Free My Losing Season by Pat Conroy

our own small achievements might have granted us. The Conroy boys learned their game in the streets. The Conroy girls grew up unnoticed and unpraised. Their brothers envied them.
    My father pulled the ’55 Chevy station wagon out of the driveway at 945 North Hyer Street as Uncle Russ and Aunt Helen stood with the four Harper boys waving a tearful goodbye to their five cousins and their favorite aunt and uncle. It was the first trip to a new assignment that we started in broad daylight. Normally, we left at midnight when the roads would be empty and we could “make good time,” according to my father. He drove straight through to Arlington, Virginia, where he began a new job at the Pentagon as his family built a new life on Culpepper Street in Arlington. The Culpepper Street years were stormy ones between my parents—the only calm years they ever had was when Dad was called overseas. My mother and I had grown exceptionally close in the year he’d been gone, and now when Dad beat me it seemed like a punishment meted out for being liked too much by his wife.
    But the basketball was wonderful in Virginia, with outdoor courts everywhere. Culpepper dead-ended onto the grounds of Wakefield High School, and in the first summer I shot around with a bunch of high school kids, one of whom was the son of a coach. The Wakefield gym was the first time I had ever played the game on a wooden floor or dribbled a regulation leather basketball. When the gym was closed I’d settle for an outdoor court by Claremont Elementary School. By myself, I would shoot all day, happy as a boy could be.
    For three straight years, I attended Blessed Sacrament School in Alexandria and played in the church leagues from sixth through eighth grade. I did well in those leagues and was the star in my last year. Neither of my parents attended one of my games. My mother was overwhelmed with small children; my brother Tim was born in the hospital in Bethesda in December of 1957; and I was grateful my father was too overworked by his job at the Pentagon to be at my games.
    It was during my Arlington years that I discovered the vast difference between the way black kids played the game of basketball and the way white kids did. The black kids would drift onto the courts near Blessed Sacrament and I would walk over to “Green Valley,” the black neighborhood near Claremont where I’d be the only white kid in sight. From the beginning, I took to everything about basketball as it was played in the ghettos. It was high-speed, rough-around-the-edges, tough-talking, hand-checking, kick-ass basketball, the way the game was supposed to be played. It was hard for me to get into a game in Green Valley because I was white and because I was little. But sometimes I’d luck out and they’d need my body to complete a team. I’d get the ball to the best shooters on my team and do it quickly and often. Very early on, I learned that all shooters—black or white—value guys like me who get them the ball. I mimicked the showmanship and style of the fifty or so black kids I played against for the next three years. I loved their heart and their aggression and the fierceness of their bantering and back talk. They called me “white boy,” “cracker boy,” and “white fuck,” as in: “Shit, we’ll take the little white fuck.”
    The guy that called me “white fuck” was a grown man, unemployed and sad-faced, who played with the boys and young men of Green Valley because he had nothing to do and because he had a glorious jump shot, high and hanging and architecturally perfect. I fed him the ball every chance I got. When a new kid came to the court, he elbowed me, an eighth grader, in the back of the head and I went somersaulting out of bounds, sliding across concrete. The new kid walked toward me with his fists clenched and I prepared myself as well as I could for the beating. Then someone grabbed