My Losing Season: A Memoir

by Pat Conroy

Book Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A deeply affecting coming-of-age memoir about family, love, loss, basketball--and life itself--by the beloved author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini

During one unforgettable season as a Citadel cadet, Pat Conroy becomes part of a basketball team that is ultimately destined to fail. And yet for a military kid who grew up on the move, the Bulldogs provide a sanctuary...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553381903
• ISBN13: 9780553381900
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: Dial Press
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Wisdom for Writers in My Losing Season

There are many reasons why people write. It's cathartic, for one. You can get off your chest whatever's been eating at you. You can be the hand of justice and dish out rewards and penalties like the gods of ancient Greece. Some people write simply to tell a good story. They have imaginations that cannot stop. There are stories in their heads, relentless, begging to get out. And then others write because they have learned something, and they have something to say. They have wisdom that can only truly be learned the hard way, through painful experience. Pat Conroy is someone who writes for all of these reasons. He exorcises his demons of a painful childhood through words. He examines himself, his heart, his motives, his view on reality, through words. It is through words that he discovers who he is and what his place is in this world. In his non-fiction book, My Losing Season, he carries the reader back to his Citadel days when he was point guard for the Bulldogs basketball team. His team members suffered under a man they called "coach." His team lost that season, badly. For many, their lives were changed because of it. Mr. Conroy appears to have written My Losing Season for himself, for his teammates, but also for us, the readers. He wrote the book for us, so that we may learn the hard lessons he learned that season, about losing, about rising up again, about holding on to that which cannot be touched--what is inside us. I have a confession to make: I do not know sports, not a lick. But this book about basketball touched my spirit, the writer in me. Mr. Conroy compares his season as a point guard to his position in this world as a novelist. The book is a valuable tool for anyone, especially writers, who need to prepare themselves for winning--and losing--seasons. Because we all must get up and get back on the court.

The making of a writer

Although the largest section of this book is entitled "The Making of a Point Guard," the book's subject is actually the making of a writer. As far back as he can remember, Conroy wanted to play basketball, and for almost that long, he wanted to be a novelist. Both callings, he tells us, are fraught with difficulty, require long apprenticeships, and are borne out of intensely hard work and forged in a crucible of pain. Conroy's best novels emerge from the facts of his life -- the abusive family in which he grew up and the formative experience of his college years at the Citadel. Rather than fictionalizing, in this book Conroy tries to explain who he is and how he got that way. "It is time itself I am trying to retrieve," Conroy writes on page 137. "I long to pin it down in the surreal hyacinth-light of both memory and dream that now have faded where once they were three-dimensional and rich. ... It was the year I woke up to the dream of my own life. As I walked across the parade ground during the first week, I began the long, terrifying process of turning myself into the southern writer my mother had told me I would be since I was five years old." This passage is typical of Conroy at his best -- the anguish over the passing of time, the emotional pain, the southern sense of destiny, even the (literally) flowery language. Just as Conroy frequently despairs that he will never be a truly great point guard, he often says he will never be a writer on the level of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and the other southern novelists whose work he has breathed in. All he can do is the best that he is capable of, just the way this young man of limited basketball talents performed for the Citadel in 1966-67. The novelist is like the point guard in another way as well, Conroy writes. The novelist "needs a strong ego, a sense of arrogance, complete knowledge of tempo, and control of the court." The novelist must thumb his nose at academics and critics the way a basketball player ignores jeers from spectators or trash talk from opponents. "The point guard knows that the world is fraught with pitfalls and dangers, and so does the novelist." And the novelist must "create the world" around him, just as the point guard leads the charge and creates the play. This is not a basketball book but one that uses sports as a metaphor in a totally fresh manner.

I'm cheering for Pat!

My Losing Season is the beautifully-told story of one boy's final college basketball season. More than that, it's about the triumph of the human spirit. Conroy may consider himself a second-rate athlete, but he's a first-rate man. This book has appeal for athletes and non-athletes.I have a personal story about Pat Conroy. I'm a freelance writer with a small (very small) business which I call The Word Doctor. A few years ago, I took on some work as a fact-checker for a large magazine. The magazine paired me up with Pat Conroy to fact-check a story he wrote (gorgeous, by the way). When we finally chatted, we had a conversation I'll never forget. He teased me a little about being The Word Doctor and put me right at ease. Remember that he's famous, and I'm not, but he treated me like I was the most important person in his life. I'm trying to make the point that the real Pat Conroy is every bit as wonderful as the author.My Losing Season makes you want to rush out and succeed at something. I give it five stars and highly recomment this book.

A Slam Dunk!

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

Knowlege of sports not required

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.