Again, the sophomores had to contain their snickering. Mel did not allow horseplay or any member of his team to look like he might be having a good time, especially after a defeat. Their buried, covert laughter made a forlorn sound, like the call of barn owls.
When we lande
d in Tampa, a bus drove us to the hotel. By the time we had unpacked our gear, the Corps of Cadets back in Charleston had called the final roster and been released for their Christmas furlough. My team rejoiced because that meant that we could also wear civilian clothes in Tampa with the single caveat that we dress in coat and tie since we were still representing The Citadel. Thus began an annual humiliation for me and Dan Mohr.
When we gathered in the hotel lobby to take the bus to the amphitheater, the team seemed transformed into normal earthlings. In fact, my teammates looked camouflaged, almost deceitful, in their civilian clothing. Bob Cauthen and Tee Hooper and Doug Bridges dressed in the most stylish clothing, wearing their slacks and sports coats with great flair. Their loafers gleamed with the brightness of fine leather. The rest of the guys wore basic, off-the-rack sports coats, the kind they would wear for church or special occasions back home.
On the other side of the lobby stood Dan Mohr, wearing the same sweater he wore last Christmas break in Pittsburgh before we played Duquesne. Hanging back, I wore the same sweater my mother had bought me for a dollar at a yard sale in Beaufort my senior year in high school. Dan and I both wore our cadet shoes in a glittering pool of Bass Weejuns. When Dan felt shame, he raised his chin higher and from my vantage point across the room, I could see his Adam’s apple in perfect bas-relief.
“Nice sports coat, Conroy,” DeBrosse said.
“I didn’t know you were from the Alps, Conroy,” Cauthen added, a remark that stung because I thought the sweater made me look like Heidi’s brother.
When our impeccably dressed head coach entered the lobby, he looked his team over with the same note of approval. Mel knew his clothes and the sharpness of his attire was an integral part of his unreadable character. It did not unlock any mysteries about him, but it at least gave you a clue. I saw the exact moment when Mel spotted Mohr out of uniform for the third straight Christmas break.