My Losing Season


Conroy, Pat


This autobiography details Conroy’s senior year at The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina, in the mid-60s. We learn about his lifelong love of basketball and how he was point guard and captain for The Citadel Bulldogs. He also details his childhood and youth with his physically, verbally and emotionally abusive Marine father, who he refers to as “The Great Santini” (the title of another Conroy book on the Blue Valley reading list). He plays for an abusive Citadel coach “who counted on the fear and cowering obedience he inspired in his young players” because “the coach’s intimidation also inspired an odd, crouching form of love that echoed his relationship with his own fearsome father.”

Conroy states (in My Losing Season): “My books are all disfigured by the sullen presence of my child-beating father, Don Conroy, and this one is no exception. I can remember hating him when I was a two-year-old boy and first came to consciousness when my mother tried to stab him with a butcher knife and he backhanded her to the floor, laughing, a scene I observed from my high chair.”

Parents, please be aware that Conroy's books contain a great deal of vulgarity and profane language. However, Blue Valley Communication Arts teachers love this author. Not only do they assign My Losing Season, but they ask our kids to read three other Conroy books in various classes. Conroy's other Blue Valley textbooks are Lords of Discipline, The Great Santini, and The Water is Wide.

Read more about the impact of abusive fathers on families and My Losing Season in an article by Ken Canfield at fathers.com by clicking here.
Excerpts:

• I could not shake the obsessional urge to end my life. I found myself shopping for pistols in pawn shops, studying the veins of wrist and throat, and learning how to get to the roof of the DeSoto Hilton….imagined a perfect suicide in which I rowed my johnboat out into the Atlantic…tied an anchor around my waist before I cut my wrists and carotid artery, then slipped into the water…I had decided on this course when another Citadel point guard …to save my life.

• I find myself exploring caverns of my psyche where the stalactites are arsenic-tipped, the bats rabid, and…I have a history of cracking up at least once during the writing of each of my last five books.

• This fucking place sucks...Fuck you Zipper...This fucking place sucks...Eat me, Rat…Bob stuck up a middle finger...and said, Eat a big hairy one, Root...This fucking place sucks…Eat me, Zipper, Danny said, again shooting Bob the finger...None of this negative shit...This fucking place sucks.

• Catch the goddamn ball...You still ain’t worth a shit…can’t shoot worth a shit…Move it, goddamn it...

• I’m going to eat your jock…Don’t you have any fucking pride? Jesus Christ, give me some goddamn rebounds.

• Shut the fuck up…Bullshit, Mohr. You ain’t got shit…you stop the son of a bitch.

• ...how are you and the other homos getting along down in the English department? I hear the English profs are one hundred percent faggots….Eat me, DeBrosse...full of shit.

• They called me white boy, cracker boy and white fuck, as in: Shit, we’ll take the little white fuck...Don’t fuck with the white fuck.

• (After an awards ceremony while playing sports at Gonzaga High School, Conroy’s father beats him): I was talking to a boy on my left when I received a stunning backhand across my right jaw that sent me crashing to the floor. The blow was delivered with such force that I did not know if I was going to be able to rise…(someone’s father asked): Are you okay, Pat? I …nodded my head…The second backhand caught me on the left jaw, harder than the first, and I went down…(later, in the car) my father…gave me a beating like none other I would receive in my childhood…His fist landed so hard on my forehead that I thought the back of my head would go through the passenger-side window. Again, he punched my face…(upon arriving home, Mom is an “enabler”): Mom screamed when she saw my face. She refused to let me go to school for the next few days and would not let me show myself to my brothers and sisters. (His father then announces the family is moving and refuses to allow him to accept a full 2-year scholarship to the school, including room and board. Mom says): He loves you too much to let you go. No, Mom, he hates me too much to let me go.

• (After Conroy loses a game, his father)…backhanded me into the passenger-side window…my nose started bleeding profusely…I knew that the first backhand was a warmup for a long night spent warding off his blows…This is a kick-ass world that doesn’t have time to wait around for pussies like you to wake up and read the fucking headlines. These teams…are eating your jock. Because you’ve got a pussy between your legs instead of a dick, it’s working on you. I’d’ve gone through this league like shit through a goose.

• (After meeting a black girl on a train): We stayed together on a six-hour layover…I fell asleep wondering how you tell a girl like this you were in love with her. When I woke the next morning, she had departed my life forever.

• We’ll help you get through this fucking shithole…”Racking ass” was an art form…the best among them could break a weak boy in an hour or less.

• You feel bad about shitting on your classmates, abortion?, someone shouted above me…

• …made the eloquent gesture of urinating on my back while I was doing pushups for him…

• Gutless fuck. Little baby boy. Cry, little girl…We’ll shake your pussy hands goodbye…You chickenshit fucks…

• Clemson’s only got these big, mean, stupid redneck boys like yourself, only these boys…grew up fucking sheep and who knows what else. These boys are so backward they major in agriculture and shit like that…Plow 101. Milk a Fucking Cow 202…We just got to hope they don’t fuck us before they kill us.

• (While warming the bench during a game, they talk about the female fans): Beaver shot. Eleven o’clock. Another one. Two o’clock. Bornhorst handled the shame of sitting on the bench by becoming an aficionado of spotting the panties of coeds with casually parted legs.

• …cross-dresser…wife had confronted him sneaking into their house wearing her hose and brassiere and dress.

• Fuck you, Bouncy. Doug’s nickname came because Cauthen thought Doug “bounced like a nigger” when he ran.

• Ivy League. There’s pussy basketball at its best.

• (Conroy’s father tells him he doesn’t have the killer instinct): I had the killer instinct. I called it The Great Santini. It would put a cruise missile into his cockpit that would change my father’s life forever. At the end of the novel, I killed the father.

• Get your ass touching the ground, Conroy…Like a dog with worms.

• Have you ever had sex with a girl? I’ve thought about it. In fact, I don’t think I’ve thought of anything else for more than four or five seconds since I turned thirteen…Mel (the coach) has never taken a great interest in his team’s love life. He doesn’t want some strange girl taking over his job of removing all bodily fluids from us.

• Can you imagine what it would be like to make love to a real live Greek belly dancer?…(he) engaged in the lewdest, bawdiest, and most obscene dance I had ever witnessed. As he thrust his pelvis back and forth, looking like a warmup act at a strip show, Dave moved across..the floor…his head thrown back in ecstasy and moaning like a dog in heat. His teammates began clapping and cheering in time with the orgiastic thrusts of his groin.

• (Conroy asks the coach if he can go out on a date after a game): Mel looked down at me like I was a stool sample…How can you think about sex at a time like this?...Losing makes you think about sex?

• We finally know what’s wrong with this team…Pussy. Pussy? That’s right Conroy. You guys are more interested in pussy than you are in winning…What’re you doing, Coach? Searching your room for pussy.

• (Listening to an anti-Vietnam War speaker): If they got to Vietnam, here’s how they could help end this war: roll a grenade under their officer’s bunk when he was asleep...it was becoming more and more popular with the ground troops who knew this war was bullshit.

• Other language includes Jesus Christ, douche bag, chickenshit, dick, jacking off, wad-waste, assholes, shitbag, bitch