Free My Losing Season by Pat Conroy Page A

him from behind, a muscled arm around the kid’s neck. “The rule, new boy. Don’t fuck with the white fuck. That boy gets me the ball.”
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    A FTER MY GRADUATION FROM Blessed Sacrament, the gypsy caravan that disguised itself as my family started up in earnest as though to punish us for our three years on Culpepper, the longest amount of time I’d ever spent on a single street (even though we had lived in two separate houses). After years of going to night school, my father had applied for the Operation Bootstrap program which sent officers whose college studies had been interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War back to school to earn their diplomas. From far-flung sources, my father collected all the credits he’d earned at St. Ambrose and beyond and found a college that would allow him to graduate after taking a single year off from the Marine Corps.
    Leaving again at night as was his habit, my father took us to the road once more, driving us down country roads through Virginia until he pulled into the driveway of the smallest house the Conroy family would ever live in, on Kees Road in Belmont, North Carolina. My father would spend the year as an undergraduate senior at Belmont Abbey College. I had only known my father in his mythological, unconquerable ideal of the Marine Corps fighter pilot so I had a difficult time making the adjustment to him as a college student who had trouble making C’s. Among my brothers and sisters, we now conduct polls to discover which were Dad’s worst and most violent years as a father. Belmont always ranks high on the list. It was the year my restless father had too much time on his hands.
    My sister Carol became expert at excavating my father’s graded essays which he went to great length to bury under his huge stack of intimidating college textbooks. Once she found an early essay from his American literature class and announced to the family: “Hey, everybody! Dad got a C– on his English paper. What a dope.” I got to Carol before Dad did and sent her hightailing it to her room.
    On the first day of school I walked into the comely entranceway of Sacred Heart Academy, a junior college for women with a boarding high school for girls. Several years before, the Sisters of Mercy had begun taking day students, including thirty boys from the local communities. Sacred Heart did not have enough boys to field a football or baseball team and barely enough to make up a basketball team to compete in the Catholic League of North Carolina. I followed a flow of students and found myself in the student lounge when the song “Poison Ivy” boomed out from the record player and smooth, good-looking Bud Wofford walked up to pretty Louise Howard and asked her to dance. The school was so intimate that I knew almost everyone by the end of the first week, and they knew me. I’d never seen such pretty girls, and walking down the hall of Sacred Heart was the happiest thing a ninth-grade boy could do. It was the year I would reach puberty and the last year I’d entertain my Catholic-boy fantasies of becoming a priest. The Catholic Church could fill up its seminaries if it forbade God from making women look as fabulous as they do. Even the nuns were pretty at Sacred Heart as well as being the kindest women wearing habits and rosary beads who ever taught me.
    I tried out for the varsity basketball team in October and surprised even my father when Coach Ted Crunkleton chose me as his tenth player. In this school of thirty boys, the sisters of Sacred Heart had found seven neighborhood kids who could really play the game. No one was great, but all played with determination and all hustled every moment on the court. I was five feet three inches tall when I arrived at Sacred Heart and I would be five ten when the season ended in February. It was the year I grew into the body I would carry into adulthood, and my game