When life was a battle for honor and dignity

At the beginning of his senior year at the Citadel, a basketball player with literary aspirations climbed aboard the bow of a yacht docked in the campus marina. As he surveyed the school from his lofty vantage point, the young man, fresh from an encouraging visit with his favorite English professor, made a solemn promise to “remember everything.”

Pat Conroy certainly kept that promise. He has built an impressive 30-year career from vividly recounted remembrances of his days at the Citadel, the South Carolina military college famous for its punishing caste, or “plebe,” system; of his abusive father, an ex-Marine whose rigidity mutated into unspeakable brutality on the home front; and of basketball, the game that sustained Conroy throughout his lonely youth. These three forces eventually combined to form a rich vein that he has mined for two popular novels, “The Lords of Discipline” and “The Great Santini.” (His most famous and best-selling novel, “The Prince of Tides,” stayed out of the barracks and off the basketball court but still had plenty to say on the issue of family dysfunction.)

Few who know the details of the author’s life have ever doubted that “The Lords of Discipline” and “The Great Santini” were really autobiographies masquerading as fiction. Any lingering doubts are dispelled by his memoir, “My Losing Season,” a spirited paean to the game of basketball and a bittersweet recollection of the events that ushered Conroy into his life as a novelist. Once again Conroy returns to the mine of his youth, specifically to his final year on the Citadel’s basketball team before his graduation in 1967. It was, he writes, “the year I began to catch small glimpses of the man I was becoming, moments when all the disfigurements and odd bafflements of my hidden childhood began to reveal themselves in unfocused glances into my nature.” It was also, he tells us, “the year I learned to accept loss as a part of natural law.”

What Conroy loses, mainly, is basketball games. The Citadel Bulldogs are by no means the terrors of the Southern Conference, and this second-string point guard and his teammates feel the sting of defeat as regularly as (or perhaps a little more regularly than) they experience the rush of victory. Winning is nice, he admits, but “[l]oss 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. Though I learned some things from the games we won that year, I learned much, much more from loss.”

This hard-won perspective proved invaluable decades later, when Conroy suffered bouts of depression that left him contemplating suicide. It was the lesson of his losing season, he suggests, that saved him by reminding him that life wasn’t fair, that winning wasn’t certain and that he had an obligation to go on living nonetheless.

In 1967, Conroy was also learning how to deal with his father, the abusive bully so memorably captured in “The Great Santini” (and later immortalized by Robert Duvall in the movie of the same name). Readers and moviegoers who wonder whether Conroy exaggerated his father’s cruelty may be surprised to learn that, on the contrary, he sugarcoated it. “It was my belief that if I told the truth about Donald Conroy that I would lack all credibility and that no one would want to read a book that contained so much unprovoked humiliation and violence,” he writes. “I added touches of humor and generosity to Colonel Meecham [the fictional stand-in for Conroy’s father] that my father had never displayed in his military life.”

Through it all, Pat Conroy’s refuge is basketball. As he recounts the season’s games against the Bulldogs’ formidable competitors, he seems possessed by some animating ghost. His memory for the details of decades-old glories (and ignominies) astounds us ; Conroy is able to transport us back to these games -- every one of them -- because he has been transported, seemingly reliving them as he writes. Field goals and full-court presses are recollected not as statistics but as the mighty swings of broadswords. At times, “My Losing Season” reads like a war memoir: There’s the same band-of-brothers camaraderie, the sense that every game is a battle in which honor and dignity (if not actual lives) are at stake.

Every ragtag team of soldiers needs a gruff but valorous Sarge, and Conroy delivers one in the form of Mel Thompson, the inscrutable Bulldogs coach saddled with the unenviable task of molding these boys -- whose spirits have already been broken by the plebe system -- into a cohesive team. His inability to do so gnaws at him and causes him to lash out at Conroy and his teammates, who respond to his often mean-spirited outbursts with perverse devotion. Conroy, with his horror-movie of a family life, craves affirmation from his grudging coach. The peculiar relationship between this affection-starved young man and this despairing, temperamental older one turns out to be the most important one in the book and is tenderly wrought.

Pop music lore includes the statement, source unknown, that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” meaning that the act of trying to get on the page an analysis of something as ineffable and ethereal as music is, in the end, futile. So it may be with basketball, the quickest and most dynamic of sports: a game to be watched, not read about. Conroy’s love for the sport is infectious, and he does as fine a job as anyone could of relaying its poetry and majesty. But after the 10th or 11th play-by-play, readers may find themselves counting the pages that remain until the buzzer sounds and Conroy walks out of the locker room into the less circumscribed world of plebes, professors, parents and girlfriends. It’s off the court where the real transformation is taking place, here the beleaguered athlete is becoming the self-aware writer.

Conroy is accused by some critics of being a second-string novelist, a B-teamer unfit to play alongside superstars like Philip Roth, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates. It’s unfair and ultimately pointless to compare him to writers whose critical reputations have earned them Hall of Fame status. Conroy’s losing season at the Citadel taught him, among other things, the importance of hustling for every basket and the dignity that comes from always trying your hardest, especially when you have to try harder than the other guy. Say what you will about him, Pat Conroy doesn’t coast or slack off, and his success is well earned. “My Losing Season” is as heartfelt and poignant a coming-of-age memoir as they come and a splendid contribution to the literature of sport.