My Losing Season

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Pat Conroy's entire body of published work is rooted in the circumstances of his own life: his southern heritage, his military school background, his adversarial relationship with the brutal, domineering father he would eventually immortalize in The Great Santini. Conroy's latest, the autobiographical My Losing Season, once again revisits these familiar subjects, integrating them into a painstaking account of the author's passionate, ongoing love affair with the game of basketball.

Conroy discovered basketball in Orlando, Florida, at the age of 10, and it changed his life. The sport provided him with a refuge, a place to escape the continuing storms of life in the Conroy household. From that initial encounter until his graduation from college, 12 years later, Conroy devoted the best of himself to his chosen game, which provided "the single outlet for a repressed and preternaturally shy boy to express himself in public." My Losing Season charts the complete arc of Conroy's athletic history, focusing on his years at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, and in particular on his senior season of 1966–67, when his demoralized team -- the Citadel Bulldogs -- lost 17 games out of 25. The narrative is dominated by a series of vivid, play-by-play accounts of the high and low points of an alternately inspiring and dispiriting season.

Bringing a novelist's eye and a sportsman's expertise to bear on some highly charged memories, Conroy illuminates his losing season with humor, passion, and hard-won wisdom. Highlights -- and there are many -- include a viscerally exciting re-creation of the longest game in college history, with the Citadel defeating rival military school VMI in quadruple overtime. Conroy supplements this material with empathetic portraits of his beleaguered teammates, his hard, unyielding head coach, Mel Thompson, and a host of ancillary characters. Chief among these is the Great Santini himself, Colonel Don Conroy, whose withering assessments and reflexive violence set the tone for Conroy's adolescence.

By placing all this in the larger context of life at the Citadel during the turbulent 1960s, Conroy has created a unique, compelling reminiscence that is also a useful companion piece to his 1980 novel, The Lords of Discipline. Though its power is sometimes undercut by bursts of melodramatic purple prose (an inevitable aspect of any Pat Conroy book), My Losing Season is powered, for the most part, by its conviction, its emotional urgency, and its raw narrative energy. By forcing his way back to the sometimes painful center of that seminal season, Conroy has produced a cumulatively affecting meditation on time, memory, comradeship, and the enduring lessons of loss. In the process, he has provided a credible -- and indispensable -- portrait of his own evolution as a writer and as a man. My Losing Season is one of Conroy's finest creations to date. Don't let this one pass you by. Bill Sheehan

The popular novelist of such books as The Prince of Tides and Beach Music establishes himself as the Homer of sweat socks in this memoir of a collegiate basketball season. For the rest of Conroy's teammates, The Citadel's 8–17 record in 1966–1967 made it a season best forgotten, but the author remembers it as an odyssey of hardwood heroics, Olympian fortitude and larger-than-life adversaries, with the occasional temptations of a coed siren. Despite flashes of insight into the sport he loves (along with clues to the autobiographical underpinnings of his fiction), the bulk of Conroy's self-important prose can be as difficult to penetrate as a zone defense. "I wore the memories of that season like stigmata or a crown of thorns," intones the author, after earlier admitting that "the games are fading on me now where once they imprinted themselves, bright as decals, on the whitewashed fences of memory." If only Conroy had taken seriously the question posed by a newspaper editor who responded to a thirteen-page letter Conroy sent him during his senior year: "Have you ever thought about writing with economy and restraint?" Author—Don McLeese

Don McLeese

The popular novelist of such books as The Prince of Tides and Beach Music establishes himself as the Homer of sweat socks in this memoir of a collegiate basketball season. For the rest of Conroy's teammates, The Citadel's 8–17 record in 1966–1967 made it a season best forgotten, but the author remembers it as an odyssey of hardwood heroics, Olympian fortitude and larger-than-life adversaries, with the occasional temptations of a coed siren. Despite flashes of insight into the sport he loves (along with clues to the autobiographical underpinnings of his fiction), the bulk of Conroy's self-important prose can be as difficult to penetrate as a zone defense. "I wore the memories of that season like stigmata or a crown of thorns," intones the author, after earlier admitting that "the games are fading on me now where once they imprinted themselves, bright as decals, on the whitewashed fences of memory." If only Conroy had taken seriously the question posed by a newspaper editor who responded to a thirteen-page letter Conroy sent him during his senior year: "Have you ever thought about writing with economy and restraint?"

Publishers Weekly

H"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," writes bestselling author Conroy in his first work of nonfiction since The Water Is Wide (1972). Conroy is beloved for big, passionate, compulsively readable novels propelled by the emotional jet fuel of an abusive childhood. The Lords of Discipline, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music are each informed by a knowledge of pain and heartache taught to him by a Marine pilot father whose nickname was "the Great Santini." Here, in a re-creation of the losing basketball season Conroy and his team endured during his senior year at the Citadel, 1966- 1967, Conroy gives readers an intimate look at how suffering can be transformed to become a source of strength and inspiration. "I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one," he admits. Drawing on extensive interviews with his teammates, he chronicles, game by game, their talent and his sheer determination and grit. In Conroy's hands, sports writing becomes a vehicle to describe the love and devotion that can develop between young men. Toward the end of this moving work, Conroy explains that writing books became "the form that praying takes in me." But readers will see how basketball can also be a way of reaching for something finer than a winning score. What emerges is a portrait of a young man who isn't a soldier but a knight with a great and chivalrous heart. Anyone who was a son or knows a son will be touched by this book. (Oct. 15) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

When one loses, one learns, says Conroy (The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music) in his first work of nonfiction since The Water Is Wide. A wonderfully rich, informative, and well-researched reminiscence of, primarily, his senior year as a point guard at the Citadel during the 1966-67 season, this book is a gem. Written with humility and sincerity, the volume will please former teammates in any sport, not just basketball. Despite frustrations dealing with a coach whose aberrant behavior borders on masochistic and an institution whose social customs mirror his father's brutality, Conroy excels as team captain and burgeoning writer, giving credit to his teammates and professors as they lift his playing ability and encourage him to write. In the end, the author/player perseveres, at times fantastically. Highly recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/02.]-James Thorsen, Central North Carolina Regional Lib. Syst., Burlington Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The author of overlong novels (Beach Music, 1995, etc.) returns with an overlong memoir of his last season (1966-67) as an overachieving point guard for the Citadel's mediocre basketball team (8-17). Conroy can be entertaining and endearingly self-effacing. In this autobiography of a roundballer, he reminds us from the first sentence to the last that he was among the least talented players on his or any other team. Still, he was all-state in high school and won the Citadel's MVP award with his (self-described) hustle, intelligence, and passion for the game. Here he gives us dribble-by-dribble accounts of some significant basketball moments from elementary school through his final college game, and he interviews his former coach and teammates, several of whom came to see him when he was on tour promoting Beach Music. Some of their stories are affecting, none more so than that of Al Kroboth, a POW during the Vietnam War. Looming large are coach Mel Thompson, whose bullying tactics, Conroy alleges, ruined the careers of some of the players, and-no surprise-the author's late father, a softened version of whom was the Marine meanie in The Great Santini. Don Conroy appears here as the quintessential crude abuser who slugs and slaps his son in the face, demeans his talents, calls him a "pussy," but somehow experiences an epiphany after reading Santini and becomes a Nice Guy ("the great miracle of my adult life," avows his son) whose bruised children grieve at his passing. Conroy is not an especially gifted writer, nor always even a careful one. He tells us that his college English professor taught him to avoid dangling participles and verb-subject agreement errors, but he makes both mistakeshere and for good measure throws in a pronoun-case error and a lockerful of sports clichés, mixed metaphors, and sexist language (all women are "pretty" or not). Still, this compensates for its frail artistry with hustle, intelligence, and passion for the game.