Frantically, the fans are riding the edges of their seats. Those who waited in line to be the very first inside, well, those fans are waving their arms frenetically behind the opponent's basket in a well known attempt to prevent scoring. The sound of skid marks on the hardwood floor echoes almost as loudly as the pounding of the dribbling. And when the abrasive buzzer sounds, there is no rushing of the court. There is no spirited song to be sung, no fans linked arm-in-arm. And no one player can be lifted off of his feet by any of the others. Because this, of course, is a team that has just lost.
And losing becomes the pivot on which Pat Conroy shoots -- for the basket, so to speak -- in his newest work, "My Losing Season." Strictly autobiographical this time (as opposed to the more fictionalized version of the truth for which Conroy is renowned), "My Losing Season" tells very literally that story -- the story of his senior year as point guard for The Citadel's losing team.
Conroy's work is, in many ways, a play-by-play told in his most accurate sportscaster's voice. It's a brief bio of his high school career and beginning semesters at The Citadel followed by an in-depth glimpse into every game played in his senior year. And I do mean every game, as Conroy minutely describes each key play of both teams alongside the emotions of all the players flooding the court.
These boys -- men like Tee Hooper, John DeBrosse and Dan Mohr -- and these game plays -- lay ups and blocking and the arrival of integrated teams into the South (which Conroy almost considers a strategic move) -- the elements of "My Losing Season" are all as true as can be remembered, researched meticulously as Conroy describes in his Epilogue. Plane flights across the country in search of lost teammates, finding the single tape remaining of any game (a five minute snippet against Loyola) and interviewing a painfully closed off coach, it's all here -- "an act of recovery" as Conroy calls it.
On the hallowed floors of basketball courts around the South, from New Orleans to West Virginia, Conroy's voiceover comes across the loudest. Every word seems true, every play seems remembered and readers almost could get together 10 people and replay each of these games on the court. The details are that precise. And for true basketball fans -- especially fans of any of the schools he discusses in-depth, old Southern Conference schools -- "My Losing Season" is a rare find, a sports book that's well written, by a noted and award-winning author.
The details, though, also are the work's greatest flaw; there's just a little too much basketball and not enough passion. Yes, Conroy claims to have written the book as a method of purging himself of this losing season. Yes, losing becomes a symbolic way of expressing college angst and fears, both of the future and of one's self. And yes, the theme of that losing season carries over into the lives of these men far after the last ball has left the court. Somehow, though, this just isn't enough.
Fans of Conroy's earlier works -- most notably "Lords of Discipline," "The Prince of Tides" and "Beach Music" -- are fans almost universally for a single reason. These books carry within them the capacity to generate both raucous laughter and sobbing (the kind of sobbing that halts reading because you can't see the pages) within the span of five pages. Soul shattering seems an apt enough word when these novels cover the breadth of the Vietnam War, the plebe system at The Citadel and the suicide of a lover. Nothing is too deep or too impossible of a subject for Conroy, one of those writers with the rare capacity of capturing raw emotion in words.
But "My Losing Season" just doesn't quite have enough of that raw, stomach churning emotion for which Conroy is most talented. It's there, most notably in depictions of his surging literary passion and his relationship with his father (carried over from "The Great Santini"), but it's just not quite there in the needed quantity.
That's not to say that what "My Losing Season" does have in the way of pure Conroy isn't impressive in its own right. From the beginning of the novel onward, as Conroy charts his own progression as a literary critic and novelist, the passion for writing simply can't hide between the lines but comes charging out in the power of his words.
"When I read the first 92 pages, I fretted, then despaired because it felt like I was reading the book underwater or weightless in outer space
Shaken, I reread the same 92 pages that begin with the sentence of the curling flower space and ends with Benjy in Caddy's arms
Goose bumps marched the length and breadth of my body and the back of my neck as I knew for the first time that learning itself could carry the sting of divine inextinguishable pleasure."
Powerful stuff, especially when readers consider how far a passion for literature has brought Conroy -- this book is No. 2 on the New York Times' Nonfiction list at the moment.
And as always, some of the most powerful Conroy comes from his conceptualizations of love -- for his family, for his friends and for his country.
"Do I not see America's flaws? Of course I do. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing
America is a good enough country to die for even when she is wrong."
Obviously, this isn't basketball. Neither is the depiction of his family or his relationships with literary faculty members at The Citadel. But this, the passion of Conroy alongside each of the games played that year, is the greatest (if hidden) beauty of the book.
Perhaps Conroy sums up this book within his own title, "My Losing Season." Because this book is of course a tour de force, a precise remembering of every game played within a season (emphasis on the word season). At the same time, Conroy loses something other than the games; he loses just enough of the passion, the spark and the shattering lyricism of emotional writing that make his previous novels so astounding.
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