My Losing Season by Pat Conroy Read Free Book Online Page B

victory this year.”
    My remark brought a strange, troubled laughter from the sophomores. Always, in the time I played for Mel Thompson, there was this unsettled, lunatic disjointedness to the atmosphere. In the locker room, you felt everything except what it was like to be part of a team. Year after year, the sophomores were cast adrift in the cynical laughter in an atmosphere that should have been joyous.
    I tried once again to help them relax. “Best sophomore class in the history of this school,” I said to them, then leaned down to Bill Zinsky. “This school isn’t gonna believe this good a basketball player got through the plebe system.”
    â€œQuit the rah-rah shit, Conroy,” Cauthen said. “That bullshit don’t work. Especially not here.”
    Then Coach Thompson entered the locker room, wearing his game face, a midwestern scowl that looked like cloud covering, and moving with that loping shambling walk that had become a trademark to us, his face exuded no light, just various textures of darkness. Everything Mel did was studied and habitual, and he allowed no accidents or hazards to disrupt the afternoons and evenings of his life.
    Al Beiner worked in the equipment room getting the balls ready for the warmup drills as Rat Eubanks put fresh towels in our lockers. Rat went behind me and massaged my neck with a towel still warm from the dryer. I put my hand behind my head and squeezed his thin wrist. Before every game during the year, this was our secret, unnoticed ritual.
    Coach Thompson walked by us silently. He smoked his cigarette with deliberate slowness, then went into the shower room to urinate.
    I offered a prayer to the God I was afraid of losing: “O Lord, I ask that something good come to me from this basketball season. My career, so far, has been an embarrassment to me. All I ask is for something good to come to me.”
    Coach Thompson returned from washing his hands, threw his cigarette on the cement floor, and crushed it beneath his polished, tasseled black loafers. Our coach was a fastidious man and a sharp dresser. Other teams might outplay the Citadel basketball team, but none of the other coaches in the Southern Conference could outdress Mel Thompson.
    â€œConroy,” he said, “you’ll be captain for tonight’s game.” This declaration caught me and my teammates by complete surprise. If he had asked me to put on a wedding dress to play the game it would not have astonished me more since second-stringers rarely had bestowed on them the mantle of captaincy. One minute before we took the floor against the strongest team on our schedule, Coach Thompson surprised us by humiliating our highest scorer and top rebounder from last season, Danny Mohr, and giving over the leadership role to me, who had demonstrated very little of it. We said the Lord’s Prayer and then gathered in the center of the room, placing our hands over the hands of our fiery-eyed coach. His dark eyes smoldered with a malefic competitiveness as he screamed, “The SEC. The SEC. Let’s see if we can play with the big boys.”
    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