My Losing Season by Pat Conroy Read Free Book Online

ask any more from him this year.”
    I walked back to the locker room in a state of shock. I undressed slowly, letting his words cut into me, like shards of glass. For weeks, his remark, that I could score only one point a game, ate at me. It haunted and followed me all over campus until I started to believe it. Its power was corrosive and subterranean.
    I tried to hide it from my teammates and I tried to be funny in the locker room.
    After the third practice, I walked toward the steaming shower room with my tall, beautifully built teammates. We were now in the middle of Mel’s system, and we would be exhausted until the middle of March. But we were young and high-spirited and resilient. And we were all so hopeful about this season.
    â€œHey, Root,” I said to Danny Mohr.
    â€œFuck you, Conroy,” he said.
    â€œMohr, you’re nothing but a can of corn.”
    And my team, my wonderful team, we laughed, I swear we laughed together. We could do that at the beginning of that dreadful season. I swear we could.

CHAPTER 3
    AUBURN
    A S I STARE AT T HE C ITADEL ’ S SCHEDULE FOR THE 1966 – 67 VARSITY basketball team, I mourn for the quicksilvery racehorse passage of time. Its swiftness has caught me with the same ineffable start that comes to every man and woman who lives long enough. It remains as the single great surprise of any life.
    In the locker room, I got dressed for the game that would be the first game of the last year I would play organized basketball with real uniforms and real crowds and coaches who received paychecks because of their knowledge of the game. The tension in the locker room was almost electrical, special—like the atmosphere might be on Mercury, able to sustain only certain rare forms of organisms. Outside, the crowd was beginning to form and the parking lots were filling up with the makes of automobiles I now see only in period movies. The voices of strangers streaming down the sidewalk outside our locker room came to us through the cinderblock wall, barely audible, unformed, but brimming with excitement. What a good thing it is to go to games. What strange joy is felt as you leave the flatness of your daily life, the fatigue of routine, and the killing sameness of jobs to move among thousands toward a brightly lit field house at night. They passed by us in the darkness, their expectations risen by our first game with Auburn University, hope cresting that our team would prove memorable, and if we were lucky, legendary.
    Auburn. It sounded so Big Time to a boy like me. “Good luck against Auburn, Pat,” my mother had said on the phone, and just hearing her invoke the great name made me feel the weight of my own self-worth. I thought the entire universe would be watching me and my teammates take on the War Eagles that day in 1966. Auburn was in the Southeastern Conference, one of the proudest and showiest in the country, and recruited big-name athletes for a big-time program. I loved it whenever little Citadel invoked the myth and story of Goliath and scheduled us to play the great schools. Whenever people ask me about the teams I played against in college, I always say, “Florida State, Auburn, West Virginia, Virginia Tech, and Clemson.” Never do I reply with “Erskine, Wofford, Newberry, and Presbyterian,” who were the patsies and sacrificial lambs of our schedule.
    In the big games The Citadel’s corps always showed up in force, and that day there were nearly eighteen hundred of them on hand to offer their lionesque, full-throated allegiance to their team as we took the court. No one could rock a gymnasium like the Corps of Cadets in full ecstatic cry. When the Corps unleashed itself during the passionate fury of games, the energy was both intemperate and unforgettable to visiting teams. For us, it was like having an extra man under the boards, a sullen, mean-spirited one that could be worth six to eight points in a closely fought game.
    In