Al Beiner flipped me a basketball as we lined up to enter the field house for the warmup drills. I handed the ball to Danny, but he gave it back to me and murmured, “You heard what the man said. You’re the fucking captain.”
Though Danny would not look at me, his hurt passed through the heart of my entire team. But then Rat threw open the door, and I led the way as my team burst out into the light and the sounds of “Dixie” (played better by the Citadel band than by any band in the world). The Corps rose and roared its praise, its validation of our oneness, our uniqueness—as we took the first steps into the mysteries of time and the reality of the season that would tear us in all the soft places of our young manhoods before it was over.
But I led my team to the center of the court, then broke for the basket and laid the ball in off the glass, taking care that I made the first layup of the new season that had turned suddenly real.
One of the referees came up behind me as I was shooting jumpers from the top of the key and said, “Captain Conroy, would you join us at center court?” It was one of the sweetest sentences in the English language ever directed at me, but I saw a wounded grimace cross Danny Mohr’s face as I ran to meet with the Auburn men. Though I remember shaking hands with the Auburn captain, Bobby Buisson, and noticed that he and I shared the same number, 22, I held on to little of that momentous occasion because I kept saying to myself, “I’m the captain of the Citadel basketball team and we’re about to play Auburn University.” Since Coach Thompson had told me every day of my life at The Citadel that I did not have enough talent to play college basketball, that doctrine had assumed a form of catechism, and became one of my most deeply held beliefs. I had never dreamed that I would be in this place and time, under these lights, and with almost three thousand people watching me represent my school and my team.
The referees went over the rules with Bobby Buisson and me, but their voices blurred when I heard a cry of “Conroy, Conroy, Conroy” go up in the raucous cadet section, and I could see my roommates, Bo Marks and Mike Devito, leading the Romeo Company knobs in chanting my name. Bobby and I shook hands and wished each other good luck and I went back to join my teammates.
Unknown to me, I had just shaken hands with the best point guard I would ever play against. My wife Sandra’s favorite saying is, “When the pupil is ready, a teacher appears.” Bobby Buisson had appeared in my life at the perfect moment.
Because I was a senior, Mel Thompson started me at guard with John DeBrosse. Danny Mohr would jump center against the Auburn center, the aptly named Ronnie Quick, who was two inches shorter than Danny. It struck Doug Bridges as an oddity that The Citadel had a taller center than Auburn University. Doug himself and Bill Zinsky were both taller than the Auburn forwards, Wallace Tinker, who was six three, and Tom Perry, who was an undersized six two.
Danny Mohr crouched at center court against Ronnie Quick and the ref threw up the ball. As a portent of what lay ahead, Auburn took that tip and flew down the court at breakneck speed, establishing a racehorse pace they would keep up for a solid forty minutes.
I picked up Bobby Buisson, who carried himself on the court with a brashness and a gambler’s instinct that delighted me. His greatness shone in the first moments when we stopped their fast break and he dribbled back out to the top of the key to set up their offense. I was Citadel bred and Citadel trained and I knew a natural-born leader when I saw one. The great engines of the Auburn offense started and ended with this radiant and handsome young man. Bobby threw a beautiful pass to the small forward, Tinker, who taught Doug Bridges that he was not the only pure shooter on the floor.
After Auburn scored, DeBrosse took the ball out of bounds and tossed it to me. John did not like bringing it up if he didn’t have to. He would simply entrust the ball to me to bring it past their guards.
I ran the ball upcourt, but on the way past the bench I heard Mel yelling at me, “Don’t shoot, Conroy. Don’t shoot it.”
As I crossed midcourt, Buisson was waiting for me as though I were a pizza he had ordered by phone. He played me too close and he felt like wrapping paper when I went by him. Even with the noise of the crowd, I heard my coach screaming, “Don’t shoot.” I threw the ball to Doug on the right side of the court and I ran my route into the corner, bringing Bobby with me. Mohr set a pick for Bill Zinsky on the other side of the court.
“Swing it,” Coach Thompson yelled.
Doug threw it to DeBrosse at the top of the key who swung the ball to Zinsky on the left side of the lane, then John took his man into the far left corner. Mohr picked for Bridges on the other side of the court as I moved to the top of the key, Buisson covering me like a silk glove. I had to fake a backdoor move toward the basket to open up the passing lane between me and Zinsky when I saw Mohr break toward me as I shuffled him a pass. Danny dribbled Ronnie Quick deep into the lane, then spun and shot his lovely jumper down low. Mohr actually was taller than the Auburn center, but when Danny extended his long willowy arms, he played like he was six nine or better. For a big man, Danny had the softest, supplest hands, and his shots passed through the cords as if they were trying to nest there.
Auburn played a fast-paced game but Bobby Buisson controlled the tempo and action of everything the War Eagles did. His bursts toward the basket were rabbit-swift and I started to give him some room. In the first five minutes, Bobby had proven that he could drive the lane better than I could, an accolade I did not hand out often, and always grudgingly. So I played off of him, giving him some daylight to maneuver, and hoping he would take the opportunity for jump shots. He radiated with all the dangers of the penetrator, the kind that loves to kill defenses by attacking the dead center of their engines.
“Get in his face, Conroy!” Coach Thompson yelled over the noise of the crowd, but I had all I could handle with this kid. I was a Southern Conference guard trying to hold my own with a Southeastern Conference guard, and the difference was glaringly apparent. Bobby took in the whole floor in a glance, and he got the ball to the player who was open with crisp, split-second passes that landed in his teammates’ hands soft as biscuits, and at that exact moment they were ready to shoot.
Bill Zinsky scored his first college goal on a short jumper he took after grabbing a long rebound. Thirty seconds later Bridges hit a long jump shot, pulling up while trailing on a fast break, his body already glistening with sweat from the frantic pace.
“Slow it down,” Mel Thompson commanded. As he shouted this, Bobby Buisson swarmed all over me, his arms snake-striking all around me, trying to flick the ball away, but Bobby was operating too close, and I passed him in a flash. We raced for the basket, he closing the gap slowly with every step we took, as Auburn’s center, Quick, slipped off of Danny Mohr to intercept my drive. I do not remember if Bobby fouled me or Quick or if it was Tom Perry, but whoever fouled me did it hard and made sure I did not score on the play.
I stood on the free throw line, made a sign of the cross because it irritated the Protestant boys I played against, and threw up my underhanded free throw and scored my first point of the season. When I made the next free throw, the buzzer sounded and Tee Hooper came in to replace me at guard. My role as The Citadel’s starting point guard had lasted five full minutes, and we were tied 10–10 with Auburn University. The Green Weenies all stood and cheered as I took my place at the end of the bench, trying to hide my shame over having been pulled from the game so early. “I told you not to shoot, Conroy,” Coach Thompson said.
I simply did not think I could endure one more season of riding the bench and watching a game that I loved more than anything in the world pass me by. My mediocrity at the game of basketball festered in me, tumored my normally buoyant spirit, tortured me into a kind of resigned submission as I considered the humiliation of spending my last season as a reserve guard. But I was not the kind of boy who would allow himself to fret or mope—that had not been my training. My teammates required my loyalty and enthusiastic championing of their play. And for the night of Decemb
er 2, 1966, I was their captain, their leader on and off the floor, and I knew the power and necessity of being a team player.
So I fought the colossal disappointment of being replaced by a far more talented sophomore and got on with the business of cheering the Blue Team to victory. As Green Weenies, we never got to play much because in Mel Thompson’s theories of coaching, you put your best athletes on the floor and let them win your basketball games with their superior skills. My coach did not believe in resting his best players because he never once asked to rest in his career as a center for North Carolina State. Fatigue was a form of moral cowardice to Mel, and all of his players understood that.
When Tee took my place, Bobby Buisson started to guard John DeBrosse, and the taller of the Auburn guards, Alex Howell, took on the rangy Hooper. Only when I returned to the bench did I realize how small Auburn’s forwards were.
“Hell, we’re bigger than those guys,” I said.
“You ain’t bigger than anybody, duck butt,” Bob Cauthen said.
With six minutes left in the half, Danny Mohr, who was in the middle of playing a terrific game, hit three straight turnaround jump shots to pull The Citadel within three points. Taking a pass from Bridges, Tee left his man in the dust and flew through the entire Auburn team to make a beautiful, twisting layup against the glass. His layup narrowed Auburn’s lead to one. Then Auburn got serious, and Bobby Buisson spent the rest of the night teaching me the great secrets of playing point guard. Watching him was like seeing Manolete demonstrate the proper use of the muleta to a Spanish boy maddened by the desire to face the great bulls in his own “suit of lights.” In Bobby Buisson, I had found what I had been looking for my whole life.
In the realms of college basketball, the entire concept of the point guard was a new and developing one. I had heard the phrase used in my first summer at Camp Wahoo, but the necessity of having a guard who directed the offense and distributed the ball to the big men and the shooting guard (also a new concept) was gradually spreading around the theorists and innovators who created new wrinkles in offensive patterns and strategies. I could see that the five men on my team now on the court were, by far, the five best athletes The Citadel could field on any given night. Mohr, at center; Bridges and Zinsky at forward; DeBrosse and Hooper at guard—any one of these men was fully capable of scoring twenty points in any given game. Though it would take me four or five games to realize this, my team had one great, transparent flaw in its makeup: it lacked a point guard, a Bobby Buisson. Though John DeBrosse looked like a point guard, he was deficient when it came to possessing the proper temperament of the position. John was a shooter, pure and simple.
All five players on the court for my team were either scorers or shooters. There was not a passer among them. Bobby Buisson would begin to cut our hearts out in the second half. His utter joy in getting the ball to his hustling teammates was a besotted, almost maniacal thing. He was guarding DeBrosse so closely that Johnny was having difficulty establishing his game. Buisson was quicker, faster, and stronger than either me or DeBrosse—Auburn led by seven at the half, 50–43.
In the second half, with me and the rest of the Green Weenies in agonized witness, my Citadel team fell apart. The unraveling began with the opening tip-off. Our defense, never strong, simply collapsed under the full fury of the Auburn fast break. Auburn seemed to score on every possession. My team looked exhausted, spent, and beaten down by forces they did not seem to understand. After ten minutes, Auburn led 81–59. What had been a close and fiercely fought game turned quickly into a rout. It got so bad that Coach Thompson put me back in. Playing a desperate catch-up game, I drove the lane and scored my first 2-pointer of the season. Immediately Tee Hooper came back into the game.
“I told you not to shoot, Conroy,” Mel Thompson shouted as I headed for the bench.
“Sorry, Coach,” I said, noting that I had made the shot in question.
“That’s your problem, Conroy,” he said. “You’re always sorry.”
My team did not congeal as a team for the rest of the evening. Each time one of us made a move with the ball, it seemed individual, selfish, and unrelated to the other four players on the court, while Auburn was assassin-like in its delicious execution of its offense. They were a much better basketball team and much better coached, playing with brio, freshness, and unquenchable zeal.
I studied Buisson, dissecting his game and trying to steal as much as I could from him and graft his talents onto my own. First, I saw how much Buisson wanted to be there for his teammates, the joyfulness he took in delivering a pass to an open player and the gratitude they felt toward him for his childlike magnanimity. I basked in the bracing aura of his indomitable confidence. He flashed like a buccaneer across both ends of the court, brash, swashbuckling, all the elixirs of being fully alive and in control sparking off him as his team finished the joy of taking my team to the cleaners. The final score was an unbelievable 105–83.
But ah! There were bright spots for the Bulldogs. As the News and Courier sports editor Evan Bussey would write the next morning, “Danny Mohr, The Citadel pivot man, again proved to be old Mr. Dependable in the scoring column. The 6-6 senior scored 20 points and at one stretch in the first half was about the only one holding the Citadel Bulldogs in the game. Sophomore Bill Zinsky got 16 points in his first varsity game and proved to be the best the Cadets had on the boards. He had nine rebounds.
“Doug Bridges had 15 points, DeBrosse 8, and Tee Hooper in a most impressive debut had 11.”
I followed the rest of Bobby Buisson’s career closely. He proved to be as good as I thought. His nickname was “Bweets,” and Adolph Rupp was quoted as saying that Buisson was “one of the finest defensive players we’ve ever seen.”
I agree.
Bobby Buisson. Wherever you are. I was an eyewitness to your mastery, the tender wizardry you brought to my home gym. I dedicated the rest of my year to remaking myself in your image. It was an honor to take the court against you. I was no match for you and for that I apologize. But I took some things from your game that would hold me in good stead.
After showering, I walked in darkness behind the barracks on Plebe Walk, trying to control my shame. A second-stringer and a senior, I said, torturing myself. My season was already slipping away, and it had just started. In agony I made my way across the length of the campus alone, doomed to be a spectator while my life as an athlete went flashing past me on the fly.
Shame, I felt, the purest shame.
PART 2
THE MAKING OF
A POINT GUARD
CHAPTER 4
FIRST SHOT
LET ME TAKE YOU TO THE SPOT.
In the city of Orlando, Florida, near the foul line of an outdoor court, Billy Sullivan took a pass from Gregory Rubichaud then threw it to me. “Let the new kid shoot it,” he said.
I took my first shot ever at that basket in Orlando in my tenth year on earth and felt the course of my whole life change. I felt a bolt of pure wonder and joy—I had found a place I could take my terrified childhood to hide. Though I missed that first shot, I moved in fast to retrieve it and laid it in off the backboard.
“Nice shot, kid,” Gregory said.
“Where you from?” Billy asked.
“Nowhere,” I answered. Both boys laughed and I’d made my first friends in Orlando. They also had changed my world and place in it forever. From that first day, a basketball court provided me with a sense of home in whatever town I entered. I became a fixture on that St. James playground after school and would wait patiently until the older boys would invite me into a game or until they gave up and went home. Basketball, like a good book, gave me a place to be alone without the lacerating wounds of loneliness as an accompaniment.
I mark the year in Orlando as the happiest of my childhood. It is no accident that my father was away, spending that year on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. It was a year spent fishing in a city dimpled with abundant lakes, or smelling the spiced air of my U
ncle Russ’s ferneries, climbing the trees of his pond-fed orchards to peel grapefruits, big as my head, with a pocketknife. Aunt Helen and Uncle Russ had a houseful of boys so an open door visitation of cousins spilled in and out of our house and theirs. We lived in a rodent-infested place on Livingston Street (with a baseball bat, I killed two rats perched on my brother Jim’s crib), barely a mile from my cousins’ house on North Hyer Street. It was the year I fell in love with the girl next door, Barbara Ellis, caught my first bass, became a patrol boy, and finished third in the county fifth-grade spelling bee by reversing the position of the inner s and t in the word “taste.” That word still taunts me whenever I hear it. Each day, in season, I would go out and harvest an avocado lying under a tree, bringing the best one back to my mother as she sat on the front porch reading the Orlando Sentinel. With my pocketknife I would carve glistening, pale green crescents of the fruit and hand them to her. Mom would salt and pepper each slice, anoint them with the juice of lemons grown in the same yard, and moan with pleasure when she popped each morsel in her mouth. My mother was thirty-one that year, a knockout, and often men would wolf-whistle at her. Mom would wink at me as though she and I were conspirators who knew things the uninitiated could never know.
In November I made the fifth-grade basketball team, and in our first game the sixth grade stomped us and teased us so mercilessly that one of my teammates wept. A week later in a rematch on the same outdoor court, we lost by eight, clearly outclassed by the older boys. But in our third and final game, something happened to my little band of fifth graders that contained all the elements and seeds which go into the creation of magic in sport. There was a strange coming together when Gregory Rubichaud, the largest of the fifth graders, took me by the shoulders, stared into my eyes, and said, “We can beat these guys, Pat. You, me, and Billy Sullivan. We can beat ’em.” I felt something change deep inside me.