Barry's Blog

"I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one." So reads the memorable first line of My Losing Season, best-selling novelist Pat Conroy's 2002 memoir of his 1966-67 basketball season at The Citadel, where the team finished with a miserable 8-16 record. This Friday, Conroy and his Citadel teammates of 40 years ago will gather for a reunion, as one writer has observed, "in defiance of natural law." Muses Conroy, "It is the winners who have reunions...the losing teams of the world disband without fanfare or any sense of regret." Yet Conroy has good reason for celebration and inviting his old friends to the season opener, as his first cousin, Ed Conroy, himself a celebrated basketball player at The Citadel, is the Bulldogs' new coach.

In many ways, this is the story of a score-settling novelist and the father and his alma mater which he simulaneously loved, hated, and exposed, all mind you, through his literary genius. In Conroy's, The Great Santini, he presented his father as an ex-Marine who was overbearing to his wife and children, to put it mildly. His best-selling, The Lords of Discipline, revealed The Citadel as a military "spit-and-polish" school where first-year knobs were often abused to mold them into Citadel men. Conroy would again take his father to task in his non-fiction work, My Losing Season, but offered up on the sacrificial altar Coach Mel Thompson as a surrogate, who was fired after the 1966-67 season.

Ironically, it was Conroy's mercurial ex-fighter pilot and father, Don, who took his nephew Ed under his wing in the 1980's, encouraging The Citadel to recruit Ed. He then proceeded to watch 46 of Ed's college games (according to a family count), which was 45 more than he saw of his own son Pat's. "I think he was doing for Ed what he did not do for me--or could not do for me," Conroy offers. "Dad would have loved to see Ed become coach of The Citadel. He would have been out of his mind for it."

Don Conroy died in 1998, and while he was at first furious about "Colonel Bull Meecham," the character from The Great Santini based on his life, Pat believes that his father used his 1976 novel as a blueprint to reinvent himself.  "Dad showed few human characteristics" until then, Pat says. "That's when he became a Santa Claus figure to his nieces and nephews...I think it was Ed's hero worship of my father that got him to come to The Citadel."

There is little question that writing for Conroy (and he is a tremendously gifted writer) has served as a healing, cathartic experience, to exorcise the "demons" from his past troubles with his father and his alma mater. But one doesn't have to read far to feel his pain. We all have been impacted by our own fathers, both for good and for not, have we not? What are the messages and life lessons we have received from them? Have we been able to separate the wheat from the chaff? And what are the messages and life lessons that we are effectively sending to our own children? Bertrand Russell once observed, "The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them." Could he have been right?

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow

"Sports books are always about winning because winning is far more pleasurable and exhilarating to read about than losing. Winning is wonderful in every aspect, but the darker music of loss resonates on deeper, richer planes. I think about all the games of that faraway year that played such a part in shaping me, and it is the losses that stand out because they still make their approach with all their capacities to wound intact. Winning makes you think you'll always get the girl, land the job, deposit the million-dollar check, win the promotion, and you grow accustomed to a life of answered prayers. Winning shapes the soul of bad movies and novels and lives. It is the subject of thousands of insufferably bad books and is often a sworn enemy of art."

"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. My acquaintance with loss has sustained me during the stormy passages of my life...Though I learned some things from the games we won that year, I learned much, much more from loss."

-Pat Conroy, My Losing Season