Customer Reviews

My Losing Season: The Point Guard's Way to Knowledge (Random House Large Print) (Random House Large Print Biography)

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There's a scene in a 1970s movie in which Gene Hackman tries to grind up a broken wine glass in a garbage disposal. Reading this book is a lot like that.

I picked up "My Losing Season" not as a great fan of Pat Conroy or as a former athlete. I was attracted more by the theme of loss and its lessons. And I expected a different personal story than the one Conroy tells. The losing basketball season in his last year as a cadet at The Citadel in Charleston, SC, is a pretext for a much deeper theme - survival in the face of humiliation.

And it's not the losses of the games that are humiliating. On the one hand is the brutal and unrelenting contempt of his marine colonel father, a child abuser and wife beater. On the other hand is the withering scorn of Conroy's arbitrary and capricious coach, Mel Thompson. Both, in Conroy's account, do their best to beat the spirit out of the boy who has grown into an indomitable (though undersized and modestly talented) point guard for his team. And all of this takes place in the regimented, fierce, all-male environment of The Citadel in the 1960s, where incoming boys are routinely broken by the merciless hazing of their upperclassmen.

Humiliation is a much more difficult subject than loss to deal with. Loss leaves scars, but humiliation remains an open wound, and in writing about it there is the risk of slipping into the tug of war between self-pity and self-blame. Conroy takes us there sometimes, and those are the parts of his story that are lacerating. But win or lose, the ups and downs of the season are fascinating and the accounts of the games are thrilling. As a writer, he has a gift for hustling the reader with suspense and drama and sudden shifts of mood. As an observer of character, he vividly brings to life the individual boys who make up the team. As someone deeply wounded, he is able to freely and convincingly express the many articulations of the heart - especially love, admiration, and gratitude.

Once I started into this book, I could not put it down. It kept me reading late into the night. And when I wasn't reading, it filled my thoughts, as I'm sure it will for a long time. It's a troubling book that wants to resolve a host of dark memories. And it may well want to show the reader how to do the same. I'm not sure that it's completely successful in either regard. And maybe that's the point. It's enough to recast humiliation as loss. That is a wound that can eventually heal.

This is a well-written book for anyone who ever experienced failure or the fear of failure while trying very hard to succeed. "My Losing Season" is an autobiography that focuses on the author's senior year as a college basketball player at The Citadel, the famous military school in Charleston, South Carolina. The Citadel Code begins with, "To revere God, love my country, and be loyal to The Citadel. To be faithful, honest, and sincere in every act and purpose and to know that honorable failure is better than success by unfairness or cheating."
This book holds a demonstration of how to grow more honest with oneself and sincere with others. This is a story of fear, sadism, injury, failure and loss and how these can lead to courage and achievement or degradation and estrangement.
In a way that smells like truth, Conroy tells his story, reconstructing memories over 30 years old. His understanding matures as he reconnects with the shattered team of his youth and the boy that failed them. He doesn't blame, he reveals - everything. When Conroy writes about himself, he is telling the truth about all of us. When reading this poetic work, one cannot avoid feeling connected to deeper truths of the human condition. There is no better way to spend one's reading time.

I was a bit unsure at first if I was ready to read a non fiction work by Pat Conroy. I enjoy non fiction and have lately devoted most of my reading to it, but I wasn't sure what I was going to be getting when I read the description of "My Losing Season". After all, who cares about an unknown college basketball team that played in the sixties?

I haven't read all of Mr. Conroy's books yet, not because I don't think he is one of the great writers of all time, but because I know that I'll only get to read them once for the first time. My introduction into his worlds of fiction caught me by surprise because I was well into 'The Prince of Tides' before I realized that the book wasn't a true story. I now realize after reading 'My Losing Season' that everything he writes is true, even the fiction.

I would have broken down crying several times during the reading of this book, but my heart is still guarded by never sleeping sentinels whose tireless detail is to walk the stone walls that guard my interior. Mr. Conroy manages to gain an entrance, however, and at times during reading his work I feel a sense of hatred towards him. Not meanness, just anger with no where to go.

So what is it about this book, this story that makes it so worth reading? The nakedness that Pat Conroy brings to the page. The truth. Simple and raw and courageous. Enduring and joyful, sad and painful.

I envy his memories, his legacy, his past, not because I feel that the journey was easy or he was lucky, but because whatever molded him into the man he became, whatever blessing or curse that was bestowed him at birth, whatever angels or demons followed his path, he has been able to live outside of the shells and caves and fortresses that most of us dwell in. Or at least he has done so enough to make a difference.

While I can't recommend 'My Losing Season' enough, I do have one slight reservation, that being I don't know whether or not a first time reader will enjoy it more before or after they've read one of his previous books. But do read it, whether or not you are familiar with basketball, military colleges or the journey of broken boys trying to become men, you will turn the last page wishing there was more. I promise.

MY LOSING SEASON is a sports memoir as honest and heartbreaking as a double overtime loss to a hated rival.

It is also the only memoir that deals directly with the true story --- step by step, game by game --- of an NCAA Division I basketball team that won a mere eight games (out of 25). This is counterintuitive for a sports book. You see, we are supposed to remember those athletes and teams that never lose, the Knute Rocknes, not the Bill Buckners. Yet both examples offer powerful stories.

This was the only type of sports book Pat Conroy could write.

In a moment of kismet while on the book tour for BEACH MUSIC, Conroy reconnected with his former teammate John DeBrosse. They found themselves replaying the minutiae of a loss on a basketball court 30 years ago. Both men were marked by that losing season. This encounter served as catalyst to search for meaning from this lost season. Conroy devoted two years to pouring through old newspaper clips, interviewing former teammates and diving into his own memories to reignite the fires of regret and disappointment.

He recalls that the best memories his teammates had from the 1966-67 Citadel Bulldogs Varsity Basketball team were of the great players they went up against. They remember the Michael Jordans --- or in this case the Johnny Moates. Conroy writes, "In every home I entered as I reconstituted my team, I found instead of memory scar tissue and nerve damage. There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous. But there is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss."

This memoir peeks audaciously into the minds of players on a losing team: what made them tick, what they thought and who made them what they became. So the daring part is --- who cares about a bunch of losers?

You will, and whether or not you ever played college ball you will soon discover what pushed this entire team to fixate on a single season, letting it overshadow major accomplishments. This was no ordinary team --- these men were the products of the Citadel, a military college in Charleston, South Carolina. Recounting the emotional destruction that is Plebe life (freshman military hazing) to the harsh demands of athletic scholarships (vomiting on the basketball court during six-hour workouts), it is the story of a terrible rise to manhood in a microcosm.

Before landing at the Citadel, Conroy was a military brat whose family was always on the move, with the only consistency being a father who wielded love with flying fists and words of debasement. Bloody beatings, unexplainable scars and raw masculine brutality slowly built the foundation of Conroy's childhood memories. His very first memory is from age 2, "my mother tried to stab him (Conroy's father, Colonel Donald Conroy) with a butcher knife and he backhanded her to the floor, laughing, a scene I observed from my high chair." After each game Conroy played, his father made a point to wait and dismantle his self worth. He loomed above him at 6' 4" to his 5' 10". "You're ... You didn't have an off night. You couldn't hold my jock as a ballplayer. I used to eat guys alive on the court," he would say.

The treatment of Conroy by his father is often overwhelming. At age 9 the young Conroy decides to become the best basketball player alive and prove his worth to his father. At 17, when he enters the Citadel, he is a human emotional husk (a neophyte, a virgin), and it becomes for him the ultimate fantasy to conquer the windmills of his father's brutal Chicago childhood. He wants to show his father he exists, that he is unique and worthy of love.

The intimate domestic politics of Pat Conroy's family is well-mined territory (THE GREAT SANTINI., THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE, THE PRINCE OF TIDES, BEACH MUSIC), but never has it moved with such visceral force as when it is described through the eyes of a young, willful basketball player whose only and last bridge between father and son is sport. Conroy does not overstate his pain, it is real. (Conroy's brother committed suicide and his mother died of leukemia.) Conroy has contemplated suicide many times when taking stock of the shipwrecks in his past.

Mirroring life, the story of Conroy's senior year basketball season in 1967 is complex, his pain is fierce and its shadow lurks behind every word he writes. This was no ordinary season; it was a dismal season, one of loss, pain and very few personal triumphs for the author as well as his teammates. In this personal history the moments that make up Conroy's brutal upbringing find an equal immediacy to the game of basketball.

Conroy never gives up on himself or his team because he yearns for the freedom a Citadel education can give him. He eventually graduates from the Citadel a member of their prestigious honor board, the head of its literary magazine and the captain of his basketball team as well as its most valuable player. In this way the budding author overcomes the regrets --- the "what ifs" --- that have pursued him throughout life.

MY LOSING SEASON is work of heartbreak and loss, it is honest and true to life, not a testament to "ifs", it simply is.

--- Reviewed by R. Scott Hillkirk (

I don't think I wanted to enjoy this book as much as I ended up doing, gosh darn it. I know I didn't expect to.

For one thing, I've never enjoyed basketball, and don't think I've ever in my life sat through a basketball game end-to-end, either live or on TV. And I had seen other reviewers' complaints about Conroy's wordiness.

But as it turned out, I enjoyed this book a lot -- not only for the revelations about sports and manhood and (my particular interest) life at a military college, but also for the author's sheer storytelling ability and skill at bringing people to life on the page.

Yes, Conroy can be wordy. With a bit of effort, this book could have been 100 or so pages shorter. But frankly, I don't mind. Conroy's writing has always been intensely personal -- both about himself and *for* himself. He makes a passing reference here to writing "the books which explain who I am to myself" (p. 163), and later to finding "the gargoyles and stunted trolls that ate me alive" (p. 344). If he sometimes confuses his basketball season with the Trojan War, and waxes Homeric about every drop of sweat that fell to the hardwood during that miserable, wonderful year, it's because that's how this season looms in his life (aided and abetted by an English professor, Colonel John Doyle, who himself compared Conroy to Hector). I'm more than willing to let Conroy frame his season in those terms in return for his letting me into his introspection.

While Conroy was failing as a point guard, he was also discovering himself as a writer, and it's this part of his story that I found most compelling -- that and the post-season (thirty years post-season) discoveries and reflections that finally knit this group of individuals, once and for all, into a team.

Anyone who's ever read "The Great Santini" will want to read this, to discover "the rest of the story" about Conroy's father and the impact that book had on his life and family.

I didn't expect to like this book, but I really do, and recommend it highly. (I still don't like basketball, though.)

My Losing Season is the story of The Citadel's '66-'67 season. Pat Conroy begins the book with a little background as to how he got into basketball and fell in love with the game, as a child in a military family moving from town to town every year. He takes the reader through his journey up until he arrives at The Citadel for college. While Conroy does give tremendous details about his experience at The Citadel, the majority of the book deals with the '66-'67 basketball season. Conroy takes the reader game for game through the ups and mostly downs of the season - their crazy coach Mel Thompson, the Green Weenies, the loss of confidence of the starting 5, and all the teams they play in the Southern conference.

As a reader you'll get to know these guys - DeBrosse, Cauthen, Kennedy, Zinsky, Tee Hooper, etc - you truly feel for them especially because they're real people and these games really happened! It's a great lesson on what one can learn from losing. Are those lessons more important that having a winning season? My only complaint was that since every chapter was really a different basketball game it got tedious at times. You definitely have to be a sports enthusiast to enjoy this book!

As an avid reader of Pat Conroy, I am thrilled to read his most autobiographical book to date. In My Losing Season, his insights are so reflective and passionate that reading his book is a learning and insightful experience that I can apply to my own life. No wonder he continues to remain the best of Southern writers. Now, his new book places him at the pinnacle of American authors.My Message: You MUST read this book!

When I began reading "My Losing Season", I glanced at the endpaper photograph. Reprinted from the '1967 Sphinx', the class yearbook of The Citadel, it depicts twelve young basketball players posing for their official team photograph. Author Pat Conroy is the small guy at the front and center of the old black and white photo, kneeling alongside the basketball, a spot typically reserved for the team captain.

But we can't be sure he is the team captain, or for that matter, we can't be sure anyone is the captain. No one actually holds the ball.

Over the course of 400 pages, I found myself looking back to this photo repeatedly, as Conroy adds deep dimension into each player's background and character. Conroy unveils the story behind his team, the 1966-67 Citadel Bulldogs who lost more games than they won, but as he brings forth, learned enough for a lifetime. "My Losing Season" tells the story of a young man's journey through a very difficult boyhood, his escape into sport, his endurance at a southern military school, his central participation on a team of moderately talented basketball players, and his discovery of language and writing through wonderful professors at the Citadel.

Conroy's greatest strength, his strong and unabashed character portrayals, resonates through this book. Readers of The Great Santini (or viewers of the Robert Duvall movie) will become reacquainted in great detail with the real-life Santini, Conroy's abusive father. "In My Losing Season", we also meet basketball coach Mel Thompson, who inflicts psychological terror on his charges, constantly tearing apart his young players and destroying any chance at winning this team might ever have had. Conroy adorns his professors and deans at the Citadel with laurels for giving him the keys to his future as a writer.

But Conroy shines the light most brilliantly on his teammates. He effuses his fellow cadets with the color that is missing from the front photograph, intimately introducing the reader to his court colleagues. We learn about strengths, weaknesses, skills, fears, and limitations of each of the twelve. Four years of coach Mel Thompson, cadet hazings, severely repressed social lives and a total absence of support make for an over-extended "Survivor" episode. Conroy saves the best for last: a reunion tour in which he reconnects with each of the individuals on the team and their families independently, thirty years after hanging up his Converse high-tops. Emotions spill over.

Nearly a dozen basketball games are described, in a kind of sepia-toned movie reel, as Conroy relives the play-by-play from his vantage at point guard. He overuses the flowery adjectives at times ("the beautiful boy" and such) but balances it with good locker room banter and the practical jokes of young men. The games themselves come alive again, and I found myself rooting for second half comebacks and last second heroics. You can feel the ball coming up the court, and like his teammates, you wonder where the pumpkin's going to go. Conroy emotes a strong love for his game, and basketball fans will appreciate the occasional name-dropping of great players and coaches he once bumped into.

If you don't have courtside seats to this year's ACC or SEC tournament finals, this book will be a suitable replacement. Nothin' but net, baby!

I have read all of Pat Conroy's books. The Prince of Tides has been on the absolute top of my favorites list since it first came out. Over the years, and through his novels, it has always been in my mind that he must have had a very troubled life indeed. Aside from his obvious talent with words, writing has also been his therapy. Now, since the death of his parents, we get a view of just where he came from, and it's really not such a surprise. One suffers for the young man in his losing season, and one suffers for the middle-age man who wrote about it. It's gratifying to know that his father could reform (a bit) after reading the Great Santini. Conroy's insight into that particular basketball season, and what seeds were sown within him, shows once again his keen abilities in the art of retrospection. My only complaint, and it's a small one, is the sometimes needless play-by-play of each game of that season. It shouldn't put anyone off reading My Losing Season though, and it won't change my annual habit of reading at least one of his previous novels.

Okay, I admit it, I'm not a big basketball fan. Still, I would read anything Pat Conroy penned--including the owner's manual to my DVD player. My Losing Season shows a more mature author reminicsing about a magical time in a young man's life. Not magical because it was perfect, but because it wasn't. Conroy's writing is not only about college ball, it reflects all that life offers in a clearer, deeper stye and tone than in his previous novels. Conroy's work resonates more than ever.