My Losing Season: A Memoir (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
I could be the only person in the world whose first Pat Conroy book was his sports memoir My Losing Season instead of one of his better known novels like Lords of Discipline, The Great Santini or Beach Music. But Charleston, SC made me do it. I just enjoyed my first trip to this southern stunner, and I toured the Citadel with a friend from SC who'd read this memoir. I can also blame my kids. My teenage son T-Bone and tween daughter The Bug both play basketball. He devours it; she's a work horse. So My Losing Season seemed like a natural to me.SYNOPSISPat Conroy grew up in the 50's and 60's as the eldest child in a family of 7 kids, son to a decorated Marine fighter pilot and a smart, Catholic mother. His family moved at least once a year as his father climbed in rank. What you really need to know is that Pat's dad, Don Conroy, beat him, tormented him emotionally, and never praised his remarkable son's athletic ability and huge intellect. He beat his wife and other children too. No one was immune to his rages. Don Conroy transformed himself after his tortuous fatherhood was exposed in his son's novel The Great Santini. That's all well and good but the devastation was claimed - one child committed suicide, another was institutionalized, and Pat has battled severe depression and attempted suicide too. Pat bounced his first ball when he was 9 years old and fell in love with it instantly. Basketball became his passion and savior. Through the book, the nimble point guard take us up and down the court from high school ball to the Citadel where he was a walk-on under stern coach Mel Thompson. Pat knows torture. The way he fails to recognize his own gifts. The way he idealizes his brutal college coach. And while his senior year was a losing season, this book mines the lessons and bonds that catapulted the men of this team to lifelong success in business, love and, in Pat's case, writing.MY REVIEWConroy's storytelling gifts shine through. He is a keen observer of people's mannerisms and emotions. His emotional state vacillates between self-torment and exultation with the swish of a basket. The prologue had me reeling and I immediately understood why so many friends love his work - rich detail, deep emotional struggles, beautiful language.But I think you have to be a basketball fan to love this book. After a chance meeting late in life with a Citadel teammate, Conroy decided to reconnect with his last year as a athlete. He spent 2 years researching his team's wins and losses. All the detail was poured into game summaries for 10 to 12 of his losing season's games. Who played which position, who started, who missed shots, who missed passes, how the coach walked into the locker room, how the crowds taunted and in some cases burned. Without some knowledge of the game (and mine is two half steps beyond basic) the basketball details could drown out the more universal aspects of this journey. I am tempted to give this 4 stars (story telling acumen, audacious action, fully known characters) but I will rest with a dazzling 3-pointer. The book was a spot-on look at adversity shaping a young man's character and trajectory. It's a brutally honest, inside look at college level basketball and the dynamics of competition, coaching and higher ed. Pat Conroy's fans will surely eat up the inside view of how many of his famous works were inspired by his family and the Citadel. But I found myself skipping chapters when game details overwhelmed the story. 4 stars to me means I am likely to recommend the book far and wide, and The Losing Season misses that by just a hair.BOOK CLUB QUESTIONSMy own book club questions for My Losing Season can be found at http://allaboutabook.blogspot.com/201...
Pat Conroy's life has been hell. Or it would seem that way if you've read his early work. Conroy has mined his childhood and young adulthood for his fiction. The earliest works--the most directly mined--are his best and most powerful as a result. The Water is Wide, a thinly fictionalized memoir of his first job out of college teaching disadvantaged African American children on one of South Carolina's Sea Islands in the late '60s; The Great Santini, the classic novel drawn from his life as the son of an abusive Marine aviator father; and The Lords of Discipline, a fiction based on his four years at The Citadel, the renowned and infamously strict military academy in South Carolina. Later works, notably Beach Music and South of Broad, aren't as good. That may be because as he's aged he's moved further from his source material, the abuse and dysfunction he suffered at the hands of his father and officers at The Citadel, and because as he's aged his unfortunate predilection for flowery, overwrought prose has burgeoned. My Losing Season: A Memoir deals with his time at the Citadel as a not-so-good basketball player on a not-so-good team. And, while there's still too much flower and hyperbole--seemingly every point guard he faces in his senior year, the losing season of the title, has transcendent skills that lay bare his own athletic inadequacies (a litany reinforced by his father)--it's still a a great and engrossing read. The time and the place--the Deep South in the Sixties--comes alive. Jim Crow restrictions face their first real test as the Civil Rights Era challenges the institutionalized hate and bigotry of small towns and small minds. Hard-scrabble small-college gyms play host to the contests, mental, physical, and emotional, that shape Conroy as he grows into a young man. My Losing Season is Conroy's best book, fiction or non-, in a very long time. Highly recommended.
What do You think about My Losing Season: A Memoir (2003)?
I like Pat Conroy's novels. I don't particularly like sports. So when I started reading this and realized that it was his memoir of his last season playing basketball at the Citadel, I groaned. I thought I would break my record for NEVER putting a book down until it was finished. But despite the blow by blow plays in every game and how many points were scored by this and that basketball player, I could not put this book down. Conroy continues to use his writing skills for cathartic purposes, but there was a bigger message in this book than how their basketball team lost the last season. He found he could learn more life lessons from losing than from winning. Don't let anyone tell you that you cannot do something. He also touches on his childhood with his abusive father. We follow his life of turning to basketball as a release from his home life. His basketball coach at the Citadel was just as demeaning to him and his team mates as his father was in his own family. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I also now know one heck of a lot more about basketball than I did.
—Dale
I love this book. I was raised on ACC basketball. I firmly believe that the ACC & the reverence for basketball in the Carolinas is our true regional religion. Conroy uses his incredible command of the English language to write prose that might as well be poetry. I share Conroy's love & reverence for the game of basketball & particularly for the ACC so for me this book resonates with the very essence of my being. Given that I may be quite welling to overlook what other readers think is schmaltzy & sentimental. Those people are neither Conroy fans nor basketball fans. Every book that Conroy writes is autobiographical in nature. However, most of his work is fiction & by writing fiction he can hide a certain amount of himself from his readers. Here that 's not possible. Conroy admits that the only time he was really aware of himself as a child or an adolescent was on the basketball court. In this book Conroy uses his love of basketball to bare his soul to the reader without the comfort of hiding behind the fictional nature of the story. As with all of Conroy's novels parts of My Losing Season are truly painful but also very worthwhile.
—Alice Parrish
The story of Conroy's senior year basketball season at the Citadel in 1966-67. He played point guard on a team that won 8 and lost 17 games. The book is at its best when it describes the coach and the other players. It falls flat when it goes off on tangents, like a long one about the author's girlfriend in his sophomore year. Also unwelcome is an often sappy sentimentality about the Citadel and his reunion with the players in the 1990's. The last 1/4 or so of the book could have been deleted with no great loss. His coach was made out to be a real meathead who was fired at the end of the season - no great loss. He got some good lessons on how not to coach a team.
—Frederick Bingham
