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

Pat,” my mother said. “That’s the first thing I wrote to your father.”
    â€œWon’t Dad love it, Mom? He’ll just love it.”
    If my father loved it, he never acknowledged it in any of his many letters to my mother. He never mentioned that game until I drove him to the spot on the playground of St. James School, in 1997, and told him how we defeated the sixth-grade team. Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry, and like him, I grew up court-savvy and predatory and ready to rumble in any game that came my way. Though I tried to incorporate my father’s big-city, Chicago-coarsened game into my own, I grew up in a South where basketball was still in a stage of infancy. I would hear his voice raised in mockery and vituperation with every step I took. Dad was happy to step into the role of “the sixth grader” no matter where I went or how far I took the game I had once watched him play so uncommonly well. His greatness as a ballplayer was thrown in my face each time I achieved some new milestone as a player.
    When my father returned from his tour of duty overseas he had a new assignment and my mother had to extract me from Orlando like a tooth. The year had been a fatherless idyll and I begged Mom to let me stay in the city with Aunt Helen and Uncle Russ and my beloved four cousins, the Harper boys. On his first day back, my father slapped my brother Mike in the face for the first time. Mike was four years old and did not realize that Dad was establishing his authority over a house that had gone soft in his absence. After he wept, Mike approached my father and said to him, “I want you to go back to the seas. I don’t like you.” In two sentences my brother had summoned up the courage to say out loud what I had always suppressed, and I waited for Dad to kill my brother or beat him into unconsciousness. My father surprised me by laughing as Mike shook with a four-year-old’s helpless fury. I knew Mike’s look and I shared his anger. My father looked like the strongest man in the world to me. When I asked Dad to come with me to the playground at St. James to shoot around before dinner, he appraised me, saying, “You come to me when you can give me a game. Then I’ll kick the shit out of you.”
    My father had played on the Parker High School team that won the city championship in Chicago in 1938. He is still considered, by some, to be the best basketball player to attend St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa, and his name hangs in its Athletic Hall of Fame. His college friend Ray Ambrose told me often that “when your father came to this part of the Midwest, everyone shot with two hands. When he left, everyone shot with one hand. Your old man brought the one-handed shot to Iowa.” In a practice game against DePaul Dad outscored a young sophomore by the name of George Mikan, the first great big man in the game. George Mikan was named the best basketball player in the first fifty years of the twentieth century. The incomparable Michael Jordan took the honors over the next fifty years. My father had outscored the best basketball player of his time. “I caught Mikan young, before he became George Mikan,” was all my father would say about it.
    With my father’s great gifts, he could’ve taught me everything about basketball I’d need to know, beginning that education in the schoolyard of St. James. Instead, he taught me nothing, and I went to The Citadel not knowing what a pivot was or how to block out on a rebound or how to set a pick to free a teammate for a shot or how to play defense. A beautiful shooter, a fierce rebounder, and a legendary defender, my father chose not to pass these ineffable skills on to any of his five sons. We grew up overshadowed by his legend and that legend did not lift a finger to help us toward any patch of light