week of 1/8/03
 
 
 

‘Losing Season’ marred by overt self-pity and exaggeration
By Jeff Minick

“Loss is a fiercer, more uncompromising teacher, coldhearted but clear-eyed in its understanding that life is more dilemma than game, and more trial than free pass.”

- Pat Conroy


My Losing Season by Pat Conroy.
Random House, 2002. $27.95 — 416 pp.


Loss and its influence on life is the theme behind Pat Conroy’s My Losing Season. In this memoir, Conroy takes us back to the mid-1960s, back to his days of playing basketball at the Citadel, back to that season which Conroy thought might be the most glorious in the history of the Citadel but which turned instead into an abysmal failure.

The best parts of My Losing Season are not Conroy’s passionate accounts of the Citadel’s basketball games — it is, after all, difficult to care who defeated the Citadel in 1966, or in 2003, for that matter — but are instead the stories from his childhood and from his years at the South Carolina military academy. Conroy’s father, who was made famous for his brutality in Conroy’s novel The Great Santini, was apparently worse in fact than in fiction. He appears here as a vicious mean-tempered man who constantly slapped, cursed, and punched his wife and children. If we are to believe Conroy —and we will consider that issue in a moment — the authorities should have locked Conroy’s father up for child abuse. Although Conroy and his father reconciled before his father death, we nonetheless leave this book with a real distaste for this man.

Conroy’s other nemesis in the book is Coach Mel Thompson, a former ACC player who by Conroy’s account was during his years at the Citadel a buffoon, a bully, a fool, and a jerk. Thompson makes Bobby Knight look like Saint Francis as he constantly hurls verbal abuse at his players, belittling them, telling them again and again that they are losers, and occasionally hitting them. He seems to have absolutely no coaching or leadership ability, which left me wondering why Conroy felt so affectionate toward him near the end of the book. Eventually, after Conroy graduates, Thompson’s antics catch up with him, and the Citadel fires him.

From these constant attacks and from the season of loss Conroy learns several lessons. He writes:


My acquaintance with loss has sustained me during the stormy passages of my life when the pink slips came through the door, when the checks bounced at the bank, when I told my small children I was leaving their mother, when the despair caught up with me, when the dreams of suicide began feeling like love songs of release. It sustained me when my mother lay dying of leukemia, when my sister heard the ruthless voices inside her, and when my brother Tom sailed out into the starry night in Columbia, South Carolina, sailed from a 14-story building and plunged screaming to his death, binding all of his family into his nightmare forever. Though I learned some things from the games we won that year, I learned much, much more from loss.


Although Conroy is a master of language, as both the above passage and the book’s jacket cover tell us, he is also a master of hyperbole, of exaggeration, perhaps of untruths. His account of life at the Citadel, so vividly portrayed in Lords Of Discipline, overplays the brutality of the plebe system as it was in those harsh times. His present memoir must be accounted part fiction only because he includes so much dialogue after 30 years. This practice of pretending to write nonfiction while at the same time clearly inventing dialogues will leave most readers a touch edgy in terms of what to believe in the book.

Conroy’s memoir also contains, like his popular fiction, a certain stridency, and a mixture of whining, self-pity, and sobbing. I rarely read books in which someone cries as much as Conroy. The pages of My Losing Season are both aflame with imprecations and damp with tears. He seems to have spent an inordinate part of his life in lachrymose grief and bellyaching.

If you enjoy reading about basketball, or life at the Citadel, or Pat Conroy, then My Losing Season is for you. Otherwise, you’ll need to look elsewhere for the winners.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)